The Making of a Menace

Guy Miller

Furious Minds:
The Making of the Maga New Right
By Laura K. Field
Princeton University Press, 2025, 432 pages, $35 hardcover.

“Usually, intellectual movements precede the use of political ones, but in the case of Trump’s camp followers they are reverse engineering an intellectual doctrine to match Trump’s basic instincts.” (Jacob Heilbrunn, New York Review of Books, July 18, 2019)

ON JUNE 16, 2015 Donald Trump descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in Manhattan. He reached the bottom with a brain full of isms: jingoism, racism, misogynism and narcissism.

What his brain lacked were arguments and ideas to sell his isms to the American public. Fortunately for Trump, there was a ready-made cadre able and willing to fill that gap. How this symbiosis took place is the subject of Laura K. Field’s Furious Minds.

With the exception of out-of-control McCarthyism in the 1950s, and the overreach of the Goldwater phenomenon in 1964, the American conservative movement was content to wage its fights within the Marquis of Queensbury rules set by liberalism.(1)

Although always looking to chip away at the reforms of the New Deal, and being nonplussed by the culture shocks of the late 1960s, the New Right settled into the respectable mindset of fusionism.(2)

Laura Field defines fusionism this way:

“I use Reagan/Buckley conservatism, ‘fusionism,’ and ‘establishment conservatism’ synonymously to describe the dominant ideological umbrella of the conservatism of the last half century.”

If the old fusionist right dreamt of an America of the 1920’s Calvin Coolidge, then the New Right intellectuals of Furious Minds want a world that existed before the Enlightenment. The former sought to change opinions and votes, the latter seeks to change how people live in the world.

Laura Field sounds the alarm:

“(T)he illiberal right’s renaissance has only grown in scope and power, and counterrevolutionary extremism. By 2024, the New Right obviously could no longer be ignored.” (316)

Field was an undergraduate in the early 2000s at the University of Alberta. While at UA she was mentored by a professor who was both a former U.S. Marine and a Straussian.(3)

This background provided Field with insight into the thinking of the New Right, but she never bought totally into the Straussian worldview and is a self-described liberal.

A Tale of Three Groupings

Furious Minds divides the intellectual terrain of the New Right into three main groupings. These are Claremonters, usually affiliated with the Claremont Institute of California; the primarily Roman Catholic Postliberals; and the National Conservatives.

Interacting with all three is what Field dubs the Hard Right. Most of this review will focus on who these forces are.

Early in Furious Minds, Field lists 33 dramatis personae who will play important roles in her book. Eight are names that most readers will recognize. Many of the names mentioned are identified with advanced academic degrees. None of the names belong to a woman.

Michael Anton, a.k.a. Publius Decius Mus (pretentious nicknames serve as the “secret handshakes” of this world), is a Claremont Fellow, deeply influenced by Leo Strauss.

The September 5, 2016 issue of the Claremont Review of Books featured Anton’s essay, “The Flight 93 Election.”(4) One week later Rush Limbaugh read the entire essay for the benefit of his 15 million listeners.

The first sentence of “Flight 93” is nothing less than a rallying cry to the future MAGA Right: “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die.” In short, time is running out, the clock is ticking.

In the first Trump administration the Claremont Institute established a beachhead in the Oval Office, with a few minor appointments. Four years later under Trump 2.0, Claremonters launched a full scale invasion. Field writes:

“Two months into the second Trump administration over thirty alumni of the Claremont Fellowship program have been hired on its staff.”

High on the hit-list of these new appointees was the campaign to smash the so-called administrative state, also known as the “deep state.” This bogey-man has its origins in a 1940 debate between Leon Trotsky and James Burnham (a favorite of the New Right). In the debate Burnham substituted the “Managerial Revolution” for the Marxist concept of the capitalist ruling class as the primary enemy of the working class.

Years later the “managerial revolution” idea was picked up by paleo-conservative Sam Francis, and it later entered into the Claremont playbook. Finally, “managers” had morphed into “government bureaucrats,” and in early 2025 became the target of Elon Musk’s chainsaw.

The Postliberals

The second leg on the New Right’s three-legged stool is the mostly Roman Catholic Postliberals. Many, though not all, Postliberals identify as Integralists.

Integralism traces its origin to the nearly two-century long attempt to reconcile the Church with modernism. The French Revolution, Darwinism and a new reading of biblical scripture (“higher criticism”), resulted in an intense debate between the adapters and the traditionalists/integralists.

In the early 1960s, Vatican II brought about a cease-fire, but many integralists decided to fight on. American integralists see the separation of church and state as an artificial construct that must be eliminated.

Another Postliberal concern is for what they call the “common good.” The common good turns out to be a series of abstractions, e.g. justice, peace and abundance — a substitute for concrete demands for change in the real world — to be brought about under the watchful eye of the Catholic Church.

Prominent Postliberal Patrick Deneen wrote Why Liberalism Failed, which was on the bestsellers list for several weeks. Barack Obama rated it worthy of his must read list in 2018.

In a New York Review of Books review, Robert Kuttner wrote: “ …(the book) perceives liberalism as a betrayal of deeper sources of culture and civilization, such as the family, the tribe, the nation and the church.”

Sohrab Ahmari, another Postliberal, opts to take no prisoners in his 2019 exchange with conservative commentator David French: “Fight the culture wars. Defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the public square reordered to the common good, ultimately the Highest Good.”

National Conservatism

National Conservatism dates its origin to a 2019 conference of the same name. The keynote speaker at the conference was Peter Thiel. Laura Field writes of Thiel’s political pedigree: “Thiel has been a lifelong student of Carl Schmitt,(5) Leo Strauss and the French Catholic thinker Rene Gerard.”

