Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right
By Laura K. Field
Princeton, 432 pages, $35
Where Harvard Went Wrong
By Harvey Mansfield
Encounter, 152 pages, $24.99
Laura Field’s Furious Minds was published last November, one day shy of the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris. The book, a study of the “MAGA new right,” has received a great deal of attention, an impressive feat for our author to have pulled off in our increasingly illiterate culture. The reception has predictably broken down along partisan lines, with left-of-center commentators hailing it as a mordant dissection of their enemies and right-wing critics complaining that it is a misleading polemic.
Furious Minds is an intellectual history of the present, and the thing about the present is that it keeps happening even after the last page has been proofread. Unless the tea leaves are read exactly right, contemporary history risks becoming dated more quickly than do books about ostensibly warmed-over classic subjects. Eighteen months into Trump’s second administration, how much does this celebrated portrait of the MAGA mind tell us about what has actually transpired? Not much, I’m afraid.
To be sure, Furious Minds is a book from which many readers can profit. Even those who follow developments on the right closely are likely to have missed some of the strands which Field has woven together here. For instance, her documentation of the different responses of figures on the new right to the embarrassment that was the January 6 riot is valuable. The place of the personalistic nondenominational Protestant churches known as the Independent Charismatics in the Trump coalition will be new to many readers. Field is correct as well to observe that many new right thinkers anchor their views in a sloppy and reductive conception of the history of liberalism.
Field is also right that the “realignment” that many of her characters sought has not come to pass. Despite the efforts of some on the new right, we haven’t seen a reorientation of the GOP toward soft-left economics. The sought-after transcendence of “market-absolutism” (to use a term of which new right thinkers are fond) has not occurred, Liberation Day notwithstanding. Instead, Trump has enacted a vision of neoliberalism in one country, with business and capital unshackled from tax and regulatory burdens wherever possible but the flow of goods and people into the country from abroad regarded with skepticism. “Privatize and deport,” rather than a novel post-neoliberal but culturally conservative economic dispensation, has been the story of Trump II.
However, the shortcomings of Furious Minds make it an inadequate guide to the Trump era. For one thing, the book is written in such a fit of pique that its analytical force often founders. Furious Minds opens with an epigraph intended to liken her subjects to Nazis, and the tone hardly lightens thereafter. As a result, for close exegesis the book often substitutes an overreliance on what Bentham called “passion-kindling appellatives”; insults abound. For example, Field mocks the clothes worn by attendees at the conferences she drops in on and laments what she considers the subpar demeanor of various speakers, while invariably remarking that there are too many white men in the crowd (how many is few enough?).