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Laura K. Field, "Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello. This is Lily Goren with the New Books Network, the new Books in Political Science podcast. Today I'm joined by Laura Field, who's the author of a fabulous new book called Furious Minds. This was published by Princeton University Press in 2025. And Laura is getting a lot of coverage on her book, lots of podcast interviews and reviews in different places. So I feel very, very delighted to be able to welcome Laura Field to the New Books Network and also to ask her a little bit about herself and how she came to this particular project. Hello, Laura.
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Hi, Lily. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I wrote this book over the course of 2023 and 2024, and the subtitle is the making of the Maga new right. So it's all about the intellectuals behind Trumpism who have built a movement sort of behind, underneath of the Persona of Trump, this, this intellectual movement has emerged. It, it coalesced. It sort of started to emerge right from the beginning, even before Trump was elected in 2016. And then with different, different parts of the, of the conservative world sort of came together. These formerly fringe people in many instances got together, started to cooperate and have conferences. And so during the first Trump administration, they started to really build a movement, but they weren't really that effective in terms of actually wielding power. Then after January, some of these guys were involved in January 6th and the narrative about the election fraud, and also just some of the actual nuts and bolts of what they were trying to do on January 6th. And so after that, I sort of thought that they would, they would sort of vanish from the political scene, quite honestly. But that's the opposite, obviously, of what happened. And the movement really consolidated during the Biden administration. So the book sort of tells this story of 2016 through 2024, of the coalescence, the early, early events and coming together of these different people. And then in the second half of the book, it's much more about their consolidation of power, right, and how they, they got together. They floated new policy ideas in the red states. They gained institutional authority in places like, at places like the Heritage foundation and the isi. There was this also big proliferation of new institution building and cultural influences, right, with new podcasts and social media and all kinds of building out for their movement and new conferences. And then they, they designed Project 2025. These are the real ideologues behind that, that project, and architects of that. And then they got J.D. vance to be on the ticket with Donald Trump. And that was really, I think they're, they're. A massive success for them. He's really their darling. And so whereas Trump, with his personality kind of. He's so anti intellectual. Right. He's not, he's not an ideas guy that he, he almost camouflages the fact that this whole thing has happened. And I think it helps us to understand the difference between the first and second administrations and just the real radicalism and the open extremism that we're seeing in the party now and in their actions. So the book really tries to. I think, you know, I didn't. I keep being surprised by everything that's happening in our politics and by their successes, but I think that the book really does help to explain what's going on right now.
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Yeah, And I wanted to dive into that because in a lot of ways, you are sort of unpacking a lot of the people who, as you say, have this concept of ideas first and that we're talking about sort of the intellectual rigor on some level behind a lot of the programs and the policies that we see now being implemented by particularly the second Trump administration. But there were parts of it, fragments of it, in the first Trump administration. So you talk about three kind of different schools of thought that coalesce that have come together, and it's not necessarily a history of, like, the Republican Party or the New Right, so much as it is about, you know, the sort of contemporary period and who's involved in that. Can you go through those three schools of thought and some of the folks who are sort of leading them, if you will?
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Sure, yeah. And I should probably say a little bit more about my background because I kind of forgot to. But I, I was my. The reason I'm writing the, I wrote the book, you know, is because I come from conservative intellectual spaces, right. Where I studied with all of these conservative Straussian professors and had a sort of understood their mode of speaking. I've never really been conservative myself, and I was more in, like, the great books world. And, and, and I'm, you know, very much a liberal now, but I've sort of flirted with some of this stuff when I was young and, you know, I wrote my dissertation on Nietzsche. I love Nietzsche. You know, there's. So there's this kind of, I don't know, not affinity, but there's a kind of understanding of the seductiveness of some of this anyway. But I was scandalized when I started seeing these, these characters from places like the Claremont Institute and some of these other factions defending Trumpism and giving an, an intellectual articulation of it. And so I started really paying close attention and recognizing some of the people and thinking, oh, this is something I could write about that would be a little bit different and coming from a different place. So that's, that's part of what start, you know, initially motivated me to write about the, these New right people is my own sort of dabbling in some of this stuff myself when I was younger. But yeah, as you say, it's not a history of the American conservative movement. I mean, I do have some of that in the introduction because you need to learn some of that and understand where, why the, where this is coming from, how it's not really New Right. That, that a lot of the arguments that they're giving and a lot of what Trump, whether he knew it or not, what he represents, is a, is a manifestation of these older threads of conservatism and these other impulses within the conservative movement. And so there's some of that layering just to explain what the people are talking about. But basically it's pretty, I guess as academics we would call it very presentist. Right. It's this presentist history of like 2016-2024. Anyway, with that, do you want. I'll go into the factions if you want or.
