By Richard M. Reinsch II
In "Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right," Laura K. Field probes the intellectual origins of the form of rowdy conservatism associated with the current president. Ms. Field, a fellow at the Niskanen Center, engages with the Trump-era populist right using an approach she terms "ideas first," focusing on the ideas and speeches of influential actors and thinkers within the New Right, whom she divides into three groups: the Claremonters, postliberals and National Conservatives.
The Claremonters are thinkers and activists associated with the Claremont Institute, a think tank known for its scholars' work on American founding principles and rooted in the scholarship of the philosopher Harry Jaffa, a student of Leo Strauss. Ms. Field emphasizes Claremont's strong alignment with Donald Trump, which became evident with its publication of the essay "The Flight 93 Election" on Sept. 5, 2016. Michael Anton, then writing under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, criticized the current conservative movement and argued that voters must take control as the passengers did on the hijacked Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001, or face certain defeat. A Hillary Clinton presidency, in Mr. Anton's view, was not a survivable event. He also warned that defeat was possible even if you took control. Mr. Trump might fail.
Ms. Field notes that Mr. Anton's essay shows apocalyptic thinking and "conspiracism." It contains the core ideas that define the manic intensity of New Right thinking: the belief in one last election to save the republic, the accusation that progressives betrayed America, the division of Americans into friends and enemies, and the claim that the traditional conservative movement is either ineffective or secretly helping to destroy the nation.
Enter the postliberals, one of whose leading theorists, Ms. Field observes, is the Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen, the author of "Why Liberalism Failed" (2018) and "Regime Change" (2023). In his earlier book, Mr. Deneen argues that liberalism in the West has failed because it succeeded, and that success has meant the replacement of religion, family and community with amoral individualism, secularism and neoliberal economics. Postliberals don't blame progressivism, as most conservatives do, for America's problems. They blame the U.S. Constitution. Mr. Deneen views the American Founding as a set of liberal ideas, influenced by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, that gave us the devil-may-care economics that has ultimately spoiled the country.
Mr. Deneen's "Regime Change" marks his attempt to establish peace with America by advocating for a new virtuous ruling aristocracy that will rebuild the country with left-progressive economic policies, the Christian faith and the merging of the ruling and working classes. Ms. Field mentions Mr. Deneen's direct influence on JD Vance, an influence the vice president has acknowledged.
The National Conservatives, or natcons, emerged in 2019. Ms. Field struggles to provide a clear definition of their mission. The natcon movement, primarily an international movement for nationalism, has been led by the Israeli-born writer Yoram Hazony, who immigrated to America as a child and returned to Israel as an adult. The natcon conferences have featured important politicians and thinkers, including Mr. Vance, cabinet officials and nationalist European politicians. The natcons, Ms. Field says, favor a "reversion to particularism, tribalism, and closed-mindedness" and are "entirely comfortable with illiberal forms of politics that stamp on individual rights and instead embrace raw exertions of majoritarian (or, if necessary, minoritarian) power."
She quotes remarks Mr. Hazony made at the 2022 NatCon Conference, stating that "the only thing that is strong enough to stop the religion of woke neo-Marxism is the religion of biblical Christianity." Ms. Field identifies Mr. Hazony's speech in Miami as the moment when the natcon mask slipped and the ideas of "white supremacy" and "explicit Christian nationalism" came to the forefront.
The first term is a smear, the second an ill-defined shock-term frequently thrown around by writers on the political left. The more salient fact about the natcons is that most do not understand the U.S. as a nation founded on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The group's statement of principles, to which Ms. Field pays insufficient attention, asserts a form of nationalism that is disconnected from America's actual political traditions, as outlined in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist Papers.
Beyond the New Right, Ms. Field perceives an incipient conservative darkness in the writings of prominent intellectuals, among them Leo Strauss (1899-1973) and Allan Bloom (1930-92) at the University of Chicago, Harry Jaffa (1918-2015) and Charles Kesler (b. 1956) at Claremont McKenna, and Harvey Mansfield (b. 1932) at Harvard. Each of these thinkers have influenced segments of the American right (although Strauss and Bloom did not consider themselves conservatives).
Jaffa's flaw, according to Ms. Field, is that he learned from Strauss to use abstract ideas and esoteric reading to define the foundation of a political regime in a black-and-white manner, without accounting for history's contingencies and events. Jaffa thought the principles of the Declaration provided for the decisive defeat of slavery and legal racism in America. Ms. Field finds this obtuse, considering America's actual history. Jaffa's ideas on the Founding principles, she thinks, allowed him to condemn well-meaning liberal critics of his ideas -- a trend that persists among his New Right successors.
I am not persuaded by this criticism -- the idea that Jaffa's famous pugnacity arose from his Straussian ideas rather than his personality strikes me as tendentious. More notable, though, is that Ms. Field, in a work about political theory and practice, hardly bothers to counter Jaffa or other influential thinkers with her own liberal version of a polity that upholds individual dignity while allowing civic pluralism.
Nor does Ms. Field have much to say about the ludicrous descent of modern liberalism into racial and sexual tribalism. With apologies to Ms. Field, this descent has done far more to birth the "furious minds" of the New Right than the speculations of philosophers and intellectuals.
--Mr. Reinsch is the editor of Civitas Outlook, a publication of the Civitas Institute at the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 02, 2025 16:11 ET (21:11 GMT)
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