This article appears in the forthcoming Spring 2026 Claremont Review of Books
The shock of the 2016 election that first propelled Donald Trump to the White House produced a few good-faith attempts in the prestige press to understand the president’s supporters, especially among the white working class. Those days, fleeting as they were, are far behind us now. Laura K. Field’s Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is less a book than the cornerstone of an information operation. It is intended to do two things: discredit any attempt to find anything rational or worthy in Trump’s political program, and ostracize as racist psychopaths anyone who dares try.
Sadly, so far the book has served its purpose. That’s not to say that Furious Minds is good; it’s quite bad. Nor is it to say that Field proves her case; she barely even tries. Yet as an info op, one must admit that the book has been a smashing success.
After a couple of brief academic appointments upon completing her Ph.D., Field found a home with the libertarian—and anti-Trump—think tank the Niskanen Center. From that perch she started writing in 2019 about the Claremont Institute, and the New Right more generally, for such outlets as The Bulwark and The New Republic, which she’s spun not only into a book contract but into affiliations, in addition to Niskanen, with the Brookings Institution, George Washington University, and American University. Furious Minds itself was published by a prestigious academic press in order to bestow an Ivy League imprimatur on the settled conviction that Trump and his followers have no legitimate concerns or ideas, and those who try to make a case for MAGA are bad people.
The next step in the op is to spread the word. Here the symbiotic relationship between academia and prestige journalism is most useful. There is not a single high-toned (but middlebrow) outlet that hasn’t welcomed Field with open arms. “Fascinating and important,” gushed The New York Times; “Field is an excellent and intellectually honest guide.” A “lively, devastating taxonomy and critique,” raved George Packer in The Atlantic. “[A] literary event of the highest order,” enthused one academic who writes on 20th-century liberalism and conservatism. In his review, the Brookings Institution’s William Galston went so far as to proclaim Field “a latter-day Athena soothing today’s Furies to rescue American democracy.” Even the Hoover Institution’s Peter Berkowitz, an accomplished scholar who should know better, praised Field’s “knowledge of the history of political philosophy” and “journalistic skills” in an essay for RealClear Politics. Furious Minds became a Financial Times Best Book of the Year. By January, Field was being hosted by the once-center-right American Enterprise Institute—which she repeatedly scorns in the very book they hosted her in order to promote!
The op’s final, ongoing phase is for Field and her book to serve as markers, ratifying the dogma in perpetuity that MAGA is awful and its adherents irredeemable. No further thought need be given to the matter (not that much ever was). All that is necessary going forward is a quick wave of the wrist—see Field, Furious Minds—to enforce adherence to the correct, indeed only, opinion.
***
In one sense, there’s nothing really new about Furious Minds. The book offers a run-of-the-mill restatement of Blue elite disdain for Red America, its originality confined to the scholarly gloss and the convenience of its alleged comprehensiveness, a one-stop shop for Trump haters. Furious Minds tells elites what they want to hear, allows them to feel confident and comfortable in the conclusions they’ve already jumped to, and instructs the rest of the world which thoughts are acceptable and which are not. I’ve never been a fan of Noam Chomsky’s political writings, but watching this particular info op unfold made me wonder whether the book he co-authored with Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), might have a point after all.
Field’s persistent smugness comes through clearly in this passage dismissing Allan Bloom’s landmark 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind:
In some respects, Closing was the book-length version of two conservative “gotcha” quips: “So you think all morality is relative, but is that claim relative too?” and “So you believe in toleration, but what about the intolerant?” Thoughtful liberal academics and philosophers have responses to these questions. But as with so many things liberal-adjacent, the answers are complex, academic, and not very quippy.
Leaving aside the question of whether anyone Field has in mind actually qualifies as a “philosopher,” the unmistakable point is that while things “liberal-adjacent” are “thoughtful,” “complex, academic, and not very quippy,” conservative things by contrast are simplistic, lowbrow, and short enough to put in a fortune cookie. But Field doesn’t actually provide—not here nor anywhere else in Furious Minds—the responses she insists “thoughtful liberal academics and philosophers have.” Her book overflows with similarly unsupported assertions of superiority. Field is confident—as she has every reason to be—that her audience doesn’t need to “see the receipts,” as the kids like to say; for her readers, the reassuring assertion is plenty.
