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PORTSIDE CULTURE

A MOLE IN MAGA’S MIDST  
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Alexandre Lefebvre
November 14, 2025
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ This book is an examination of the intellectual and theoretical
mentors of MAGA world. _

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_Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right_Laura K.
FieldPrinceton University PressISBN: 9780691255262

UNDERSTANDING SOMEONE IS hard if you think they’re dumb, weird, or
evil—or all three at once. Yet that’s the standard liberal view of
the conservative movement that has coalesced around Donald Trump,
often labeled the “New Right” or simply “MAGA.”

Consider two prominent voices. In his recent _On Freedom_ (2024),
celebrated historian Timothy Snyder describes Trump voters as
“sadopopulists,” so intent on punishing enemies that they end up
sabotaging their own interests. And Anne Applebaum, staff writer for
_The Atlantic_, depicts MAGA supporters as incapable of living with
the openness and complexity that democracy requires. Different idioms,
same conclusion: There’s a lot to diagnose, but little to
understand, about MAGA.

As polemics, these are fine. But to reach genuine understanding, what
the liberal-on-conservative literature needs is a mole: someone _from_
that world, but not _of_ it. Think of Megan Phelps-Roper, who as a
child carried the banners of the Westboro Baptist Church before
turning against it; or David Brock, the conservative journalist who
remade himself into a scourge of the Right. Their authority comes from
once having spoken the language of the movement fluently. Laura K.
Field is not a “defector” in that sense; she was never a MAGA
disciple. But she is steeped in the intellectual forebears of the
movement, and in the methods it uses to interpret and advance ideas.
Her new book, _Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right_, is
the closest thing we have to a mole’s-eye view of the New Right, and
it is revelatory.

What gives Field this status? Her training, for starters. She studied
under a conservative professor at the University of Alberta who
initiated her into the esoteric—some might even say
“dark”—arts of Straussianism: its painstaking reconstruction of
texts, its “Ideas First” mantra that politics is downstream from
culture, and its moral insistence that any country failing to center
ideals of character and virtue in public life is already lost. From
there came a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin to deepen this
formation, followed by the crabs-in-a-bucket world of conservative
political theory jobs. Until one fine day when Field grew fed up with
all the insularity, loyalty tests, and casual misogyny. At the
book’s opening, she recounts a particular episode that led her to
rethink her life choices. It was then, she writes, that she began
“the long, slow process of extricating myself from the world of
conservative intellectualism.”

Few books in political theory foreground the author’s biography as
much as this one. But it lands in this case, establishing Field’s
authority to identify what unifies the leading intellectual lights of
the New Right, and to make sense of their divisions and rivalries. It
takes a Straussian to catch a Straussian.

_Furious Minds_ is about the contemporary intellectual landscape of
MAGA, from circa 2016 to now. It reaches back a few decades when
necessary—tracing, for instance, the influence of Harry Jaffa and
Allan Bloom on the movement—but no further. That’s a strength, not
a weakness. The New Right may talk a big game about “Western
civilization” and “The Tradition,” but Field keeps a tight
focus: it’s Michael Anton of the Claremont Institute who matters,
not Aristotle; Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame, not Dostoevsky. This is
sociologically rich and intellectually precise political theory of and
for the moment. And despite running over 400 pages, the book carries
not an ounce of fat.

What unites the New Right? One fear and one hope. The fear is that
liberalism is everywhere, its tentacles wrapped around the public
sphere and even the most intimate details of private life. Whichever
MAGA faction you turn to, there is a shared conviction, as Field puts
it, that “for all its pretensions to neutrality, liberal,
pluralistic, modern constitutionalism has normative tendencies and
implicit preferences and inevitably shapes the liberal democratic
psyche in specific ways.” Liberalism is right there on dating apps
with every left or right swipe, in the empowerment slogans of
multinationals, and in the endless Netflix scroll of
choose-your-own-identity mush. And so, while MAGA strategies diverge
on how to respond—from tactical retreat (the so-called “Benedict
Option”) to co-opting the liberal machine (Catholic integralists) to
burning it all down (the chronically online Hard Right)—there is
consensus on the enemy.

