Review of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field (Princeton University Press, 2025)
At a Beyoncé concert last summer, I found myself thinking about the right-wing philosopher Harry V. Jaffa. As the singer performed “Ameriican Requiem,” the first song on her Cowboy Carter album, lyrics flashed on the huge screens behind her: “The big ideas are buried here.” This slogan seemed to suggest that black Americans should claim the United States’ founding values as their own. Incongruously, it reminded me of Jaffa, who used those same ideas to reenergize the Right. This echo reflected something about our polarized times: both liberals and the Right are talking about the refounding of America.
No one is taking this more to heart than the thinkers surrounding Donald Trump’s White House, the subject of an unexpected page-turner by the political theorist Laura K. Field, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. This is an important contribution to the study of the Right, an evolving field that includes John Ganz, Quinn Slobodian, and Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell, hosts of the Know Your Enemy podcast.
Field is well placed to write this book, having been trained by followers of the conservative philosopher Leo Strauss. She offers a personal account of moving away from her teachers as well as of her continuing respect for some of their arguments. The thinkers in Furious Minds believe the Right has been marginalized in intellectual life and are trying to do something about it, establishing journals and universities. They take what Field calls an “Ideas First” approach, insisting that “ideas have consequences” and “politics is downstream from culture.” While professing skepticism about this “New Right pathology” of privileging ideas over economics, Field admits she is drawn to it. This makes her an invaluable guide to their in-jokes and squabbles.
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Auteur: Orlando Reade
