Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, Laura K. Field, Princeton University Press, 2025, pp. 432, $33.00 hardcover.
Between 2016 and 2024, American conservatism was reshaped by a network of intellectuals who supplied the ideas and institutional backing for what is sometimes labeled the MAGA “New Right.” Laura K. Field’s Furious Minds offers an extended indictment of this now-prominent intellectual class, crediting it with forging the ideological armor surrounding Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. The book aims to chronicle this transformation of conservatism and to warn of what Field sees as its authoritarian tendencies.
Field is relentless in exploring the not inconsiderable evidence that some of those she considers “New Right” prioritize moral restoration over constitutional norms. But in so diligently cataloging the institutions and delineating the boundaries of the New Right, Field rips these figures from the historical moment that gave rise to them, leaving them looking distorted and unfamiliar.
When Field reproaches the New Right for its “Straussian love of abstraction,” which “liberates them from … on-the-ground facts,” she inadvertently demonstrates the same detachment in her own account, as well as a deeper failing of modern liberalism: an inability to apprehend the gravest threats to its own principles, especially when it means risking political capital in their defense.
None of this is to deny that Field—a University of Texas-trained “Straussian” and nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution—makes her case with considerable force. At 435 pages, she has produced a deeply researched scholarly polemic whose lucid prose and creatively drawn taxonomy renders the New Right intelligible despite its disparate viewpoints and purposes.
It’s possible that Field’s definition of the New Right is too inclusive. The political significance or allegiances of some semi-adjacent figures and gadflies on the “Hard Right”—TradCaths, the “tech right,” BAPists (Bronze Age Pervert and his followers), and Groypers—is not in all cases obvious. But her main achievement is to organize her material into three primary groups: Claremonters, Postliberals, and National Conservatives or “NatCons.” It is Field’s contention that these groups reject liberal pluralism, each in their own way.
The “Claremonters” are “West Coast Straussians” affiliated with the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College, including such figures as Michael Anton, Larry Arnn, Thomas Klingenstein, Chris Demuth, Chris Caldwell, John Eastman, and Charles Kesler. Anton’s pivotal 2016 essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” which appeared in the house organ Claremont Review of Books and cast the contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as an existential choice, serves as a foundational text for the movement. Here, and in myriad posts to the short-lived website the Journal of American Greatness, the Claremonters blend Greek philosophy, the bible, and reverence for the American Founding to articulate a deep antipathy for the administrative state, the reliance on “experts,” and an absolutist or “emergency” politics: Field is troubled that the Claremonters’ favorite refrain—“Do you know what time it is?”—signals a fundamental change in politics and that it is time for “radical action in America.” (30)
The Postliberals—centered on Catholic thinkers Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, but including Sohrab Ahmari, Gladden Pappin and others—argue that Enlightenment liberalism’s sacralization of the individual has led to civilizational decay. In its place, they advocate a religiously informed “common good” constitutionalism; thus, some Postliberals, such as Vermeule, are better thought of as “Catholic Integralists.” They contend that state power, in the right hands, can be “prudentially” directed toward a substantive vision of the good. (266)
The National Conservatives, led by Israeli-born scholar Yoram Hazony, and including Josh Hammer, R.R. Reno, Christopher Demuth, and others are the large umbrella group of the New Right. Field sees them as promoting a religio/ethnic heritage-based nationalism that flirts dangerously with white and Christian nationalism.
For Field, who describes herself as “ferociously attached to liberalism,” the biggest problem seems to be the New Right’s “staunch social traditionalism.” All three factions, in Field’s view, are organized around a “traditionalist (usually white, Christian, and patriarchal) social vision … meant to counter and replace pluralistic liberalism.” (28)
This concern finds its fullest expression in her treatment of Postliberals Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, whom she regards as the “most sophisticated thinkers of the New Right.” (30) This is Field at her most incisive, demonstrating that the Postliberals’ exaltation of executive power, Deneen’s rule by a “self-conscious Aristoi,” and Vermeule’s vision of a bureaucratically embedded Catholicism—make few provisions for dissent, individual rights, or practical implementation.
But committing perhaps one-third of the book to Postliberals is too much. The practical effect they have had on the MAGA movement and the Trump presidency is negligible, a point underscored by Field herself when she writes “with the exception of their influence on JD Vance, they have been the least influential thinkers of the New Right.” (270)
Field’s emphasis on Deneen and Vermeule, both with university appointments, serves to anchor the New Right within elite academic institutions. This framing amplifies its apparent power while letting her sidestep the uncomfortable problem of an academy now largely bereft of heterodox voices. Deneen’s faculty post at Notre Dame and Vermeule’s at Harvard is enough for Field to write: “The New Right as a whole consists of many extremely smart people who occupy positions of power and prestige in American institutions. They are professors at Harvard and Notre Dame and have graduate degrees from Duke and Yale.” (26)
This is true only in the narrowest sense. Beyond Deneen and Vermeule—and isolated enclaves such as Robert P. George’s program at Princeton University—the New Right remains peripheral to the academy, not embedded within it. Earlier university-based thinkers such as Leo Strauss, Harry V. Jaffa, and Allan Bloom supplied much of the theoretical foundation for the New Right, but today’s universities are far less cordial. The decades-long rule of social justice orthodoxy over curricula, hiring, and tenure has produced a professoriate that is strikingly homogenous—by 2020, only four percent of U.S. faculty identified as supporters of Donald Trump.1
A key feature of the New Right is that its intellectual character was built in spite of the academic mainstream, not through it. The Claremont Institute moved decisively beyond university affiliation in the 1990s, while Hillsdale College preserved its classical liberal arts curriculum by rejecting federal funding in the late 1970s—a path only a handful of colleges among the nation’s thousands have followed.