That’s the negative. What about the positive? Field credits
Anton—author of the galvanizing 2016 essay “The Flight 93
Election” and now a senior Trump administration figure—with
distilling MAGA’s three-point creed: “secure borders, economic
nationalism, and America-first foreign policy.” But this, she shows,
is only surface politics. The deeper point of _Furious Minds_ is to
reveal a near-consensus on a social vision and a set of moral ideals
for what a postliberal United States should look like. “However much
it rejects liberalism,” Field explains, “the New Right does not
understand itself in strictly negative terms. It thinks it has a
monopoly on things like ‘the good, the true, and the
beautiful.’”

It’s this hope that liberals can’t or won’t grasp. Their entire
worldview is set against it. Whatever their differences, the core
conviction of liberals is that the state should not interfere in the
private lives of its citizens or dictate the terms of the good life.
Yes, a liberal state should teach its members what good citizenship
looks like. But when it comes to how to spend one’s time and money,
whom to sleep with and marry, or whether to have children and how
many, the liberal conviction is that the state should back off. The
refusal to define the good life is the heart of liberalism—and, in a
pluralistic world, what liberals are proudest of.

The New Right, however, sees that stance as not just sad but also
cowardly, even crazy. After all, even liberals agree that the state
should be concerned with the good of its citizens—so why retreat
from questions of the highest and most personal good? Leo Strauss,
godfather of many furious minds, made the point 75 years ago: “We
are […] in the position of beings who are sane and sober when
engaged in trivial business and who gamble like madmen when confronted
with serious issues—retail sanity and wholesale madness.” More
recently, Harvey Mansfield Jr., the political philosopher who taught
generations of conservatives at Harvard, summed up a lifetime of
study: “I would describe what you learn from the ancients as
learning how to live in the land of virtue, and the beauties and the
difficulties of that land. […] And liberalism knows essentially
nothing of the land of virtue.”

As a good liberal, Field knows the project can’t work. It may be
nuts for politics to abandon the pursuit of the good life. But in a
modern world of religious, moral, and cultural pluralism, do you know
what’s even more nuts? For politics to try to enforce one.
Fittingly, the book closes with a G. K. Chesterton quip: “The madman
is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has
lost everything except his reason.” Still, as a lapsed initiate of
that intellectual world, Field acknowledges the project’s pull and
attraction, even its sincerity and worthiness as a moral and political
vision. The mole has eyes for this. Which is why _Furious Minds_ moves
between admiration for a vision, gratitude for her training, and
repulsion—and yes, sometimes condescension—toward the furious
minds who want to carry their ideas beyond the seminar room and into
the world.

To sum up, the MAGA mind is united by a fear of omnipresent liberalism
and a hope for the state to get back into the virtue-teaching, perhaps
even the virtue-enforcing, business. But within that shared outlook,
Field identifies four factions. There are the heirs of Strauss and
Jaffa at the Claremont Institute, who supply much of the movement’s
intellectual backbone; the Postliberals, led by Deneen and Adrian
Vermeule, with their muscular vision of seizing the deep
administrative state to pursue distinctly unliberal ends; the National
Conservatives, who champion American exceptionalism and cultural
particularism, past and present; and the Hard Right, sometimes a
faction in its own right, sometimes the radical fringe of the others,
whose constituents dream of tearing down the liberal order.

Whether intended or not, _Furious Minds_ reads like Dante’s
_Inferno_: the deeper we go, the worse everyone becomes.
Unsurprisingly, given her training, Field’s sympathies early in the
book lie with the old guard of the Straussian world. Accordingly, in
these higher circles of the opening chapters, we encounter
well-intentioned and serious thinkers such as Jaffa and Bloom, who,
like Dante’s noble pagans, are honorable, yet barred from salvation.
They return to the first principles of the American founding, grapple
with the tragic trade-offs at its core, and insist on what liberalism
knows but cannot admit: virtue, not freedom, must lie at the heart of
the democratic experiment. As we move deeper into the book, however,
their heirs at the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College fail to
live up to their forefathers.

Continuing our descent, we meet the Postliberals, above all Deneen and
Vermeule, who reject liberalism outright and dream of harnessing the
machinery of the state to enforce a common good. They argue that
governments must advance both the temporal and the spiritual good of
their citizens, to the extent that the Roman Catholic Church might
even enforce canon law and protect the faithful from heresy, apostasy,
or even temptation. For them, liberal neutrality is a fraud: every
regime shapes souls, and the only honest course is to order politics
toward the true faith. Here Field grows wary and traces how easily the
rhetoric of spiritual care shades into a theory of state capture, in
which the vast administrative machinery of liberalism is seized and
repurposed to serve religious ends. As Sohrab Ahmari, another Catholic
integralist, puts it in a line that is either inspiring or chilling
depending on where you stand, the only way forward is to “fight the
culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the
spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good
and ultimately the Highest Good."

