In the autumn of 2016 a pseudonymous essay appeared on a conservative website under the title “The Flight 93 Election.” Its author, who called himself Publius Decius Mus, argued that a Hillary Clinton presidency was equivalent to certain death, and that voters who stormed the cockpit on behalf of Donald Trump might just, at enormous personal risk, save the republic. Rush Limbaugh spent most of an episode of his radio program reading the essay to around fifteen million people.
Within weeks, the author had been identified as Michael Anton, who would subsequently be hired as a senior member of Trump’s National Security Council. He had pursued doctoral work under Charles Kesler at Claremont McKenna College, spent time in the George W. Bush administration, and thought seriously about the philosophy of natural rights. His essay was not important because it was persuasive. It was important because it revealed that behind the orange-and-gold vulgarity of the Trump campaign, an intellectual class was at work.
Laura K. Field has spent the better part of a decade documenting that class, and Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is the result. Meticulous and deeply sourced, it is written with the authority of the insider turned critic. Field was trained as a political theorist in the tradition of the German émigré Leo Strauss, whose writing on “natural rights” influenced many conservatives in the United States and elsewhere. She knows these people, has read the books they have read, attended the conferences they host, and understands not merely what they argue but what they mean when they argue it. These theorists and MAGA’s internet trolls might appear to occupy entirely different planets; Field’s achievement is to show they are closer neighbours than many imagine.
Her central argument is that between 2016 and 2024 a coalition of academic thinkers, think-tank intellectuals and media operatives supplied the ideological architecture for a populist movement that proved darker than expected. The MAGA New Right can’t be explained away as the by-product of one man’s ego or as the spasmodic expression of a working class driven to political fury by economic dislocation. It is something more deliberate and more unsettling than that.
As Field observes, MAGA’s theorists are not on the fringes of American academic life. Many hold chairs at Harvard and Notre Dame and carry doctorates from Duke and Yale. Their institutional bases range from the Claremont Institute in Southern California to Hillsdale College in Michigan, and extend outwards to Silicon Valley, the Budapest of Viktor Orbán, the more modish precincts of New York, and the familiar machinery of the Washington think tank. Treating them as unserious is not, Field insists, a cost-free mistake: it is the very presumption on which their strategy depends.
Field divides her New Right into three broad groupings. The Claremonters, the oldest strand, treats the American founding as the culmination of classical natural-rights theory — the view that the individual’s rights are inherent rather than government-given — and affirms the ethical universality of the Declaration of Independence. They have long identified the birth of the American republic as a political achievement of world-historical significance, a synthesis of biblical theology, Aristotelian philosophy, and natural-rights theory. Anton’s Flight 93 essay translated this first strand into the MAGA vernacular.
Field’s second strand, the post-liberals, drew more heavily on European Catholic political theology. Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018) is the movement’s most widely read theoretical text. Its argument is that liberalism’s crisis is not the result of having abandoned its founding principles but of their most complete realisation. The atomised, rootless, commercially saturated individual who emerges from liberal society represents not liberalism’s perversion, he argues, but its success, the achievement of what Locke and Mill intended.
This is a serious argument, and Field takes it seriously enough to show precisely how it collapses. Deneen systematically understates what liberal democracy has accomplished — protecting minorities, securing civil liberties, constraining political domination — and his diagnosis licenses his less scrupulous followers to promote authoritarian rule.
Deneen’s fellow-traveller, Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule, goes further in Common Good Constitutionalism (2022), the most technically sophisticated version of the post-liberal legal program. Vermeule argues that the American administrative state should be reconceived around the “common good” as defined by the natural law tradition. This would entail using the full coercive apparatus of the state to promote virtue, family formation, religious observance and a hierarchical social order sanctioned by Catholic political theology. Field shows that this amounts to a blueprint for a theocracy of a kind that most Americans — including most American Catholics — wouldn’t recognise as a common good.
The third strand, National Conservatives, is more heterodox. Organised around the Edmund Burke Foundation and its annual NatCon conferences, this grouping has developed what it presents as a principled philosophical alternative to liberal internationalism. Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) contends that the nation-state is the only viable unit of political community, that international institutions are inimical to democratic self-governance, and that cultural homogeneity is necessary for genuine political solidarity.
