Daniel McCarthy

COVID-19, the Wuhan virus, is an epidemiological scourge — but it’s also a clarifying catalyst for American politics. The virus’s relevance for globalization has been widely noted: this disease of Chinese origin has exposed how incapable the de-industrialized West has become of providing its own masks, drugs, and ventilators. It has highlighted the class divide that globalization produces within countries such as America as well. The highly educated professional classes can work from home, and their jobs are relatively secure; the service class, on the other hand — the waiters and cooks and hotel maids and retail clerks and others — are out of their jobs and shit out of luck. Not to worry: the professional class will write all of them checks for $1,200.

Before the world went into quarantine, I had the chance to take part in a small way in some interesting discussions about the present and future of US foreign policy. Some of these involved Trump administration officials and think-tank honchos; others brought together US and European diplomats and scholars. Chatham House rules were in effect, but identifying who said what is less important than giving a sense of how hard it is for conversations on these topics to break out of old habits of thought and ideological preconceptions. The academics and policy minds of America’s most respectable think tanks, for example, still assume that the most morally edifying solution to a world problem is also the most practically effective one.

Four years ago I cast a vote for Bernie Sanders in the Virginia Democratic Primary. It was a triple protest: against a Republican party that I was certain would cheat Donald Trump out of the nomination; against Trump’s own waffling on torture and foreign policy; and against Hillary Clinton, the hawkish liberal who at that time seemed the inevitable next president of the United States. I am, obviously, a moderate swing voter. Since turning 18 my presidential votes have included a Republican nominee (Bob Dole), a third-party nominee (Pat Buchanan), a Democratic nominee (John Kerry), two write-ins (Ron Paul and Rand Paul), and another Republican nominee (Trump). Add my 2016 primary vote for Bernie, and you have an obvious pattern: I’m a NeverClinton, NeverBush voter.

Bernie Sanders just lost his first primary of 2020. He’ll lose a few more on Tuesday. But as of now, in terms of delegates and polling alike, Bernie Sanders remains the Democratic front-runner. And Joe Biden has wound up, ironically, not as the frontrunner but as the 'Stop Bernie!' candidate. South Carolina was Biden’s first primary win in any of the presidential races he’s ever run, which stretch back to 1988. He’s had his eye on the White House for a very long time, and voters have consistently found other Democrats more compelling — other Democrats like Michael Dukakis, not just other Democrats like Barack Obama.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. For most of the past 200 years, the left, whether revolutionary or liberal, derived power and popularity from being on the side of freedom. If you resented the economic, social and political privileges enjoyed by hereditary aristocrats and landowners, you were on the left. If you chafed against the restraints imposed on what you could read, write, say, think or do by established churches or majoritarian cultural Christianity, you had reason to support one left-wing movement or another — philosophes and Jacobins in the 18th century, liberals in the 19th century, the American Civil Liberties Union in the 20th.

Bernie Sanders has a long way to go yet before he locks up the Democratic nomination. He fell short of expectations in both Iowa and New Hampshire, winning both by the thinnest of margins. (And Pete Buttigieg may yet emerge with more delegates from those first two contests.) His victory in Nevada was a knockout, but the South Carolina and Super Tuesday contests could still revive Joe Biden’s fortunes or show that Elizabeth Warren didn’t really abort Bloomberg’s campaign by humiliating him in last week’s debate. Squint and you can still just about see a way for somebody else to win the nomination and take on Trump in November, maybe after a contested convention where enough moderates pool their delegates to deny Bernie the prize.

Now that ‘entrepreneur’ Andrew Yang has ended his presidential campaign, can we all admit what a sad commentary on the millennial generation it was? Yang was a policy quack who instantly won a cult following among young people who had never before taken the slightest interest in politics — in the other words, low-information voters. Yang seemed pleasant enough on the debate stage, and when he’d take a break from his pop-socioeconomic jargon — ‘fourth industrial revolution’ — he occasionally voiced some simple truth, like the importance of valuing the contributions of stay-at-home mothers, even though they aren’t included in measures of GDP. But such common sense was not the core of his campaign, the snake oil was.