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Yeah, that would be great. I mean, in part, I appreciate the fact that you do have this training in understanding and thinking about these sort of big ideas and the canonical texts in political theory, which is also some of the traditions that, that a lot of the folks that you talk about in the book are also coming out of. But you do a really interesting sort of weaving together of some of the thinking in these different groups and how they've sort of coalesced around Trump and Trumpism over the past 10 years.
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Yeah, so that's right. They're cooperating, but they do come from very different parts of sort of the conservative tradition. Or, and if they, I sort of talk about how they have just like different flavors and styles that they are representing. And, and so there's, there's, there's quite a lot of diversity on, in these right wing spaces. So. And I wanted to try to capture that. So, and, and I think it's, it's also pretty obvious if you're paying close attention, that there are just these, there are these different approaches, these different clusters and they don't, they sometimes are bickering with one another. They are, there is contestation and, and they clearly have different things that they care about. So I start with the Claremont Institute people or the Claremonters or they call Themselves, the Claremonsters, very often. So it's kind of this tongue in cheek thing. But they're close with the Claremont Institute in California. And probably the most important figure there is Michael Anton, who wrote the first big intellectual defense of Trumpism, that famous Flight 93 election essay where he really went after the conservative establishment of like Reagan, Buckley, conservatism and said. And the neocons. And he just said, you haven't conserved anything. We've been. This has been a complete failure. And it was also just full of all this hyperbolic. Now, you know, our civilization is going to end, we're in the state of absolute decay, late stage, you know, Republic, it's it. The situation is dire. And the Claremont World has a phrase for that. They say the hour is late, right? Do you know what time it is? It's this really, I think, irritating phrase that these guys, you know, are constantly reciting. And if you, and if you know what time it is, then you know that the hour is late and it's time for like a counter revolution and for extreme action. And I'm laughing now, but I mean, I think that on the ground this stuff is really nasty, right? So like, I don't want to minimize. I mean, it's not just silly, it's also frightening. Anyway, they are the Claremont World. The mission of the Claremont Institute is to preserve the principles or restore the principles of the American founding. And so they take themselves very seriously as the people who truly understand the meaning of the American founding. And they, they inherit some of this from a scholar that inspired the. Their own institution, Harry V. Jaffa, who's, who is a Lincoln scholar who really did give voice to the kind of moral authority and the moral conviction that allowed Lincoln to act as he did, as this wonderful, you know, historical statesman. And so they're caught up in these narratives though, about the American founding as. And as of America as the best possible regime. Right. So there's exceptionalism, it's super exceptionalism, it's like exceptionalism on steroids, like world historical exceptionism. And that's sometimes, I mean, it can be maybe a good counter measure to, or corrective to some of the discourse, maybe, but they really go very far with it. And it's not just that. So they've got this very rigid way of understanding the American Founding and what that means and what the true constitutional order is and how the Founders Constitution differed from the progressive Constitution and how everything now is a complete departure from the original. So they've got this argument about that they use to justify attacks on the current, you know, on the dominant establishment liberal or conservative. But beyond that, I think that the Claremont outlook has also basically been corrupted by a kind of nativism. And at one point, Michael Anton, in some of the earlier writings before the Flight 93 election, called himself a Paleo Straussian. And we don't have to get into all of that, but. But that he's referring to the paleoconservative tradition, and that was best represented by Pat Buchanan. But there are other theorists in the mix, too, people like Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried, some of these pretty questionable figures bound up in kind of particularist understanding of what the American ideal should be, and sort of regional, sort of reaching in some cases back to the Southern agrarianism or Confederacy. It's a pretty ugly mix in some cases with the Paleo Straussians. And there was a lot of anti Semitism there. But