Daniel McCarthy on Massie Defeat, Neocons, and America's Role in the World

And of the conversations that matter podcast,

I'm your host, John Harris. And we have a special guest who's been on the podcast once before, but someone

I very much appreciate. I actually like to check my math against him. If I have a certain political take and this particular person agrees with me,

I always feel a little bit better about it because Daniel McCarthy is a very smart individual, but he's,

I think, stellar when it comes to analyzing the political situation, including things like foreign policy, which is what we're gonna talk about a little bit today.

He is a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He's also the editor of Modern Age.

And if you don't have Modern Age, if you aren't subscribed, if you don't go to the website, I would encourage you to do so. It'll make you a lot smarter when it comes to politics.

So without further ado, Daniel McCarthy, thank you for being here and talking to us about foreign policy a little bit. Thanks, John.

So you wrote a piece for Compact Magazine on the Massey defeat, but it was really more about the

Republican Party and conservative movement and their lack of foreign policy vision post -Reagan.

And I'm simplifying it, but you go through each administration and describe,

I think perfectly, where the Republican Party was at at that particular time post -Reagan.

And then bringing us to our moment now where we have someone, Thomas Massey, who has been compared to Ron Paul a lot with his foreign policy vision, but this is not the policy or the philosophy that the

Republican Party is necessarily interested in at the moment. They're more interested in Trump's kind of peace through strength, strong foreign policy, but obviously it's not a neocon foreign policy.

So what I'm hoping to do is maybe flush out some of that piece, connect the dots for viewers, most of whom are gonna be probably conservatives and Christians who vote

Republican generally. Some of them might not be happy that Massey lost. And just to give them some context for all of this.

So we could do this sequentially. That's probably the best way to start off and then bring it home to what just happened last week.

So maybe post -Cold War, what was the policy of the conservative movement,

Republican Party up until the time of Reagan? You didn't really cover this, but pre -Reagan, what were conservatives saying about our relationship with other countries around the world?

Well, up to Ronald Reagan, the Cold War was the predominant fact in the way conservatives thought about foreign policy.

The Soviet Union was not just a military threat, was also an ideological antithesis to the

United States. It was an ideological antithesis to Christianity. Across the board, the

Soviet Union represented, again, not just a worldly opponent, but also a very different worldview that conservatives rejected.

And therefore, conservatives generally favored military strength in the United States. They tended to be in some ways quite hawkish, but really they were more anti -communist.

They were concerned about the ideological threat even more than they were eager to get into foreign countries and fight wars there.

So something like Vietnam, interestingly enough, is a war that gets started under democratic administrations and obviously sort of becomes a major issue under the

Lyndon Johnson administration in the 1960s. So conservatives were not necessarily demented war hawks or anything like that as they're often portrayed by their progressive enemies.

And progressives tried to present Ronald Reagan that way too. They said, oh, Ronald Reagan would blow up the world if he got a chance.

You know, this guy's dangerous. He shouldn't have his hand on the nuclear button. He's gonna get us into wars. In fact, what

Reagan actually did was to have a very prudent foreign policy. He would put pressure on the

Soviet Union, especially when it came to spending on new weapon systems and new technologies like the idea of space -based defense.

He also was willing to support various resistance movements against communism in Central Asia, in Afghanistan, for example, and in Latin America.

But he was not, in fact, bringing us to the brink of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. He was not, in fact, about to send

NATO troops marching across the borders into Eastern Europe. On the contrary, Reagan was setting things up so that the

Soviet Union would collapse of its own entropy and then basically its own tyranny over the Eastern Europeans and the

Russians themselves would bring it down. And that was very successful. Was there a difference initially post -World

War II between Republicans and Democrats on foreign policy, or did that become more of a contrast as Democrats were a little bit more aligned or soft on the

Soviet Union? Well, that's a great point because the Franklin Roosevelt administration really was infiltrated by people who were quite pro -communist and very soft on the

Soviet Union indeed. And as a result, coming out of World War II, conservatives were very critical of the

Democratic Party, which they saw as being a party of basically surrendering to Stalin. And even after Roosevelt dies and he's succeeded by Harry Truman, who is somewhat more aggressive at taking on communist infiltration at home and also sees the

Soviet Union abroad as a big threat, the conservative movement is still very critical of Harry Truman. They see him really as being in the shadow of Franklin Roosevelt.

But that said, there are a lot of dimensions to the way early conservatives after World War II think about foreign policy.

And even though they want to have a clear moral understanding of the Soviet Union as an opponent, exactly what form of resistance to the

Soviet Union that's going to take, there are several ideas that are floating around. They certainly generally support more of a military buildup, although President Eisenhower sees that as a problem.

