Laura K. Field could not have picked a better month for the release of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. At the beginning of November, Kevin Roberts’ defense of Tucker Carlson set off a firestorm in the activist class over whether the “new right” is now too right. There was an ever-flowing stream of “takes” about how now-mainstream movements like national conservatism and postliberalism relate to the seedy underbelly of the right represented by Nick Fuentes or Curtis Yarvin. The basic identity of conservatism and “the right” is the topic du jour.
Picking up Field’s book in this environment, I hoped that it would provide an interesting framework for understanding where today’s right came from, how it relates to what has gone by the name “conservative” in the past, how it has gained ascendency so quickly across a wide swath of institutions, and how the various strands intersect and potentially clash with one another.
Unfortunately, Furious Minds doesn’t provide much beyond a meandering stroll down memory lane, with some subjective context and judgment thrown in here and there. It recounts some of the “greatest hits” of the new right over the past decade or so: Flight 93; Ahmari-French; liberalism failing; knowing what time it is; common-good constitutionalism; Red Caesar; Nate Hochman’s sonnenrad; and Tucker’s Low-T Special. If none of those sounds familiar, count your blessings. If any do sound familiar, then Furious Minds won’t add much to your understanding aside from serving as a basic, who’s-who manual.
She breaks down the new right into three groups: Claremonters (Straussians), postliberals, and national conservatives. If there is a through-line other than her own moral disapproval, it is the notion that all three reveal the problems with an “Ideas First” mentality, which essentially means they are enamored with grand visions and abstractions, while ignoring empirical reality. There is certainly something to that. But she leaves the concept underdeveloped and ill-defined. Often, it seems that it is merely her way of chastising her subjects for not being attuned to the “realities” of many left-wing shibboleths: “income inequality,” “racial inequities,” “gun violence,” “attacks on the LGBTQ communities,” etc.
That’s not to say that the book isn’t entertaining. We live in a time where one of the most influential ideological movements on the political right has among its ideas-peddlers an online persona named “Raw Egg Nationalist” who seems very, very interested in men. You can’t help but laugh at some of this, and a compendium of a decade’s worth of pseudo-intellectual clickbait inevitably has its moments. Entertainment value aside, though, there are serious questions to ask about emerging right-wing ideologies that ought to be a real cause for concern among those committed to freedom and constitutionalism. Unfortunately, Field doesn’t go very far beyond pointing and scolding. The book is limited in several ways.
First, it is fairly narrowly focused on people who straddle the line between intellectual life and popular political agitation. Podcaster and master of the Liminal Order, Jack Murphy, for instance, gets as much or more coverage than do Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, or Candace Owens—presumably because he can be fitted more neatly into the Claremont circle of influence, and therefore as part of the intellectual side of things. Even Tucker Carlson, perhaps the most influential voice that has shaped the dynamics of the new right, mainly serves only to introduce us to certain “manosphere” types who have more academic backgrounds.
It’s perfectly valid to write only about the more “intellectual” side of things. But that focus does prevent the book from living up to its subtitle, which suggests a wider view. It also cuts off a potential explanatory avenue that is never explored: Perhaps some of the more extreme new right ideas Field chronicles took hold not because of their intellectual pedigree, but simply because there is an audience ready to click on and pay for shocking, transgressive rhetoric. The rise of this new right has, after all, parallelled the rise of monetized social media, which can mean massive payoffs for people—including self-understood “intellectuals”—who are willing to be dancing monkeys. The media personalities who clearly played a big part in the rise of “the MAGA New Right,” but who are nevertheless absent from the book, are primarily entertainers. Just because Bronze Age Pervert has a PhD doesn’t mean he isn’t doing the same thing.
Field ignores perhaps the most important causal explanation for the rise of the new right: the incredibly radicalized left.
In this sense, Field is herself utilizing something of an “Ideas First” approach, which she acknowledges in the introduction. Ironically, this winds up giving her more ridiculous subjects the benefit of the doubt—it treats them as essentially good-faith actors, developing ideas they are committed to. Very little attention is given to the question of grift. On the flip side of the coin, she also leaves the reader without a good sense of whose ideas are worth taking seriously and whose are not. As with most political movements, there are plenty of serious-minded people in these circles, along with some buffoons. Field gestures at such distinctions from time to time (when she discusses Christopher DeMuth, for instance), but she certainly rewards the loudest and most cartoonish voices with her attention, and thus probably lumps in some people who shouldn’t be in the same conversation.