the Paleo Straussian basically stands against universalism of any kind and want a more rooted and grounded particularist understanding of what it means to be American. And they're also anti interventionist in foreign policy. So going back to the old right of like the interwar period. So. So there's this sort of Paleo thing that Anton was very well versed in, and you can re. You can see how. And it was always sort of in struggle with mainstream conservatism, as people are probably familiar with, with like the, you know, regular establishment neo. We'll just call it neoconservatism. There were all these sort of a Paleo populist wing was in constantly in contention with the more establishment Reagan style of conservatism. And so Michael Anton was familiar with all that. And when he saw Trump on the scene in 2016, he thought, oh, that's our guy, right? This is. This is the Paleo. This is the sort of Paleo solution to our politics. And so we recognize that Trump represented a lot of things that were sort of fomenting for many years on the far right and was able to capitalize on that recognition and give this full voice to Trumpism. I'll just say one more thing. He defined Trumpism in 2016 as nationalist economics, secure borders, and America first foreign policy. And I think it's a pretty useful definition that's held up pretty well. I mean, it's also still fused with social conservatism, but that's a really clear analytic departure from what Reagan stood for.
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And so you had another school of thought that I forgot the title of the group, but certainly integrated a lot of religion into their thinking.
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Yeah, so the. Sometimes the Claremont guys get into a little bit. They'll get into the sort of Christian foundations of the country. And a lot of. They're. They're interested in the founding. And that's another departure, I think, from Harry Jaffa, where they're. They're reading a lot more Christianity into it than he would have been comfortable and maybe I think, than Lincoln would have been comfortable with. But. But they're not. But then. And they're also. I want to just say it just to distinguish from where I'm headed. They're also very against the administrative state. So there's something of. In their outlook that's kind of not quite small government, but. But. But I think so, like destroy the administrative state. That's a lot of that language, and a lot of that activity has been coming from sort of a Claremont style of politics. But the next group, the ones you're thinking of, I think, are the post liberals, and they are basically some very sort of traditionalist Catholics. There are a lot of Catholics in the. In conservative intellectual spaces. But this, this particular group I'm writing about are kind of extreme and novel in their orientation and have really gone full hog with this critique of liberalism that you can trace back to other Catholic reactionary thinkers. And they sometimes quote them. But the idea is basically, you know, liberalism has these faulty foundations of liberal individualism, and it seeks to conquer nature or sort of break free of our natural orientation and our natural limits. You know, any. You know, Patrick Deneen is one of these guys. He's at the University of Notre Dame, and he'll quote, you know, Francis Bacon and say, you know, this whole modern project is just faulty and wrong. And so their idea is to restore a much more traditionalist vision of politics, which basically involves reorienting the state towards what they call the common good. So. And that has. They define in various ways, and it sounds very nice, and there is a kind of tradition here. There's a connection here to communitarianism, and there's also, I think, a sincere interest in Catholic social teaching, but it also has a kind of authoritarian tilt, and they're very in favor of a strong administrative state. This is Adrian Vermeule in particular, who's the most radical of this group, quite Willy, quite a fan of, you know, the. Of executive authority and of. And of you harnessing state power to reorient the nation towards what they call the common good. But that also means conservative moral principle. And, and the most. The most sort of radical version of this is Catholic integralism which. Which Adrian Vermeule and another man named Gladden Papin are both sort of were part of, which started. There was this sort of weird group of people connected to one another on some slack channel in 2016 or 2015. And they were talking about, you know, I don't really know all the ins and outs of it, but, you know, thinking, well, how. How can we save modernity from itself? And what are we going to be doing? You know, what do the next decades of our politics look like? And they were inspired by this Catholic theologian, Thomas Pink, but also then by this priest, a Cistercian monk, excuse me, in Austria, who had a novel reading of