Many of Kimball's essays in The New Criterion, and in books including Experiments Against Reality and Lives of the Mind, focus on figures from the Western canon whose work he feels has been neglected or misunderstood.

The book carries a preface by George Will and includes contributions from John R. Bolton, Richard Epstein, Victor Davis Hanson, Andrew C. McCarthy, Michael B. Mukasey, Glenn Reynolds, and others.

[6] In July 2017, Kimball wrote an article comparing Trump's 2017 speech in Warsaw to the Funeral Oration of Pericles of Athens during the Peloponnesian War.

"[8] Kimball responded that Trump, "despite his imperfections, is a man of good character" because he repeatedly demonstrated willingness "to storm the cockpit of our corrupt, sclerotic, and increasingly unaccountable governmental apparatus.

The book argues that modern humanities have become politicized and seek to subvert "the tradition of high culture embodied in the classics of Western art and thought".

[12] Kimball maintains that yesterday's radical thinker has become today's tenured professor carrying out "ideologically motivated assaults on the intellectual and moral substance of our culture."

[15] Michael Uhlmann noted, "If it weren't otherwise already apparent, the publication of The Fortunes of Permanence confirms Roger Kimball's status as America's foremost cultural critic.

In truth, 'cultural critic,' as that term is commonly employed, hardly does justice to the breadth and depth of an essayist whose keen observations range comfortably and gracefully across politics, history, religion, philosophy, education, literature, and art.