Furious Minds

 

What passes for "conservatism" in the U.S. - including in its current MAGA iteration - has long been both a populist movement (often quite extreme, sometimes at the fringes of the larger movement, more recently closer to its mainstream) and a serious intellectual movement worthy of study as political theory. In Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton University Press, 2025), sometime academic political theorist. Laaura K. Field has chronicled the intellectual antecedents and expressions of this modern political movement.

The author was herself educated in part in the intellectual traditions (notably Straussianism) which were he antecedents to today's :furious minds." This is one of the book's assets, although the book does suffer somewhat from perhaps overly frequent interjections by the author highlighting her own disagreements with these authors, disagreements which often enough reflect predictable ideological positions. On the other hand, her background may have helped her to appreciate conservative insights which mainstream liberal academia notable fails to appreciate.

As someone who was once at the margins of the political theory world (although not as a Straussian), I found the more academic parts of the book among the most interesting. In the end, If nothing else, I felt nostalgic reading about Straussians Harry Jaffa, Allan Bloom, and Harve Mansrield. That said, I am not convinced that the self-regarding MAGA intellectual elites will end up leading rather than following the MAGA populists in whatever that movement's future will be, but we have perhaps always overrated the intellectual dimension of American right-wing politics, what Field calls an "Ideas First approach."

Field divides the New Right into "the Claremonters, the Postliberalsm and the National /conservatives." The West Coast Struassian Claremonters are "youthful, bitter, masculinist, and counterrevolutionary." The Postliberals are less interested than the Claremnoters in the American founding and embrace "many elements of communitarianism and traditional Catholic social teaching, including a greater role for the state in shaping public life and morality." They are "sober, traditionalist, and highbrow." The National Conservatives are the movement's "big tent and umbrella." National Conservatism embraces an exclusive sense of American nationalism that "cuts against America's tradition of religious pluralism, as well as the Declarationist creedal elements of America's traditional understanding and civil religion." Its mood is "fervent and unyielding." Ideologically spanning these camps is what she calls the "Hard Right," which is "more hard-line, racist, misogyinistic, and violent in their rhetoric." It aesthetic is "hypermasculinist, desperate, and ruthless."

Field emphasizes how the New Right is so "untethered from the ordinary decency and commons sense that characterize America at its idealistic best - and from the pluralistic reality of the country as it exists today." She identifies a failure to reckon with basic political life "the fact that people really do think differently and disagree, about just about everything, and especially about the most important things, like the meaning of life, God, and the soul, and what is good."

To me, the most interesting thing about Field's work is that in her treatment of these dangerous ideas and directions, she also recognizes the fundamental weakness of liberalism which helped bring us to this pass. She credits the Straussian Bloom, for example, for conveying "how people in modern democracies are confused about the role that moral evaluations play in democratic life and politics. In the universities, this often means either that ethical and moral questions are avoided entirely or that the answers are presumed and righteously taken for granted."

Also of interest is the way the Postliberals appear to separate from the rest of the New Right is certain respects. The Postliberals "are more serious about moving beyond neoliberal economics in ways that would help the working class. They are also at once more skeptical of the New Right's crude nativism and. more free-thinking when it comes to international affairs. ... They are not beholden to GOP donors, or to the GOP base." As a result, "with the exception of their influence on JD Vance, they have been the least influential thinkers on the New Right." Indeed, the whole Catholic component of Postliberalism, to the extent it takes its Catholic claims seriously, serves to separate and marginalize Postliberalism. An extreme case is Sohrab Ahmari, who in 2023 finally realized that the Republicans "will never be the party of the working class" and remain "incorrigibly, a vehicle for the wealthy." 

Another important takeaway from Field's work, which is in a sense obvious at the popular level, but which deserves special mention is the intensely masculinist sensibility of so much New Right thinking. Field inverts the classical story of the Furies (who, of course, were feminine and pre-political and were displaced by a more masculine classical politics. A lot more attention probably needs to be paid to the primordial rage and anger that are revealed in the contemporary New Right - both in its intellectual as well as its populist performances.

Most important, however, is the challenge the New Right's rejection of liberalism poses for the inherent weakness of liberalism. Field notes "liberals have far too long accepted a minimalist self-understanding that avoids all talk of virtue and ethical vision; they have similarly refused to acknowledge and cultivate the moral worlds and traditions that sustain our lives."