He thinks the country is going to bankrupt itself. So conservatives were worried about that too. And they looked for cheaper ways to deter

Soviet aggression rather than having repeats of things like the Korean War. They thought perhaps we should strengthen our nuclear arsenal and also use covert operations in places like Guatemala and Iran and elsewhere, which is one of the things that opens the door to some of what the

CIA gets involved in over the course of the Cold War. So that brings us to Ronald Reagan, and he has a piece through Strength Vision that resonates with conservatives, obviously credited with winning the

Cold War, helping win it. And then after Reagan, you make the case that this mentality continues through Bush, but it's different than obviously the

MAGA Trump approach. So maybe contrast that for us. What makes George W.

Bush different than Trump, and are they reading Reagan in different ways? Because they both claim that they're like Reagan.

Right, so there's this great intellectual civil war among conservatives after the end of the

Cold War. And because so much of conservative foreign policy thinking has been shaped for decades at that point by the conditions of the

Cold War, once the Soviet Union is no longer around, the question becomes, well, what should our attitude towards the world be now?

Should we, in fact, be much more focused on the United States, much less committed to international institutions like NATO?

That's what one side says. The other side says, well, actually, the world perhaps is less ordered now because you don't have the superpower conflict.

And because of the potential for disorder, the United States now has to actually take a more active role in perhaps policing faraway conflicts.

And the George H. W. Bush administration generally favors continuing to have a very active role around the world in foreign policy.

And you see that with the Persian Gulf War. You'll see it eventually with rounds of, not just maintaining

NATO, which is one thing, but also as you get into the Clinton administration, expansion of NATO as well, which

George H. W. Bush was in favor of too. When you get to the George W. Bush administration in the early 2000s,

Bush has become president, he is presenting himself not just as an heir to his own father, but also an heir to Ronald Reagan.

And he and a number of people who come to be called neoconservatives and who in many cases self -identify as neoconservatives are saying quite explicitly, well, we believe that you have to have a very sort of engaged foreign policy.

And of course, after 9 -11, the whole country agrees with that. The whole country says, well, yes, the United States needs to fight a war on terror.

That means we need to be not just in places like Afghanistan, but also perhaps in Iraq. And then it turns out that George W.

Bush doesn't really have a plan for what to do once you've taken on hostile regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And so what winds up happening is that this idea that every nation state should be democratic and liberal and kind of like us, this is the vision that George W.

Bush winds up pursuing in Afghanistan and Iraq. And we get these decades long occupations, which are aimed at not just knocking out a regime that's hostile to us, but actually trying to build some sort of liberal democracy in those places.

And then Trump. Well, and yes, indeed. So Trump is, you know, he recognizes that the

American people do not have the patience and it's correct that they don't have the patience to permanently occupy these far away countries which in fact are very resistant to becoming culturally and politically like us.

He recognizes that these are what critics have been calling forever wars. And he says, you know, when we think about America getting to war, our objective should be to win and our objective should be able to point to something and say, this is what we have been able to get out of the war.

Whereas if you have conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan, it's not clear what exactly we have in the long run taken, you know, in terms of making

America more powerful from these decades long occupations. And there's no end in sight when

Trump first becomes president in 2016, 2017, there's no end in sight to what we're doing in Afghanistan. So Trump, you know, appeals to people who,

Americans who say we should have a less engaged foreign policy, a less activist foreign policy abroad, and that we should in fact, you know, be much more limited in terms of the wars we choose to fight and when we fight them, we should fight them in order to win and to win quickly rather than having prolonged occupations.

When you look back at oftentimes, it's George Washington's foreign policy and not to get involved in foreign entanglements or John C Calhoun who,

I mean, he was a war hawk at first, but then he's against the Mexican American war. These are figures that are sort of summoned from the past to teach us what real conservatives think about these things or in the 20th century, is it

Robert Taft, I think it's Robert Taft, the Republican who's very against getting involved in foreign affairs too much.

And I know that the side that is very, very against all the bases we have and the wars that we fight and all of that, they like to go to the past and try to pick out these examples to say these were the authentic conservatives.

Maybe talk about that a little bit before we get to Massey. Is there an authentic conservatism?

Can the real authentic conservatives stand up and tell us what the foreign policy objective is, or is this very complicated and our circumstances different and Trump inherited something that obviously he didn't create.

So just try to peel back some onion layers for us because I see this very oversimplified in my opinion. And I think you'd be a great person to just flesh out what the conservative approach to foreign policy is.

Well, we're definitely right to look back to our own history for some guidance, even though America's current position in the world is somewhat different from that of our country at the time of the founding.

George Washington is indeed someone I think that we can always find wisdom in.

It's interesting to look back at the circumstances of his neutrality proclamation. So his neutrality proclamation, this is around 1790s.

It is really an attempt to keep us out of what is basically a European war.

You could even argue it was a world war, this conflict between revolutionary France and Great Britain.

And there are Americans, including Thomas Jefferson, who are quite eager for us to support the

French side of that conflict. Not necessarily to get into armed conflict immediately, but Jefferson thinks that the

French revolutionary cause is the cause of liberalism, the cause of what we would now call liberal democracy.

And Jefferson still identifies the British as with monarchy and with everything that he believes the

American Revolution was fought against. Adding to this is the fact that we have a treaty of alliance with France.

