A Mole in MAGA’s Midst

Alexandre Lefebvre reads “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right” by Laura K. Field.

By Alexandre LefebvreNovember 14, 2025

• Politics

• Philosophy & Religion

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.