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The Realignment
592 | Laura Field: How the MAGA New Right Took Power - From the Flight 93 Essay to Trump 2024
01:23:06
Laura Field, author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, joins The Realignment. Marshall and Laura discuss the intellectual movement behind Trumpism and the rise of the MAGA New Right, the intellectual branches of the movement: the Claremont Institute, Postliberals, and the National Conservatives, how cultural conflict became the engine of New Right movement-building, the future of higher education, and why the center-left's obsession with "policy" leaves it vulnerable to populist movements with ideas and language that speak to deeper questions of meaning in 21st century America.
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- [00:00]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment. My guest on today's episode is Laura Field, author of the recently released Furious the Making of the Maganu Right. This conversation is about the intellectuals and movements behind the effort to turn Trumpism into a durable ideology driven by but also extending beyond the presidencies of Donald Trump. The figures involved in the story include everyone from Patrick Dineen, author of why liberalism failed and CRT criticized, Christopher Ruffo, two power players like Vice President J.D. vance and investor Peter Thiel. What I appreciated about Laura's perspective is that she isn't just writing about the MAGA New Right from an outsider's reporting perspective, but like me, spent many reformative academic years in the space beyond charting the New Right's different branches. I hope that we make the case for why ideas and ideology matter. One of the big struggles I've had over the past year is convincing centrists and center left people, especially those in elected office, to believe that ideology isn't just an academic irrelevant thing separate from policies and the day to day business of politics. You can rightfully criticize the New Right's ideas and answers, but what you can't criticize is their institution building and talent development, their ability to staff their compatriots across all levels of the federal government, and their successful supercision of the pre2016 Reaganite ideology that dominated the GOP for decades. The lessons from their experiences has vast implications for Left liberalism, higher education and the future of the Democratic Party. Hope you all enjoy the conversation. Laura Field, welcome to the Realignment.
- [01:40]
B
Thank you Marshall. I'm so happy to be here.
- [01:42]
A
I'm so happy to chat with you. So your book Furious Minds, which is all about the MAGA New Right, came out in November and I actually was initially going to send you a booking request in November after the book came out, but the book really activated a lot of sort of thoughts and experiences I've had because I spent times in a lot of these like MAGA New Right spaces. So I actually spent the next month after that reading a bunch of other books that followed up on your book so we could really have the real version of the conversation. So I'm glad that I'm now fully realized enough to speak with you. So thanks for coming on.
- [02:14]
B
Oh that's awesome. Well, thank you. I'm glad it spurred a bunch of thoughts for you.
- [02:19]
A
So I think the first question for you that really matters this is gonna be the definitions section of the podcast. The least sexy but also most deeply, especially with a book like this is when you're writing about the MAGA New Right, you don't just say maga, you don't just say populace, you don't just say New Right, you actually delineate it into a couple different groups. So you have the Claremont people, you have the post liberals, and you have the national conservatives. If you're not coming from an ideological space like a lot of my sort of center left listeners are, this sort of sounds kind of like nitpicky or over relabel y, but these titles really matter and how, no matter how much they may sound similar, they're actually very different. So if you just go down the list, sort of offering a quick intro to each. So starting with Claremont.
