FURIOUS MINDS: The Making of the MAGA New Right, by Laura K. Field
Laura K. Field has been writing about the intellectuals of what she calls the MAGA New Right since 2019, and when she tells people about her beat, the responses are often incredulous: “Trumpy intellectuals? Now that’s an oxymoron!” or “Hahaha, I think you mean dumb fascists!”
But a year into a second Trump term, those “Trumpy intellectuals” are wielding palpable influence, even if it has been obscured by President Trump’s total lack of interest in the world of ideas. As Field explains in her fascinating and important new book, “Furious Minds,” what’s notable is how swiftly some esoteric theories have helped to radicalize the MAGA movement.
During the early 1960s, the historian Richard Hofstadter described anti-intellectualism as a phenomenon that was more pronounced on the far right. Field would mostly agree. In the United States, she says, conservative intellectuals were once largely an ameliorating force, acting as a “brake and restraint” on some of the right’s uglier impulses (bigotry, misogyny). Now, bizarre, “galaxy-brained” ideas that used to be the arcane obsessions of nerdy young men and buttoned-up tenured professors have become “an engine and accelerant for extremism.” Field borrows a vivid analogy from the Christianity scholar Matthew Taylor’s book “The Violent Take It by Force”: The fringe has become the rug.
Having written extensively about the New Right for outlets like The New Republic and The Bulwark, Field knows her subject well. She also has a personal connection to the material. She is a political theorist who studied with professors inspired by the 20th-century political philosopher Leo Strauss — a totemic figure among conservative thinkers for his embrace of the ancients and his refusal of moral relativism.
“I am not a conservative,” Field writes, “and never have been.” But she understands how Strauss’s teachings — especially his emphasis on decoding texts for secret meanings, a practice that can resemble conspiratorial thinking — have been weaponized by a generation of scholars who dislike the fact that the United States is a pluralist country. Strauss once described himself as a “friend of liberal democracy” and a teacher of “moderation.” Field writes about an intellectual movement that vehemently rejects both.
Field divides the figures in “Furious Minds” into three main groups: the “Claremonters,” who are associated with the Claremont Institute in California and “idolize the American founding”; the “Postliberals,” who want to curb individual rights in favor of what they vaguely define as “the common good”; and the “National Conservatives,” who endorse a homogenous nation-state and often embrace elements of Christian nationalism. Field also identifies another, more amorphous, group as part of this New Right: a “Hard Right Underbelly” that draws from (and fuels) the other three. Figures in this last group adopt aggressively silly nicknames like “Raw Egg Nationalist” (who has a Ph.D. from Oxford) and “Bronze Age Pervert” (who has a Ph.D. from Yale). They are extremely online and promote a hypermasculinist aesthetic; some of them, she notes, are openly racist and fascist.
What all these groups share is a hatred of liberalism — defined not as a partisan political ideology that is left-wing (though they hate that too), but as a system of government that values individualism and pluralism. Postliberals like Patrick Deneen, a political theorist whom Field credits with “the most palatable, sanitized version of Trumpy populism that one is likely to encounter,” started out by criticizing a liberal establishment composed of mainstream centrists in both parties.
Deneen and his fellow postliberals have insisted that this liberal establishment, despite its claims of open-mindedness, is overweening and tyrannical. Field suggests that these thinkers’ fury stems from being immersed in a milieu — as the highbrow postliberals often are — of “insular academics and elites.” Within that context, “conservatives who complain about liberal intolerance have a point.”
There was a time when such critiques were undeniably bracing — and some liberals, despite the postliberal slur against them as blithe and uncaring, were apparently willing to listen. Barack Obama, still a bugbear among the MAGA faithful, even included Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed” (2018) on one of his annual reading lists.
But for some of Deneen’s right-wing peers, his critique of liberalism didn’t go far enough. Field details the strange call-and-response between Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, a constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School, who in a review of “Why Liberalism Failed” encouraged Deneen to offer a more ambitious political program. Deneen obliged, publishing “Regime Change” in 2023, in which he envisioned a “self-conscious aristoi” and the conservative masses joining forces in an “overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class.” (Is Trump’s program in his second term — the gutting of federal agencies, the intimidation of law firms, the attacks on universities — what Deneen had in mind?)
Field is an excellent and intellectually honest guide to these self-styled egghead brawlers. She takes them seriously, reading their texts closely, “trying my best to give their ideas a fair shake, and assuming a degree of good faith.” But her sympathetic approach cannot avoid showing how even the most diligent far-right intellectuals eventually succumb to apocalyptic despair, replacing the hard work of thinking and reflecting on the world — in all of its pluralism and plenitude — with a reflexive embrace of coercive political power.
Her response to some of the bad ideas she encounters is to offer a dry aside. “Furious Minds” includes some surprisingly witty and playful moments, which stand in stark contrast to the turgid moralizing and hostility she examines in the book. Field pokes fun at the New Right’s apparently endless stores of grievance and self-pity: “Other forms of political order imprison, exile or kill their ideological opponents; the liberal ‘regime’ gives them tassels, velvet ropes and profiles in The Atlantic magazine.”
Her book includes an incisive discussion of misogyny on the New Right. Field notes how “gynocracy” and “the longhouse” have become overwrought MAGA epithets for an unbearably feminized and pluralist society. She is unsparing when enumerating the deficits of liberal rationalism — the faith in technocratic solutions to political problems, the tendency to dodge big existential questions, the blind spots when it comes to potent emotions like anger and enmity. But she also reminds the intellectuals of the New Right of something they all too easily forget: They can indulge in fantasies of an authoritarian regime because of the freedom and security afforded by the liberal democracy they loathe.
In a memorable passage, Field breaks the fourth wall and addresses the men whose cramped extremism has become so familiar to her. “You take the liberal world for granted, too,” she writes. “This has allowed you to don the language of grievance and oppression far too lightly, without having given enough thought to what oppression actually means — the kind of oppression that doesn’t let you love who you want to, or vote in free elections or not be disappeared.”
Field detects a strain of decadence underlying the fanaticism, with soft, comfortable men mistaking cruel titillation for insight and trying their mightiest to look tough: “It is unseemly, and it is unmanly, and some of you will miss your liberalism when it’s gone.”
FURIOUS MINDS: The Making of the MAGA New Right | By Laura K. Field | Princeton University Press | 406 pp. | $35
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
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