***
Field tries to cloak her prose in a tone more-in-sorrow-than anger, but her anger shines through on every page. Field doesn’t merely believe that her targets are misguided, or wrong, or reckless, or poor scholars—though she believes all that and more. She thinks we are evil and dangerous and destructive. She makes her enmity clear in her choice of epigraph, which is not short, and so can’t be quoted here, but the upshot of which is that it was ideas and writings that led to the Holocaust—and might again. In other words, Field is saying—indirectly but unmistakably—that the figures she attacks in her book are the heirs of the Final Solution and may well become responsible for another.
While Field purports to be standing up for decency, moderation, comity, and calm reason, nowhere does she concede that Trump, his voters, or the figures she excoriates have a point about anything, any legitimate grievances, or any reason to be dissatisfied with the way things have been going over the past 30 or so years. Field is determined to see the worst in everything and everyone she targets while never giving even a sliver of the benefit of the doubt. She must recognize this as a shortcoming of her book because early on she warns readers that “to believe that there is nothing to learn from these thinkers and no compelling noneconomic reasons to support something like Trump…is naïve and dangerous.” Nearly every review of Furious Minds quotes this sentence as proof of Field’s scrupulous fair-mindedness, but none pauses to acknowledge that Field never actually, you know, cites a single example of one of the figures she discusses being right about anything, however small. That sentence is just a “to-be-sure” feint to make her book seem less unyieldingly one-sided than it actually is.
***
Field begins Furious Minds rather melodramatically with a “dramatis personae,” a list of the villains the reader will encounter in this tome of horrors, which divides the New Right into three overlapping groups. There are “the Claremonters,” including CRB editor Charles Kesler, Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn, John Eastman, as well as yours truly, who are said to “idolize the American Founding”; followed by “the Postliberals,” led by Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen and Harvard’s Adrienne Vermeule, who hold “a particular (religiously inspired) conception of the ‘common good’”; and finally “the National Conservatives,” such as Yoram Hazony, Christopher DeMuth, First Things editor R.R. Reno, and Christopher Rufo, who believe in “the myth of the traditional American nation.” These three groups are shadowed by the “rather capacious underbelly” of “the Hard Right,” which includes Curtis Yarvin, pseudonymous authors Bronze Age Pervert and Raw Egg Nationalist, as well as Tucker Carlson and White House aide Stephen Miller.
Throughout the book, Field goes on to present more lists, a litany of lists—of names, institutions, books, articles—so that by the end Furious Minds comes off like an extended conspiracist Venn diagram that shows how everything and everyone is linked. X knows Y who once met Z! At other times the book reads like the minutes to a city council meeting, as Field offers blow-by-blow accounts of (among other events) one of the National Conservatism conferences, an American Enterprise Institute conference, and an Intercollegiate Studies Institute panel. She apparently attended a lot of such get-togethers, took copious notes, and then having gathered the material, felt compelled to include it. As a result, the book feels padded.
In looking further at Furious Minds, I shall focus on Field’s calumnies against my fellow Claremont scholars. Not that I don’t sympathize with her other targets, but they are better able than I to defend themselves.
***
For starters—and this may seem a small matter, but it’s indicative of the care and attention Field brings to her subject—no one says “Claremonter.” We might say “Claremont conservative,” or if you’re really one of us, “Claremonster.” But “Claremonter”? That’s just made up.
Field also gets a surprising amount of detail wrong about Harry Jaffa, the intellectual godfather of the Claremont Institute and its scholarship. She could easily have consulted my friend and colleague Glenn Ellmers’s excellent intellectual biography, The Soul of Politics: Harry V. Jaffa and the Fight for America (2021). But she can’t bring herself to do that—too icky, I suppose—so instead she cites reviews of Ellmers’s book rather than the book itself, even though simply cracking the damned thing open could have saved her considerable embarrassment. It’s this sort of behavior Henry Kissinger had in mind in his famous remark about the pettiness of academic politics. I won’t relist the mistakes that Ellmers himself identified in his review of Furious Minds for Perspectives on Political Science, but to his catalogue I would add that Jaffa’s essay “The American Founding as the Best Regime” was originally published in 1990, not 2007; that former Claremont Institute president Thomas Silver was never a college professor; that David Azerrad’s name is not spelled “Azzerad”; and, for good measure, that R.R. Reno’s 2019 book is titled Return of the Strong Gods, not Return of the Old Gods.
And that’s to say nothing of the substance of Field’s scholarship. At one point she summarizes me as saying that women “adore male attention.” Field does not put the self-evidently (to her) offensive phrase in quotation marks. But I did—because I was quoting someone else, a fact she either didn’t realize, couldn’t remember, or deliberately obscures. My point in repeating that quote was to show a representative example of a critic wrongheadedly dismissing Tom Wolfe. In other words, Field put into my mouth the words of an author I quoted in order to refute! A greater example of “scholarly” malfeasance would be hard to imagine.