Biden might have been embarrassed by the Des Moines Register poll right before the Iowa caucuses, but he got lucky: the poll couldn’t be released because of a methodological error. He may have been the beneficiary of the glitches that prevented the Iowa Democratic party from announcing any results the night of the caucuses, too. But he heads into the New Hampshire contest next week a condemned man, likely to be beaten by Bernie Sanders in the Granite State before running into the billionaire buzzsaw that is Michael Bloomberg on Super Tuesday. A Biden win in South Carolina or Nevada (or both) between those contests would only prolong his ordeal. Joe Biden is a dead man walking — this year’s Jeb Bush.

The Senate is not going to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, and to all appearances the whole thing is nearly over. Acquittal is imminent, and supposedly serious commentators are on Twitter wailing in unison with Democratic activists. But what they are saying does not make any sense — it’s contradictory. On the one hand, they say that the case against Donald Trump is open-and-shut: so utterly persuasive in objective terms that only the Senate Republicans’ bad faith has prevented them from admitting it.

The first sentence of the New York Times report on John Bolton’s tell-all memoir about his time in the Trump White House contains a bombshell — but not the one that everybody thinks. The real revelation is that it suggests that President Trump is innocent of the charges on which Democrats are trying to impeach him. Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt reported on Sunday that Trump 'wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Groupthink is the last thing a country needs when debating questions of war and peace. But groupthink is what America’s pundits have succumbed to once again. In 2003, voices of opposition to the Iraq War struggled to be heard, with even the progressive cable news channel MSNBC silencing its most outspoken critic (Phil Donahue) and telling a right-wing dissenter from President Bush’s war (Pat Buchanan) that he was expected to represent Republican opinion — which is to say, pro-war opinion. So much for press freedom. Today, groupthink is on the side of peace, or rather on the side of caricaturing President Trump as a warmonger.

The third presidential impeachment in US history has now reached the Senate. Like the first two, this one is almost certainly going to lead to presidential acquittal. An old saying given definitive expression by Ralph Waldo Emerson (and recently adapted by The Wire) warns that you should 'never strike a king unless you are sure that you shall kill him'. Congress may not be risking royal reprisal here, but it is teaching all Americans — including all future presidents — a fateful lesson in institutional impotence. After this, who is ever again going to take the threat of impeachment seriously? Congress has called its own bluff.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. America has a problem, and it’s not Donald Trump. Suicides and deaths by overdose are up; life expectancy is down. The country that led its allies to definitive victory against both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in just four years has now been fighting in Afghanistan for nearly 20, with no end to the Taliban in sight. Wall Street prospers but young Americans are deep in debt, manufacturing employment is in decline, and the Great Recession of a decade ago revealed how fragile and irrational the whole financial system is. For all the talk we hear about ‘polarization’, the policies that led to these grim results were born of bipartisan consensus.

The Democratic party is dying from its hatred of President Trump. The impeachment fiasco is just the latest symptom. After weeks of testimony, Democrats have not been able to come up with any charges more concrete than 'abuse of power' and 'obstruction of Congress.' Abuse of power is certainly a serious thing — but only if it’s real. Partisans think that almost anything a president from the opposing party does amounts to an abuse of power. For impeachment to amount to anything more than partisan harassment, an actual crime ought to be found somewhere along the line: an act of wrongdoing objectively contrary to the law.

So, impeachment it is. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced that the House will begin articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, and the vote will probably take place before the year is out. The inevitable is, it turns out, inevitable. Henry Kissinger knows something about impeachment. Not because his boss, Richard Nixon, was almost impeached, but rather because Kissinger is a realist. And the reality of impeachment is that it doesn’t work — the threshold for launching impeachment proceedings is low enough that it can be done frivolously, for merely partisan purposes. But the threshold for removing a president from office is so high that it has never been met, and it almost certainly won’t be met in the case of Donald Trump.

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. November inflicted more dismay on Republicans. Twelve months out from the presidential election, state and local races this year subjected the GOP to another bloodbath. The party lost both chambers of the Virginia legislature and gave up the governor’s mansion in deep-red Kentucky, despite a campaign intervention by the President. The drubbing Republicans received in city and county contests near Philadelphia was the most frightening of all, presaging difficulty ahead for Trump’s reelection efforts in Pennsylvania. Democrats could relax: 2018 was not a fluke after all.