Curtis Yarvin (Peter Duke)

John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote that “the modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” There’s some truth to this, but it’s an oversimplification: at least some on the right do have principles, and not all of these are a pretext for self-interest. In his classic essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” Friedrich Hayek got a little closer to the mark when he described the essence of conservatism as the conviction that “there are recognizably superior persons whose inherited standards and values and position ought to be protected and who should have a greater influence on public affairs than others.” But when the right feels that the “recognizably superior” have been dispossessed of all their rightful privileges, they sometimes declare that “conservatism is no longer enough,” and that the time has come for “counter-revolution” and “regime change.”

Laura K. Field’s fascinating new book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is the story of how a group of well-heeled men (and they are almost all men) have fought to reclaim the authority and deference they believe is owed to them by the lower orders. Field is well situated to write such a book. In her youth, she was deeply enamored with Straussian political theory and moved within conservative intellectual circles. At the time—not so long ago—these were rather genteel spaces, where the vulgarity and brazen mendacity of someone like Trump would be held in disdain. Field describes a Road to Damascus moment in 2010 when, at a dinner party, she heard several young up-and-coming conservative intellectuals talking about Michelle Obama. One of them observed that the then–First Lady was “truly statuesque. Very tall, very impressive. I’d really like to fuck her.” Field suddenly realized that even intellectual conservatism was on the short path to cheering on the “Q-Anon Shaman” and his friends rampaging through halls of the Capitol.

In Field’s words, hers is a story of “ideological radicalization”:

The men of the New Right saw Trump as a major opportunity. They egged him and his supporters on, and they brought others into the fold. They saw that he shared some of their extremist, old school conservative views, and they appreciated that he would use whatever means necessary—including unconstitutional means—to gain and exert power.

Field shows that the world of MAGA intellectuals and activists is a surprisingly diverse place, whose various factions often despise each other almost as much as they despise liberals.

Their reactionary principles may or may not have been sincere, but their methods were openly opportunistic—more Machiavelli than Aristotle. As Field writes, the men of the New Right sought, and still seek, to “turn back the clock on pluralistic liberal democracy, and even on modernity itself” in order to impose “their own homogenizing moral and political vision on the rest of the country.”

Furious Minds covers an enormous range of figures and ideas. This means that despite being more than four hundred pages long, it moves at an appropriately furious pace. One of its most impressive achievements is its comprehensive ideological taxonomy, which charts how different groups within the New Right compete against or align with one another depending on the circumstances. Field shows that the world of MAGA intellectuals and activists is a surprisingly diverse place, whose various factions often despise each other almost as much as they despise liberals.

One of these factions is made up of “postliberal” Catholics such as Patrick Deneen, J. D. Vance, and Adrian Vermeule. It’s pretty clear that Field considers this group the most intellectually sophisticated element of the MAGA coalition, and I think she is right. Postliberals believe that liberalism has “failed” precisely by successfully imposing its unrealistic and unsustainable worldview. In one of the more interesting sections of the book, Field demonstrates that postliberalism, always well to the right of the old Republican Party, has become even more radical in recent years. In his surprise bestseller Why Liberalism Failed,* *Deneen suggested that the best thing for conservatives to do was to take the “Benedict Option” (Rod Dreher’s term) and establish traditionalist local communities. By the time Joe Biden was president, Deneen had moved closer to legal philosopher Adrian Vermeule—the same Adrian Vermeule who regularly invokes the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt and calls for a complete overturning of the liberal order. Meanwhile, Vance, who speculated that Trump might be “America’s Hitler” in 2016, quickly changed his mind when he realized those were just his principles talking, and if they stood in the way of his ambition…well, he had others.

The darkest sections of this book are Field’s long chapters on the “hard right” underbelly of MAGA, which includes open fascists like “Bronze Age Pervert,” white supremacists like Darren Beattie, and monarchists like Curtis Yarvin—aka Mencius Moldbug. Field’s assessment of these figures is withering. She notes that “Yarvin’s writing is very bad, and the reasoning is worse; come for the edgelord conspiracism (‘Did Barak Obama Go To Columbia?’ pondered Moldbug in 2008), stay for the non sequiturs and slapdash pseudohistorical bricolage.” It’s tempting to dismiss the hard right as a bunch of ridiculous cranks, but they now wield very real influence in the Trump administration. As historian Dave Austin Walsh reminds us in Taking America Back, the cordon sanitaire that once separated people like Yarvin from Republican powerbrokers was always thinner than most people thought. It’s now been completely dismantled. Beattie is now back to working for the Trump administration, and Yarvin’s neo-monarchism is the subject of op-eds and interviews in the mainstream press.

The anger and resentment driving our current agonies can end in only one place.

One of the questions *Furious Minds *doesn’t quite answer is why, despite its increasingly open misogyny and racism, the MAGA right has gained so much ground not only as an intellectual trend but as an electoral force in a country where most voters are not white men. The answer will no doubt turn out to be complex. Trump has never been especially popular beyond his base, and even when he won the popular vote in 2024, he still couldn’t crack 50 percent. Some liberals see that as cause for optimism. I disagree. After all, it means that the Democratic Party has managed to lose two out of three elections to an unpopular demagogue. This should have produced some deep soul-searching among the centrist liberals in charge of the party. That the only lesson they seem to have drawn so far is “we need better messaging” shows just how severe the problem is.

Field notes that the “Ideas First” approach of the New Right privileges the “recitation of moral ideology…over the practice of good and virtuous deeds.” Ideological purity takes priority over grubby statistics and historical facts, such as who actually won an election. In a cosmic battle between the forces of chaos and the forces of order, telling the truth matters less than upholding the capital-T Truth by whatever means necessary. I think that Field is right, but I wonder if this problem is unique to the right. American political elites in general are now so removed from the material problems of most Americans that they can hardly help thinking in terms of “Ideas First”—abstractions and talking points with no connection to any policy that might make every-day life easier for the average American. Although liberals are usually less cavalier about the facts, they can be just as distracted by their own rhetoric.

But Furious Minds is specifically about the New Right and what ails it, and that’s more than enough for one book. Field’s tight focus allows her to inspect the tiny fissures and subtle distinctions of an ideological tendency that can seem oppressively monochromatic to outsiders. She helps us to understand recent developments that appear counterintuitive, if not unintelligible—for example, how a movement that preaches the revival of Christian virtue ended up supporting a convicted sex offender who palled around with Jeffrey Epstein; or how a politician who promised to be a tribune of the working class ended up giving more billions to the billionaires and taking orders from Silicon Valley. On a mundane level, these look like contradictions because they *are *contradictions. But once politics becomes nothing more than a projection of metaphysical obsessions, such contradictions cease to be outrageous and become almost trivial. Then there are the cynics masquerading as zealots, the ones who only pretend to have metaphysical obsessions in order to disguise wanton ambition and avarice. Either way, what matters is to fortify the frontier between one’s righteous allies and the barbarians at the gates.

This is a very troubling moment for American democracy, such as it is, and the path forward is unclear to many of us. *Furious Minds *may help by showing readers, in stark detail, the obscure path that led us to where we are. It’s a work of intellectual history, not a polemic, but it offers an important warning to those with ears to hear: the anger and resentment driving our current agonies can end in only one place.

Furious Minds The Making of the MAGA New Right Laura K. Field Princeton University Press $35 | 432 pp.

**Matt McManus **is an assistant professor at Spelman College. He is the author of The Political Right and Equality and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, among other books.

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