Yet this is only the tip of a very large iceberg. A great many details Field “cites” about me personally, for example, are wrong—despite the fact that her sources were articles I wrote. A commentary on Furious Minds could go through it word by word and find an outright error, an unsupported assertion, a hasty generalization, a deliberate mischaracterization, or a bad-faith restatement of someone else’s position on virtually every page. Even in a long review in a quarterly journal, most of that must be skipped over simply for reasons of space.
***
Field and her many admirers in academia and the press never tire of pointing out her Straussian training, since it is supposed to give her some special insight into, and thus extra credibility on, the Claremont school, which also traces its roots to Leo Strauss and several of his students. Two hallmarks of the Straussian approach are careful reading and seeking to understand an author as he understands himself—neither of which Field attempts. She maintains early on, for example, that “[i]n addition to ongoing right-wing indulgence of President Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ about the 2020 election, and their refusal to contend honestly with the implications of January 6, 2021, right-wing thought leaders were talking about ending liberal democracy and installing a ‘Red Caesar.’”
Really? Did no one have any legitimate reason to wonder about the validity of the 2020 election? Were there absolutely no irregularities, anomalies, or oddities that might cause a rational person in good faith to suspect fraud? Nor does Field pause to acknowledge the establishment Left openly boasting (in Time magazine, among other places), after a Democratic administration had been safely secured, of having “fortified”—that is, guaranteed Trump would lose—the 2020 election.
What does it mean to “contend honestly” with January 6? For some of us, it means admitting that no coup or anything like it was attempted, not by Trump or anyone else. It means acknowledging that the only person who died violently that day was an unarmed woman shot by a Capitol Police officer who suffered no legal repercussions from the act, that all the other deaths were the result either of pre-existing medical conditions or, in one case, a drug overdose, and that all five of the people who died as a result or in the aftermath of the day’s events were Trump supporters. It means admitting that conducting the federal government’s largest-ever manhunt to track down hundreds of elderly people who walked through open doors—in many cases, held open by police—and who entered and exited the Capitol peacefully, was not merely a ridiculous waste of resources but an extraordinary abuse of government power. It means acknowledging the good sense of the American people, three-fourths of whom correctly judge January 6 to have been “a protest that went too far.”
***
But the problem with Furious Minds is not so much disagreement as Field’s inability to see why anyone might see things differently. She cannot refute because she does not comprehend, which is fatal to a book that purports to explore intellectual history. Field simply cannot understand others as they understand themselves.
The supposed right-wing wish for a “Red Caesar” has been a left-wing talking point for at least five years now, repeated across dozens of platforms. Since I coined the term, it seems only fair that I should have some say in its interpretation. Field, like everyone else on the left who has written on the topic, deliberately misrepresents my analysis, offered in my 2020 book, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, as if it were a recommendation. Like Field I am somewhat apprehensive about the future of the United States, if for entirely different reasons. In Chapter 7 of The Stakes, I speculate how the future of this country might unfold should certain negative trends I identify in the prior chapters intensify. Field doesn’t mention that I sketch nine such possible futures, of which Red Caesar is only one. Nor does she mention that before I discuss the possibility of a Red Caesar, I explore Blue Caesar, a scenario I assess as more likely to arise than Red. Because the alleged rightist longing for “Red Caesar” fits Field’s narrative, it was (as the saying goes) “too good to check,” and so she didn’t. Instead, she makes a broad, unsupportable assertion, and then gives that assertion the imprimatur of “scholarship” by including a footnote to my book, knowing that none of her readers is ever going to consult, much less read, it. The footnote does its work simply by existing, reassuring Field’s self-satisfied and incurious audience that hers is a serious book, every word of which can be taken as gospel. (It’s worth noting that I got the term “Caesarism,” which Field insinuates is a recently concocted far-right plot to overthrow the United States government, from Leo Strauss, who—writing in 1954—recognized Caesarism as a permanent political possibility and sketched its fundamental characteristics. In other words, Caesarism as a phenomenon dates back at least two millennia and its most penetrating analysis was published 72 years ago. You’d think a Straussian political theorist, even a lapsed one, would know this, and maybe Field does, but if so, she suppresses it in order to score cheap points.)