France came to our aid during the Revolutionary War. We signed a treaty of mutual defense.

And so Jefferson and his side of politics is saying, America has a treaty duty to support its ally here.

And George Washington, he says that, no, we're not, we're gonna call ourselves neutral.

And Alexander Hamilton makes an argument that actually the France that we had a treaty with was the

France of Louis XVI. And now that he has been deposed, it's a completely different regime in France and therefore our treaty obligations don't continue.

It's controversial, by the way. It speaks to something that a lot of conservatives and libertarians talk about even now in the 21st century, which is to what degree can the executive simply unilaterally set foreign policy?

And to what extent is what the constitution says about Congress's power to declare war?

Just how far does that go? How binding is that? Because Jefferson and James Madison both make the argument that George Washington doesn't constitutionally have the power to declare neutrality.

They say that if you need Congress to declare war, then you also need Congress to declare that we're not going to war, that we're not, we're gonna be neutral.

And that in fact, neutrality can have a lot of effects on a foreign conflict, which may in fact favor one side over another.

And so Jefferson and Madison are both, they both think that Washington has chosen a policy that's going to favor the

British and harm France, even though it's a policy officially of neutrality. So it's a very complicated situation.

And just as you have to think through the complexities of modern 21st century foreign policy, when you go back and look at what

George Washington had to do in the foreign policy of our very first presidential administration, he too faced a complex situation.

And he too was accused of many of the same things that a president like Trump is accused of, of being, of using executive power in too broad of a way.

And there are sort of great controversies here, including a controversy over who was actually trying to seek peace, right?

So Washington and Hamilton thought that they were doing the right thing by keeping America as much out of the conflict as possible.

Jefferson and Madison thought, well, really what you're doing is you're weakening France and you're strengthening

Britain because you're maintaining these trade ties with Britain. And therefore you're actually kind of entering the war on the side of the bad guys and you shouldn't do that.

So there's more complexity to that than a lot of retrospective views would suggest.

As you say, in the Cold War even, there were figures like Robert Taft, who was a

Senator from Ohio, who was very critical of NATO, very critical of the idea that we would have to have a global crusade against communism.

So there was indeed conservative thinking, which said that actually we still need to look back on this 19th century tradition that is less interventionist, rather than think about the

Cold War as being something that is setting the stage for World War III or that otherwise is going to be a long -term commitment that might bankrupt us.

That was certainly one of Robert Taft's fears. And you can see how some of these threads continue into various Republican figures today.

You can see some of it in Ron Paul, you can certainly see some of it in Thomas Massey, and others too. It's not just libertarian -leaning

Republicans, but there is a true and honorable sense of restraint in foreign policy that is very conservative as well as quite libertarian.

The irony, of course, being a lot of libertarians like Thomas Jefferson, even though Thomas Jefferson, James Madison's the one who is

Jefferson's disciple and finally gets us actually into a major foreign war, which is the War of 1812, where the

United States declares war on Britain and invades Canada. And of course that doesn't work out so well for us.

So yes, there is a conservative tradition of foreign policy restraint in America, but it has to be applied intelligently at every step of the way.

It's not simply a matter of thinking that you can do exactly as George Washington did, because even

Washington, what he did was controversial in his day. The closest I've gotten to trying to understand what a conservative singular position on this would be from the

American's perspective is Calhoun, because Calhoun has a problem with the British intercepting our ships, conscripting our sailors.

He thinks this is a violation of the honor of the United States, and that's one of the chief reasons in my reading that he's a war hawk.

But then later he, of course, is against the Mexican -American War. He doesn't want a war with England over the 38th parallel.

And he tries to basically say that a war for the sake of territory expansion is a wrong motive.

And so the difference that I saw in him was that if our honor is abridged somehow, we have an obligation to answer that.

Like we're just being disrespected on the world stage, which maybe is a very Southern thing anyway. Although I know there are people who disagreed with him from the

South. Like I think even John, is it John Randolph, I think disagreed with him about the

War of 1812. Yes, and in fact, that's worth commenting on. So you're exactly right that someone like Calhoun is a figure well worth taking a very close look at.

And again, people might be confused because he's very hawkish in 1812, but then less so later on.

And John Randolph of Roanoke, who is a kinsman of Thomas Jefferson, but is very critical. He thinks that Jefferson is in many ways, not

Jeffersonian enough. But Randolph of Roanoke is also very sympathetic to the more conservative line of thought coming from someone like Edmund Burke in the

UK. Randolph of Roanoke, he's very critical of his fellow Southerners. Randolph of Roanoke is against the

War of 1812. And he says that this war is basically, it's about economics and it's about the fact that Southern economic interests are being harmed by, you know, they were harmed by the embargo that Thomas Jefferson had pursued to try to keep, you know,

America separated mostly from Britain, British economic power.

That was bad for Southern, you know, economic interests. And as an alternative to this kind of economic warfare or economic embargo in place of war, which

Jefferson had pursued, the, a lot of Southerners in Congress by the

Madison administration, they're saying, well, look, you know, the embargo hasn't worked. What can we do instead? We've got to end this problem.

