A Conversation with Modern Age’s Daniel McCarthy (Part 1 of 2)

The editor of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute journal talks to Michael E. Hartmann about recent developments in, the current states of, and potential future directions for conservatism and philanthropy, including conservative philanthropy in particular.

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Founded by Russell Kirk and Henry Regnery in 1957, the respected quarterly Modern Age: A Conservative Review has deep roots in conservative intellectualism. It has been around. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) became its owner in 1976, and Daniel McCarthy has been its editor-in-chief since 2017. Earlier this year, it launched a brand new, regularly updated website.

McCarthy is also ISI’s vice president for the Collegiate Network college-journalism program. He formerly edited The American Conservative and directed The Fund for American Studies’ Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship Program, and he is a contributing editor of and columnist for The Spectator.

The cerebral McCarthy was nice enough to take time for a recorded conversation with me last week. The less than 13-minute video below is the first part of our discussion; the second is here. In the first part, we talk about recent developments in, the current states of, and potential future directions for conservatism and philanthropy, including conservative philanthropy in particular.

Confusion and Anxiety, Objection and Disappointment

“I think in the conservative institutional world,” McCarthy tells me, “there is a bit of confusion and anxiety. There really has been, ever since 2016, and maybe even a little bit before that as well,” a situation in which “many conservative institutions are sort of questioning the extent to which their mission has succeeded or failed over the last 30 years, basically, since the end of the Cold War.

“I understand the anxieties that others have,” he continues.

There is a need for conservatives to really no longer take for granted many of the things that they just assumed would be true after the Cold War, whether that’s in foreign policy or economics or in the social realm. But that doesn’t mean repudiating the conservatism of William F. Buckley, Jr., or Barry Goldwater, certainly not the conservatism of Russell Kirk.

Within conservative philanthropy in particular, “I think it’s fair to say that most of philanthropy on the center-right was surprised and some of it was quite upset by the rise of a new conservative populism,” according to McCarthy. “Part of it was perhaps a sense that the policy impetus of the new populist tendency on the right was going in the wrong direction. So some of it was a principled objection.

But “I fear that some of it was also just a sense of disappointment that sort of long-laid plans that had been put into motion at conservative institutions that had been the recipients of philanthropic support had been derailed,” McCarthy says, “and that, in fact, a number of sort of scrappy intellectual entrepreneurs or policy entrepreneurs or political outsiders were finding a momentum that all of these investments in movement conservatism were not producing.”

Lessons Learned, Looking Ahead

Since then, in the wake of the surprising populist ascendance, “there have been lessons learned and there are signs that lost ground is being made up quickly by philanthropy, that philanthropy is taking a very fresh look at the kinds of programs that it was supporting [and] what results those programs were realizing,” he says.

“I do think there’s also a bit of competitive pressure coming on conservative philanthropy, at least in its traditional forms, from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and others who have considerable personal wealth, and considerable networks of wealth,” McCarthy adds. They “are very interested in pursuing entirely new strategies” and supporting “entirely new institutions,” and they’re “often doing things which are shaking up what can sometimes be a rather-bureaucratic” mindset in conservatism and its institutions.

Looking ahead, “I’m someone who believes very strongly that you have to have a balance. You can’t simply say that we’re going to forget about anything that happened before 2016 and now we’re going to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks,” he says. “There’s a need for some of these Silicon Valley folks to acquire some of the wisdom and experience of a concerted movement going back many decades and conservative philanthropic efforts going back” decades. “But at the same time, there’s a need for the older institutions to become more flexible and entrepreneurial.”

Within all of philanthropy writ large, there’s a tendency for it “to go farther and farther in terms of trying to support a very progressive set of institutions, and a very progressive agenda,” McCarthy notes. “I think that much of philanthropy buys into the idea that not only Donald Trump personally, … but also any kind of populist impulse in America is anti-democratic, is unhealthy, is dangerous.” That’s wrong, he believes.

There are “large swaths of the American public feeling alienated from and ill-served by America’s institutions and America’s leadership class. Philanthropy, I think, needs to adjust,” he observes.

There are philanthropic organizations and institutions with significant resources which have tried to creatively engage with this environment, which have tried to bring together some of the new thinking that’s happening on the right about economics, with various surprisingly progressive or left-of-center ideas about trust-busting for example or certain labor issues and other things.

In the conversation’s second part, we talk more about establishment and conservative philanthropy, including in the context of populism’s ascendance.

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This article first appeared in the Giving Review on October 10, 2024.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/a-conversation-with-modern-ages-daniel-mccarthy-part-1-of-2/