***
Field tries to present herself as a rather milquetoast garden variety liberal, yet flashes of sympathy for the hard Left burst forth with regularity. She lavishes praise on Nikole Hannah-Jones and her 1619 Project and condemns all criticism of it as the “irrational” result of “pent-up racism and white supremacy.” She heaps scorn on the 1776 Commission Report (on which several Claremont scholars worked). She lauds Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2014 Atlantic paean to racial expropriation, “The Case for Reparations.” She invokes the late leftist (turned neoconservative hawk) Christopher Hitchens to call Allan Bloom a racist for objecting to an armed takeover of the Cornell campus in 1969, an event Field whitewashes as “civil rights activism.” She uncritically praises Black Lives Matter without mentioning its track record of riots stretching back to 2014, the orgy of violence it unleashed in 2020 that caused dozens of deaths and billions in property damage, multiyear spikes in black deaths from under-policed criminal violence and car crashes, not to mention subsequent revelations of embezzlement by BLM leadership. To the contrary, she proudly boasts that she was one of the marchers. Field even has good things to say about school busing, a practice the rest of her fellow liberals gave up on more than 40 years ago.
Field’s particular animosities come through at many points, perhaps exemplified by this passage:
Critics would have been amused but unsurprised by the constitution of the audience: Nearly all white, overwhelmingly male, and with a strong showing from young Republicans in navy blazers and khakis. They would perhaps have been entertained by the sight of ninety-year-old Harvey periodically nodding off during the proceedings, supported by his “spectacular” third wife Anna (his word).
One must marvel at the sheer snideness, the catty malevolence of that litany of cheap jibes.
Like every virtue-signaling white liberal, Field takes for granted that just mentioning demographics is enough to “prove” “racism.” (To be fair, to her audience, it is.) They’re white! Ooh! They’re male! Oooh! Navy blazers! What is this, a Hitler Youth meeting? Similarly, in a later passage all she needs to say about the Republican Party to induce her readers to nod in disapproval is that it is “still overwhelmingly white.” Case closed, QED. It’s all so cliched, so tiresome, so devoid of thought.
Beyond this, one wonders: what does Field expect those kids to wear? What do properly socialized, correct-thinking liberal young men wear to conferences? Frilly pink bathrobes? But this is just one of many of Field’s damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t cheap shots. No matter what they wore, Field’s targets can’t win; they’ve already been condemned in advance. Field elsewhere, and frequently, laments that more young people are not engaged in civic education. But when a slew of earnest young men show up, on their own time, wearing their Sunday best, to listen to distinguished scholars talk about politics, political philosophy, the Constitution, and the future of their country, all she can see are brownshirts.
What’s more, the “Harvey” in the above-quoted sentence is Harvey C. Mansfield, probably America’s most distinguished living political scientist. That someone of Field’s trifling accomplishment can so casually insult a scholar so obviously her superior is galling to those who admire human excellence. It might also interest Field to know that Mansfield married for a third time after his second wife died of cancer. Field and her editors should be ashamed of themselves.
***
In her preface, Field presents herself as an exemplar of philosophic probity, someone able to gaze squarely into the abyss without flinching. She boasts of being able to consider, cooly, the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche (on whose popular rhetoric she wrote her dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin) despite their radicalism and, she adds, Rousseau’s disreputable personal behavior. Leaving aside the extent to which this self-congratulatory self-assessment contrasts with the pearl-clutching tone of the rest of her book, when it comes to examining real and large political phenomena, Field’s alleged probity entirely fails her.
The figures Field slanders in Furious Minds are wrestling with, however haltingly or incompletely, very large spiritual and political questions: the future of the country, the limitations of liberalism, the strengths and weaknesses of democracy, the place of religion in public life, relations between the sexes, and many others. These are among the grandest themes of political philosophy, the field in which Field and her admirers never tire of reminding us Field received a Ph.D. All she can manage to do, however, is point and sputter at the various ways her targets’ opinions deviate from present elite orthodoxy. Field cannot be unaware—can she?—that the philosophers she claims to have studied without flinching more than deviate from, and often (one might say “furiously”) clash with, said orthodoxy. Indeed, compared to what those philosophers wrote at their boldest, not to say most outrageous, Field’s targets are spring lambs. She can handle Rousseau and Nietzsche but Patrick Deneen and Yoram Hazony give her the vapors? The “general will” and the “merciless annihilation of everything degenerating and parasitical” don’t trouble her, but she finds “national conservatism” and “patriotic education” terrifying? Pathetic, and yet hilarious.