Next up are the National Conservatives, led by Yoram Hazony and
organized around his National Conservative (“NatCon”) conferences
since 2019. Their pitch is simple: nations, not individuals or
international bodies, are the true bearers of identity and moral
purpose. For Hazony, a nation is not an abstraction but a cultural
tribe with its own language, laws, and traditions, bound together by
religious memory, honor codes, and historical struggle.
Imperialism—whether by violent conquest or international governance
(degrees of difference for National Conservatives)—is the enemy,
because it levels these national distinctions in the name of universal
order. Diversity, in this vision, is secured between nations, not
within them; inside the polity, a dominant cultural majority must set
the terms. Here Field’s tone is scathing (and often too sweeping and
cynical for my taste). National Conservatism, she concludes, dresses
itself in biblical rhetoric and political theory but in practice
offers cover for ethnic exclusion and the denial of minority rights.
It is particularism raised to a principle and, in Field’s reading of
Hazony especially, an artifice to dispossess Palestinians abroad and
consolidate MAGA at home.

If the earlier factions can be laid out on their own terms, Field
never lets us forget that _Furious Minds_ is a critical book. Her
analysis is laced with objections to their abstractions, Ideas First
optimism, Machiavellian maneuvering, and ethnocentric nationalism.
These criticisms pave the way for her final descent to the Hard Right.
What is unsayable within Claremont, Harvard, or Notre Dame circles
becomes explicit in the writings of Bronze Age Pervert or Curtis
Yarvin. The danger is twofold. First, the Hard Right encodes into all
the other camps its maxim of “No Enemies to the Right,” ensuring
that extremism is shielded so long as liberals remain the target.
Second, it gives open voice to the misogyny that Field sees as latent
throughout the movement: the consensus that we live under a
“gynocracy,” an order that is meek yet controlling, mediocre yet
punishing, where the soft virtues of accommodation and empathy
dominate every institution of Western civilization. The furious mind
casts itself as the counterforce—youthful, bitter, masculinist, and
counterrevolutionary. And here, in Field’s culminating claim, lies
the book’s unsettling insight: despite a decline in mainstream media
coverage since the 2017 Charlottesville riots, the Hard Right never
went away. To the contrary, it was absorbed and mainstreamed until it
began to pulse through the New Right itself.

Let me conclude with a question: who is _Furious Minds_ written for?
Never Trumpers, whatever remains of them, will eat it up. But this
smart, stylish, scathingly critical overview of the New Right won’t
find a readership on the Trumpist right, which will surely ignore or
dismiss it. Its real audience, I suspect, is liberals. The
exasperation Field feels toward her fellow liberals pours off the
page. It is not that she thinks they are complacent, as if politics
and culture today were business as usual. It is that their caricatures
of the New Right are so cartoonish and dismissive that they cannot see
what they are truly up against. Admittedly, Trump’s own
anti-intellectualism doesn’t help, but the deeper problem is
liberals’ difficulty in conceiving of worldviews so alien, so
extreme. They oscillate between dramatizing the threat—portraying
the Right as mere villains and schemers—and diminishing it, by
refusing to acknowledge the force and attractiveness of its ideas.

But the book is also, I suspect, written for the author herself. Field
is an heir of the conservative intellectual tradition she now
critiques. She loves the training it gave her and is grateful for its
discipline and seriousness. Yet she recoils from the form it has
taken. _Furious Minds_ reads as a personal exorcism of that
inheritance: a way of working through its intellectual riches and
moral perils, of freeing herself of a tradition she cannot quite
renounce but also cannot abide.

That doubleness is why the book often feels both fair and unfair,
generous and withering, in the same breath. As Matthew Rose, another
liberal traveler in conservative lands, reminds us in _A World After
Liberalism:_ _Philosophers of the Radical Right_ (2021): “The
alt-right is not stupid; it is deep. Its ideas are not ridiculous;
they are serious. […] Behind its online tantrums and personal
attacks are arguments of seductive power.” Field knows this. And in
showing us the New Right at once in its most magnificent and its most
menacing form, she has done her readers—and herself—an important
service.

* the MAGA movement
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* Right wing intelligentsia
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* anti-liberalism
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* conservativism
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