a particular Catholic doctrine document called the Dignitas Humanae. And his interpretation, that's the document on religious liberty. That sort of. It's like the Catholic Church's settlement with religious freedom in the liberal world. And these guys thought, oh, we could reinterpret this in a way to mean that actually the Church doesn't stand for religious freedom, but actually wants to. That there's a way of reading this to reimpose the hierarchy between the church and state and to reintegrate the church and state so that politics could be subsumed under. Under the religious ends of humanity. I mean, so their basic argument is like, religion matters more. The religious purposes of life supersede political purposes. And so our politics should reflect that and the state should serve those other ends should be put to use in, in the. So it gets pretty radical. It means a break with traditional Catholic. The traditional Catholic understanding of that document, though, they, they don't. They're. But they're savvy. They're not asking for, like a open breach with, with the Pope. Anyway, this, this, this contingent is for a strong state. They're very close with J.D. vance, and it's a very radical project. And yet they speak quite openly about what they call integration for within, which is basically, you know, an infiltration of the state by conservatives who will replace the elites. That's Demesne's language. And at times he talks about. You'll appreciate this as a theorist using Machiavellian ends towards Aristotelian. No, Machiavellian means towards Aristotelian ends. Right. So there's a kind of wink, wink, nod, nod. Things might get ugly, and that's okay. So there's something, I think, very, very troubling about a lot of that, and.
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It certainly seems to be maybe a bit at odds with sort of Jeffersonian commitments to the separation of.
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Oh, yeah, I Mean, it's pretty far gone. Adrian Vermeel wrote, he's a legal scholar primarily and he wrote a book in the aughts at some point called the Executive Unbound where he basically said, you know, let's, let's get, let's get real. We know that the congressional, you know, we know that the separation of powers is sort of not real anymore. That basically it's the executive that has the power and that, you know, the different branches of government are. The idea that they're going to be balancing against one another, that's just, that's not true anymore. So like that those old constitutional forms are basically defunct. There's still some safeguard against a powerful, a powerful executive which is basically like the voice of the people through elections, but, but pretty blase about, about the separation of powers and the balance. Balance of powers. So, you know, he's not discomfited by that and he's a student of Carl Schmidt. And so in many of these cases he'll, he'll embrace that and he'll cite that. And I think with the executive just say what's more important? I think what's motivating some of this is a sense that what's more worrisome than a strong executive is the disintegration of moral bonds in our modern culture. And so we need to worry less about too much state power or excess of tyranny even. He'll use that kind of language because, because a situation where power disintegrates and, or our political world becomes too divided, that's much more worrisome. And I mean that's, that's also how Schmidt defended some of his actions.
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And for listeners who might not be familiar with Carl Schmidt, Carl Schmidt was one of the thinkers behind, I mean.
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He was a legal scholar also and wrote a Nazism during the state and yeah, during Nazism. And so the Nazis really embraced a lot of. Because he had these strong defenses of those of US Central executive also against the background of the chaos of Weimar. Right. And so you could see how that would be a compelling argument. They embraced him. He embraced them for a time. He became a Nazi. They sort of eventually kicked him out because he wasn't quite gung ho. And I think my understanding, you know, that he wasn't quite one of them enough, but he never recanted. I mean, he never, he never, he never let go of any of that. And he was a terrible anti Semite. I mean, if you read into this stuff, it's pretty awful.
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So in terms of the post liberals, they also, from my reading of your book and reading in other places, they have a lot of affection for Hungary and Viktor Orban.
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Yes.
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And maybe a bit for Vladimir Putin as well. But how is it that these ideas coming from places like Viktor Orban's hungry are ones that they think are useful or the sort of. How are they translating this?