***
One gets the strong impression that the chief reason Field ever picked up Rousseau, Nietzsche, or any of the others is because of their status, until recently, within the academic professional tradition. In other words, Field only knows the defanged, bowdlerized versions of these thinkers, reduced to museum pieces or authorities made safe for easily offended left-leaning, feminist-friendly graduate students.
Field excoriates Allan Bloom and Harvey Mansfield (and me) for pointing out characteristic differences between men and women, but she doesn’t attempt to show that we are wrong. If anything, her whole book, with its subjectivism and focus on feelings, is evidence that we are right. She further mocks Mansfield (and me) for pointing out that left-brained women who follow data wherever it leads, even to places unflattering to their sex, exist (I married one of them; my friend Helen Andrews is another), but that they are the exception, not the rule.
It is therefore not a coincidence that Furious Minds is framed entirely in terms of Field’s own personal reactions to various perceived slights. The first thing in the book (after that epigraph tarring her targets with the Holocaust) is a personal anecdote in which a (bad conservative male) fellow academic made a crude remark. In Field’s own telling, this induced in her a crisis of confidence that caused her to rethink her whole career. In this, Furious Minds is reminiscent of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s vapid Between the World and Me (2015), in which Coates teases a grand unified theory of omnipresent, permanent racism out of an anecdote about his son once being pushed on an escalator. The rest of Furious Minds is similarly shot through with Field’s personal—always anguished—reactions to things. She frequently describes her own fear, pity, anger, and depression, among other emotions. Interspersed with her blow-by-blow accounts of various conferences and chronologies of blog posts and op-eds, she gives a running narrative of her own gradual self-separation from the conservative academic world. Finally, she exhales: “I have seldom been so glad to no longer be part of something as when I walked out of the AEI building and into the DC sunshine that day.”
***
“That day” refers to a conference honoring Harvey Mansfield at that notorious hotbed of alt-right thinking, the American Enterprise Institute—a conference whose luminaries included well-known far-right bomb throwers Bill Kristol, Yuval Levin, and Bryan Garsten. This was Field’s final breaking point. It takes a heart of stone not to laugh. Similarly, she goes out of her way in four separate chapters to paint the polished, careful Charles Kesler as some sort of mouth-frothing troglodyte, finding his alleged “vitriol” “hyperbolic,” “Manichean,” and “dystopian,” on par with the rest of the “shock-jock right” (and that’s just one passage!).
But was Field ever a part of the conservative world she professes herself so relieved to have left? She describes herself as “more liberal—socially, economically—” than the Straussians, citing only Strauss himself, who stated few political positions beyond anti-Communism, and Allan Bloom, who frankly disavowed the label “conservative” and according to his friends voted Democrat until the end of his life. If Field was always “more liberal” than that, in what sense was she ever conservative? Again, this is all part of the op. Field is like Damon Linker, who established himself with a tell-all book, The Theocons (2006), about his sojourn through the dungeons of conservative intellectualism. Ever since his brief time at the magazine First Things in the early Aughts, Linker has made a career out of scaring liberals with the alleged dangers from the Morlocks he encountered down there while simultaneously reassuring his audience that the Right is entirely populated with losers. This only works, or works much better, if you can convince your audience that you were, however briefly, “one of them” but came to your senses. People love a redemption story.
Field similarly wants to reassure her readers that her targets are zeros. She is quick to employ the mean-girl tactic of the emasculating insult. She refers to Stephen Wolfe, author of The Case for Christian Nationalism (2022), as a “creep.” I am allegedly (on the basis of two articles) “uniquely obsessed with ideas about masculinity and women.” Young men on the New Right who lament the 21st century’s broken dating-and-mating scene are pathetic incels; older men who think about how to increase marriages, birthrates, and happy families are misogynistic “creeps” obsessed with sex and oppressing women. Field recounts trying to gain entrance to one of the NatCons only to be “gallantly shepherded…over to the women’s line (that was a first; it was short).” These losers can’t attract girls, get it? I happened to be at that conference and don’t recall a “women’s line,” so I contacted the organizers and asked: as I expected, they confirmed that there was no “women’s line”; Field made that up. But in a later chapter Field mocks Lower Manhattan’s vaguely New Right “Dimes Square” social scene, which is heavily female.
