The past decade, since the entry of Donald J. Trump into electoral politics, has been a disorienting one for … well, everyone. But especially, perhaps, for “movement” conservatives who regard the principles they have always held dear to be as sound as ever, but beleaguered in practice by the events of this young century. Conservatism, from this point of view, should have emerged from the Bush and Obama years bloodied but unbowed, ready to refresh and recommit itself to principles of classical liberalism—the rule of law, the free market, limited government, fiscal restraint, the protection of equal human dignity, and American leadership of strong alliances with the free world—all while thinking afresh about policies that meet the new problems of the day.
Yet that form of conservatism—the movement that had its innings under Reagan and the two Bushes, and went toe to toe with Clinton and Obama—is now eclipsed by a new right that is in many ways very old and reactionary: preferring authority to law and rent-seeking to free markets, cheap moralism to authentic morals, and a fearful and inward-looking nationalism to a confident, patriotic internationalism. The proud boast of “MAGA” in fact promises to make America smaller, meaner, and poorer. Even religion is distorted by proximity to the black-hole moral implosion of the new right.
So too is the life of the mind. In the last decade, many thinkers and writers on the right—academics, think tankers, and journalists—have worked overtime to craft intellectual rationales that will undergird, shore up, or justify Trump’s ambitions as candidate and president. The results in terms of positive programs are various and diffuse, the common denominator (apart from a general attraction to Trump) being a renunciation of some or all of the elements of classical liberalism described above.
In Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, political theorist Laura K. Field surveys the various players in this chaotic scene. We meet a motley assortment of thinkers and publicists: “Claremonters,” national conservatives, postliberals and Catholic integralists, authoritarians avowedly drawn to monarchy, Nietzschean wrecking balls, tech-bro futurists, Reformed Christian nationalists, and devotees of the Third Reich’s second-rate legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Some of these people developed their ideas before Trump emerged on the scene; all of them have become remoras to his shark.
Field spent many years in close proximity to some of the figures in her narrative; she was first an undergraduate and a master’s student of Leon Craig, a notable Straussian at the University of Alberta, earned a Ph.D. under Thomas Pangle and Lorraine Smith Pangle at the University of Texas at Austin, and has taught at both Georgetown and American University in Washington. This education brought her into the world of conservative academia’s conferences, seminars, fellowships, summer programs, and D.C. institutions. I have never met or communicated with Field, but I am acquainted with 15 of the 35 people in the Dramatis Personae at the beginning of her book, and I’ve met upward of 50 of the people in her index.
Not surprisingly, given this overlap of my circle and Field’s, I too know a great many people who have “gone MAGA.” Some of my oldest friends—among them fellow academics—have voted for Donald Trump three times, and I won’t deny that our differences on this matter make for some friction in those friendships. Most of the time our mutual affection is best served by avoiding the subject. Thus, I don’t have a good sense of how much some of my friends are drawn to this or that branch of Field’s “MAGA New Right,” and for all I know, even my act of writing this review might be viewed by one or two of them as a provocation. But they already know my antipathy to Trump as well as I know their attraction to him, so I must bank on our history and a reciprocal generosity of spirit.
I mention this personal background for reasons I hope to make plain in a moment. Laura Field’s politics and mine are very different: She’s a liberal, and I’m a conservative. I am also a full generation her senior. Yet I know enough of the world she is describing to say that her account is a fair-minded one. She has her unexamined priors (e.g., that “marriage equality” was the issue at hand in the Obergefell case), but she is not dismissive of the ideas she discusses, never flattening them with an iron but showing them in the round with an appreciation of their contours. Field does not make straw men or caricatures of those she disagrees with, and that is very much to her credit—even if the reader disagrees with her judgments, as I sometimes do. She has read the books and essays (even the doctoral dissertations!), listened to the podcasts, watched the videos, attended the conferences. And her background as a scholar equips her to understand what she reads and hears. As personal as this book sometimes is, it is nonetheless commendable for a certain kind of detachment that hears before condemning.
