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Andrew Klavan’s recent Klavan Christmas Special was more than a seasonal diversion — it was a cultural intervention. On December 24 he devoted an hour to a deep dive into Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, arguing that this old-fashioned moral tale still speaks louder than the fashionable slogans of our moment.
That timing wasn’t accidental. Klavan framed Dickens as a corrective to a West in flux, a reminder that literature can steady a nation when elites and technocrats try to remake everything in their image. Conservatives should welcome a public intellectual using a mainstream platform to insist that moral imagination and personal responsibility matter in civic life.
For years Klavan has connected Christmas stories to larger questions about culture and character, and his return to Dickens underlines a simple point: great books teach habits of heart that can’t be manufactured by bureaucrats or universities. The notion that Scrooge’s conversion—from stingy, fearful isolation to generous communal life—is irrelevant to Americans today is not just false, it is dangerous.
Klavan’s family connection to the tale—discussions he’s had on his show about modern retellings and even episodes with his daughter reimagining the story—shows this isn’t nostalgia for its own sake but a living argument for passing values on to the next generation. Conservatives ought to celebrate any effort that restores ordinary patriotism, faith, and family to the center of public storytelling.
This isn’t fringe talk; Klavan’s episode was distributed across major podcast and streaming platforms, meaning millions of Americans heard a clear conservative prescription: read, think, and refuse the flattening moral language of the cultural left. There’s a practical politics here—rebuild institutions from the bottom up by reviving the habits that made Western freedom possible.
If you care about the Republic and about handing a free country to your children, pick up Dickens this winter and listen to voices willing to defend the moral imagination. Read Scrooge and remember that redemption, duty, and neighborly love are not “woke” trends to be derided but the very glue of a thriving, ordered, and free society.