***
All this is typical of Field’s any-weapon-at-hand style of argumentation. Those of us who love the American Founding are fanatics, but those who find shortcomings in it from a religious or communitarian perspective are illiberal autocrats. The more academic among her targets are pompous poseurs; those who write and speak in more popular tones are lowbrow hacks. When Field encounters a joke, she pretends it’s 100% serious and flies into high-dudgeon outrage. When she comes across a pointed criticism, no matter how warranted, if she doesn’t like the criticizer, she declares it nasty and cruel, entirely ignoring the substance. When confronted with a claim she doesn’t like, she demands evidence. When evidence is provided, she ignores it or changes the subject. She chastises her targets for being overly provocative and shallow, but when shown serious arguments and substantive writings, she pronounces them “boring” and skips over them. At one point, Field confesses that she finds Harry Jaffa’s “late writings unreadable,” an extraordinary admission from an author who purports to see straight through the vagaries, errors, and contradictions of Claremontism and to pull the whole noxious weed up from its roots: Jaffa’s “late writings” are Claremontism.
Indeed, the most laughable aspect of Furious Minds is Field’s presentation of herself, in the course of her excoriation of the Claremont school, as more Claremont than Claremont. One of her early efforts that led to Furious Minds was an article titled “What the Hell Happened to the Claremont Institute?,” in which Field contrasts the supposedly “good” original or earlier Claremont school with its post-2016 iteration. It’s the same trick leftists play when they claim a Republican politician whom they smeared as a Nazi while in office is, in hindsight, a great exemplar of moderate statesmanship compared to the Nazi in power now (who will, in turn, be praised as a Solon whenever the next Nazi takes office). The old Claremont Institute, you see, was—like Field—a stalwart and true defender of American principle, but the bad, new Claremont Institute has ditched all that in order to suck up to Donald Trump. Never mind the many explanations Claremont scholars have written to illustrate why our support for Trump (which, contra Field’s insinuation, has never been absolute) arises precisely from our interpretation of America’s political principles. Field doesn’t have time for any of that.
Field takes me to task for quoting Abraham Lincoln’s response to the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision. In that speech, Lincoln affirms the American Founders’ central proposition that “all men are created equal” in their natural rights, but then, as I pointed out, “adds the crucial caveat: all men are not ‘equal in all respects’ (emphasis in the original). They are not ‘equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments or social capacity.’” From this I concluded that “[p]eople from different nations with different circumstances, histories, beliefs and traditions will—by definition—hold very different conceptions of good government, some irreconcilably opposed to our own.”
***
Field insists that “Lincoln drew a clear distinction between the unjust real world and the ideal, between the descriptive and the prescriptive…. [H]e said that the Declaration was—contra the Dred Scott ruling—intended by the founders to be a beacon of hope for a more equal future.” All well and good, but then she goes on to call me a “sophist” who misuses “Lincoln’s description of the empirical (but, in Lincoln’s view, very bad) reality of inequality” in order to “defend the normative ideals of inequality and exclusion (or what [Anton] liked to call ‘the historic American nation’).”
But Lincoln and the American Founders are quite clear: the practice of protecting natural equality is the business of each individual nation; the principle’s universality does not mean that the United States government is obligated to secure the equal natural rights of non-Americans. This is what, for example, the words “to ourselves and our Posterity” in the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution mean. When Lincoln distinguishes between the “reality of inequality” in his own time and some future time when “the enforcement of [equality] might follow as fast as circumstances should permit,” he was speaking solely of enforcement within the United States.
For Field, the natural equality defended by the founders and Lincoln requires not only perpetual open borders but the electorate’s complete neutrality, even indifference, as to who is admitted and who is not. That she thinks this approach is the only just and moral position on immigration is perhaps the ultimate testament to how extreme elite opinion has become. It also helps explain the bitter polarization of American politics, which Field (naturally) blames entirely on the populist Right. To the Fields of the world, one half or so of the electorate possesses an absolute right to flood the country with endless immigration, and the other half not only has no right to object, but if and when they do, they are somehow betraying America’s principles. Field cannot understand that it was precisely the elites’ insistent, incessant radicalism, dishonesty, and word-twisting—especially on the issue of immigration—that got people like her stuck with Trump. Tens of millions of voters became exasperated by their betters constantly telling them that any and all opposition to mass immigration is “racist” and that the American creed somehow requires open borders forever.
At any rate, one can search high and low for evidence of Laura Field embracing the (allegedly) “old” Claremont position on American principles and not find any. To the contrary, the particular corner of the Straussian world in which Field received her education is and always has been opposed to the Claremont interpretation of the American Founding. Indeed, the entire “East-West” divide among Straussians arises from this very dispute. Throughout Furious Minds Field presents herself as a great champion of “democracy.” Nevertheless, when going after Claremont writers Field praises “skepticism” to the skies and criticizes us for lacking any—unlike herself and her teachers, who, as philosophic followers of Leo Strauss, understand that at the end of the day, nothing is really knowable. But when attacking democracy’s various allegedly “illiberal” critics, Field’s skepticism disappears under a tidal wave of righteous certainty that liberal democracy (as she misunderstands it) is the best and only moral regime, which these dangerous fanatics undermine by daring to question.
