Furious Minds
The Making of the MAGA New Right
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4.7 • 6개의 평가
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- US$24.99
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“[An] excellent new book.”—Michelle Goldberg, New York Times
The story of the radical conservative intellectual movement shaping Donald Trump’s agenda—and how it threatens American freedoms, values, and democracy
Donald Trump is not a big thinker, but his 2016 presidential victory presented a grand opportunity for people who are, and it set off a radicalization and reconfiguration of the American conservative intellectual world. In Furious Minds, Laura Field, who spent close to a decade in conservative academic circles, chronicles the rise of the New Right—the network of academics, public intellectuals, and influencers who provide ideological fuel to Trumpism. This movement includes figures such as Patrick Deneen, Christopher Rufo, Peter Thiel, and JD Vance. Their agenda is built to last, and it has dire long-term implications for liberal democracy.
The New Right has precedents in American history, but it is distinct for its youthfulness, misogyny, and extraordinary successes—most notably the elevation of Vance to the vice presidency. The movement—which draws together associates of the right-wing Claremont Institute, National Conservatives, Postliberals, and the Hard Right—advocates nationalist economics, tight borders, isolationism, and reactionary social values. It helped to strategize January 6th and created Project 2025. But above all, the New Right is engaged in a vast culture war against modern liberal pluralism. It is determined to harness state power and use it in new, illiberal ways, from college campuses to the international scene—all driven by the fantasy of restoring a pure America.
Incisive and urgent, Furious Minds tells the story of the thinkers of the New Right—and their powerful assault on American freedoms, values, and ideals.
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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 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."