And condemn it surely does. After her introduction, Field devotes chapters 2 and 3 to the Claremonters and other Straussians. From these precincts issued the obscene Claremont Review of Books essay “The Flight 93 Election” in September 2016, written by Michael Anton under a Roman pseudonym. The idea that America’s constitutional republic would be utterly and permanently lost if such a center-left mediocrity as Hillary Clinton were elected president was ludicrous on its face. That was merely paranoid; what was obscene was the title metaphor extended in the essay, that voting for Donald Trump was akin to the suicidal heroism of the passengers on an airplane headed for the capital with terrorists in the cockpit.
But paranoid catastrophism is the seedbed of authoritarianism. Trump was, to everyone’s surprise including his, elected. And if one bought into the notion that everything was at stake in his election, then his presidency’s combination of incompetence, malevolence, and corruption (now far worse in his second term) could be excused, justified, even celebrated because no quarter could possibly be given to the hero’s enemies. Imagine viewing the “No prisoners!” scene in Lawrence of Arabia not as a tragedy but as a righteous beat-down: This became the attitude of MAGA’s willing elite supporters, not just of its rank and file.
This same self-vulgarization of an intellectual elite can be seen among the postliberals and the national conservatives, Field’s subjects later in the book. That they could welcome into their ranks such permanently adolescent horse-frighteners as Curtis Yarvin and Costin Alamariu is an indication of how low the MAGA elite were prepared to go. That they would then go so far as to manufacture factual and legal grounds for keeping Trump in office after he lost the 2020 election was something that many of us still did not anticipate—at least I didn’t. But “the worst is not, so long as we can say, ‘this is the worst,’” as Edgar remarks in King Lear. And so came something still worse, as the right rallied around a man who had whipped up a crowd to attempt a coup on his behalf, and ultimately returned him to office. Once the Flight 93 mindset is adopted, nothing is off-limits.
The urgency of Field’s argument falters a bit in chapters 8 and 9, as she takes up such damp squibs as the Trump-sponsored “1776 Report” and the right’s opposition to corporate “ESG” strategies and to critical race theory in education. And her footing is not terribly sure in chapter 10, on Adrian Vermeule’s “common good constitutionalism,” which will remain a hothouse theory so long as American constitutionalism retains its rule-of-law antibodies (fingers crossed but I’m not alarmed, yet).
I highly recommend Furious Minds for readers who want to understand the views of the self-appointed intellectual vanguard of MAGA. If you have wondered how long-established institutions of respectable conservatism like the Heritage Foundation and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute have come to sacrifice intellectual probity to partisan slavishness, Field’s book can help you understand.
What puzzles me, especially because I know some of the actors in her tragic farce, is why they have attached themselves to a politics of extremism, why they have largely embraced a “no enemies to the right” posture, and why they so readily resort to “whataboutism” to excuse the actions of the worst president in living memory. Field’s answer to such “why” questions is that intellectuals are naturally drawn to what she calls “Ideas First” thinking (she invokes Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences as emblematic). There’s something to that, and many of her subjects could indeed profit from more study of history, economics, and contemporary social conditions. But on their merits, so many of their ideas are hollow vanities that I come away still wondering. When the ivory tower turns out to be made of beige plastic, something has gone badly wrong.
Another reviewer of this book, whom I respect, faults Field for not recognizing that the chief cause of the radicalization of the right is the radicalization of the left—a kind of Newtonian “equal and opposite reaction” account of things. But I think that’s wrong. American conservatism for six decades worked to counteract the left while policing its own ranks in light of enduring principles of classical liberalism—principles that both embody traditional American justice and have a proven track record. Something has changed in the practical environment—of political parties, of media and information consumption, of former gatekeeping institutions, of the academy itself—that has eroded conservatism’s ability to conserve itself. And the fish, as we know, rots from the head down.
