What’s Behind the Making of the MAGA New Right? 

Laura K. Field’s work Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is a troubling survey of various political-intellectual groups on the right. These are groups that led American conservatives to “capitulate” to and help “foment” Donald Trump’s election victories based on his MAGA slogan.  

Field’s account is eye-opening. At the same time, as a professed “liberal,” she exhibits elements of excessive partisanship that weaken her argument. 

First of all, Field depicts the formation of the “New Right” as a story of “ideological radicalization.” It’s a story, she explains, in which “old-school” conservatives were supplanted by others who judged that Trump, in his willingness to “gain and exert power,” could further their political goals. Their aim, she says, was “to leverage real problems” and “vulnerabilities” of liberalism “to impose their own homogenizing moral and political vision” on the country, “turn[ing] back the clock on pluralistic, liberal democracy, and even on modernity itself.” The chief figures in this plan were “extremely smart people” holding graduate degrees and in some cases teaching positions at America’s leading universities. These people occupied places at major think tanks and attracted support from prominent politicians like Senators Hawley, Cotton, and Rubio; Governor Ron DeSantis; and (now) Vice President Vance. 

Acknowledging that the New Right is “not a monolith,” Field divides it into three groups: the “Claremonters” (scholars associated with California’s Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship who “idolize the American Founding”); the “Postliberals,” advocates of a religiously inspired vision of the Common Good that they wish to impose on the country; and the “National Conservatives,” advocates of what Field calls “the myth of the traditional American nation.” But she emphasizes that these groups, far from being mutually exclusive, form “a highly networked movement with distinct clusters and modes of thinking,” linking “activists, influencers, staffers, and politicians.”  

Field identifies the origins of the Claremonters in the work of the late, distinguished Lincoln scholar Harry Jaffa, a student of the great political philosopher Leo Strauss (under whom this reviewer also studied). While spending most of his teaching career at Claremont McKenna College and Graduate School, Jaffa, unlike his mentor, devoted an increasing amount of his time to conservative political activism. In fact, he gradually launched conflicts with former Straussian friends and denounced conservative officeholders like Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Rehnquist as insufficiently loyal to the principles of the Constitution.  

These facts aside, Field understates the significance of Jaffa’s devotion to the Lincolnian principle of equality of rights (in opposition to “paleoconservatives” like Willmoore Kendall), as well as to the Declaration of Independence itself. Any purported Straussians (from Claremont or elsewhere) who, Field maintains, subsequently enlisted in the contemptible “far-right ‘race science club,’ or worse,” had utterly departed from the teachings of Jaffa, let alone Strauss.  

Given the devotion of Jaffa and his students to the study of the American Founders and their legacy, one should hardly regret, as Field does, that Claremonters “were heavily involved” in President Trump’s call for … patriotic education.” But while Field devotes an entire chapter to that theme, and mocks the “downright fury and hysteria” with which conservatives met the New York Times’ 1619 Project (a work repudiated by mainstream, even liberal historians for its inaccuracies, but thus far assigned in more than 4,500 American classrooms), the government-promoted ethos against which Trump has reacted in that regard is vastly more extensive. 

Field is on firmer, and more concerning, ground when she takes up other elements of the intellectual New Right who have associated themselves with Trumpism, starting with the “postliberal” movement led by Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, and journalist Sohrab Ahmari. Unlike mainstream conservatives and centrists who were drawn to Trump by his defense of traditional American liberty and patriotism against their “woke” critics, the postliberals attack America’s constitutional principles no less sharply from the right than their counterparts do on the left.  

As Field points out, in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen challenged not merely American liberalism in its twentieth- or twenty-first-century sense (as “progressivism”), nor only the classical liberalism of the Founders, but rather the “political philosophy conceived some 500 years ago” that “conceived humans as rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life.” The hallmarks of this liberalism (expounded most clearly by John Locke) included “limited but effective government, rule of law, an independent judiciary, responsive public officials, and free and fair elections.” While the vast majority of Americans (left and right) would accept that as a satisfactory definition of good government, Deneen objected to its underlying philosophical framework for promoting “individualism and the idea of the conquest of nature.” In their place Deneen originally advocated “grass-roots experiments in community and localism,” without delineating “any clear delimitation” of legitimate government’s powers.  

