Daniel McCarthy

How a Latino wave carried Trump to victory

6 November 2024 7:00 pm

Donald Trump’s victory this time may not be the surprise that his 2016 win was, but for his critics it’s…

A ripple, not a wave, will decide the US election

5 November 2024 6:16 pm

What can the 2020 and 2016 elections, the previous votes in which Donald Trump was the Republican nominee, tell us…

Vibes don’t matter. Donald Trump is still the underdog

30 October 2024 9:04 pm

Hillary Clinton has a simple but bitter lesson to teach Donald Trump’s supporters in 2024: the best way to lose…

The pro-life problem

12 September 2024 11:05 pm

The pro-life movement has reason to be grateful to Donald Trump, even as it has reason to feel exasperated as…

What is war good for in the twenty-first century?

18 June 2024 4:35 am

What exactly is war good for in the twenty-first century? The US should have asked itself this before embarking on…

Biden’s base rebels over Gaza

15 May 2024 11:40 pm

Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is a multifront war. Unfortunately for him, the youngest soldiers in his coalition would rather fight…

Lessons from costly wars past

18 March 2024 6:00 am

Money is often a substitute for strategy in US foreign policy. We spent $2 trillion in Afghanistan, only to lose…

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…