- [03:02]
B
Sure. Yeah. And I think it's important just to kind of to clarify that the book is really focused on the intellectual movement behind Trumpism. So it's sort of one slice of MAGA and I. It's that slice came together between 2016 and 2024 into a strong coalition that is now pretty much ideologically in charge of the gop, I think it's fair to say. And so the book is telling the story of the emergence of this coalition and then even after January 7, the consolidation of what I call the MAGA New Right. But it didn't happen instantly, and it brought together a bunch of different players from different parts of the conservative world with very different interests and ideologies. And so that's also something the book is trying to do, is sort of track this emergence of the movement, but also to be pretty clear about where the different people are coming from and how they do and don't fit together. They fit together pretty well pragmatically. Right. They're happy to go along with a lot, but they still are coming at things from a pretty different perspective. So to start with the Claremont people, probably people have read some of these accounts about the Claremont Institute and John Eastman, so hopefully there's some familiarity. But the Claremont Institute is a think tank in Claremont, California, that was founded in 1979 by some students of a Lincoln scholar named Harry Jaffa. And Jaffa was a wonderful scholar in some respects. He wrote a wonderful book called the Crisis of the House Divided, which was all about the Lincoln Douglas debates and really tried to restate the moral core of Lincolnian political philosophy and at a time when historians were quite critical of Lincoln and weren't really appreciating that part of Lincoln. And Jaffa really shows know that the moral convictions that Lincoln held fast to really were what allowed him to get through the Civil War with, you know, and to the outcome that he had. And so the Claremont people. But then he also sort of got. Later in life, he's a very ornery man and just really kind of controversial. And he got really dogmatic and sort of jingoistic about the American founding. So he always had this love of Lincoln and the love of the American founding and the Declaration, but it became something really dogmatic and rigid. And that's part of the legacy at the Claremont Institute. So when I talk about what the Claremont Institute people are devoted to or the ideals that they are driven towards their purpose, it's really. The Institute itself is devoted to restoring the principles of the American founding, but they've got a very sort of whitewashed version of that that they cling to. And it's also been really, I'd say, compromised or corrupted by Paleo conservatism and a deep nativism about what the American nation is. Anyway, so you've got the Claremont Institute people are really leading the charge and were the first to defend Trumpism from an intellectual perspective, starting with Michael Anton, who wrote this famous essay, infamous essay, the Flight 93 election. And that's where he. I mean, there was a lot of stuff in there. It was about the Great Replacement Theory, deep down, it was about how the conservative establishment had failed to protect, to conserve anything. But he also gave a clear definition of Trumpism, which was that it stands for economic nationalism, secure Borders, and America First Foreign Policy. And that was already back in 2016. I mean, it was before the election. But he saw very clearly that Trump represented this older sort of old right, more isolationist, more closed, more nativist and particularistic kind of conservatism. And he saw that Trump could represent that. And he was like, yes, that's our guy.
- [07:13]
A
And I gotta say real quick, and this is going to speak to a theme that we want to engage with later, which is sort of differences between how left liberal spaces operate and right wing spaces operate. So the Flight 93 election comes out, and it was really coming out in a moment where much of the right had just turned against Trump and thought that Trump would be this ultimately, like, disastrous situation for conservatives. So Nash Review has the famous Against Trump essay. There's talk of David French running as a third party candidate. And Anton's essay is just actually saying, and this is why it's the Flight 93 election. He's saying, if you are a conservative and see the direction that America is going under a Obama presidency and then Hillary Clinton's succession, you are faced with a choice. Do you charge the cockpit, as did the original people in Flight 93 on September 11, or do you basically just sit and you may fail, it may not work, but you have to try? And that's what he's really arguing. But I think what's so fascinating, and.
- [08:11]
B
He says, if you don't try, death is certain. I mean, the sensationalism of the rhetoric cannot be overstated. Yeah.
- [08:20]
A
And I think the thing that's interesting, though, is that famously, Rush Limbaugh reads this essay. Rush Limbaugh's reading this essay out loud to his listeners. So when I'm talking about how on the center left, people sort of react to this stuff and say, oh, this is just wonky and it's academic and it's nerdy. What makes the conservative media ecosystem so interesting is that there is a connection between sort of the wonky thinker academic people and the popularizers like Rush Limbaugh. So I just wanted to really note that as an example of how this stuff may seem obscure, but actually there was a huge audience of people who, through the right translator like Limbaugh, would be interested in it.