***
Because Field cannot understand us as we understand ourselves, she does not grasp that we Claremont scholars see ourselves as defending the American version of liberal democracy as the best practicable regime in the modern world. That is the whole point of Harry Jaffa’s “unreadable” (to Field) later writings. Field can’t decide if we are bad because we are too unskeptically committed to this regime (and to its founders whom we irrationally idolize), or because we cynically betray its tenets. At various points in Furious Minds, she accuses us of each. But shouldn’t commitment to the American political tradition make us allies of someone who sees herself as democracy’s stalwart defender?
Granted, any such alliance would be uneasy, given all the ways in which Claremont shows that the American Founding does not comport either with the tenets of pure democracy or with the alleged requirements of “democracy” as interpreted by the contemporary Left. Field naturally rejects all that, but it’s not always clear on what basis. Is it that we’re wrong to argue that the founders saw pure democracy as a bad regime and so incorporated nondemocratic elements into the Constitution, or is it that those elements are there but the founders were wrong to incorporate them and the subsequent history of the United States is the salutary excision of these “illiberal” tumors from the body politic? When going after Claremont, Field argues the former; when standing up for modern leftism, she argues the latter. In other words, Field treats the founders as, variously, nobly democratic or sinisterly anti-democratic (and racist) depending on whose ox she happens to be goring at the given moment.
***
When Field is not invoking the founding to bash the “post-liberals” and “national conservatives,” she sides with her “East Coast” Straussian teachers against Claremont. Yet if one side of the Straussian divide can be said to be “pro-democracy,” it is the Jaffa-inspired West Coasters, whom Field dismisses as holding a “hagiographic view of the founding generation.” But one point on which all Straussians should agree is that democracy is not without its flaws. The Claremont argument is that the American Founders were well aware not just of classical doubts about democracy but of the classical remedies proposed and enacted to mitigate the problems diagnosed in democracy, which the founders incorporated into the American regime, altered to suit modern circumstances. Claremont’s East Coast critics by contrast believe (or at least used to say) they hew closer to the classics (and to Strauss) in judging democracy a bad regime simply, and American democracy its characteristically modern incarnation. And by “modern” they mean (among other things) geared toward getting and spending while indifferent to virtue. It is therefore somewhat incongruous to see Field and many prominent East Coasters today moralistically extoll “our democracy”—a regime their own most cherished texts condemn as among the worst—as a cudgel against Trump.
Among other ways East and West differ, we in the West take seriously the American Founders’ grappling with the question of virtue—and, more to the point, we see America as a real, living political entity, not a mere epiphenomenon of modern political philosophy. It is odd, then, to read Field repeatedly refer to us as “Ideas First” ideologues who believe political outcomes are determined by thought and writings when that designation would seem to apply, to the extent that it describes anyone at all, more to her own (former) side.
The Eastern Straussian world from which Field emerged criticizes Claremont not merely for our alleged misunderstanding of America but for (allegedly) misapprehending the entire philosophic tradition. Although it is true, these critics concede, that the tradition speaks of virtue, morality, ethics, justice and injustice, right and wrong, teleology, etc., Claremont misses or willfully ignores the all-important clues that all that is just exoteric cover. Whether our misunderstanding arises from limited intelligence, moralistic zeal, or a psychological need to believe in life-affirming myths is immaterial. The upshot is the same: we just don’t get it.
***
I don’t mean to dismiss this argument out of hand. It has a certain plausibility and, in any case, a long philosophical pedigree dating back to ancient Greece. And those Straussians who level this charge against us are surely correct that the books we all wrestle with are, by their authors’ deliberate design, hard to interpret and do not lend themselves to definitive readings. All the conscientious reader can do is weigh the cases for and against this or that interpretation, in part by comparing textual assertions with observable phenomena. As Strauss himself put it, “It is impossible to think about these problems without becoming inclined toward a solution, toward one or the other of the very few typical solutions.” Having thought about it, Claremont’s (tentative) conclusion is that virtue, teleology, and all the rest are more plausible, more likely to be right than wrong, than the alternatives—that the philosophic case for them is intellectually stronger than the case against. As students of philosophy, we must necessarily admit that this question can never be definitively settled and we must therefore remain open-minded. As citizens who must engage in politics in the here and now, however, we find it more reasonable—truer to the phenomena—to do so on the assumption that virtue and morality are real, and that acting on that basis produces better outcomes. Indeed, the very word “better,” which human beings cannot help but think and utter, points to the human perception of a hierarchy of ends, of the sacred and of sacred limits, which even if conventional will always drive and shape human action.