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I mean, I think that it's, I'll just put the third group on the table here because it goes, it's pretty easy, right, which is the national conservatives who are organized around an idea of not of nationalism and of basically a unified homogenizing nation state or like relatively homogenous nation state, shared traditions, shared religion, shared language. That's the way. And it's based on this book by Yoram Hazoni and a lot of that's, that's the main organizer for the natcons is this guy named Yoram Hazoni who's an Israeli American who wrote a book called the Virtue of Nationalism. And it's just a full throated, there's sort of one American nation and it's an anti pluralistic embrace of a homogenous nation. And that's the organizing sort of umbrella group that brings some of these different groups together. There are some fissures and there's a lot. I think one useful way to distinguish the post liberals from the Nat cons is that the Nat cons, basically they blame outsiders for the problems of modernity. This is the way a new, a new book by a guy named Stefan Borg offers this, this distinction. So they, the nationalists, including I think the Claremonters are blaming external forces, you know, immigration and, and sort of outsiders for America's problems or supposed outsiders. Whereas the post liberals are, it's a more radical internal critique like that. The, the, the sources of corruption are internal, but with, or Orban, they're almost all sort of unified in their love of Orban because Orban puts this into practice, right? And he's got the, he's got a relatively hom. Homogeneous nation state already and he's got the post liberal and he's got the power, right? So he's, he's this very savvy political operator and he's been able to implement a lot of the policies that they would like to implement. And so he's been able to, you know, get rid of some of the universities he doesn't like, get rid of some of the programs within the universities that he doesn't like redirect things so that there's sort of new forms of educational formation. So I think he's been very, you know, influential in some of, and inspiring to them for some of the things that we're seeing happen in higher ed and some of the family policy that the, that these guys care about Orban is implementing, whether it's like pronatalism or just like just rules governing family life. He's, he's got policy ideas for them and I think they also just like the fact that he is standing against the EU in many instances and he's got these immigration policies that are really draconian and so they like everything he's doing. They're very explicit about that. They constantly minimize his anti Democratic tendencies and his corruption and the extent to which this involves trampling on civil rights that they don't seem to care about so much. So, yeah, I think he's a useful figure to just keep in mind in terms of what they're concretely pining after. And then Orban, I think they would far, they far prefer Orban to Trump, I think if I'm honest. Right. Because he's a much more sort of, he's a much better face for what they are of seeking in politics.
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Well, there's more consistency, I think.
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Yeah, yeah, much more consistency. He's much more appealing, I think for like a normal conservative person. Right. I mean Trump is not your ideal leader, even though he, he's, he had some qualities that they really admire and are obviously benefiting from because he's got this other kind of personality, this personalism and the charisma, apparently.
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So you sketch out through a lot of the book these sort of three different somewhat intellectual traditions that also are coming out of parts of the conservative movement, the Republican Party or even like the Confederate Democratic Party from way back when. And that they, you know, some of them had been sort of involved in politics or had a hand in politics here or there, but that there's a kind of foundation that they have established and a lot of them have now sort of moved into positions of power within the sort of Trump world, Trump administration and, or in media or other places and certainly in think tanks. So what happened? Like how were they able to make this jump in a certain sense?
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Yeah, I think that what happened is they got their people in, in very of the, in various institutions in D.C. they're they with I think especially the Heritage foundation, but through these natcon conferences and they're the, the Republican world or the political, the conservative political world in D.C. is pretty tight knit and there's a lot of. I was Just speaking to someone. There's all these. And the book starts at one of these education programs, right? There's all these summer schools, summer camps, basically, for young conservatives. And there's, you know, there's 10 different ones you can go to, and you. All these other people, and it's exciting, and you learn the history and you're all connected. And Claremont has been very actively cultivating that kind of thing. And they've got, you know, decades worth now of these fellowships and the alumni from these fellowships where they're all quite well connected, and they're training these young people to get involved in conservative culture and also in cons. You know, in the world of the capital, they're staffing a lot of these. And so that's been going for a long time from different strains, from these different institutions. But I think that, you know, when the Heritage foundation got a new president after January 6th in 2021, this. This Kevin Roberts guy, that was a real symbol of how the institution thought, okay, this. Things. That Trumpism is not going away. Maybe Trump will leave the scene. But these ideas are important. You know, they're