Thiel’s world view can be summed up in this 2000 statement: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

My guess is that he would gladly dispense with either freedom or democracy for the masses, leaving “no-holds-barred” freedom of billionaires to rule the world.

The driving force behind the Nat Cons movement is the Israeli-born Yoram Hazony. Hazony was strongly influenced by the far-right Zionist, Meir Kahane.

Israel serves as the template for Nat Cons’ “perfect” nation state: no need for pluralism, no need for multiculturalism. For Nat Cons the ideal nation state should have a dominant majority, with a dominant religion, and a dominant culture.

Nat Cons stress homogeneity for individual states, but are willing to concede diversity among the various nation states.

Field ends the chapter on National Conservatism with words that could apply to much of the New Right: “It stands for a reversion to particularism(6), tribalism, and closed mindedness. And it is entirely comfortable with illiberal forms of politics that stamp on individual rights, and instead embrace raw exertions of majoritarian power. The predominant national group calls the shots.” Case closed.

The Hard Right

Field characterizes the Postliberals and the National Conservatives as being the “id” of the New Right. If so, the Hard Right constitutes “Monsters from the Id.”

3. Furious Minds points to Charlottesville in May, 2017, as the turning point in which “the alt-right was on the way out, but the dissident Hard Right was rising.”

Both the mainstream New Right and the Hard Right look to ancient Greece for role models. However, the Hard Right chooses Sparta (the militarist image) rather than Athens. Another distinction is the Hard Right’s preference for earthy, rather than Roman, nicknames. Gone are Mancius Manlius Capitolinus and Plautus, to be replaced by Raw Egg Nationalists and Bronze Age Pervert (aka BAP.)

BAP is the Romanian-born Costin Alamariu, whose nickname belies his Yale PhD in Political Philosophy. Alamariu’s self-published book Bronze Age Mindset (BAM) appeared in 2018, and  became a bestseller on Amazon.

BAM counterposes the “heroic” Bronze Age to the Iron Age, which in BAM’s fanciful telling was dominated by “feminism and socialism,” along with “sallow night of the matriarchy.” BAP sees the contemporary world as a reincarnation of the Iron Age, and calls on men to “lift weights, join the military, prepare for a takeover of the world, sow great chaos, and discredit the system.”

Sound absurd? Just listen to Pete Hegseth when he addresses the troops. This toxic brew reaches millions of young men in the virtual world of the “manosphere.”

Method of the Madness

Furious Minds reminds us several times that the world of the New Right is a world where ideas come first, and where the real world rarely follows. You can search its index for the all-important word, capitalism, but you won’t find it.

To fully appreciate the method of the New Right’s madness we must jump through Alice’s looking glass and examine two opposing explanations for the fifteen to twenty-five million demonstrators mobilized by George Floyd’s brutal murder.

Those of us trained in the materialist approach would see it as a reaction to the long march through the unjust history of slavery, Jim Crow and racist policing, ending in the nine minutes of Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck.

The huge outpouring that followed was the result of that horrific history. The New Right will have none of this. Instead, they would point to — in their view — the bias of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and the New York Times’ study of slavery and institutional racism, Project 1619 as the real causes, because they stoke racial animosity.

The New Right has perfected the technique of latching onto unfamiliar terms (e.g. “antifa,” “cultural Marxism,” “wokeism”) and turning them into menacing straw men, which in turn, they proceed to beat like overstuffed piñatas. Perhaps, the best example of this gambit is Critical Race Theory (CRT.)

Public Education in the Crosshairs

Christopher Rufo, a product of Claremont, the Heritage Foundation, and the Manhattan Institute, has converted CRT into an all-purpose wrecking ball aimed squarely at public education. Field quotes Rufo:

“…in education CRT has become the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy, and is now being weaponized against the American people.”

She later cites an NBC News 2021 report:

“…over 165 local and national groups had popped up, aiming to disrupt lessons on race and gender.”

While school boards across the country were inundated with parents enraged over the largely non-existent problem of CRT, Rufo next turned his attention toward higher education and New College in Florida.

New College, once a highly progressive liberal arts college in Sarasota, was targeted for overhaul by Rufo and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. In the space of one school year they transformed New College into a reactionary clone of Hillsdale College in Michigan. Erik Wallenberg, who taught at New College during that traumatic year, sums up the result of the transformation:

“New College was a test case for the fascist forces in higher education. Chris Rufo and the Republicans have ransacked NCF, and chased out the highly qualified faculty, staff, and students, and replaced them with the most reactionary forces in higher education today.”

In this review I have focused on the first two thirds of Furious Minds. However the book’s final chapters are also fascinating. They contain related, but new, topics, including Field’s writing on the Christian Right(7) and additional details about the New Right’s international co-thinkers.

Laura Field’s writing flows nicely, and never slips into the dreaded academic style. Her creative use of Aeschylus’s Oresteia to illustrate a point brought a smile to this reviewer’s face.

Notes

1. Liberalism: I used the Merriam Webster definition. “A political philosophy based on a belief in progress and stressing the essential goodness of the human race, freedom for the individual from arbitrary authority.
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2. New Right: there had been several earlier incarnations. I used the term meaning the MAGA Right, beginning around 2015.
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3. Straussianism: those influenced by the University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss. Strauss was famous for his esoteric reading of Plato in order to reach mostly right-wing conclusions.
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4. Flight 93: the airplane hijacked by terrorists, retaken by its passengers, and crashed on September 11, 2001.
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5. Carl Schmitt: a Nazi legal scholar highly regarded by the New Right.
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6. Particularism: emphasizes context-specific factors over universal rules or general principles.
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7. See “Christian Right on the March,” Against the Current 239, Nov/Dec 2025.
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July-August 2026, ATC 243