The MAGA New Right

Furious Minds

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Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right

Author: Laura K. Field
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Year: 2025
Genre: Political history / intellectual history

What It Is

Furious Minds is the foundational text for this wiki. Field — a political theorist trained in the Straussian tradition who spent time in conservative intellectual circles before leaving them — documents the intellectual history of the MAGA New Right from 2016 to 2024. Her focus is squarely on the ideas and thinkers behind right-wing populism, not on the sociological phenomenon of Trump voters or the mechanics of electoral politics.

Field’s core argument: between 2016 and 2024, American conservatism underwent a mutually reinforcing radicalization of intellectuals, politicians, and the populist movement they led. The New Right was not simply a response to Trump; Trump was an opportunity that a pre-existing intellectual milieu seized, egged on, and radicalized further. The movement fully cohered only after January 6, 2021 — that event became a loyalty test and consolidation point.

Field’s Taxonomy of the New Right

Field divides the New Right into three main intellectual camps, with an overlapping “Hard Right Underbelly”:

The Claremonters — West Coast Straussians clustered around the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College. Idolize the American founding; rally around “Declarationism” (first principles of the founding rather than constitutional text). Aesthetic: youthful, bitter, masculinist, counterrevolutionary. Signaling phrase: “knowing what time it is.”

Postliberalism — Less enamored of the founders; embrace Catholic social teaching, communitarianism, a greater role for the state in shaping public life and morality. Some are Catholic integralists. Key thinkers: Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari, JD Vance. Aesthetic: sober, traditionalist, highbrow.

National Conservatism — The “big tent” umbrella of the movement. Promotes a single, relatively homogeneous nation-state under threat from within and without. Formally organized with regular conferences. Key thinkers: Yoram Hazony, R.R. Reno, Josh Hammer, Christopher Rufo. Institutions: Edmund Burke Foundation, First Things, Heritage Foundation. Mood: fervent, unyielding.

Hard Right — Not a separate camp but an underbelly spanning all three. More hard-line, racist, misogynistic, violent in rhetoric. Hypermasculinist aesthetic. Key figures: Curtis Yarvin, Steve Bannon, Costin Alamariu (“Bronze Age Pervert”), Darren Beattie.

Field’s taxonomy is visualized in Figure 1 of the book: overlapping circles, with Claremonters at center-left, Postliberals at upper right, National Conservatives at upper left, and Hard Right at lower right — with all circles sitting inside a larger MAGA tent.

Key Arguments

The “Four Pillars” of the New Right (vs. Reagan’s three-legged stool):

  1. Social conservativism (R.R. Reno’s “strong gods”)
  2. Economic nationalism
  3. Isolationist foreign policy
  4. Anti-immigration

The spine holding these together is “a staunch social traditionalism and rejection of liberal pluralism and egalitarianism” — a traditionalist (usually white, Christian, and patriarchal) social vision meant to replace pluralistic liberalism.

Reagan’s “Three-Legged Stool” (the fusionist establishment the New Right replaced):

  1. Social conservatism
  2. Free-market economics
  3. Anticommunism

The New Right vs. its precursors:

  1. It is populated by sophisticated young people who understand populism and modern media
  2. It is misogynist and obsessed with masculinity in an unprecedented way
  3. Under Trump, the far right ascended unambiguously to the center of power in the GOP

January 6 as consolidation point: The attack on the Capitol was not the movement’s nadir but its triumph — a loyalty test that conservative leaders briefly flunked, only to see the New Right’s “Big Lie” become GOP orthodoxy. Journalist David A. Graham: it became a “New Lost Cause” myth.

Field on the “Ideas First” pathology: The New Right practices an extreme version of the conservative belief that “politics is downstream from culture” and “ideas have consequences.” This often becomes a way of using intellectual abstractions to defend nativism and myths, privileging ideology over empirical reality.

Field’s Standpoint

Field is a liberal and says so explicitly. She is a former Straussian-trained political theorist who was embedded in conservative intellectual circles from roughly 2010 before extricating herself. Her Straussian training shapes her method: she reads texts closely, focuses on what intellectuals actually write and argue, and takes ideas seriously as drivers of political change. But she breaks with Straussians in insisting that historical context and empirical reality matter — and in being a liberal.