Field engages carefully with these claims before demonstrating how they unravel. The difficulty is not simply that Hazony’s framework is internally inconsistent — though it certainly is — but that the nationalism he promotes turns out to be readily available for export. Orbán’s Hungary, whose systematic dismantling of democratic scaffolding NatCon’s leading figures consistently declined to criticise, proves an awkward test case for a movement that presents national sovereignty as the essential bulwark of self-governance.
What distinguishes Field’s account from the many journalistic treatments of this complex terrain is her patient attention to institutional and personal networks. Peter Thiel appears throughout as the crucial connective tissue. The PayPal and Palantir co-founder and sometime prophet of the Antichrist has been the most important single financial patron of the New Right, funding the Burke Foundation, backing J.D. Vance’s Senate campaign, supporting a network of New Right–aligned media operations, and maintaining a long friendship with Curtis Yarvin, the Brown University–trained software engineer who, writing as Mencius Moldbug, has provided the contemporary right’s most systematic antidemocratic intellectual framework.
Yarvin’s argument is simple enough. Liberal democracy is constitutionally dysfunctional, a machine designed to produce disorder, and should be replaced by a techno-monarchism. The state would be reconceived as a corporation, he argues, and the sovereign as its chief executive officer. That Yarvin has required hundreds of thousands of words of blog prose to make this case is itself revealing. The meandering style is not incidental to the project. Its ironic register is cool and self-aware, laced with Silicon Valley insider argot, and paired with the disavowals of a committed provocateur.
On closer inspection, Field shows, the Thiel–Yarvin nexus reveals that the neoreactionary tradition (which the New Right’s more decorous representatives are careful to regard sceptically) is linked perfectly legibly to institutions that operate in the full light of respectable intellectual life.
Field writes with clarity, and her account of new right ideas illuminates their contours with precision. But she also acknowledges that her account sets aside contemporary media dynamics, QAnon, money, technology, race, gender, and economics. The “Ideas First” approach she identifies is also her own: lucid on the what of ideological production, reticent on the why.
The problem is one of timing as much as scope. The Claremont Institute predates Trump’s first election in 2016 by decades; so does West Coast Straussianism, Patrick Deneen, and Adrian Vermeule. The ideas did not change dramatically. What changed was the political conjuncture, which is precisely what her framework leaves out.
A natural point of departure is autumn 2008, when the international financial system buckled under its own contradictions. For months, the axioms of the neoliberal dispensation — long proclaimed as near-natural law — were abruptly jettisoned by their own authors. Spectacularly reckless private banks were recapitalised with public funds long denied to healthcare, education and aged care. Central banks injected trillions into markets even as wages stagnated and the gap between asset-owners and wage-earners widened remorselessly.
The recovery, as the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck observed, was financed not by growth but by the future: by debt, by deepened financialisation, by the very conditions that had conjured the catastrophe. Its political consequences were clear: divided electorates developed contempt for a bipartisan order seen as corrupt and immune to democratic correction. The two great American parties had converged on a program differing chiefly in rhetorical colouring. This was the oligarchic closure of liberal democracy.
Field’s account would also have gained historical depth from closer attention to three figures she invokes without fully developing: James Burnham, Samuel Francis, and Carl Schmitt.
In The Managerial Revolution (1941) Burnham furnished the paleoconservative tradition with something it had conspicuously lacked: a systematic class analysis grounded not in nostalgia but in sociology. He argued that mid-century capitalist democracies were governed neither by the old bourgeoisie nor by the rising proletariat, but by a new elite of managers, technicians and administrators — in industry, universities, the media, and the bureaucracy — whose authority derived from expertise and institutional position rather than ownership. Although his analysis was not particularly original, it has been treated by right-wing thinkers in America as a kind of Bible for our troubled times.
Samuel Francis, who served as Pat Buchanan’s in-house philosopher in the 1990s, was the first to systematically apply Burnham’s framework to post–cold war America. His concept of “Middle American Radicals” — the working-class and lower-middle-class whites who had benefited from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and then experienced its brutal dissolution — described the social constituency that Trump would mobilise a generation later. The racism that eventually got Francis expelled from polite paleoconservative circles was not incidental to his analysis but a part of its structure. Yet the analytical core of his argument tracked something real: the massive deterioration in the economic position of the non-college-educated working class and the political volatility that deterioration eventually generated.