the future of the party. So that sent a signal, and I think that. That a lot of the energy and excitement was with these young people with these sort of radical ideas. And. And so it had a lot of momentum to it. And then they knew each other from some of these institutions and some of the institution building that's always been, you know, pretty good on the. On the right. And so they sort of took over those. That internal world. And then I think, inspired a lot of people who wanted to be part of that scene. And so they built up this scene. And I mean, I don't know exactly. I'm sure there are still a lot of holdovers from other Republican, you know, actors from other administrations and from the first administration. So it's not like there's been a total overhaul, but I think a lot of the, you know, when within the first few months of the Trump administration, the Claremont Institute published a list of all the people who had been through their programs who were hired onto the new administration. Right. Michael Anton was one of their very first hires. You know, other people who had been. There's a guy named Darren Beatty who had been fired from the first administration for his. Because he gave this speech at basically a white nationalist conference. And, you know, he's now currently working in. For State. Right. As in the diplomatic or whatever you. I think. I don't know if he's actually a. He doesn't have A title like diplomatic role. But he's, he's pretty high up in there, you know, and so, so you have. I don't know, there's just this proliferation of people, and they're all sort of on the same page. And a part. I wanted to. Part of what I wanted to do in the book is show how radical this is and how a lot of these people, I think it's true, are staffing Capitol Hill right now. They are replacing some of the former actors. And I was skeptical at first, but you have this guy Rod Dreher, who kind of can't help but just speak the truth as he sees it. And he said that 30 to 40% of the staffers are groipers. And I didn't believe that until I spoke to some young people who had more connections to the conservative institutional world. And they were like, yeah, that sounds about right. So it's, it's pretty dramatic. And so I think that, that some of those institutional. That takeover is. Oh, it's. I think it's happening in Washington, D.C. it helps us to explain why Trump 2.0 is so different from the first administration. And it's also very different, I think, and from what most Americans really are attuned to and what even they want as voters. I mean, there's plenty of ugliness. I'm not saying that, you know, the average MAGA voter is against all this stuff, but, you know, I don't know that they're really for it. I think this is a lot of what's happening is extremely unpopular, really contrary to sort of the best in American conservatism and sort of other traditions. And so part of what I wanted to do with the book is show how extreme a lot of this is and how it's not really representative of, you know, the average conservative voter or.
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Even MAGA voter, in part because it is essentially sophisticated in the thinking and in the ideas. That's what a lot of what comes through in your book is just sort of getting at and peeling back sort of the various ideas that have been sort of written or articulated by people who are now in political power. And so I found that to be a really gripping part of the story that you're telling, because it is always this case of like, you know, who's got the ideas and do they usually get into politics? A lot of times, you know, people who are, you know, political theorists certainly don't necessarily get into politics. But one of the points that you're making is that there are different groups of Political theorists who have also now become active political participants.
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Yeah. And so they. Yeah, I think they're driving a lot of this. I mean, certainly not all of it. Right. It's a whole weird world, but they're driving some of it. They're intoxicated by their own ideas. Right. They've got very rigid ideas, and a lot of it's really disconnected from sort of empirical reality. And that's what I mean when I say some of it's sort of super extreme and almost delusional. Right. They're caught up in these weird abstract theories about the evil elites and the Democratic establishment and the enemies within. And I think it's really a really stark departure from even how conservatives used to speak, but also, I think, from what most Americans are comfortable with. And there's a sort of. There's they're really. I mean, I guess I. I think I do use the phrase at the end of the book that they're high on their own supply. And I. I mean, I don't. It's easy to laugh, but it's also like. It's really, really upsetting because. Because of what they're. What they're actually. What that means. Right. I mean, they are. If you look at some of their social media accounts, right. There's like. They're openly fascistic. And. And so, I mean, we're all watching what's happening in Minneapolis. So, I mean, it's. It's. But I do think that it's. I mean, that's why I think it's sort of strong and weak at the same time. But part of it is that how they're. Part of what they've been able to do is shift the culture on the right into this sort of masculinist, frenzied, manosphere style, you know, engagement. And a part of that's because of how they use these abstractions and these ideas and how they use it as kind of cultural clickbait for some of. Yeah. Just in all kinds of different ways. Right. That's very seductive and kind of, I think, appealing, especially against a background of sort of the stale liberal status quo. They're really. They're really benefiting from that. But I. Again, I don't think it's really. I think it's a departure from. And far more radical than. Than what most Americans are comfortable with.