Her stated purpose: to help liberals understand that the New Right is not stupid, that dismissing it as mere greed or racism misses the genuine intellectual substance (however wrongheaded) of its arguments. Understanding the enemy is a prerequisite to defeating it.

Chapter Structure

  1. Introducing the MAGA New Right
  2. The Claremonters
  3. The Journal of American Greatness
  4. Postliberalism
  5. National Conservatism
  6. From Alt-right to Hard Right
  7. Stopping the Steal
  8. “Patriotic Education”
  9. Laying Siege to the Institutions
  10. Common Good Constitutionalism
  11. The End of Men
  12. Christian Nationalism and Revival
  13. Conclusion: Ecce Furor

Chapter 13: Conclusion — Ecce Furor

The title — Ecce Furor, “Behold the Fury” — is Field’s coda for the entire analysis. The conclusion is organized in seven sections that move from her personal experience of NatCon 4 (July 8, 2024, Capital Hilton, DC) to a structural reading of the Oresteia as political allegory to a prescriptive liberal manifesto.

The Furies Metaphor

Field’s central image: the MAGA New Right as the ancient Greek Furies (Erinyes / Eumenides) — goddesses of vengeance who upheld old forms of justice, hounding anyone who acted with ingratitude or insolence, especially toward blood relatives. In Aeschylus’s Oresteia (the only surviving tragic trilogy from ancient Greece), the Furies form the play’s wretched chorus and haunt Orestes, who has murdered his mother Clytemnestra. The Furies take the side of women, domesticity, and the old laws; they are opposed by the newer Olympian gods.

“The masculinist Furies of the twenty-first century, with their anger, their reactionary values, and their all-or-nothing takes, found a comfortable home on the American New Right.” The GOP as defined by Trump “wanted badly to represent men and MAGA masculinity — from PUA-obsessed Michael Anton and Manosphere anons like Raw Egg Nationalist, to Josh Hawley and Brett Kavanaugh — and even to hound and chase out women from public life.”

The Emily Wilson Homer controversy is Field’s illustration: Wilson’s translations of the Odyssey (2018) and Iliad (September 2023) — the first major translations of Homer into English by a woman — enraged Hard Right figures. IM-1776 published “Homer’s Brazen Vandalizers: How Female Academics are ruining the Classics”; a man named Max Meyer attempted to critique Wilson’s translations based on his single year of ancient Greek in college — his thread went viral with nearly three million views. Field: “It is hard to overstate the idiocy of these attacks, which, in addition to their ugly treatment of Wilson, reduced Homer to a machismo-propagating hack.”

Summer 2024

July 13, 2024: Trump assassination attempt in Pennsylvania; Corey Comperatore killed. Trump, forced to the ground by Secret Service, rose with fist raised, yelling “FIGHT!” — “the perfect distillation of the movement’s macho energy.” On X: Elon Musk endorsed Trump within the hour (“Last time America had a candidate this tough was Theodore Roosevelt”). Sohrab Ahmari: “If a bullet grazed my ear, I would not have it in me to get up, pump my first, and urge my supporters to ‘fight’! That’s evidence of a truly extraordinary man. World-historical in the way Napoleon was for the 19th century.” Stephen Wolfe: the photo captured “courage and victory” such that “a new possibility of being has opened before young men.” Conclusion: “The future is rightwing.”

Within days, the online right was blaming DEI for the attack because some Secret Service agents on site were women, and the head of the Secret Service was a woman. Ahmari: “That footage of the overweight Secret Service agent struggling to re-holster her pistol is yet another everything-is-broken moment.” Field: “Even Trump did not sink that low.”

July 15, 2024: Trump announced JD Vance as running mate — a bold choice designed to please the New Right. Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019 (the same year he converted to Trumpism); was ideologically closest to Deneen and Vermeule; spoke at the Regime Change book launch; Peter Thiel was his patron. But unlike Deneen and Vermeule, Vance “never kept his distance from the New Right’s more activist and imprudent expressions.”