Let's have a war against Canada. Let's take out, you know, the British to our

North. And then we won't be held hostage. Our trade won't be held hostage by British power.

So Randolph thinks that is, you know, very important. And he, you know, doesn't really credit other

Southerners views about honor. Not that he doesn't believe in honor himself. He very much does, but he thinks that, you know, other

Southerners are basically being deceitful and have motives that are quite different, which is just to say,

I mean, you know, all of the America's wars, you can have some very, you know, very intelligent, very principled people who wind up being on opposite sides and having very different interpretations of why we're doing these conflicts and getting into them, which is just another reason to, you know, take these things seriously and not think you can paint with a broad brush.

Well, I could just envision Calhoun, which is always dangerous to do, I suppose, to take these historical figures and cast them in present situations.

But I could envision him seeing the Ayatollah Khamenei and seeing the

Death to America chants and using their forces while we were in places like Iraq to attack us and their proxies and saying, you know what?

This is an abridgment of our honor. This is a threat to our trade, even on the global stage, like being supportive.

But at the same time, it's a very different situation, obviously, with military bases in a region that he never probably would have conceived of us ever having military bases.

And so this is where, in my mind, it gets very tricky. And I admit, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is I myself go back and forth and am confused sometimes just because I value the small government argument of like, let's reel it back.

But then you look at it and it's a knot and you think to yourself, who's gonna occupy the space that we're leaving?

Is it China? Is it one of our enemies? Is it possible to do this? I want to do it.

But then when you have regimes that are threatening us in massive ways, attempting to seek nuclear weapons that they will, in fact, most likely use, that kind of thing, then yeah, it does seem like that merits a response.

So any thoughts there with just kind of the situation that we've inherited as a result of post -war activity,

Cold War policy? How do you see the

United States on the world stage today? And if we wanted to reel it back, what would we even do? I don't even know how we get started in doing that.

Well, you're right. Not only is there the question of whether rivals or opponents are going to fill a vacuum, if we're not playing the sort of expansive role that we've been playing recently, even if our allies fill that vacuum, it turns out that there are risks involved with that too.

And you're kind of seeing that play out right now in the Middle East. So Israel has very grave security concerns with Iran.

For us, Iran is a troublemaker and is hostile to us and has used force against our own troops.

When we were in Iraq, it's harassed us and done terrible things to us in various ways.

But for Israel, it's a much, much bigger question. And the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon is not negligible to the rest of the world.

Not necessarily because the Iranians have a suicidal desire to make a first strike or anything like that.

It's not that scenario that's the problem. It's rather that Iran, which is a nation which already loves to blackmail others, will have tremendous blackmail power if it has a nuclear weapon.

But the Israelis really do have to think seriously about the existential threat if Iran has a nuclear weapon, partly because Israel is a very small, compact country.

So in terms of population, in terms of geographic space, in terms of how much of the

Israeli territory is actually not desert, right? And you can actually have a population. It's quite limited and compact, which means that it would not take a large nuclear arsenal to target the main population centers of Israel and basically annihilate

Israel. So that is a danger that Israel faces that's very different from larger countries, not just like the

United States or China. Famously, Mao Zedong said, "'Look, we have so many billions of people in China "'and we have such a large country.

"'Even if we get in a nuclear war, we're going to survive it "'and we're going to be able to have a second strike "'and we're going to take out our enemies.'"

So Mao thought his country, because of its sheer size, was somewhat insulated against the logic of nuclear destruction.

Iran is also a very big country, both in terms of population, about 90 million people, and in terms of its geographic footprint.

And it would be much harder, even if you had nuclear parity between Iran and Israel, it would be very hard for Israel to use the same number of nuclear weapons in a way that crippled

Iran as a state, relative to how easy it would be for Iran to use a similar number of nuclear weapons to completely wipe out

Israel. So Israel has quite naturally been eager to have a war to stop

Iran from furthering its nuclear ambitions. And that means that even if the United States isn't quite sure that we want to get into a war,

Israel is going to go ahead and do it because their lives may depend on it. Well, and if Israel gets started on the war, then the

United States will feel an obligation, in fact, partly a matter of honor, also a matter of interest, also a matter of political pressure.

There certainly is such a thing as an Israel lobby in the United States. All of these elements are going to make a case that we need to be involved in a war against Iran.

If Israel's involved in a war against Iran, then we should also be involved in a war against Iran. And you saw that last year when

Israel started a war that it was fighting by itself, and then subsequently the United States came in and ended the war very quickly.

And you see it also now where both Israel and the United States have been partners from the beginning in this longer operation against Iran.

So even if our allies are leading the charge, that can be a conflict we wind up getting into.

