Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered at The New Criterion’s gala on April 28, 2022, honoring Larry P. Arnn with the ninth Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society.

This is not the only honor I have received this month. I have also been named by The New Republic as the number one enemy in America of “our democracy.” I am ahead even of my friend Cleta Mitchell, who is high on the list. This is the complexity of honor. As Aristotle reminds us, it depends as much on the giver as the recipient. This means that this night is not only about me.

Thank God this is not The New Republic’s gala dinner.

I take both pleasure and honor in being here in this estimable company, full of friends. I am proud to have my wife, my dearest Penelope, and my daughter Alice, an architect with the same appreciation for classical style and proportions as, say, the architect Peter Pennoyer, who appears often in the pages of The New Criterion. I have learned from Alice and from her teachers that classical architecture is beautiful and worth the expense, which is not inconsiderable.

The world in which honor is most magnified is the political one. The governor of Nebraska, Pete Ricketts, comes here tonight from a land like