- [08:57]
B
Yeah. And I think another thing to note about the Claremont people is that they. They've always stood a little bit apart from the rest of the conservative movement or some of the wonkier elements in that they really have stood for kind of cultural engagement and culture warring. Right. They have these summer schools that they run that are. Yeah. Where you would get this sort of educative formation in certain strands of conservative thinking. But they also have these different fellowships for media people. Right. And this has been going on for decades where you go and you learn to write an op ed. You go and you learn to. To talk the talking points, and you learn to network with other conservatives who are young and. Or who are aspiring to those same spaces. So the Claremont people have always been kind of almost anti wonk because they've clear clearly seen we need people who are good speakers, who are educated in certain traditions, who can go out there and make these arguments. And then, yeah, some of the stuff gets picked up.
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A
So the next group you have are the post liberals.
- [10:03]
B
Okay. Yeah. The post liberals are mainly Catholic, conservative Catholic thinkers and writers. And they in some instances, are also enamored of something called integralism. And so there's many of. Some are more or less radical than others. But the people we're talking about here, there's a wonderful. You probably know Kevin Vallier talks about this group as the premier radicalism of The New Right, which I think is a nice phrase. So you've got Adrian Vermeule at Harvard University, Patrick Deneen at the University of Notre Dame, Sohraba Mari, who's probably familiar to everybody, and Chad Pecknold, and then Gladden Papin, who's a big operator, who is a political philosophy PhD from Harvard, but also now works in Hungary as a advisor to Orban and the president of a think tank. And this group is intellectually very different from the Claremont people because they are enamored of certain strands of Catholic conservative thinking and sort of social justice, not social justice, but Catholic social teaching. And so part of the New Right is, as you know, Anton put it, as economic nationalism. But the whole movement also represents a turn against neoliberal economics. And so with the Claremont people, that manifests, it's a little dicey. I mean, they turn against, they stand for economic nationalism. They are open to new ideas about the economy and how to control the economy from a political or statesmanly perspective. But mostly they're for the deconstruction of the administrative state. A lot of the talk about the administrative state and its deconstruction, you can trace that back to an obsession that the Claremont Institute has had for many, many years. But the post liberals are very different in that they want to, they're quite open to communitarian social values and economic values. And so they're more sincere in their turn against neoliberalism economically. And part of what they want to do is embrace the power of the state. They're sort of more authoritarian and more in favor of using the state for their own ends. So that means they're more open to certain left style economic ideas about policy. But it also means they're quite comfortable with a top down government and with authoritarian style of government. And there's also something much more moralizing in their approach. So they will be quite open about their overall purpose of their movement is to create what they call the common good. But that pretty invariably has a religious connotation when they start to unpack what that actually means. And usually it's very vague. But these integralists who I've, I've mentioned, Adrian Vermeule is the most explicitly integralist in his thinking. And that means doing away with the Catholic Church's settlement with modern religious pluralism. And, and they argue that you can reinterpret certain Catholic Church doctrines to actually reintegrate the church and state and to recognize that the state actually should be subsumed, the goals of the state should be subsumed under religious goals and purposes. And so that includes spiritual salvation and also the common good. But the whole idea is that you should, that the secular authorities should be submissive to religious principle. And sometimes they talk about. Vermeil has spoken about integration from within, which is basically this idea that you need to infiltrate the federal bureaucracy with Catholics and with like minded people and redirect the, the sort of reorient, the whole machinery of government. And that though they speak in a Catholic register in, in the post liberal circles, in these Catholic circles, it's also. They're quite comfortable to cooperate with the rest of the new right. Right. It doesn't. It's not like they actually need to have just Catholics infiltrating the state and taking over. It works pretty well with Doge or whatever actually is manifesting.
- [14:23]
A
And I will say I'd love to hear your response to this. So what's sort of there? And this would be for. Because I'm sure there is a million listeners who are wondering this. What is their response to the accusation that this is a parody of what anti papist, anti Catholic Americans accused a Catholic trying to engage in politics in. Like this entire program is a rebuttal of JFK's speech in Houston in the 1960s saying that as a Catholic I can be president because I'm not gonna put my Catholicism and my relationship to the Pope above America and our understanding of the project.