It would be the same way with NATO. You could imagine that if the Europeans did what we say we want them to do, which is to take more responsibility for their own foreign policy, this might eventually lead to a country like Poland deciding it needs to directly intervene in a conflict neighboring it in Ukraine, and that it's going to send its own troops to go fight

Russians, in which case, even though NATO is a defensive alliance and we would not be required by the alliance structure to go to war on behalf of Poland, it would still be kind of like something that looks like an incipient world war, and the

United States would probably feel a very strong degree of sympathy for the Poles and would want to support them any way it could, which might ultimately drag us into the conflict.

So this is just to say, we may want a policy of disengagement and a peaceful policy that doesn't involve us in faraway conflicts, but the faraway conflicts aren't necessarily going to leave us alone, right?

Not because we're gonna get invaded or anything like that, but because we really do, and this again goes back all the way to the founding, we do have sympathies for different sides, right?

So during the founding era, some Americans sympathized with revolutionary France, others sympathized with Britain, and we thought it was really important to us, not only for reasons of self -interest, economic or otherwise, but also for reasons of philosophy and for reasons of honor, that one side win and another side lose.

Americans still feel that way about many of the conflicts happening around the world today. And we do also have all these military bases in the

Middle East as well. I mean, they could attack us, but it wouldn't be our national soil.

It would be our large bases that are, and why are they over there? I mean, part of it is,

I know what we're experiencing right now because of the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz. We wanna make sure trade is flowing and that China's not the one that's influencing all of the decisions.

And if we want a bargaining chip, if there's something that comes up that isn't our national interest. And so,

I mean, I look at all of this complexity and it's like, I would love to be Fortress America, like the 80s game.

Like, I just wanna be here and not have to worry about the things over there. But I've wondered whether in a global economy that's even possible, let alone the conditions that we have now with bases all over the world and stuff.

So yeah, I didn't expect you to give like the silver bullet answer for here's what

America can do to make both of these things a possibility. One, not have to care much about what happens in Europe and Asia and the

Middle East. And two, also secure our national interests and trade policies and so forth.

That seems to be the balancing act that every administration faces. And you make the case that there's been a bit of a, well,

I'll let you speak to it. My interpretation was you said there's been a bit of a wandering on what our foreign policy should be post -Bush.

And Trump's filled the vacuum, but this is not satisfactory to - Yeah, so I mean, part of the problem here is that it's a complicated enough world when you think of it in terms of material interests, economic interests, strategic considerations like keeping waterways open.

Those are difficult enough things to tackle in trying to create a foreign policy that serves the country well.

And then on top of it, you have what might be called matters of imagination and sort of grand ideological visions.

And one of the problems after the Cold War is that not only, it was a watershed.

It was really a historic choice in the early 1990s where George H .W.

Bush, he had elements within his administration that were thought of as realists. They were meant to be people who considered military affairs in terms of power, in terms of interests, in terms of strategic needs.

And they were not meant to be sort of ideologues who took a romantic view of what foreign policy could accomplish.

The trouble is a lot of that romanticism and a lot of it took the form of a certain variety of neoconservatism that did start to creep into even the

George H .W. Bush administration. And then it became very much a part of the George W. Bush administration.

And curiously enough, even Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who was considered to be, he was a protester against the

Vietnam War. He was someone who was coming from what was imagined to be the anti -war left. But even

Bill Clinton came to see using American power as a way to advance American ideals.

Now, ideals are a good thing in the abstract, but when you conduct an idealist foreign policy and you think that you can bring about not just stability, but also a sort of new dawn, a new world order, as George H .W.

Bush said, where you are promoting your values and your way of life and your form of government all around the planet, that unfortunately is kind of like what the

French Revolution was trying to do. It was trying to do it in a very heavy -handed way, but that was certainly what it aimed to do.

And George Washington was quite right to say, wait a minute, look, I mean, we may be a republic just like France is a republic, but that doesn't mean that we have the same ideological goals and the same sort of vision for democratizing the whole planet.

Well, a lot of neoconservatives did have that French revolutionary sort of fervor. That doesn't mean they necessarily wanted to have wars as aggressive as the

French revolutions were, but they certainly did want America to use a lot of military force in pursuit of an ideal, in pursuit of a dream.

And that became a big problem. And it can be a problem now too. Although one of the things that I think distinguishes

Trump from the Republicans who had preceded him at the end of the, after the Cold War is that Trump is not a romantic.

He's not an idealist. He's someone who is transactional, and that's actually a good thing. It means he's always looking for deals, but he is willing to use force, and he does understand interests in a way that, too few leading

Republicans are willing to open their minds to. So Trump, I think, is certainly up until now in interventions like the one against Maduro in Venezuela, and for that matter, taking out the head of RIRGC back in his first term,

Trump had been very, very good at using exactly the right amount of force to accomplish something significant for the

United States and not over -investing and not getting into conflicts that he seemed like he couldn't win or couldn't bring to an end.

The Iran war that we're fighting right now, it's a serious war that has a proper objective in trying to stop

Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but it is obviously a much more difficult and much larger conflict than the ones that Trump has succeeded with before.

And so we're in this very tough position where Trump is basically, I mean, he has a choice of either trying to strike a deal based on where things are right now, which is going to be tough because the

Iranians feel like they have a lot of leverage with the Strait of Hormuz, or alternatively, he can escalate.

