Review: Charting the 3 Factions of the MAGA Movement

Books had little to do with the populist uprising that swept Donald Trump into power in 2016 and 2024. But a cadre of right-wing writers and influencers have been constructing intellectual scaffolding around the MAGA phenomenon ever since. In Furious Minds, Laura K. Field explains and taxonomizes the effort to replace old-school Reagan-style conservatism with something more ruthless and muscular—but still grounded in ideas.

Field divides the New Right into three rough factions: Claremonters (such as Michael Anton, the man behind the infamous “Flight 93 Election”essay published in the Claremont Review of Books), postliberals (such as Patrick Deneen, author of Why Liberalism Failed, which made it onto former President Barack Obama’s reading list), and national conservatives (such as Yoram Hazony, an Israeli-American philosopher trying to make nationalism great again).

Field has especially rich insights into the first camp, having studied political theory in the Straussian tradition. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of Thomas Pangle, a student of both Closing of the American Mind author Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss himself. This lineage makes her treatment of figures associated with the Claremont Institute, headquarters of “West Coast Straussianism,” particularly valuable.

The New Right factions are united, Field writes, by “a staunch social traditionalism and rejection of liberal pluralism.” They want to fight and definitively win the culture war. Field’s center-left critiques are not always the ones a libertarian would make. But her work mapping this intellectual space provides an indispensable starting point for anyone who hopes to go beyond a superficial understanding of the anti-liberal American right.