The excesses of intellectual illiberalism

Leo Strauss had it that the rejection of “natural rights” — or call it objective truth — led ultimately to nihilism. In the age of proliferating alternative truths, AI deep fakes, and cultural malaise, it feels like Strauss was on to something. When liberalism accommodates, or even encourages, a self-multiplying pluralism in values, priorities, and beliefs, we can lose our bearings. 

In Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton, 2026), Laura K. Field shows how this reasonable Straussian concern has metastasised into a range of intellectual justifications for Trumpism. Field is a political theorist by training — no stranger to Strauss, Rawls, Nietzsche and company — so she is an apt and fastidious guide to the complex ecosystem of “New Right”, from California to Budapest. 

In her timely book, Field accomplishes what many of her fellow commentators on the Left have not: a calm consideration of the good, the bad, and the ugly ideas that have developed on the Right between 2016 and 2024. A faceless and amorphous notion of “MAGA” has made it all the easier to ridicule or dismiss its components. Field resists this temptation by putting a face on specific activists and institutions that form the bewildering New Right world: as erudite in some corners as it is sinisterly illiberal in others. 

There is the Claremont Institute in California, intellectually descended from Strauss and his students Harry Jaffa and Allan Bloom; the Postliberals like Patrick Deneen, author of Why Liberalism Failed (2018), and the National Conservatives, host of the high profile “NatCon” conferences, whose orbit overlaps with The Heritage Foundation and The Edmund Burke Foundation.

Field distinguishes between these groups’ ideas with a fairmindedness and lack of premeditated contempt rarely offered to these subjects. Of the Claremonters — or “West Coast Straussians” — Field writes with some sympathy, noting that “unlike much of academia, which can be excessively critical”, Straussians “make room for old-fashioned moral and ethical concerns, and old-fashioned bookish enthusiasms.” 

This lack of cynicism arises, Field explains, from a moral certitude that Jaffa, Bloom, and the Claremonters of today find woefully lacking in contemporary liberal society. “The core of radical modernity is radical skepticism,” Jaffa wrote, “a dogmatic skepticism that denies that we do have, or can have, any genuine knowledge of the external world.” 

Field portrays how affronting and destabilizing this kind of skepticism becomes to thinkers committed to premodern notions of absolute truth — so destabilising that it can easily mutate into hubristic certainty and an “ends justify the means” approach to reinstating “objective” truth as they understand it. Michael Anton’s famous essay “The Flight 93 Election” ahead of Trump’s election in 2016 became a clear example of this. Anton argued that the conventional order was dead, and only norm-busting radical action — storming the cockpit — was left. 

Field shows again and again how reasonable dissatisfaction with the establishment order, or the moral confusion of liberal pluralism, or the pace of cultural change, fermented and curdled into something far less reasonable and more open to authoritarian intervention. This was observable in a blog founded by Claremont-adjacent thinkers called The Journal of American Greatness, where they wrote under Roman pseudonyms to call for urgent revolutionary change, invoking crisis points in the Roman Republic. Julius Krein — writing as “Titus Maccius Plautus” — may have spoken for many when he decried the “soulless managerial class” that wields power over American life, but Field argues that he descended into a language that was “fervent, revolutionary, and conspiratorial.” Gladden Pappin – “Marcus Manlius Capitolinus” — similarly showed “a genuine respect for employment, manufacturing, and real production value – and disdain for commodification and financialization” but these grounded concerns for work and production hardened into an illiberal urge to superimpose top-down values in the name of social order and economic restoration. 

High-minded post-liberals like Patrick Deneen followed a similar trajectory. Field notes that Deneen wrote his early essays on a blog called “Front Porch Republic.” Deneen, like the poet Wendell Berry and Field herself, was wary of the excesses of capitalism and worried about the fraying of local bonds. Field describes Deneen’s writing in this era as “ecologically grounded and earthy: something like Little House meets Thoreau meets Pope Francis’s Laudato Si.” 