As for Schmitt, the Nazi jurist’s importance extends beyond the specific influence Field documents. Schmitt argued that a structural tension existed between liberalism, which is grounded in individual rights, procedural rule and deliberative legitimacy, and democracy, which depends on the homogeneity of the people and their capacity for direct political decision. MAGA’s invocation of democratic legitimacy alongside its contempt for procedural forms strikingly echoes Schmitt’s thought.
Sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry have shown that a fifth of Americans believe the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that its public life should be guided by Christian principles. This is not a peripheral obsession of the doctrinally fervent but a load-bearing element in the ideological architecture of a significant fraction of white religious America.
Field is charting is not a single movement but a series of parallel developments that converged on a political formation none of their architects had designed but was open to appropriated by figures and organisations operating at considerable cultural distance from their origins. Among them was that very contemporary figure, Peter Thiel, who arrived at National Conservatism not through the church basement and the direct mail operation but through Schmitt, Strauss and his old friend Curtis Yarvin.
Thiel shares the New Right’s preoccupations — contempt for the administrative state, nostalgia for an unencumbered capitalism, and a conviction that postwar egalitarianism was a costly mistake — enough to mark him as a fellow traveller. But he represents, above all, a fraction of capital for which dismantling regulatory capacity is not ideological preference but material necessity. The platform monopolies he has helped midwife rest on self-perpetuating network effects, on labour practices still constrained by the regulatory state, and on advertising architectures threatened by any meaningful privacy regime.
As intellectual history and political intervention, Furious Minds is undoubtedly the most sustained and scrupulous mapping of the MAGA New Right’s intellectual geography yet produced. It will be indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the ideological composition of the Trump administration’s intellectual vanguard. Field’s four-page “Dramatis Personae” — compressed intellectual portraits of figures from Michael Anton through Gladden Pappin to Curtis Yarvin — is a small tour de force that gives the reader immediate orientation in a landscape that most accounts leave bewilderingly unmapped.
As a guide to political responses, the book is harder to assess. Her Ideas First framework, for all its considerable analytical purchase, has a tendency to generate something rather less than the gravity of the moment seems to require. A body of thought rigorously worked out during long years of apparent marginality can persist for decades in a condition of suspended animation, only to discharge itself with sudden force the instant a crisis lays bare the existing regime.
Neoliberalism did not cause the stagflation of the 1970s; it was simply ready when stagflation arrived. The New Right did not cause the financial crisis of 2008 or the bipartisan establishment’s mismanagement of its aftermath, but it was ready when those conditions generated the political crisis that Field carefully describes.
If the New Right’s ascent is, at its core, an intellectual event — a war of ideas fought on the terrain of argument, rhetoric and theoretical imagination — then the remedy follows naturally from the diagnosis. We need better ideas, on these terms, more rigorously elaborated, more courageously defended, pressed into the service of a more persuasive account of the world.
If the phenomenon draws its energy not from doctrine but from the structure a specific economic regime then intellectual clarity, however necessary, cannot be sufficient. It is, at most, a condition of possibility for the kind of transformative response that the moment demands, not a substitute for it.
The New Right’s practical achievements have not rested primarily on the persuasive force of its arguments. They have rested on the occupation of America’s institutional terrain — courts, administrative agencies, state legislatures, school boards — in a decades-long effort whose organisational discipline the liberal centre has been incapable of matching.
If Field’s account explains how the New Right arrived at influence, it is less equipped to register how unstable that influence has already become. Trump’s second presidency has not so much consolidated the intellectual tendencies she maps as placed them under immense strain. The movement’s theorists, briefly elevated as interpreters of a civilisational crisis, now operate within an administration whose priorities are often more recognisably those of patronage and leverage, which sit uneasily with the high seriousness of post-liberal or Straussian movements.
Meanwhile, the coalition itself shows signs of fraying. The partial political isolation of figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, once emblematic of the movement’s insurgent energy, and her increasingly open break with Trump on substantive issues, indicate that the unity of MAGA was always more contingent than its theorists allowed.
In such a setting, the New Right’s intellectuals may find that their moment of maximum relevance coincides with the beginning of their marginalisation. •