To the book’s detriment, Field largely overlooks the degree to which universities have hardened into an ideological monoculture and the effect that has had on the New Right: its opposition to Critical Race Theory and quotas, its insistence on meritocratic advancement, and its defense of Western civilization has been driven in no small part by the capture of academia by “diversity ideology.”
Field allows, at one point, that Critical Race Theory has had a “growing influence in American universities over the past few decades,” but adds that the New Right campaign against CRT led by Chris Rufo, Hillsdale President Larry Arnn, and others “took a peripheral academic theory and exaggerated its threat to a generation of students.” (225)
Field’s embedding the New Right in academic culture obscures its success at building durable institutions and a coherent alternative to the identitarianism of American universities. One needn’t be a fellow traveler to see that its rise in influence—and proximity to power—owes chiefly to the salience—or at least the usefulness—of its ideas, not to public subsidy. A fair accounting of the movement must reckon with the pervasive hostility and stifling conformity of academic life, and the role both have played in shaping the New Right.
And it’s not only the illiberalism of academia that Field neglects. The book is marked by a kind of willful blindness toward the historical circumstances informing New Right thought, preventing a deeper feel for its work. While Field focuses on ideas, she is not shy about discussing “on-the-ground” historical episodes when they are presumed to reflect poorly on the New Right, such as the Jan. 6th 2021 Capitol riot—which she tendentiously calls an “insurrection”—in which she implicates pro-Trump Christian groups for “fomenting the conditions for the Jan 6 attack.” (170) Her book is peppered with references to the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally and 2020 “election denialism,” both of which she claims were formative events for the New Right.
But other defining episodes go untouched, including the 2016 strain of “election denialism,” which triggered a three-year, $32 million investigation into Trump for alleged collusion with Russia—an inquiry premised on an unverified dossier funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Even with Trump in office, this dubious allegation metastasized into a prolonged national crisis, sustained by partisans across the federal bureaucracy, academia, the media, and international organizations. The point is not that this stands among the most far-reaching abuses of federal power, but that it provides powerful confirmation of the Claremonters’ suspicion of the administrative “deep” state and to Postliberal anxieties about the unaccountable reach of the “managerial class.”
Not even four years later, that same alignment of bureaucracy and national media—now joined by Big Tech—moved to suppress the damaging contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, clearing the biggest obstacle ahead of Joe Biden’s election. In that light, even the controversial theorizing of New Rightist Curtis Yarvin—who coined “the Cathedral,” the loosely aligned network of media, government, and academia—takes on a more consequential edge.
Field is admirably candid about her liberal commitments, citing her sensitivity to “grotesque and rising economic inequality … degrading racial inequities, dystopian gun violence … failures of accountability in American policing, [and] cruel attacks on LGBTQ communities.” (46–47) But such candor does not relieve her of the obligation to situate this school of thought within its proper historical context.
The New Right is heavily influenced by the sustained upheavals of 2016 to 2024, much of which they had earlier identified: decades of mass migration of low-skilled labor into a wage-stagnant economy; the most destructive riots in a generation and the rise of Black Lives Matter; intensifying transgender and climate activism. At the same time, university-generated DEI/social justice policies spilled out into the wider public, resulting in what even left-wing pundit Matthew Iglesias christened the “Great Awokening.”
But Field writes as if the New Right emerged in a vacuum, reflecting little more than the opportunism of aging paleoconservative thinkers whose racism and xenophobia had been suppressed during the “fusionism” of William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan. For Field, the New Right simply recognized Trump as someone who shared elements of their discredited ideology and was up for a fight.
This intra-conservative warfare was real. New Rightists were deeply embittered by the refusal of establishment conservatives to deliver on social issues, especially immigration. But that doesn’t explain why the ideas of the New Right attracted a broad enough coalition to win two national elections. The last “paleoconservative” to run for president, Patrick Buchanan, tried three times and never came close.
That is likely because the New Right, at least that portion of it most responsible for Trump’s MAGA agenda, left Buchanan’s resentments in the past and directly addressed problems that liberal pluralism’s “cancel culture” had rendered taboo: the dangers of racial and gender quotas, mandated “antiracism” training, 1619 Project-infused education, the pretense of free trade, radical transgender ideology, and, more generally, what looked to a lot of people like the destruction of America as a meritocratic republic. As critic Robert Bellafiore wrote in First Things: the New Right gained “an audience because they are willing to say what Americans see before them every day: that liberalism’s vaunted pluralism is a fiction.”
Field brushes this aside with a stroke of her keyboard: “both movements—the old paleoconservatives and the New Right—are bound up with old-fashioned racism.” (92)
Like many liberals, Field is unbothered by “woke America” because it largely “embraces plurality and equality, including across various formerly marginalized identities.” Field can’t think of a time “when things have actually been better.” “I often look around today and compare it to the world my grandmother inhabited, and I can’t help but shake my head at men like Bloom and Deneen.” (110)
Even as formidable a writer as Field cannot adequately round out the story of the New Right without attending to the social and institutional realities that shaped it. Michael Anton’s article “The Flight 93 Election” offers a line that Field—if only for the benefit of the book—might have taken more seriously: “[O]nly in a corrupt republic, in corrupt times, could a Trump rise.”
Seth Forman is managing editor of Academic Questions.
1 Eric Kaufmann, Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship, CSPI Report No. 2, March 1, 2021.
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