Exposing the MAGA New Right’s Intellectuals

A review of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field, 432 pages, Princeton University Press (November 2025)

There was a time when the unrepentant conservative nerd was a man in owlish spectacles and a bow tie—columnist George Will, author Daniel Boorstin, and even broadcaster and pundit Tucker Carlson during his CNN and MSNBC days. See, I’m not like those slick liberals, dressed in the latest styles, their attire implied. I stand for old-fashioned fiscal responsibility and respect for American values! Today, the heirs to that tradition sport unkempt beards and host podcasts, but the self-congratulation and reflexive enmity towards anyone outside their circle have hardly changed. What’s different is that contemporary right-wing thinkers don’t just oppose government social programs and world communism, they also despise feminism, the separation of church and state, and anything that might reasonably be considered a legacy of the European Enlightenment. Their influence is growing, and one of them is currently the vice-president of the United States.

The conceits of this clique are called out in Laura K. Field’s new book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. A number of titles have already examined the origins and supporters of Donald Trump’s rise to power, including Robert Draper’s Weapons of Mass Delusion, Joe Conason’s The Longest Con, Katherine Stewart’s Money, Lies, and God, Elle Reeve’s Black Pill, and Jeff Sharlet’s The Undertow. Unlike these works, however, Furious Minds eschews the rust belt and the dark web for the Ivy League schools and think tanks in which the author has been immersed for the last twenty years. Field earned an undergrad degree from the University of Alberta and a PhD from the University of Texas, and she speaks the same erudite language of Roman history and Greek philosophy as her subjects. She’s not an outsider to the movement who sees only bitter redneck resentment, she’s a scholar who recognises and understands the movement’s key intellectual references, and the weaknesses in its reasoning. 

Although Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are closely considered here (there are also cameos from people like Ron DeSantis and Jordan Peterson), most of Field’s study covers less well-known personalities (at least to readers who do not live on the internet): educators, writers, and assorted egghead provocateurs like Patrick Deneen, Christopher Rufo, Yoram Hazony, Curtis Yarvin, and Costin Alamariu, better known by the alias “Bronze Age Pervert.” They work in academia, niche publishing, and a network of lobby groups like the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation, and they now have the ear of the movers and shakers in the Trump administration. Though they’re all confident that their superior ideas will carry their country into a post-democratic, post-secular Golden Age, Furious Minds succinctly identifies the gaps in their logic. “Sometimes, not having a PhD can be a boon to clear thinking,” Field quips.

Many of the figures profiled by Field draw on the precedent set by Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, a surprise bestseller credited with launching several decades of culture wars. Bloom’s incendiary but deeply considered message was that Western structures of higher education were indoctrinating generations of students in shallow relativism and diverting them from the best lessons of the art and history bequeathed by their ancestors. Bloom wasn’t a religious prude or a small-town hick; he was a sophisticated teacher and citizen who wanted to remind his readers of how far modern learning and pop styles had strayed from civilisation’s noblest principles. The cast of characters in Furious Minds have evidently taken Bloom’s warnings and embellished them—the problems they indict don’t end at rock music or postmodern theory, they encompass several centuries of social and political evolution. Conservatives have long complained that things started going wrong in the 1960s. These new conservative thinkers say things went off the rails some 500 years earlier.

A lot of the MAGA case, Field points out, relies on “a particularly juvenile form of cognitive bias: the supposition that every insight that is titillating or cruel must also be secretly true and important.”

Do they really believe it? There certainly seems to be an element of shock value in the statements of Deneen, Yarvin, Bronze Age Pervert, and their brethren (there aren’t many sisters in this crowd). They can win easy notoriety by advocating an overthrow of the “gynocracy,” for example, or with other affronts to the pieties of legacy media and the faculty lounge. It doesn’t seem to matter if affronts like these stand a chance of actually being implemented in the real world. A lot of the MAGA case, Field points out, relies on “a particularly juvenile form of cognitive bias: the supposition that every insight that is titillating or cruel must also be secretly true and important.”