He can send in ground troops, try to take over enough of the coast of the

Red Sea that he can then open up the Straits of Hormuz and deprive

Iran of that leverage. But of course, once you get on the ground in Iran, then you've got another problem because then you've got to defend your spot on the ground against the

Iranians who have most of the ground on their side and most of the population as well. So Trump has, this is gonna be the greatest test of Trump's negotiating skills that we have yet encountered.

And I saw last night, I don't know where things are at this morning. I was trying to figure it out, but every hour changes that it seemed like, despite Netanyahu's posts online, and I think they are supportive of Trump, Netanyahu is supportive, but there's a lot of people in Israel that are not happy that Trump may strike a deal that gets the

United States what we want in our interest. They can't have a nuclear bomb.

They're gonna hand over the uranium and dispose of it. But it doesn't go farther, and we're not gonna say much about their proxies that are attacking

Israel and stuff. And so, I mean, this is, as far as I know right now, where it stands, that Trump seems to think we're making headway on the objectives that America has had in this, but this isn't meeting all the expectations that Israel was hoping it would meet, which, if that is the way it goes down, will be interesting, to say the least.

Maybe the best thing right now is to just briefly talk about the Democrats a little bit.

You made the case in your post that someone like a Thomas Massie has possibilities in the

Democrat Party, because the Democrat Party already has ownership or a monopoly on being anti -Zionist, anti -Israel.

So it's sort of a natural fit for the people that are almost like the sort of stereotypical

McCarthy when it comes to, or they're getting that way. I mean, Thomas Massie, since his loss, has been just pointing fingers all over the place online, accusing people of being, taking money from Israel or whatever, even if it's not accurate.

I mean, I've been watching this, and I'm like, what is going on? It's quite remarkable. I've never quite seen anything like this.

But is he gonna become like Justin Amash or Joe Scarborough or any of these guys who went to DC, and they just said, we just want fiscal responsibility.

We want some of these libertarian objectives, smaller government. But then when they become the opposition to the

Republicans, the Democrats look at them like they're darlings, which is kind of what happened to Thomas Massie.

And now they've got an ideological kind of objective that they share in common.

So flesh that out a little for us, if you will, because you do talk about it, that the

Democrats could capitalize on that. Yeah, so I wrote an article for Compact and also an article for The Spectator about Thomas Massie's primary election.

Now, Massie himself and many of his online supporters have said, well, really the only reason

Massie lost his primary was because he was facing massive spending against him by the

Israel lobby and by a number of Jewish billionaires who are pro -Israel and see

Massie as an opponent of Israel and therefore put in more than $30 million basically over the course of his race to get

Massie defeated. And so that's what Massie has been pointing to. Massie, you know, makes a lot of jokes. He says his opponent,

Ed Galrain, is basically just a tool of Israel. Massie even kicked off his concession speech, which is, you know, normally an opportunity to show that you're a gentleman and that you've taken your defeat in stride.

Instead, Massie kicked off his concession speech by saying that he just got off the phone to Israel because that's the only place, you know, you can reach

Ed Galrain, his opponent. So this is something that Massie has taken very, very personally.

And as I say, he and his most diehard supporters attribute all of his, you know, all the reason for his defeat to the spending by supporters of Israel.

Now, one question or several questions that emerge from that, first of all, it's kind of odd for libertarians of all people to suddenly have a problem with campaign finance spending, right?

So libertarians famously are opposed to restrictions on wealthy people being able to give money in political elections.

Does that rule suddenly not apply if the people giving the money are Jewish or if Israel is the cause that they want to support?

So that's, you know, a kind of question about, you know, just where is principled libertarianism going there?

One could also say that, well, maybe it's not, maybe, you know, people aren't, you know, supporters of Thomas Massie aren't going to call for new laws to prevent billionaires from giving money to support

Israel, but maybe they're just going to say, well, we're going to talk about this and call it out and then, you know, kind of shame billionaires into not being able to support

Israel. But that's what Massie tried to do in his primary. I mean, he certainly talked about it a lot and yet he's still lost.

And Massie himself, you know, admits that, you know, in his way of thinking, the spending, you know, counted for much more than his talking about the spending in terms of, you know, which way voters decided to go.

So just talking about it the way Massie talked about it, which was often quite bitter and harsh, that didn't succeed.

So I asked him one of my articles, what's the next level then? Are you going to escalate this? Are you going to, you know, you know, start talking about Israel and not just Israel, but Americans who support

Israel, which is going to include a great many American Jews. It's also going to include, you know, some American, you know,

Christian Zionists and others. Are you going to start talking about them explicitly as enemies and, you know, say that this is all, you know, a foreign element, which is now hijacking our elections and we need to, you know, be on guard against this kind of subversion.

If you start taking that kind of rhetoric, you know, too far, you're going to be very hard to distinguish from, you know, an out and out anti -Semite.

