About Daniel McCarthy

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age. He is also director of the Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship Program at the Fund for American Studies. From 2010 through 2016 he served as editor of The American Conservative. His writing has appeared in a wide variety of other publications, including The Spectator, Reason, and Orion. He is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied classics.

Books That Make Us Human

By |2022-11-07T16:14:54-06:00November 7th, 2022|Categories: Books, Books that Make Us Human, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

My canon of the very best books that help us understand our humanity would contain no surprises. But allow me instead to suggest some works that are instructive for reasons quite different from those of the recognized classics. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson – It’s an untrue truism that good monster stories are really [...]

The Intellectual Revolution That Made the Modern World

By |2019-07-19T17:20:55-05:00July 19th, 2019|Categories: Adam Smith, Books, Economics, History, Morality, Philosophy|

The Enlightenment may well be the end of an old story rather than the beginning of a new one. The philosophy of insatiable appetites changed the Christian-Aristotelian moral order into the modern world, but now that the change is just about complete, what purpose does its catalyst serve? Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites From [...]

Revisiting Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations”

By |2019-11-21T11:47:05-06:00February 19th, 2019|Categories: Books, Civilization, Culture, Politics, Western Civilization|

A decade after his death, we are living in the world that Samuel Huntington foretold. Today he again looks like a prophet, as immigration has become the most contentious political question in America and western Europe alike, and popular movements across the world are now urgently asking who “we” are within the context of their [...]

Suicide of the West: James Burnham vs. Jonah Goldberg

By |2018-10-15T12:06:13-05:00October 11th, 2018|Categories: Conservatism, Culture, Liberalism, Nationalism, Neoconservatism, Politics|

The nation-state, along with a broadly Christian culture, has always been the surest foundation for a classically liberal order. America’s ideals depend not on tribal loyalty to universal propositions but on loyalty to the tribes—and little platoons—from which our ideals arise... How do you gauge the health of a civilization? There are geographic and demographic, [...]

Willmoore Kendall: Forgotten Founder of Conservatism

By |2022-09-29T09:49:03-05:00March 29th, 2017|Categories: Constitution, Willmoore Kendall|

Willmoore Kendall held that American politics is not supposed to reflect universal values expressed through the rhetoric of a single leader, but rather the values or truths that American politics expresses must become known through the deliberate sense of the community… Willmoore Kendall is one of the most overlooked founding fathers of the conservative movement [...]

Why Liberalism Means Empire

By |2022-07-16T07:12:48-05:00August 9th, 2014|Categories: Christendom, Conservatism, Democracy in America, Liberalism, War|Tags: , |

Liberal democracy is unnatural. It is a product of power and security, not innate human sociability. It is peculiar rather than universal, accidental rather than teleologically preordained. And Americans have been shaped by its framework throughout their history. History ended on October 14, 1806. That was the day of the Battle of Jena, the turning [...]

Leo Strauss and the Right’s Civil War

By |2020-09-25T00:51:32-05:00June 13th, 2014|Categories: Conservatism, Leo Strauss|Tags: , |

I recently reviewed Paul Gottfried’s Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America for the University Bookman. Paul responds to my review here. Note that in addition to Paul’s book being available as an affordable paperback, the Kindle edition is now going for just $12.49—if you’re interested in this topic, be sure to read it [...]

GOP Demographic Crisis: Traditional Conservatism ≠ Conformism

By |2014-02-21T15:55:48-06:00February 24th, 2014|Categories: Conservatism, Edmund Burke|Tags: , |

The problem with Republican Party outreach runs deeper than a failure to offer policies tailored to ethnic interests, such as amnesty for illegal immigrants. The core of the GOP demographic crisis isn’t just racial, it’s generational and cultural: as Leon Hadar has noted of the Asian vote, “younger and more educated Asian-Americans are drifting by large [...]

Modernism & Conservatism: Does the culture of “The Waste Land” lead to freedom—or something more?

By |2014-01-21T12:51:53-06:00November 26th, 2012|Categories: Conservatism, Film, Modernity, T.S. Eliot|Tags: , |

Nearly 30 years before he shocked National Review by endorsing Barack Obama for president, senior editor Jeffery Hart announced a divorce of a different kind from the American right. With “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to a Modern American Conservatism”—published in The New Right Papers in 1982 and previewed in NR a few months earlier—Hart split [...]

Liberal Imperialism: Metternich vs. McEmpire

By |2014-01-23T09:14:47-06:00November 28th, 2011|Categories: Foreign Affairs|Tags: , |

Conservatism is poorly understood in the United States. It is not right-wing liberalism or nationalism; nor is it political Protestantism. It has nothing to do with a neurotic longing for an ideal past, and reactionaries who insist there is nothing left to conserve show that they don’t know the meaning of the word. Conservatism has [...]

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