Vance appeared on niche podcasts like Jack Murphy Live and American Moment, “where he made claims that harmonized with Hard Right positions on everything from getting red-pilled for Trump and Claremont-style ‘hour-is-lateism,’ to the misery of modern professional women.” His “childless cat ladies” phrase — “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives… and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too” — “might as well have come from Bronze Age Mindset or The Case for Christian Nationalism.”

July 21, 2024: Biden withdrew; Harris gained the nomination. Gender dynamics of the campaign transformed; Vance’s culture-warrior style “seemed, briefly, like a liability.” Tim Walz — Minnesota governor; working-class background, coach and teacher — drew dramatic contrast with Vance.

By the end of the summer, Trump and Vance were spreading gross conspiracies about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio — Vance’s own district — leading to bomb threats and school closures. Vance: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Field: “I guess it’s what they call a noble lie.”

February 2025: As Elon Musk and DOGE purged the federal government, Patrick Deneen delivered the First Things Inaugural Neuhaus Lecture at New College, Florida: “the most urgent question for us to explore today… is the possibility that we must think through and assist in developing a fourth wave of modernity.” This new “truly postliberal age” would be “made not of the salty waters of liberal modernity but refreshed, and perhaps even replaced, with the purer waters of premodernity, our classical and Christian heritage.”

Field’s Prescriptions (“Playing Athena”)

Short-term: Americans who oppose Trump must keep engaging and pushing back — protests, civil actions, lawsuits, running for election at every level, pressuring Congress to restore its constitutional authority.

Longer-term: “contra Deneen’s ‘purer waters of premodernity,’ our era calls for liberal renaissance and reinvention.” Key elements:

  • Liberals must be more upfront about what liberalism values and why, “in language that can be broadly understood”
  • Field quotes Rufo’s own words and endorses them against him: “The best way to counter the degradations of American institutional life is to remind the public of the fundamental purpose of those institutions… What is justice? What is love? What does it mean to live well?… The idea of happiness, properly understood, can be revolutionary.” The difference: liberal purposes and happiness will always be “plural and messy: more Mardi Gras or renaissance fair than country club gala or debutante ball”
  • To antiliberals: “You have lost your way and should walk with more care… you take the liberal world for granted, too… some of you will miss your liberalism when it’s gone”
  • To liberals and progressives: “conflict is not abuse” (Sarah Schulman); “hardened but steadfast toleration for worldviews that we find incomprehensible, deeply offensive, or dangerous”
  • From the New Right, liberals should genuinely learn: economics, trade, localism, the critique of technocracy and managerialism, campus silos and bureaucracies, and the crisis of masculinity
  • Field’s educational vision: new liberal education programs in big state schools; genuinely pluralistic; Socratic; expose students to great works of art, literature, history; questions like “What is justice? What is love? What does it mean to live well?” Faculty-directed; sharing leadership with women academics. At one school: The Federalist and Annette Gordon-Reed; at another, James Baldwin and Hannah Arendt; Homer and the Bible everywhere

The Oresteia Resolution and Its Failure

In Aeschylus, Athena resolves the Orestes/Furies contest by establishing the first trial by jury. The Furies lose but are given dignity — a “cavern-dwelling” in the city, honored as deities of marriage and family, receiving “the first fruits of the fertile Athenian land.” Athena beseeches: “You do still have your rights…. Soothe down the seething storm-waves of your rage.” The play ends with the possibility of reconciliation.

“From 2016 to 2024 the psychodramatic landscape in America was an almost perfect reversal of the Oresteia with respect to gender and who represents the old and the new — and, of course, with regards to who won out in the end. In our story, after the 2024 election, the masculinist furies prevailed, ready for vengeance, and no bright-eyed Athena appeared to vote them down, offer peace, or bind up the nation’s wounds. Our lessons are more brutal, and we will have to forge our own way.”

Final Paragraph

Closing with Aeschylus’s chorus in Agamemnon: “The scales of Justice weigh out gain / to those who’ve learned from pain: / but as for what the future bears, / you’ll hear as it occurs. / Let be: it will emerge as bright / as when the dawn brings light.”

Field: “I hope our fate is otherwise. Let’s work to make it so.”

Key Cross-References

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