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Well, I mean, I think part of what you are trying to get at is that, okay, people have lots of ideas about how politics should work and what the end of the society should be and what we are seeking as the common good or the goal to lead virtuous lives and to lead free lives and so forth, if that's really what full human flourishing is in contemporary modernity. But I think you are also poking at the sort of mythologies that have been developed around, like, what is actually going on in the United States versus what is actually going on in the United States. And I found that to be really interesting because I think that's where a lot of people, perhaps outside of these. These kinds of intellectual and political. I don't want to call them bubbles, but sort of arenas are kind of like. Well, what. What. What do you actually think is going on, like, day to day in people's lives? That, like, everybody is corrupt or that, you know, everybody is evil? And I think that unfortunately, some of these sort of. The end goal of some of these intellectual experiments or concepts that some of these people have is that that's what they think, whereas most of us are kind of like, that doesn't seem to be what happens in my neighborhood.
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Yeah, no, I think that's right. I think that's exactly right. It's the mythologizing about what's going on, which they're very good at, spinning these narratives. They're very shameless, I think, oftentimes, in distorting the truth. And some of that's sort of strategic on their part, they'll admit. Right. And it becomes this sort of closed system that can sound very convincing if. Especially if you're not out much, if you don't get out much. Right. Because you're right. I mean, there's just a kind. There's a reality out there that we all encounter when we go to the grocery store. Right. No matter where we are in the country. And that's quite different from the stories they're spinning, even though we can also connect to some parts of these sort of dystopian things that they're describing.
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Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Living here in Wisconsin and having a lot of students who over the last decade have also talked about the rise of addiction that they are experiencing in their home life. Not them specifically, but, you know, and so that. That is a reality that. That does often feel dystopian, but it's also, you know, kind of at odds with, like, the catastrophe that the apocalypse is about to happen.
- [37:40]
A
Yeah, yeah. And I think all the catastrophizing. I mean, I'm not going to say it's a distraction because I think that's pretty glib, but there is a point at which it Certainly isn't doing much work to actually help anybody, you know, and it's. And it's not. It's not very tuned in to anything real in the world that matters to people. So, I mean, that's kind of the tragedy of Trumpism, right? That there's this kind of huge. It's so high on itself, it's so brutal, so big, and yet it's not really accomplishing anything sort of wholesome for the country, to say the least. I mean, it's brutalizing people. Right. And I think sowing division and anger.
- [38:25]
B
And so on that happy note, Laura, I really enjoyed this book and it is actually propulsive. I mean, I was turning pages. I didn't want to put it down last night when I was going to sleep. And so I thank you for an extremely well written book that is really captivating in so many different ways and on so many different levels. Are you working on something new now?
- [38:52]
A
Not. Not yet. Really. I mean, I'm interested in this question of the vulnerabilities that the New Right has been exploiting in our. In our popular culture and in our culture and in higher education and, and also from the perspective of liberal. Liberal Democratic philosophy. Right. And the kind of just the new. The new ways of thinking about liberalism in, In America and the world. So I'm interested in all that and I'm interested in higher ed. So I've got a bunch of ideas popping around, but nothing tangible yet.
- [39:23]
B
Okay. Well, I hope when the next book comes out, you'll come and talk to me about it on the New Books Network.
- [39:29]
A
I hope so too. And I hope we get to meet in person someday soon.
- [39:33]
B
I look forward to that. I want to thank Laura Field for joining me today to talk about Furious Minds, the making of the MAGA New Right, published by Princeton in 2025. It's a fabulous book. I really recommend it. And is there a brick and mortar store with an online presence to which you would like to give a shout out?
- [39:54]
A
Yeah, I mean, here in D.C. i've had a couple events at Busboys and Poets, and so I think that would be the one I would choose. Busboys and poets in Washington D.C. busboys.
- [40:03]
B
And poets at Washington D.C. i'll put a link in the show notes for that and also of course, at Princeton University Press's website. So I appreciate those plugs. And I wanted to thank you for joining me today to talk about this magnificent book.
- [40:18]
A
Thank you, Lily.