Daniel McCarthy—The American Conservative’s own former editor and current board member, current editor of ISI’s occasional publication Modern Age, and also now something to do with the Heritage Foundation—has decided that Thomas Massie had it coming. He feels so strongly about it that he has written his thoughts at length in two separate publications, the Spectator and Compact. The nub of the argument is that Massie was insufficiently imbued with partisan spirit: In his opposition to the administration’s foreign policy and his efforts to publicize the Epstein files, he antagonized Trump, who is popular with Republicans, and interests supportive of Israel, which is popular with Republicans.
McCarthy isn’t above trying to have his cake and eat it, too—an attitude I admire, but perhaps not one that is conducive to the best analysis. “If the fight had merely been over the war with Iran, the outcome might have been different, even with the degree of support the war finds among older Republicans,” he writes in the Spec. “But the Iran war was subsumed by the Israel discourse, and while some Massie supporters considered him an antiwar hero, others actually agreed with his opponents in framing him as first and foremost an anti-Zionist. Massie’s critical views of NATO were more aligned with MAGA’s sentiments, but didn’t feature prominently in the race.”
I am not sure holding a candidate accountable for the variety of opinions among his supporters and for national discursive conditions is particularly fair, or particularly good politics. (Some pretty dodgy people have supported Trump at various times, after all. Sometimes your baggage claims you.) This account also elides the crucial fact that opposition to the Iran War—which, for better or worse, is the single largest news story of the second administration so far and hence inevitable on the stump—has been equated with anti-Zionism (and consequently antisemitism) by the pro-Israel element on the American right. Massie holds a view on the war that was smeared by pro-Israel figures and donors as equivalent to anti-Zionism, and, when Massie blamed the pro-Israel figures and donors for intervening in the race against him, they used that blame to reinforce the underlying charge—and so on and so forth ad infinitum, or at least until this Tuesday. This is pushme-pullyou logic, a Chinese finger trap. No fun, to be sure, but what does McCarthy propose Massie should have done? Abandoned his stance on the war? Not responded to smears against his character? Not objected to pro-Israel interests taking an outsized interest in his race?
There may be no good ways out of this political Zugzwang, but blaming Massie for it has comic overtones. McCarthy is smart enough to know what’s going on here; those whose memories stretch back longer than two numbers of the Economist may remember that he has written an article or two about the Israel lobby (in a familiar venue even—please subscribe, by the way). He can read a newspaper and watch a television, so he has also probably noticed that Trump gets pretty tetchy when people oppose his policies of the moment; he has little use for the concept of “loyal opposition.” The logical conclusion is that Massie should have just eaten his reservations and adopted the party line, with the two inherent defects that go with it: first, having to support policies you think are bad, and second, being held liable for those policies if they do in fact turn out to be bad.
This dynamic, while less pronounced, is also present in l’affaire Epstein. While I am myself less interested in the Epstein files than many of my fellows, and less persuaded of their use as a hermeneutic for understanding how things work, their disclosure was in fact a signature issue for Trump’s FBI director and first attorney general, and something that Trump has claimed would not tarnish his own reputation at all. That Massie stuck with yesteryear’s Trumpist flavor—that is to say, tried to be consistent in his own record—seems less like a knock on Massie and more like a knock on Trump. While I am an enthusiastic connoisseur of human folly and wickedness, it seems a little perverse even to me to browbeat a politician for not changing stripes quickly enough.
Likewise, McCarthy’s perfervid vision of a libertarian-neocon-leftist alliance in his Spec piece, while a perversely appealing mental construct, seems to miss the mark. While Bill Kristol’s little cult is perhaps feeling strange tinglings about Massie, the mainstream of neoconservative sentiment is closer to Mark Levin’s or John Podhoretz’s.
Much rests on how important you think the Iran War is, and on your analysis of what went wrong for the Republicans during the Iraq War. McCarthy’s Compact piece includes a lengthy archaeology of the “liberty Republicans” like Ron Paul and their failures to shift policy. (A conscientious editor would have inserted a note that McCarthy was internet communications coordinator for the 2008 Ron Paul campaign, which seems like an important datum.) While he absolves his old boss of the political impracticalities he criticizes in Massie—Paul’s was “a necessary function at a time when the party had to be forced to confront its failures as the party of the Bushes”—his assessment of the liberty Republicans’ efficacy in the period is appropriately bleak. What is different now, he asserts, is that Trump is revivifying an “institutionally weak” party, and that the warring clans ought to lay down their arms to help restore party discipline.
This is a nice bit of question-begging; institutional strength is only so good as the ends pursued with it. Why was indulging in party-weakening factional infighting that undermined those trying to unify the party excusable in 2008, but not in 2026? Why was principled opposition to a badly conceived foreign adventure “a necessary function” in 2008, but a good reason to be hurled into the outer darkness in 2026?
Perhaps it is because voters like Trump but didn’t like McCain, Romney, et al. McCarthy writes that, among other things, “they liked his willingness to denounce the Bush foreign policy in terms hardly less vivid than Ron Paul had once used, though Trump’s objections were not about whether the wars were unconstitutional but about why they weren’t won.” While this is true in a narrow sense—“unconstitutional” is not a word that enters frequently into Trump’s vocabulary—it is also true that he described the Iraq War as “a big, fat mistake” and asserted that its architects “lied” to get the project off the ground. These are criticisms that go beyond Monday-morning quarterbacking about the war’s conduct to the actual premises of having the war in the first place; “we will do the Global War on Terror but better” would not have been so distinctive a position in 2016.
