Conflict between right-wing populists and mainstream conservatives is a persistent problem, according to Daniel McCarthy, vice president of publications at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Collegiate Network.

McCarthy presented a talk Nov. 13 titled “Is Populism Conservatism’s Future…Or Its Demise?” which was hosted by the Lyceum.

McCarthy said there was a civil war on the American right in the early 1990s in which complicated battle lines were drawn based on the issues of immigration, trade, and foreign policy — in large part due to the end of the unifying threat of the Soviet Union.

“Our success in the Cold War created new questions for the American right,” McCarthy said.

These three issues aren’t the only problems which have divided conservatives.

“The questions of America’s relationship with Israel, how that affects potential conflicts in the Middle East, and whether criticism of that relationship is antisemitism,” McCarthy said. “This is also something that dates back to the 1990s and even earlier.”

McCarthy explained the emergence of populist figures such as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot, and detailed their struggles with the Republican establishment and President George H.W. Bush.

“I go back to this scene in the 1990s and in the early 2000s to start to indicate how we’ve arrived at the present moment and how these fault lines have been in place for a very long time,” McCarthy said.

The economic boom of the late ’90s and the shock of 9/11 weakened populism as a political force until the rise of Donald Trump, but the years that followed ultimately vindicated populist criticisms of conservative policies, according to McCarthy.

“In foreign policy, attempts to Americanize other parts of the world, or to liberalize other parts of the world by force, have failed,” McCarthy said.

Conservative attempts to liberalize and democratize other parts of the world through free trade have also failed, according to McCarthy.

“What free trade succeeds in doing is actually making America more dependent on other countries for basic technologies,” McCarthy said. “Things like computer chips and steel manufacturing, things that we actually would need in the event of a war.”

Mass immigration and a lack of assimilation have enabled Democrats and progressives to weaponize the immigration system, according to McCarthy.

“Again, this is something that populists have been complaining about going back all the way to the 1980s and 1990s, and yet it only becomes salient once it becomes a kind of crisis — which happens in 2016,” McCarthy said.

He said former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s controversial platforming of white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his podcast was “dumb.”

“I think that Tucker Carlson probably did that because he knows that Fuentes has an enormous underground audience,” McCarthy said. “Not just among ordinary folks, but even on Capitol Hill.”

Lyceum president and senior Adriana Azarian said she thought the compatibility of populism and conservatism has become increasingly relevant with Trump’s election.

“McCarthy did a very good job explaining the history of conservatism and how it’s always been more complex than we like to think it is,” Azarian said.

Sophomore Noah Abrudeanu said he remained unsure of the merits of populism, but that he was impressed by McCarthy’s eloquence.

“I really liked his historical contextualization of populism that I feel that I did not have nearly as much of before this talk,” Abrudeanu said.