“The New Right scholars,” she adds, “succeed with these kinds of arguments, to the extent that they do, because of the growing insularity of the conservative intellectual world.” Their notions aren’t wholly illegitimate, and sometimes they’ve made useful critiques of liberalism’s excesses and dead ends, like the fetish for diversity and the apparent dismissal of any common moral standards. But, the author cautions, “It’s one thing to explore history and reveal some long-forgotten truths. It’s quite another to impose a reductive version of the past—or a newfangled Postliberal theocracy—on the present. Especially after 250 plus years of pluralistic transformation.”

Attitudes within the MAGA brain trust to Donald Trump himself—a man who probably thinks Herodotus is a type of dinosaur and Plato is something children make sculptures with—range from shameless admiration to wary tolerance. Some apologists seem to revere him as the saviour who will finally usher in their imagined new order. Others consider him a necessary embarrassment who will at least bring the old order crashing down. Not many in the club disavow him entirely. And they all seem to agree that there is nothing worth saving in the current regime, a view expressed as early as Michael Anton’s widely read pseudonymous essay “The Flight 93 Election” in 2016:

[A] Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances. … The truth is that Trump articulated, if incompletely and inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues—immigration, trade, and war—right from the beginning.

To which Field replies: “Once you begin understanding our national politics as a matter of emergencies, corruption, and lies reparable only by figures of exceptional heroism, there is no returning to a politics of the everyday, of democratic choice, and of disagreement, contestation, and compromise.” 

In a way, this New Right is affected by the same blind spots as the (old) New Left of sixty years ago. Take down the system, they all insist, except of course for those parts of it that enable us to insist the system be taken down. Student radicals of 1966 were fine with the corporate capitalism that gave them the Grateful Dead and birth-control pills; likewise, MAGA theorists don’t mind the liberalism that fosters elected legislators, open debate, and academic tenure. In each case, an anti-establishment cause develops, defines, and markets itself with products of the same establishment it otherwise rejects. And in each case, the most strident agitators could well be the first casualties of the revolution they’re pursuing. Men like Anton, Vance, Deneen, and Rufo may extol a remade culture of manly strengths and godly virtues built on the ruins of our emasculated cosmopolitan decadence, but would classically trained keyboard warriors naturally emerge as the ruling elite in a world as likely to turn out like Mad Max as The Handmaid’s Tale? 

The tech and trad bros who profess an affinity for the rugged vitality of the ancients also seem to have forgotten a great deal of more recent history. The relativism now derided by populists and authoritarians wasn’t merely a naïve experiment the chattering classes began to test in 1968. It can be traced back to the aftermath of World War I, when humanity saw that the unswerving devotion to faith and nation commended by Vance and Viktor Orbán had turned the flatlands of northwest Europe into an abattoir. World War II also showed Westerners how charismatic leadership and moral absolutes of the kind lately promoted by Bronze Age Pervert and Vladimir Putin had ultimately led to Auschwitz and Hiroshima. And at the core of the Great Power colonialism Donald Trump wants to retry in Greenland, Venezuela, and Canada in 2026 is a fundamental evil that Joseph Conrad called the Heart of Darkness after he saw it at work in Africa in 1890. 

Laura Field puts this shortsightedness into perspective:

The latent violence of the Postliberal movement is evident … in their totalizing beliefs about the monolithic nature of the Common Good, and their failure to speak openly about what they would propose to do with the massive plurality of people in modern liberal societies—libertines and pagans alike—who do not see the world as they do. There is a real sense in which the Postliberals seem determined to reignite the moral and religious conflagrations that inspired the birth of liberalism in the first place.

Furious Minds is a smart and welcome rejoinder to thinking that’s passed unchallenged for too long, levelled against a gang of smug and sheltered bullies who are overdue a public humiliation.