Laura K. Field is the author of the new book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. She is a political theorist, and she lives in Washington, D.C.
Q: What inspired you to write Furious Minds, and how was the book’s title chosen?
A: In 2022 or so, I was thinking that I would really like to write a book. I had been writing about the New Right intellectuals or MAGA intellectuals for quite some time, but I honestly thought that after January 6 their power would wane. That wasn’t the case.
And so it was seeing the ongoing coalescence of the New Right after January 6, 2021, that I decided to work on a book. I was well-situated to take this on because I come from conservative academic circles, and while I’m not a conservative myself, I am familiar with a lot of the traditions that they work within.
The title came together at the very end! I had been fiddling in the conclusion with an analogy between the men of the New Right and the ancient Furies of Greek legend -- but with the gender roles reversed, so thinking about the New Right men as masculinist furies. And so when someone at Princeton suggested Furious Minds as a title, it really clicked.
Q: Do you see the MAGA new right as unique in American history, or do you see commonalities with previous right-wing movements?
A: There are definitely precursors to Trumpism and the MAGA New Right. In the book I talk about Barry Goldwater as a precursor, and about the paleoconservative movement under Pat Buchanan, and the Tea Party movement too. They each had both prominent politicians and radical intellectuals making arguments behind the scenes.
The earliest intellectual defenders of Trumpism were very well-versed in those other traditions and made explicit connections to those other trends -- going back all the way to the “Old Right” of the early part of the 20th century.
But there are also some things that make this movement, or this iteration of the American far-right, unique. In the book I argue that it is singular in its misogyny, in its media savvy, and, quite simply, in its success. Barry Goldwater lost the general election in a landslide, and Pat Buchanan never came close to the presidency.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that particularly surprised you?
A: I approached my task mainly as a political theorist and academic, and so most of my research involved reading the articles and books written by the men who constitute the MAGA New Right. These are people who like to write and opine and so the public record here is very thick.
I also listened to a lot of podcasts, went to several relevant events and a couple of conferences, and spoke to a few of the people I write about. But my focus was largely on their written and spoken record.
But of course to figure out who mattered I had to watch politics closely, and to track major events as they unfolded. That was hard because there has been so much going on, so my editor suggested that I tell the story chronologically.
In the final version, each chapter covers roughly a year or two, starting in 2016 and then through 2024 and dipping into 2025. That helped me to structure the book and keep my mind in one place at a time.
There was so much that surprised me! I come from conservative academic circles -- but more from the “great books” world than the political world, and so I had to learn a lot about conservative intellectual history as I wrote. That history is not my focus but I needed to understand it to write the book.
The most surprising thing to me was probably the MAGA New Right’s embrace of paleoconservatism -- which is a very radical and nativist approach, whose main proponents are linked to white nationalists if they aren’t white nationalists themselves. I maybe shouldn’t have been surprised by that, but I was.
I have also been surprised by the extent to which the people I write about have been willing to leverage the language of Western Civilization -- and ideas from the great books tradition that I love -- in the service of their hyper-partisan political movement.
You have someone like Christopher Rufo claiming that the right has a kind of monopoly on ideas about the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. I find this really alarming and dangerous because it isn’t true -- in my view, all people have access to those concepts, experiences, and realities -- and because it contains a very strong undercurrent of authoritarianism.
Their understanding of truth, beauty, and the good are anti-pluralistic and at times, if I’m honest, smack of fascism.
Which brings me to a final surprise, which is the extent to which the MAGA New Right -- and in particular the figures of the MAGA Hard Right or “dissident right” -- dabble in something that is reminiscent of fascism. This is where the misogyny is especially bad.
And though there is perhaps nothing surprising about the existence of fascist intellectuals, I have been surprised -- and frankly, pretty repulsed -- by the silence of the MAGA New Right about the rise of these other people and ideas in their midst. Sohrab Ahmari is really the only person who has taken a strong stand against the Hard Right. Deneen has made some remarks in that direction. Good for them, but the silence of the rest of them is deafening.
Q: The scholar Elizabeth Anderson said of the book, “Readers should be rushing to this book to understand how and why conservative elites embraced extremism.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: Well, that’s easy! I think the world of Elizabeth Anderson and heartily agree with her assessment! Of course, joking aside, I do hope that the book offers several layers of explanation of how this has all happened. I am just covering one slice of the whole world of MAGA, the intellectual slice.
But in the book I try to provide a decent, thorough explainer of how the world of the MAGA New Right came together -- by profiling key figures, chronicling key moments in the coalescence of the movement, and providing an analysis of the ideas that shape the movement.
I also try to convey why some of this is so seductive and alluring -- in part by discussing how I was and am seduced by some of the ideas coming from the right, and in other ways by giving voice to some of the things that these characters have found frustrating about our current politics and culture, which are frustrations that I often share.
But ultimately I’m not on their side, I’m a critic. And one of my motives beyond explanation was to convey a sense of urgency. I want people to learn from my book, and from the movement, but also then I hope they are inspired to keep fighting extremism and working for a better tomorrow.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am doing some work with the Illiberalism Studies Program at George Washington University, and have just joined the Brookings Institution as a nonresident fellow. I’m mostly still focused on the New Right and expect to be busy with that for the near future. I have a couple other book ideas percolating but nothing I’m quite ready to talk about.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: One thing I hope that readers take away from my book is a sense of the ideological extremism that has captured the Republican Party, including JD Vance.
But I also want to emphasize that I do not think the intellectuals are representative of the general electorate. I do not think that the average Republican voter has been radicalized to anywhere near this extent or in the same dramatic way that these intellectuals have.
And I think that should be a source of hope for the rest of us, who want to move beyond the awful and divisive and counterproductive politics of the present.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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