But after Trump’s election, and influenced by Catholic legal scholar Adrian Vermuele, Deneen drifted away from his arguments for grassroots localism and embraced a politics of emergency, calling for an epoch-shifting departure from liberal norms. He and other postliberals like Sohrab Ahmari signed an open letter in First Things called “Against the Dead Consensus” that described a “conservative consensus” that “surrendered to the pornographization of daily life, to the culture of death, to the cult of competitiveness.” For Field, it was the kind of apocalyptic language that paved the way for justified tyranny. A long way from Little House on the Prairie. 

When it comes to Deneen, Field attempts to retain the baby while discarding the bath water. She thinks Deneen’s idea of “mixed constitutionalism” — where governance structures actively mix the elite and the ordinary, through more local and decentralized institutions — is worth exploring. She also adopts Deneen’s idea of mandatory national service, suggesting it could unite disparate people for conservation and social projects, as well as military service. In this way, Field wants to harness what she sees as Deneen’s inclination toward governmental dictates in a more liberal direction. 

In the latter sections of the book, Field’s framing is sometimes shaped by more obvious left-leaning assumptions. She deploys charges of racism or Islamophobia as settled categories rather than preserving her careful analytical distance. In assessing Christopher Rufo’s campaign against Critical Race Theory, Field argues that Trump’s 2022 “Executive Order Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping” effectively “forbade something that was not happening.” Here, Field flattens a more complex empirical debate about the degree to which CRT concepts — such as white privilege or systemic racism — were present in federal training and education; it’s a slip from her usual meticulousness, even if Rufo was often overly alarmist. 

There is a further tension in how Field treats unrealised political aspirations. She writes of “wokeism” as a bygone trend, arguing that it “was not especially lasting or effective. The police were not defunded, prisons were not abolished, and reparations went unpaid.” At the same time, Field treats Adrian Vermuele’s legal scholarship as serious policy proposals that threaten democracy. Vermeule is, in Field’s words, “an antiliberal authoritarian and advocate for Catholic moral and political domination” who would make “the case for a total, top-down, intellectual reconfiguration of orthodox American constitutional thinking.” The tone is asymmetrical: woke ideas are presented as benign because they have not been realised, while Catholic integralist arguments are treated more politically consequential. 

Field can be forgiven this imbalance. Her exploration of the truly bizarre world of the online hard-right — with its “racist spewings, photographs of white muscle men posing on the beaches around the world, and prowar propaganda” — is enough to make an abundance of caution about the direction of this political project a wise idea. It’s hard to argue with her apt conclusion that “under Trump, the far-right American world came up for air.” 

One of the book’s strongest strands is Field’s portrayal of how well-considered critiques of elite liberalism slide down a slope towards frightening permission structures for illiberal authorities who promise some sort of restoration. She shows how this happens subtly and symbiotically: a “mutually reinforcing radicalization process” that involves different forms of media, tonal registers, and political subcultures that slowly acclimatise their audiences to more radical ideas. The overall effect is like a frog in boiling water: the temperature change is so incremental that he doesn’t realise it until the water is roiling around him. 

Other groups appear less online and more respectable, but are equally convinced that they are in a battle with dark and hostile forces conspiring to bring them down. For them, this existential struggle justifies abandoning previously cherished American tenets like freedom and democracy in order to regain control. Field lays out an elegant explanation of the independent Charismatic Christian communities who have become the unlikely backbone of Trumpism. As she puts it, “The New Right gave intellectuals a justificatory rationale for Trumpism; the evangelical right helped to provide that for conservative Christians. In both cases the fringe became the weave and in both cases the fabric stayed intact.” 

Refreshingly, this is not a book written merely to echo within an already noisy chamber. In her conclusion Field admonishes liberals for taking liberalism for granted and for refusing “to acknowledge and cultivate the moral worlds and traditions that sustain our lives.” Their neglect, she argues, has indirectly invited the New Right and the “coarse brazenness of its ideologues” into the fore of American political life. 

But her strongest words — and the ones that will resonate when her readers close the book — are reserved for all those antiliberals and postliberals on the New Right who have flirted with revolution and tyranny in the name of restoration. To them she says, “You have lost your way and you should walk with more care. You take the liberal world for granted, too. This has allowed you to don the language of grievance and oppression far too lightly … It is unseemly, and it is unmanly, and some of you will miss your liberalism when it’s gone.”