Daniel McCarthy

Author Archive

  • October 24, 2024
    Is it ironic to give a prize for encouraging “open discussion and debate in the classroom” and “creating an environment where all perspectives can be heard”...
  • September 10, 2024
    In the 2020s, “conservatism” sounds passé, and its failure is taken for granted. A new right finds inspiration less in Russell Kirk or Edmund Burke than in Carl...
  • July 24, 2024
    Lord Acton said that great men are almost always bad men. Their greatness, he thought, contributed to their wickedness: power corrupts, and more power is all the more corrupting....
  • June 14, 2024
    Americans still read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, 75 years after it was first published on June 8, 1949. At the time, the year 1984 was far in the future; now...
  • May 20, 2024
    The strange new official portrait of Charles III is an occasion for conservatives to ask once more, “What’s wrong with modern art?” And is there any alternative to...
  • April 29, 2024
    Thirty years after his death on April 29, 1994, Russell Kirk haunts America’s conservatives—because conservatism itself is a ghost. It appears amid ruins, glimpsed at...
  • April 19, 2024
    Macbeth is a play about two things very much on Americans’ minds—regime change at home and whose children will inherit the kingdom. Macbeth seizes power...
  • April 10, 2024
    Imagine making a documentary about one of the 20th century’s leading opponents of the Ku Klux Klan — without ever talking about the evil of the KKK itself. If that sounds...
  • January 8, 2024
    “The Sopranos” debuted 25 years ago, but what makes it a masterpiece is how much older its themes are. In 1827, Goethe wrote a poem that begins, “America, you have...