So there are real, you know, I'm not trying to say here that, you know, people who are criticizing

Israel or people who are criticizing the billionaires are anti -Semites because I don't think that's true. What I am saying is that they have put themselves in an escalatory spiral, which if they're not careful is going to lead people around them in a direction that's going to start, you know, being indistinguishable from anti -Semitism.

So that's a real, you know, moral problem and a problem on a number of levels. I don't think that Massey lost his primary because of the spending against him.

It certainly didn't help, but if you think of what, you know, was basically at stake in Massey's primary as far as the ordinary

Republican primary voter was concerned, Massey had defined himself, you know, kind of in three ways.

Massey was a big critic of Donald Trump. He was someone who was supporting the release of the

Epstein files and was doing that. It looked like precisely because he wanted to embarrass Trump. He had voted against the one big, beautiful bill, which was the most important piece of domestic, you know, sort of spending and tax cut legislation that Trump has championed, which again, you know, places

Massey against Trump. And Massey was also asking Republican primary voters to basically produce a referendum on whether they had positive feelings towards Israel or negative feelings towards Israel.

And if you know anything at all about Republican primary voters, all three of those questions, you know, if you had no

Israel, you know, no pro -Israel spending at all, you know, if you had no Israel spending at all in the primary, and you just asked ordinary

Republican primary voters, are you pro -Trump or pro -Massey? Do you see the release of the

Epstein files as being just something Massey is doing for, you know, the sake of fighting, you know, child abuse?

Or do you see this as something he's doing to embarrass Trump? And if you ask them, do you like Israel or do you dislike

Israel? On all three of those questions, anyone who knows the first thing about Republican primary voters anywhere in the country is going to say, of course, primary voters are going to choose

Trump over Massey. So he had, you know, kind of put himself in a corner and kept reinforcing a message that was guaranteed to get him to lose his primary.

And again, you know, the spending by the billionaires certainly, you know, added fuel to that fire. And, you know, that's probably a big reason why he lost, not just lost, but lost by 10 points.

But, you know, the idea that you would single out this, you know, spending coming from a few billionaires rather than looking at the fact that you're actually at war with your president and your party, that I think is foolish.

Now, what I say is that I think the people who are most inclined to reject what I've just said and want to focus purely on Israel and reject the idea that, you know, alienation from his president and his party was a big part of Massey's defeat.

I think people who view this purely through the lens of Zionism or anti -Zionism have to ask themselves, where is anti -Zionism going to have the best political future?

If that's the most important issue, is that gonna be a successful issue in Republican primaries or is it gonna be more successful in Democratic primaries?

And if you look at the condition of the Democratic Party right now, it seems to me that that is the party that is most open to anti -Zionism.

That's the party where the strongest criticisms of Israel will probably find the most favorable reception.

I'm an hour and a half, two hours north of New York City right now. So I just saw this play out with the New York City race.

Mamdami, that was one of his main issues. And it's frankly interesting to see that at a local level where it shouldn't really matter, but it does to the

Democrat voters quite a bit. So, no, that's, I think, a spot on analysis. And, you know,

I don't know if you're aware, I don't know how much you are online, but that is kind of what you just described

Massey doing. That is what he was doing, I think it was just yesterday, with Turning Point USA, trying to insinuate that their distributor is,

I think it was Salem Media, and Salem Media is pro -Israel. And it wasn't true, and Turning Point USA pointed this out, but then

Candace Owens got in on it, and it was a big kind of thing online over the weekend.

And I just thought, man, this is so sad for me to see this, because, I mean, I don't know how long, I mean,

I'm sure just being in politics, you've followed Massey for a while, but he's always struck me as someone who had some conviction,

I liked a lot of the small government talk, and to see him doing this kind of thing right now, it just feels like he's spending whatever kind of built -up respect that he's had on really cheap fights that aren't helping him in his political future, in the

Republican Party at least. And, you know, where's this all going? Do you have a prediction for us?

I mean, you sort of said that the Democrats are gonna be able to capitalize on this kind of energy more and more, but do you see a fusion forming?

Because I've heard Tucker Carlson talk about this, I've even heard Nick Fuentes talk about this, that there is an alignment that decent people have, where if we just softened over here on the free market stuff, and if the

Democrats were just able to meet us a little bit on the immigration stuff, we could have this sort of decent people's coalition that would transcend

Republican and Democrat. I don't see that ever happening, but I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that.

Well, it's very interesting that Thomas Massey started to get favorable coverage in places like the

New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, even among neoconservatives at the Bulwark, which is the publication of Bill Kristol.

Massey, who, you know, until about a year ago was considered to be either irrelevant or a kind of kooky libertarian guy, or an outright enemy by most of these kind of establishment liberal and neocon voices, suddenly they changed their attitude towards him.