If we accept that this appealed to voters, and that appealing to voters is a good per se, well, what do you do with the fact that the Iran War appears to be a betrayal of this attitude? Even if you think that the American people just care about winning, which I concede may be close to the mark, the war has been an ambivalent venture. And the polls have not been kind; a third of your own party plus most of everyone else opposing you is not the sort of “popularism” that got Trump elected.
McCarthy anticipates this argument, and tries to wave it away in the interests of GOP unity. “There’s more to foreign policy than Israel and Iran, after all, even at a time when the country is embroiled in a Middle East conflict,” he writes, praising Trump’s reorientation of American foreign policy. “The representatives who should have been MAGA’s peace wing in Congress chose to treat this moment like 2003 instead.”
Certainly there is more to American foreign policy than the Iran War, but, at the moment, that’s like saying there were other things going on at Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865. (Nor has the rest of Trump’s second-term foreign policy been altogether happy for those on the right who would like a humbler, more prudent orientation in the world.) But McCarthy is right that it’s not 2003. It’s 2006. The Republicans are saddled with a war that admits of no easy solution and is broadly unpopular but, because it’s Trump’s war, continues to register relatively high approval with the Republican base. Republican politicians were articulating defenses of the war in Iraq deep into Obama’s second term; they had to, because Iraq was their war. This unhappy marriage to an unpopular policy was one reason among several for the period of Republican weakness at the national level from the 2006 midterms until the end of the second Obama term. It was also part of why Donald Trump, who had few prior connections to the GOP before he decided to take it over, was able to win: He was allowed to say the obvious thing, that Iraq was a failure and should never have been fought. In this context, opposing the current war does not just seem ideologically principled, but politically justifiable in the long term.
None of this is to defend every tactical choice Massie made or every stance he took, or to assert that libertarians are naturally irenic and electorally competent coalition-builders. (I am just as happy to concede the failures of McCarthy’s old boss as he is.) Nor is it to say that Massie and his fellow travelers have articulated much by way of a positive vision for American foreign policy; one struggles to imagine how the Antiwar.com front page would be translated into a program. It is to raise the question of where political prudence shades into giving up.
McCarthy, for what it is worth, also presents no positive vision; he meets Massie’s “oppositionism” with mere institutionalism. Concretely, how does he propose promoting policies that are in direct contradiction to the policies of the party leader, who tolerates little dissent and enjoys reprisals? McCarthy’s position seems to be that those of us in the plane with Trump should take a deep breath and jump a little at first—in short, to recapitulate the Con, Inc. dynamic of holding our noses because the alternative is always worse.
“Instead of being targets for MAGA, they could have played a part in picking MAGA’s targets,” he writes in Compact. That’s a nice idea, and, indeed, many libertarians played along with that, whether by trying to codify the DOGE spending cuts or by cheering for Trump’s 2025 Middle East tour. (It bears repeating: Cutting frivolous spending and no new wars were literally Trump campaign promises. How much more aligned can you get?) But Trump is MAGA, as we are so often reminded, and he has decided that he prefers Lindsey Graham to DOGE, peace, and the rump of the liberty Republicans.
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Perhaps in an effort to learn from the mistakes of his own prior projects, McCarthy seems to have swung the opposite way: unconditional party loyalty. This seems like a pretty crummy substitution. (Of course, I’m bound to say that. This magazine, which McCarthy ran ably for years, has the motto “Principles Over Party.”) I also suspect that it sits on a false dichotomy. There are other ways. As I have written in relation to the travails of the pro-life movement, the black voting bloc consistently racks up policy wins—even those like affirmative action that are unpopular with the public at large—and this is because the bloc is willing to punish politicians that deviate from their preferred policies. Politics is a nasty business, and sometimes you have to be a jerk to get the policies you deem good.
I am happy to deal pragmatically; while various of my fellows were writhing in exquisite agonies about staffing issues, I was pretty sanguine about the appointment of various warhawks to the cabinet. (Were I writing today, I would perhaps frame my analysis a touch differently.) The political realities of the United States mean a lot of compromises on the things I care about—war, abortion, civil liberties, welfare spending, and so forth. True Russoism has never been tried, and seems unlikely to take the field any time soon. But part of political prudence is deciding when the compromise is no longer favorable. “Shut up and ignore the president’s unpopular, expensive, badly executed war of choice, which is destroying energy markets and making the bond traders vomit in their shoes” is a very big charge to the account, and it is not clear that anything in the company store is worth buying at that price. Where should Massie have drawn the line? Is there anywhere he should have drawn the line?
Donald Trump is not God, I’m pretty certain; I confess to doubting that he’s even the Deity’s local representative. He’s a politico. He works for me, and for everyone else who voted for him (and, notionally, for everyone in the country). When he does things I think he should do, I’m happy to clap and cheer. When he does things I think he shouldn’t do, I will boo and throw popcorn from the cheap seats. This is how you get what you want in a representative democracy, which is still notionally the form of government prevailing in These States. I am not a movement man, nor especially ideological, nor especially invested in the persons of my employees—that is, the sorry wretches in the American government. But then again, I don’t work for the Heritage Foundation.
