Daniel McCarthy

Donald Trump and the clash of realities

16 February 2024 7:40 am

As Donald Trump marches to the Republican nomination a third time, Americans are divided into two radically opposed camps. On…

The future looks Republican

21 October 2023 6:25 am

In presidential elections there’s no such thing as a Pyrrhic victory. Winning is everything — and neither party would ever…

NATO’s post-Cold War strategy has been a disaster

19 September 2023 1:15 pm

NATO is fighting for its life — and dying. The alliance has only grown larger as a result of Russia’s…

The rise of the popcons

20 August 2023 11:30 am

The Republican Party has to come to grips with populism. Donald Trump’s commanding lead in the race for the 2024…

The once and future president?

23 July 2023 10:23 am

Donald Trump is having a better year than Joe Biden, notwithstanding an indictment or two. Both men hold commanding leads…

Will DeSantis lose if he runs to the right of Trump?

21 May 2023 3:44 am

“Negative partisanship” is a notorious feature of American politics. In presidential elections especially, voters don’t vote for the party and…

Why Ron DeSantis should wait for 2028

14 April 2023 12:00 am

Maybe Niccolò Machiavelli was not the first political consultant, but he remains one of the best. Ron DeSantis might solicit…

How Pat Buchanan redefined the twenty-first century

21 February 2023 9:40 pm

Pat Buchanan recently ended his syndicated column, essentially completing his retirement from public life. Yet it’s hard to think of any…

Tocqueville’s warning about the Democrats

30 January 2023 2:54 pm

Cassandra was a Trojan princess with the gift of prophecy — or the curse. For while she could foresee the…

The liberal-conservative tug of war for the GOP

23 December 2022 6:00 pm

For the last thirty years, the Republican Party has been a battleground between two competing ideologies. One of these is…

What conservatives lack

29 November 2022 2:03 pm

A famous passage in the preface to Lionel Trilling’s book The Liberal Imagination is widely quoted and just as widely…

This election was no loss for Trump

15 November 2022 2:28 pm

If conservatives interpreted Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 the way Trump supporters are being told to interpret the 2022 midterms,…

Life after liberalism

5 August 2022 1:31 pm

Liberalism is dying, and the American right is ascendant. That’s the lesson of the last six or eight years of…

Brave new wombs

16 July 2022 12:10 pm

Sometime this century, or early in the next, women will no longer have to give birth. Already conception can take…

Liberalism gave us this hard new right

8 May 2022 12:55 pm

The future of conservatism will look like Friedrich Nietzsche meets Beavis and Butt-Head if things continue the way they have been going. As…

How conservatives concede the culture

21 February 2022 7:23 am

Conservatives suffer from a short attention span, and it largely explains their defeats in the culture war. They fight every…

The next chapter in American foreign policy

4 January 2022 1:30 am

The new year begins a new chapter in American foreign policy. For the first time since 2001, we are not…

Who won the Cold War, anyway?

17 November 2021 5:18 pm

Thirty years ago this December 26, the impossible happened. One of the bloodiest states of the twentieth century (a horrific…

The age of entropy

18 October 2021 4:23 pm

Americans and other westerners have long been accustomed to thinking that history has a clear direction. Sometimes the direction is…

The vanishing presidency

15 September 2021 4:37 pm

Joe Biden is beginning to feel like an ex-president after only nine months in office. The last two Democrats to occupy…

The War on Terror is a war of religion

11 September 2021 10:04 am

Compare the world 20 years after the 9/11 attacks to the world two decades after Pearl Harbor. World War Two…

Who lost Afghanistan?

30 August 2021 6:00 am

America’s longest war draws to a bloody end. As the pullout deadline approaches, the probability of more atrocities like the…

The last war for democracy

21 August 2021 12:22 pm

Twenty years after 9/11, the War on Terror has come full circle. Everyone expected the Taliban to surge back to…

The Democrats should investigate themselves for insurrection

30 July 2021 6:20 am

For nearly a month last summer a violent insurrection claimed control of Capitol Hill — in Seattle, that is, not…

Donald Rumsfeld succeeded at everything — so why did he fail in the end?

1 July 2021 6:38 pm

What kind of man was Donald Rumsfeld? A successful one, by almost every measure. Ivy League scholar-athlete, captain of Princeton’s…