- [15:00]
B
Yeah, that's great. I mean, in the book I try to make it pretty clear that this isn't a broad Catholic tendency on the right, that there are a lot of Catholics on the American right in the intellectual space as I'm describing. And I think that's because many conservatives who are Catholic or who are intellectuals are drawn to Catholicism. I would assume because there's this incredibly rich intellectual history in Catholicism, right, Going back to Aquinas and so on and Augustine. So there's a kind of like mindedness there or a selectivity bias or something. So there are a lot of Catholics on the American right in these intellectual spaces. But I try to make it clear in my book that not all Catholics, not even all conservative Catholics. I mean, you take somebody like Robbie George, who is a much. He's a very Catholic person, right? I mean, he's very much on board with this, this attack on marriage equality that they've just taken on like yesterday and you know, very anti abortion and all of that, but. And he's very well organized and very well connected. He's very political. But he still holds on to a kind of liberal pluralistic vision and religious freedom and market liberalism that, that the rest of these integralists don't. And I think, and so I think it's. I try to differentiate between the post liberal integralists who I think are a big force on the Maganu right. And even the. There are a lot of. Even like the federal, the, the Supreme Court, right, where you have six Catholics. But I don't think they're. I don't think they're following Adrian Vermeil's constitutional model. It's quite. There are a lot of different flavors even of Catholic conservatism in this country. And so the people I'm writing about are quite distinctive on the MAGA new right. And a lot of. And even Robbie George left the Heritage foundation last month or this month over the Nick Fuentes. Right, Right. So you do have some pretty hard lines between these people. And very different. I think. I don't think Robbie George is a Christian nationalist. Right. And I think some of these other people in their. In practice they wouldn't call themselves that they. But they. You know, Adrian Roulamull has a very clear theocratic streak. I mean it's not, it's not hidden.
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A
This is something I'm curious about before I have another question, but I. Because this shows the realignment we're looking at how things are changing. And I just. Anyone who was in conservative spaces and this was remarked about during the time in the 2010s when was sort of in this world during the 2000s, everyone was evangelical, right. It's the George W. Bush presidency. He's very publicly and sort of biographically oriented around the fact that he's a born again Christian. And evangelical institutions like Patrick Henry College and different places like that were at the core of what it was to be on the sort of elite right. At Some point in 2016, when we talk about this in our sort of social group, everyone and their cousins started converting to Catholicism. It became very, very, very cool. So I get that if you are conservative and you're intellectually inclined, like there is sort of a rich Catholic history and doctrine that would make it appealing to you, but it's not always been true that the cat that the right intellectual class is always more identified with Catholicism over like other Protestant faiths, especially during that 2000s period. So like, what about this period do you think drove Catholicism to the forefront? I say this as a person who people tried to convert like three or four separate times. I had to have that weird social dynamic of like, wait A second. We're not just trying to hang out to be friends. This is an open conversion attempt. And let's separate this relationship.
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B
You know, I think you have a better answer for that than I do. I mean, I think there's something. For me, I find the Catholic aesthetic very appealing. I understand the kind of whatever's drawing people to fascism. I think there's something, you know, I wouldn't deny that there's a kind of centrality, you know, central power, authority, dimension to Catholicism and illiberalness compared to Protestantism. Right. That is interesting and seductive. Plus the intellectual history and plus its manifestation in America that I think, and its importance, you know, going back to somebody like Bill Buckley, that you could kind of see how this would be appealing to young, conservative, intellectual style people. But I do think there's a lot of other. There are a lot of other currents, right. On the religious right, including the maga. Right. There's this reform, reformist, Calvinist, bro Culture and the American reformer. You know, those guys. There's all the charismatic world, which is quite different in its aesthetic. And so for me, I don't. I mean, I have. I've joked before, I don't know about just some part of me, like, I understand the draw of fascism and just the idea that, oh, I understand what's right for the world and I'm going to impose my will on the world. And I guess for me, the allure of Catholicism is not hard to understand. Plus, you get all the churches and everything. But I don't know, Marshall, what do you think?
