In the summer of 2010, Laura K. Field was a grad student in political theory with an affinity for conservative ideas and institutions. At a fancy dinner hosted by “a conservative educational organization devoted to American history and the founding,” Field sat at a table with a high-level staffer who’d been at an event with First Lady Michelle Obama, whom he found “very tall, very impressive,” adding: “I’d really like to fuck her.” Field excused herself to the restroom, contemplating that this man was a “total asshole” but not an isolated case of misogyny and racism. “It was the beginning of the long, slow process of extricating myself from the world of conservative intellectualism,” she writes. “My timing was good.”
Field’s new book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton University Press), is a perceptive history and analysis, bolstered by the author’s proximity to the subject. Field writes from what she calls an “Ideas First” perspective, an emphasis on abstractions as drivers of events that’s shared by many intellectuals on the right, fostered by thinkers including Richard Weaver and Leo Strauss, and reflected in phrases such as “Ideas have consequences” and “Politics is downstream from culture.”
“New Right” is a term that’s been used before, marking changes in the 1960s and 1980s, but here refers to proponents of doctrines associated with MAGA. Whereas late-20th-century conservatism was a three-legged stool of free-market economics, social conservatism, and interventionist foreign policy, the New Right’s pillars are economic nationalism, social conservatism, “America First” foreign policy, and anti-immigration. The New Right, Field notes, has shown greater political clout and media-savvy than previous conservatives, and is “misogynist and obsessed with masculinity” in ways they were not.
Field breaks the New Right into factions, including “Claremonters” (named for the Claremont Institute and revering the American founding), “Postliberals” (who promote a religiously-inspired concept of the “Common Good” and are most inclined to break with free-market economics) and “National Conservatives” (who are well-organized and strive to be an umbrella group). There is also what she calls the “Hard Right Underbelly,” with extreme views and provocative arguments, often initially presented under pseudonyms. Late in the book, she discusses some Christian Nationalist thinkers, including proponents of the Seven Mountain Mandate for seizing control of society.
Furious Minds offers a useful service in getting MAGA opponents to realize that they are dealing with, in part, an intellectual phenomenon, one whose ideas need to be taken seriously, rather than just dismissed. Field writes: “I have been writing about New Right intellectuals since 2019. The most common response I get when I mention this to liberals is something along the lines of ‘Trumpy intellectuals? Now that’s an oxymoron!’ or ‘Hahaha, I think you mean dumb fascists!’ While the impulse is understandable, it’s also counterproductive.” She adds that “America’s reactionary intellectuals” have “reasons and arguments that they appear to care about, whole epochs and libraries full, ready-to-hand.”
This doesn’t mean those reasons and arguments are good. Consider “The 1776 Report,” put out by an advisory committee set up by the first Trump administration to counter The New York Times’ 1619 Project. In a section on “Challenges to America’s Principles,” It enumerates these as “slavery, progressivism, fascism, communism, and racism and identity politics.” “As many others have observed,” writes Field, “this is an unserious list; the inclusion of progressivism and identity politics is a sign of the commissioners’ extraordinary and unthinking partisanship.”
Similarly, a Claremont Review of Books essay by Christopher Caldwell offers an odd defense of Robert E. Lee: “The urgent, invective-filled attacks on Lee that are beginning to appear would have seemed overheated even if the Civil War were still going on.” Field comments: “The fact is, of course, that millions of Union soldiers risked their lives trying to kill Lee and his army—a simple truth that reveals the perversion of Caldwell’s thinking.”
Field writes: “The New Right movement that materialized under the first Trump administration and then grew in power after January 6, 2021, was in many respects hard for American liberals to see and appreciate. This was partly because the movement was given cover by Trump’s anti-intellectualism, and partly because liberals (and establishment types, too) have difficulty conceiving of perspectives and world views that differ so significantly from their own and seem so outlandish and extreme.”
In a recent Substack essay, Noah Smith made an intriguing—and grim—argument about how the right may evolve once Donald Trump is no longer president: “There is simply no one else on the political Right whose charisma comes even close to Trump’s. If you think JD Vance is a Trump-like figure, just watch him ordering some donuts.” Smith continued: “Figures like Vance or Stephen Miller won’t be able to rely on personal charisma to hold together and direct the movement that Trump bequeaths to them, so instead they’ll turn to more typical, pedestrian expedients. That will mean ideology.”
Furious Minds is a valuable guide to understanding that ideology and countering it.