Second, the analysis and judgment the book does contain seems to be heavily focused on Field’s own subjective experiences and ideological inclinations. In tracing out the intellectual roots of new right thinking, for instance, she devotes plenty of attention to Harry Jaffa, Allan Bloom, and (to a lesser extent) Harvey Mansfield—all of whom share the basic intellectual lane that Field was educated in. But there isn’t much about, for instance, the obscure Catholic thinkers that have inspired the new integralism, or the capital-T Traditionalism of Julius Evola and René Guénon that has reportedly been influential on Steven Bannon. The only reason I can surmise for the heavy Straussian focus is that Field is simply more familiar with those thinkers.
Here again, there’s nothing wrong with focusing on what one knows, but it should lead to a narrower thesis. I, for one, would welcome a systematic and critical assessment of Jaffa’s thought to see what if any elements of it might have primed some (though not all) of his acolytes to think of politics as a binary choice between two stark options, to flirt with the idea of an “American Caesar,” and to define away Americans they don’t want to have to deal with.
Jaffa tended to treat the constitutional and legal order in instrumental terms—defensible only insofar as it can be shown to have established the “best regime” that resolves internal tensions through the application of abstract, universal principles. And he approached Lincoln not simply with a healthy respect appropriate for a statesman navigating a time of crisis, but as a messianic figure who, transcending all temptations of power, “refounded” the country around a political religion. When his conservative critics argued that this might encourage perpetual “refoundings” and morally self-assured Caesarism, he often dismissed them—whether or not they had distinctly southern sympathies—by comparing them to Jefferson Davis. All that is to say, there is certainly some fodder there for a profitable study.
Field’s “ideas first” critique touches briefly on some of these aspects of Jaffa’s thought, but she is not particularly focused on teasing out the implications. Rather, she seems more interested in how his preference for abstraction served as cover for him to violate left-liberal pieties, namely, supporting Goldwater and opposing gay rights. Here again, her own ideological commitments seem to be the primary barometer of judgment.
Third, as other reviewers have pointed out, she ignores perhaps the most important causal explanation for the rise of the new right: the incredibly radicalized left. In my own reading and conversation, I have found that the most convincing argument deployed by the new right is some variation of “we’re already there.” The imperial, pen-and-phone presidency? Erosion of constitutional limits on power? Courts that consciously go beyond the established law to impose their particular view of the good? Coercion of citizens by law on matters of conscience and religion? Strategic plans to redirect culture by capturing institutions and stocking them with ideologues? Using civil rights law to impose policy demands on private institutions? The promotion of racial identitarianism? Economic class warfare? All of these things have been characteristic of left-wing activism for generations. And they have been carried out under the approving gaze of respectable liberal opinion.
These sorts of practices—coming from the right or left—are generally self-destructive; they empower demagogues, invite civil strife, and inculcate an attitude of servility among citizens who are told that they are victims of forces beyond their control and in need of a political savior. Far be it from me to engage in “whataboutism.” Most of my writing on such topics “punches right,” as they say, because those are the people I think should know better. But the reason some erstwhile conservative defenders of constitutionalism, decentralization, and limits have embraced radical ideas and strategies is because they have seen left-wing radicalism run rampant over old civil, legal, and constitutional limits already. And, in my own judgement at least, the new right is correct that the movement conservatism that was regnant in the early aughts did not resist this radicalism with much gusto. So people think fighting “fire with fire” is the only way. I think that conclusion is dangerously wrong when you’re trying to put out a fire, but it is not hard to comprehend.
If one wants to understand the “rise of the MAGA new right,” therefore, the most important places to look aren’t Straussian books from fifty years ago, Why Liberalism Failed, or the Collected Writings of Mencius Moldbug. They are Obergefell, Bostock, Obama’s “Dear Colleague” letter, and the average university’s equity and inclusion statement from 2020. The ideas promoted by the new right, either its intelligentsia or underbelly, are giving frustrated and overwhelmed conservatives what they want to hear.
Field acknowledges from time to time that some of the purveyors of new right ideas are drawing on left-wing sources, but the criticism suddenly gets muted in those instances, especially when it comes to economic policy. (She lavishes praise on Sohrab Ahmari for his commitment to a planned economy, for instance.) And she never suggests that the radicalism in her sights is only one part of a much broader phenomenon.
Ultimately, Furious Minds seems to be a book written by a center-left academic mostly for other center-left academics. It is certainly not designed to convince anyone tempted toward the new right, nor will it prompt any self-reflection from those on the left who have helped empower it. American civil life right now is in a spiral, and trying to pin it exclusively on the ideas of one side is not particularly enlightening.