But Vermeule went further, praising Deneen’s analysis but lamenting its lack of “ambition.” In Vermeule’s view, Deneen’s localism would still leave communities subject to the liberal “axe.” Hence Vermeule, a Catholic “integralist,” exhorted antiliberals (in Field’s summary) to “co-opt the power of the state” so as to “undo liberal freedoms” (my emphasis). Whereas traditional American conservatives and constitutionalists sought to cut back the size and scope of America’s administrative state, Vermeule hoped that the bureaucracy created by progressive liberals might “be turned to new ends, becoming the great instrument with which to restore a substantive politics of the good” and impose it on the people as a whole.  

Dismissing liberal concerns about such coercion, Vermeule, heavily influenced by the antiliberal German theorist Carl Schmitt, insisted on the need “to sear the liberal faith with hot irons.” In turn, Field reports, by the time of his next book, Regime Change, Deneen himself had become radicalized by Vermeule’s argument and espoused an “aristopopulism,” in which existing so-called “elites” would be replaced by “genuine aristoi,” who would give effect to the true concerns of the long-neglected multitude. 

All this sounds like scary stuff, but also a program that would seem unlikely to appeal to a substantial number of Americans. Yet it is noteworthy that then-Senator Vance spoke at the launch of Regime Change. Field mentions that Vance had also spoken at the first major conference of the National Conservatism conference in 2019, giving a speech titled “Getting Beyond Libertarianism.”  

Although the “NatCon” movement had originated in the work of an American-educated Israeli political theorist, Yoram Hazony, an ardent Zionist who aimed to defend Israel’s autonomy against the encroachments of international, unaccountable bodies like the EU and the UN, he also distinguished sharply between nationalism properly understood and its opposite, imperialism. (For some reason Field, ignoring that distinction, is surprised by Hazony’s support of Ukraine’s cause against Vladimir Putin’s campaign to subjugate it to a restored Russian empire.) But while Hazony was joined in heading the first NatCon conference by Christopher DeMuth, former president of the American Enterprise Institute who originally espoused a “more moderate” version of nationalism, DeMuth somewhat curiously maintained that nationalism was the “essence” of Trumpism. Like Deneen and Vance, Field observes, DeMuth professed to uphold the cause of “Somewhere” people, with a fixed national attachment, against internationalist “Anywheres.”      

Here, Field observes the prefigurement of “schisms” within the New Right movement. DeMuth’s call for “financial transparency and accountability about the costs of the welfare state” overlooked the way that the “austerity programs of the 1980s and 1990s” instituted under Presidents Reagan and Clinton had “fostered” the struggles of contemporary “Somewheres.”  

Field’s criticism of DeMuth on this issue is one of several instances of her letting her left-leaning, partisan slip show. Another is her applause of the “economic populism” expressed at the first NatCon conference by Julius Krein, who alleged that owing to “twentieth-century conservative economic policy,” Americans “constructed an economy increasingly geared toward producing financial wealth for narrower segments of the population, rather than growing through productivity gains, innovation, and widespread improvements in economic conditions.” She also astonishingly claims “that none of the financial beneficiaries of corporate profits had ever decided to reinvest their earnings in the American economy.”   

Like Vermeule’s integralism and Deneen’s denunciation of individualism, Krein’s remarks exhibit the truth of the “horseshoe theory” that Field herself cites, according to which in politics, the extremes meet. (Compare the pledge of New York City’s newly elected socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”)  

But there are other issues on which Field reveals her own deviation from the Founders’ principles of individual freedom. She finds it “truly sickening to see college administrators” who had “celebrated … activism and diversity react so forcefully against pro-Palestine student protesters and critics of Israel’s gruesome war on Gaza.” Yet she made no mention of the Hamas massacre that had precipitated it, or the sometimes violent and often physically obstructive tactics of the “protestors.”  

Elsewhere, she mocks the critique of “identity politics” contained in the 1776 Commission Report and its claim that policies elevating “group rights” to favor preferred racial, ethnic, or gender groups mirror the antiliberal outlook of slavocrat John Calhoun. She reserves a special contempt for the crusading journalist Christopher Rufo, who helped Trump enact a 2020 executive order banning teaching or training in federal agencies or contractors in “divisive concepts” involving “race or sex stereotyping.” For Field this constituted the “New Right’s” attack on free speech,” even though she denies that the banned training (contrary to the evidence supplied by Rufo and the Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez) had been happening anyway. 

All this said, I highly recommend this book for the facts it uncovers about the deeply troubling, antiliberal tendencies it dissects on the intellectual– political right. At the same time, readers are forewarned of some of the antiliberal or hyperpartisan character of some of its author’s arguments, which obscure some of the real problems that have generated the New Right’s frequent overreactions. 

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