Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA Right

This formidable debut intellectual history of Trumpism’s “brain trust” from political theorist Field identifies three main factions of the “new populist Republican politics.” The “Claremonters,” named for their association with the Claremont Institute, “idolize the [American] founding” and are intellectual heirs of the philosopher Leo Strauss, whose focus on “coded” meanings within texts has, in the Trump era, “devolved into rank conspiracism” and has led Claremonters to push for “patriotic education” in schools. The “National Conservatives,” meanwhile, are a coalition attempting to redefine the “nation state” as “homogenous” and “under threat from within and without”; their racially inflected arguments, Field suggests, stem from Zionist author Yoran Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism, which draws heavily on the Bible and depicts the nation state as an “organic historical emergence” rather than a 17th-century political invention. Finally, the “Post-Liberals,” among them Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and Sohrab Ahmari, argue that the “liberal desire for freedom leads to deracination, depredation, disintegration and... despotism.” (Deneen, for instance, writes that freeing women from household labor “puts women and men alike” in “bondage.”) This final group makes up the core intellectual foundation of Trumpism, Field astutely observes, as they have most forcefully articulated that “a constrained executive” (in Vermeule’s words) is now a defunct “historical curiosity.” It’s a meticulous and unsettling revelation of a right-wing plan for a “new old-fashioned world.” (Nov.)