If conservatives favor limited government, how limited should it be?

In this episode, Dan McCarthy explores that unexpected convergence on the American Right. We revisit the late-20th-century debates between libertarians, paleoconservatives, and neoconservatives over trade, borders, national sovereignty, and the growing power of the federal state and why those arguments are resurfacing today in the New Right.

The discussion turns to a deeper question: whether either the market or the modern bureaucratic state can sustain the families, churches, and local communities conservatives seek to preserve. Drawing on thinkers like Robert Nisbet and the idea sometimes called “Tory anarchism,” this episode asks how much authority a healthy society really needs.

What if the story you’ve been told about the American Revolution is backwards?

Dan McCarthy argues that the Founding was not a revolt against law, authority, or order. It was a conservative revolution, aimed at defending inherited rights, lawful government, and constitutional liberty.

In today’s protests against immigration enforcement and law enforcement in places like Minneapolis, the Left often claims the mantle of 1776. But the Founders, especially George Washington and John Adams, feared mob rule, condemned extra legal “democratic societies,” and even used federal force to suppress lawless rebellion.

This episode revisits what the American Revolution actually meant and why the Founders would likely side with enforcing the law, not undermining it.

Has Donald Trump brought the conservative era to an end, or has he exposed something deeper about what conservatism has been for the past eighty years?

Dan McCarthy responds to a recent argument that Trump marks a break with the Reagan, Buckley, and Goldwater tradition. Instead, Dan argues that much of modern conservatism lived in the shadow of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, defined more by opposition than by a full vision of conservative.

This episode explores how the New Deal reshaped American government, foreign policy, and the administrative state, and why Trump’s presidency challenges not just the welfare state, but the broader legacy of Roosevelt era liberalism. Is this the end of conservatism, or the beginning of something older and wider?

For an in-depth read on the topic, check out Dan's article:
https://tomklingenstein.com/the-first-republican-since-fdr/

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