It’s one thing for students of political philosophy to take a different view—we, or at least I, respect that. It is quite another to be moralistically lectured by people who otherwise mock us as naïve for saying openly that we think morality is real. The precise contours of the lecture hardly matter; if virtue talk is all exoteric, then any finger-wagging in our direction over any alleged transgression must be either cynical or contradictory.
Of course, Field’s “skepticism” is a put-on, a cloak worn when expedient. She rather seeks to impose skepticism on people who come to conclusions she doesn’t like. Those people should be more skeptical, you see, and realize that they can’t really be sure they’re right about anything, and in the spirit of virtuous circumspection, step back and stop making arguments or trying to influence anyone. Field herself, however, has no need of, or use for, skepticism because in her mind she is simply right.
***
Though Field never spells it out, it’s clear enough what she thinks should come next. Anyone associated with Trump, Trumpism, populism, nationalism, immigration restriction, opposition to DEI or racial preferences, anyone in favor of a more robust presence of religion in American life or anything even glancingly resembling the pre-sexual revolution family—these people and their ideas must be absolutely excluded from any influence on, or participation in, American public life. That this category covers at least a third, and perhaps more than half, of the American people does not seem to give her any pause.
What, exactly, Field would do to lock us all out permanently is anything but clear, and I doubt she’s thought it through herself. That she thinks this is the only just—the only safe—outcome is, however, crystal clear. It cannot be lost on those of us who want nothing more “extreme” than a secure border, immigration policies that benefit the existing citizenry, an end to industry-sapping and community-destroying trade giveaways, and foreign policy restraint that serves the national interest that we are tarred as extremists by an actual extremist the logic of whose “argument” points to the necessity and “justice” of our…let us say, absence.
How, then, is coexistence as fellow citizens possible between Trump’s 80-something million supporters and Laura K. Field and the (admittedly) tens of millions for whom she may be said to speak? It’s not merely that we hardly share anything in common, though it’s clear enough that we don’t. It’s that the disdain Field and her allies pour on ordinary Americans is so overwhelming as to approach a rejection of the totality of American life. She and the rest of her ilk laughably try to turn this back on us—as if enduring three-plus decades of being despoiled and despised and finally standing up and voting in our interests constitutes an intolerable provocation against sacred democracy.
Nor is it a stretch to foresee a time when yet another troubled soul whose psychoses are intensified via an unceasing broadcast of denunciation decides that Furious Minds provides a fine list of targets for “action-oriented politics.” Disturbing polls by Axios, Harvard, and others, taken in the wake of the Brian Thompson assassination, the two attempts on President Trump’s life, and Charlie Kirk’s murder, show that as many as 40% of young people on the left now think political violence is justified. Frightening as this is, it should not be altogether surprising, given the accelerating drumbeat of hysterical “warnings” that America is on the verge of an imminent “fascist” takeover. Furious Minds has emerged as the timpani in this percussion section. We are headed nowhere good, and Laura Field is doing her part to ensure we get there.
Since the days of Nixon’s “enemies list” at least, the Right simply does not do this. We have no massively funded equivalent to the Anti-Defamation League or Southern Poverty Law Center, no CNN “K-File,” no doxxing-industrial complex, all of which exist to catalogue any deviation from elite woke orthodoxy and mark their targets for ostracism or worse. The Left spends billions to destroy lives and then plaintively wonders aloud why the country has gotten so polarized and bitter.
***
The various endowed-chair professors, think tank senior fellows, national newspaper columnists, and other assorted luminaries who have heaped praise on this book should be embarrassed. That they can, with a straight face, praise it as good scholarship calls into question whether they can any longer recognize even passable scholarship. More likely, however, they know bilge when they see it—but laud this particular bilge nonetheless because it furthers a common partisan interest.
The very scholars who boast that they are above partisanship, who quote Alexis de Tocqueville about seeing “further” than the parties, have abandoned all pretense. These “philosophers” who join Field in condemning her targets for taking a political side, have themselves taken a side, and what’s worse, the side which insists—against reason, against philosophy, against the experience of history—that there is only one side.
