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

The editor of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute journal talks to Michael E. Hartmann about establishment and conservative philanthropy, including in the context of populism’s ascendance.

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.

Summer 2024 issue,

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. During the first part of our discussion, which is here, we talk about recent developments in, the current states of, and potential future directions for conservatism and philanthropy, including conservative philanthropy in particular.

The just more than less than 12-minute video below is the second part, in which we further discuss establishment and conservative philanthropy, including in the context of populism’s ascendance.

A Short Circuit

Overall, there has been a “translation of, in many cases, quite-radical ideas into not just the academy, but also into the media, into organizations that Americans are involved with at every level,” McCarthy tells me. “Yet the American people as voters, and the American people just in their neighborhoods, have not really had enough of a say in these quite-radical new ideas. That, I think, is a problem that establishment philanthropy has created. It has in some ways, short-circuited the democratic process.”

Within conservatism, “you had a set of ideas and perhaps even a set of leaders who were discarded by this populist upsurge in 2016,” he says. Conservative “philanthropy should have been paying much more attention to ideas at a much-earlier stage. Then the surprise would have been avoided, and perhaps some of the investments of conservative philanthropy would have been more effective again,” according to McCarthy. Separate and apart from saying who was right and who was wrong, “Twenty years ago, there were people on the right, and institutions that were receiving philanthropic support, and I think philanthropists themselves who simply didn’t want to hear the things that some of us had to say.”

Philanthropy’s in a unique position to take trends like these into account, he believes. “I think the great strength of philanthropy, and this includes conservative philanthropy, is it can afford to be patient and it can afford to be confident,” he says.

Philanthropy can work on much-longer time scales certainly than politicians or political activists, much-longer time scales than journalists, and really, longer time scales even than most policy shops and institutions that are focused on the very highest level of ideas. … Philanthropy can be confident because it should have this sense of playing a long game.

A Moment of “Wet Cement”

McCarthy offers an example. “I think we need more thinkers like Robert Nisbet on the American right,” he says. Nisbet

wrote many important books, one of them being The Quest for Community in 1953. We don’t have any grand thinker on the American right quite like Robert Nisbet today, someone who combines the picture of American society in Western civilization with some very concrete work on American families and American institutions.

Conservatism would and should benefit from “people who are doing the work that’s actually above policy and it’s really more grounded in the great trends of American society. I think Charles Murray is a wonderful example of that,” as well, McCarthy adds. “We need to have a new generation of people who are willing to think with the sweep that Charles Murray and Robert Nisbet had. I think philanthropy has a vital role in identifying those people.”

Perhaps especially now. “You can look at the whole world, you can look at things happening in Europe or in the Middle East, anywhere, and see that there are social transformations, political transformations taking place all around the globe, and that includes an America,” McCarthy concludes.

I think this is a moment of kind of “wet cement” throughout the political spectrum and this is a time for new building. Again, it’s time for building based on lessons that have been learned over decades of successful conservative philanthropy. But you don’t continue to be successful just by continuing to do exactly the same things you were doing before that led you to a point where you got very surprised by outcomes.

This article first appeared in the Giving Review on October 11, 2024.