And something I've been trying to get a lot of Massey's fans to understand is these people who've suddenly decided they like Massey, just like they suddenly decided they like Marjorie Taylor Greene, these are smart, sophisticated people, and if they're changing their tune on someone, that's probably not because they have suddenly decided that, hey, libertarianism is great, you know, small government is great, we like what

Massey's saying about constitutionalism. On the contrary, what it's telling you is that these people see something that is in the advantage of their existing ideology at stake in Massey's reelection, and they favor

Massey over the critics of Massey, they favor Massey over Donald Trump. So I've just, you know, tried to get

Massey supporters to think about what else is at stake there. Massey supporters, you know,

I understand where they're coming from, they want to view this in terms of Massey being a good, strict constitutionalist, which is true, they want to view this in terms of smaller government, which, you know,

Massey is also a champion of, and they don't want to look at how those issues, which are generally not things that actually have any effect on what happens in Washington, D .C.,

right? So Massey is usually a lone vote in protest, he's not someone who's leading legislation that's shrinking the government.

Nevertheless, I mean, he conducts himself honorably, and he has a, you know, with respect to the size of government, and he has, you know, a very consistent small government philosophy.

But there are people who can use Massey, and use his views, and use the way he speaks as a weapon against Donald Trump, and as a weapon in the fights that actually do have consequences in Washington, D .C.

You know, fights about limited government virtually never have any consequences in Washington, D .C., because the sad truth is virtually no one in either party, you know, supports actually limited government.

Massey is an exception to that, Massey does really support limited government, but he's one guy, and you can't do anything with one guy.

This is another thing that, you know, I've kind of made a key part of my essay for Compact. If you really believe that we need to have limited government, and I think a lot of us do, then you actually have to have friends, you actually have to have a political party where, you know, lots of people believe that, and you can coordinate, you know, in terms of getting the policies you want.

You can't just elect one guy and think, hey, this is fine, or have, you know, three or four guys, Rand Paul, and Massey, and Abash, and think that that's gonna be enough.

You've got to, you know, elect more people. That means you're probably gonna have to make alliances and trade -offs with some

Republicans who aren't as hardcore as you, and maybe even don't share your prime principles, and you're gonna have to learn from Donald Trump and be transactional.

You're gonna have to trade off, you know, okay, maybe you're not gonna oppose one bill, but you're going to do that in order to get support for another.

This is not what, you know, guys like Thomas Massey, or, you know, even for the most part, Rand Paul, are willing to do.

So they're not real politicians in that sense. Now, Ron Paul is kind of the original model of this, the

Texas Congressman, and I think, you know, Ron Paul knew what he was doing. He knew that he was not, you know, building a sort of party within a party for the sake of liberty during his, you know, long tenure in Congress.

He was, you know, basically as a Congressman trying to be an educator rather than a legislator, and that's fine.

There is a place for that. And he also, even to the extent that he didn't want to, you know, take over the

Republican Party for the longest time he nonetheless would vote for, you know, the Republican speaker, whoever the candidate might be.

He generally wasn't trying to shake things up, you know, when it came to leadership elections and other things that are extremely sensitive when it comes to, you know, the party's internal apparatus.

I understand what, you know, people inspired by Ron Paul were trying to do. You know,

I was part of Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign. I thought, you know, it was great to see Ron Paul inspire a number of Republicans to run for office as limited government

Republicans, you know, in, you know, the same era of the Tea Party. And in fact, the Tea Party really has some of its origins in Ron Paul.

That was all great. But unfortunately, people very quickly, you know, who were involved in that effort decided, well, this is enough, you know, getting one senator in, getting, you know, two congressmen, getting some state legislators elected, that's enough.

And now we can, you know, call the shots, perhaps in the Republican Party and in the country as a whole. And in fact, it was nowhere near enough.

You actually have to be much more, you have to talk to a lot more people and, you know, either win them over to your cause or make allies of them through transactions than the

Liberty Movement was ever able to do. And of course, Donald Trump has shown that you can do it and you can do it very quickly, but you have to have, you know, some of the transactional qualities that Trump has.

You can't just be a philosophical purist. Well, I think the moral of the story then is look at the full picture and look at the

Republican Party even as this is a tool, this is a step in the right direction, even if you don't agree with everything it's standing for or doing, you have to look at all the alternatives and you have to then negotiate and navigate a world where it's not gonna be perfect.

It's not all philosophical and ideological. It really is messy. And that's the world Donald Trump seems to thrive in.

He likes that. He likes to be in the boardroom and work people over and try to get whatever his policy objective is using whatever means necessary.

And this is something maybe that could be learned from. So I appreciate that. This has really been a helpful, I think, clarifying and educating and enlightening discussion,

Daniel. And I want people to know where they can find your stuff. So Modern Age, you can go to, is it modernage .com,

I think, is the website? Modernagejournal .com. Modernagejournal .com, modernagejournal .com.

Check that out and you can check out all of Daniel McCarthy's essays and also the podcast, right? Do you still host a podcast?

I know you were doing that. Yeah, I did a podcast for about a year for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. And that is now wrapped up, but I'm sure

I will have new podcasting opportunities in the near future. So you're a guest on people's podcasts more so.

I'm a guest, yeah. And I'm a guest on many shows and I'm always grateful for it. So thank you. All right, well, very good.