Furious Minds: The Making of the Maga New Right
The most up-to-date introduction we have to the MAGA intellectual right reshaping America with astonishing speed today ... [Field] is particularly good on the less well known National Conservatives ... But the most interesting chapters are those that Field devotes to a sect of Leo Strauss admirers at the Claremont Institute in California ... Insightful.
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The National Conservatives, or natcons, emerged in 2019. Ms. Field struggles to provide a clear definition of their mission .... The idea that Jaffa’s famous pugnacity arose from his Straussian ideas rather than his personality strikes me as tendentious. More notable, though, is that Ms. Field, in a work about political theory and practice, hardly bothers to counter Jaffa or other influential thinkers with her own liberal version of a polity that upholds individual dignity while allowing civic pluralism ... Nor does Ms. Field have much to say about the ludicrous descent of modern liberalism into racial and sexual tribalism. With apologies to Ms. Field, this descent has done far more to birth the 'furious minds' of the New Right than the speculations of philosophers and intellectuals.
The closest thing we have to a mole’s-eye view of the New Right, and it is revelatory ... 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 ... Sociologically rich and intellectually precise political theory of and for the moment ... Despite running over 400 pages, the book carries not an ounce of fat ... 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 ... [A] Smart, stylish, scathingly critical overview of the New Right ... Generous and withering ... An important service.
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