Daniel McCarthy Subscribe

Daniel McCarthy is editor of Modern Age and director of the Novak Journalism Fellowship at the Fund for American Studies.

January 22, 2020|

Economic Nationalism as Political Realism

by Daniel McCarthy|

In response to: How Economic Nationalism Hurts Nations

Panoramic view of the Bethlehem Steel Factory in Bethlehem, PA. The factory operated from 1857-2003 (gary718 / Shutterstock.com).

No market exists in a social vacuum, and hardly any market exists in a political vacuum.

More Responses

Comparative Disadvantage

by Oren Cass

If comparative advantage is created rather than discovered, refusing to play the game has consequences.

Economic Nationalism Can’t Heal the U.S.

by Richard M. Reinsch II

We aren’t going to spend or policy-wonk our way out of decline and anomie in certain segments of our population.

Why the Case for Economic Nationalism Fails

by Samuel Gregg

American policymakers and citizens should acknowledge that the benefits promised by economic nationalism are illusory.

April 2, 2019|Geoffrey M. Vaughan, Leo Strauss, Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers, Ralph Hancock, Thomas Aquinas

Natural Right, Natural Law, and Leo Strauss

by Daniel McCarthy|

Relief from entrance to the Eglise Saint Thomas d'Aquin, Paris (Zvonimir Atletic / shutterstock.com)

Strauss recognized that Thomists were fighting some of the same battles against historicists and philosophical modernists that he was fighting.

April 1, 2019|capitalism, China, free trade, Globalization, Industrial Policy, Nationalism, tariffs

The Economic Nationalism Agenda: A Conversation with Daniel McCarthy

by Daniel McCarthy|

Steelworker utilizing an electric furnace (shutterstock.com)

Daniel McCarthy makes the case for a new conservative agenda rooted in an aggressive industrial policy.

January 13, 2018|

Trump, the Great De-Mythologizer

by Daniel McCarthy|

In response to: The Price of Trump: Year One Reflections on an Unconventional Presidency

WASHINGTON, DC - DECEMBER 20: U.S. President Donald Trump celebrates Congress passing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on the South Lawn of the White House. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

If there were a Cult of Trump, his supporters wouldn't criticize him. They do—oftener and in more serious ways than George W. Bush's fans criticized him.

More Responses

He’s Good and Bad on Foreign Affairs, Good and Bad on the Economy

by David R. Henderson

Trump’s biggest triumphs for liberty are in the area of regulation and taxes.

Making Politics Possible Again

by Julie Ponzi

Those who fear that the good ideas Trump champions will be tainted by his unsavory character are not thinking politically.

Greg Weiner Responds to His Critics

by Greg Weiner

Nothing about Trump's lying or vulgarity has contributed to his policy successes.

February 14, 2017|

We Might Need a Prince of the Potomac

by Daniel McCarthy|

In response to: He Tried to Warn Us

Friedrich Hayek (1899 - 1992) with a class of students at the London School of Economics, 1948. (Photo by Paul Popper/Getty Images)

Within days of Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s 1984 shot to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list. Trump’s America is not Big Brother’s Oceania or Airstrip One. (Hillary Clinton’s America would not have been, either.) But however far Orwell’s dystopia is from becoming our reality, it’s good for Americans to reacquaint themselves with his warnings. They might do the same for Friedrich Hayek’s warnings in The Road to Serfdom. On the other hand, there’s a sense in which, valuable as these books are, it’s too late to return to them. America has already gone down a road to serfdom, if not…

Why the Worst Now?

by Tom Palmer

The Road to Serfdom’s publication was one of the intellectual and political turning points of the 20th century. The bloom was starting to come off the rose of socialism and Hayek explained why—in clear, crisp, and precise language and in a spirit of respect for those who had believed or still believed in socialism. I’m…

Father Knows Best

by Brian A. Smith

In many key respects, F.A. Hayek’s fears that the modern social-democratic welfare state would lead to totalitarianism did not come to pass. Even soft despotism seems only to have been partially realized. However, rereading The Road to Serfdom in the opening days of Donald Trump’s presidency offers an uncomfortable glimpse of where our national politics…

Grasping at the Straws of Public Virtù

by Greg Weiner

Friedrich Hayek did not predict Donald Trump, and President Trump is not the central planner of Professor Hayek’s dark imaginings. The question is whether Hayek’s analysis of the central planner can help explain the Trump phenomenon. The claim of my February Liberty Forum essay was that it could. In assessing that claim, I have the…

June 4, 2012|

From the Nation State to the New Church

by Daniel McCarthy|

In response to: Prospects for the Democratic Nation-State: What State Are We In?

Mankind is not easily rid of theology once it gets the bug. The nation-state tried to erase the distinction between earthly power and absolute right, but the attempt failed, with the result that the modern nation-state, its professed secularism notwithstanding, is once more coming under the tutelage of a clerisy. Almost since its beginning the nation-state has implied self-government in matters spiritual as well as temporal. It aspired to be an integral unit within whose borders a people were fully sovereign, answerable only to God—and perhaps not even to God, for what power could gainsay the people’s interpretation of His commands?…

Loving the Democratic State Moderately

by Aurelian Craiutu

Ralph Hancock begins his interesting essay[i] be reminding us that, despite its internal contradictions and failures, the modern state has become the only conceivable political form in our post-modern world. This should be puzzling since the record is far from being a convincing successful story. At its best, the modern state has allowed us to…

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.