- [20:05]
A
Well, I think that's. I think, because I want to be very clear, I was not alleging with that question that this is cynical, that, like, everyone just sort of sat down after a happy hour and said, okay, I need to be cool and with it, time to be Catholic. Because some people also were attracted to, like, Eastern Orthodoxy, too.
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B
Of course, there's a trend, Right?
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A
Yeah, exactly. So I think this is. And it was funny. I was talking to a buddy of mine who lives in Fredericksburg, Texas, who. He's grown up Catholic, he's Mexican, German American. It's a very specific, like, Central Texas sort of genealogy there. But he was talking about how he was visiting the Catholic Church that his family went to, and there were people with veils on. And it was just a much. It was a much different sort of space than it felt like when he was growing up. And he was sort of like, hey, like, what's the deal there? So I think just sort of like late stage secular, secularism and all of, like, the obvious flaws with that status quoism. I think the specific structure and inherently true from a, like, this is what we are as Catholics and this is how we do it perspective meant that it was just perfect fit for people who would be looking for something was in deep contrast with the 2010s.
- [21:14]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And I think one thing that the post liberal Catholics I write about do is their critique of their critique of liberalism is grounded on this idea of the individualizing anthropology and the idea of autonomy. Right. That that core part of liberal philosophy goes against our human nature, our human collectives. It acts as a solvent on our culture and our communities. And I think there's some truth to that. But I think what Patrick Deneen is the one I'm speaking to specifically, what he completely neglects is the extent to which Protestantism is bound, the extent to which that tradition of liberalism is also bound up with Protestantism. Right. And this idea that you. The theological principles of all of, you know, evangelical world and Protestantism about your own sort of individual autonomy. Right. That's my understanding. And so there's a kind of tension there, though, between a religion that wants you as an individual to find your way to God. Right. And the Catholic mode, which is quite different and takes on sort of authority in a much different flavor and direction. So there's much more authority built into Catholicism and a hierarchy that Protestantism obviously was trying to do away with and counter in really deep ways. And so there's those really deep tensions that I think emerge from all of this. But they're happy to cooperate in practice. I mean, let me be very clear about that.
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A
And I think the other question about the post liberals, before we get to the national conservatives, is, as you probably know, there was a lot of sort of post neoliberal philanthropy interest in engaging with the right, both because there's a very deep bipartisan urge within the world of philanthropy, even at sort of like very quote unquote liberal foundations, they want to sort of, and actually have to, for a variety of 501c3 tax reasons, engage with both sides. So what was interesting about the post liberals, and this was a shift between the late 2000 and tens and like today, is that the post liberals got a lot of attention and interest from people within, like center left reformist philanthropy, because they were like, oh, wow, like this common good idea, when you apply it to economic things is actually really great. Like, we really identify that, like, you could restate the whole, you know, Deneen's whole individualism is Atomizing. And you could basically say, yeah, and when you add neoliberal capitalism to that, no wonder we're all on our phones in our rooms doing Couchy bets over disagreements with your grandfather at the Thanksgiving table. That was an example that the Couchy CEO brought up. So like the center left was most attracted to this category of persons. And what I always tried to emphasize to them is that. So I'd love to hear from you sort of how you think, because this is the sort of news you can use part of the podcast. I know some of these grand offices are listening how you advise them to engage with these new rights bases. Because what I always said is you are always going to be attracted to sort of the front facing layer of these projects. So whether it's the. We needed to rethink the American economy and actually capitalism causes all these problems. And I just saw time after time, lots of excitement about that and very little looking at the other side of the table that these people very much believe in, which is like to your point, the integralism and those different categories. So how would you just sort of, how do you just think about the challenge of engaging with the good ideas here and the ideas that you would probably not want to put on your sort of grantmaking at the end of the year, sort of roundup?
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B
Yeah, I mean, I think what's really difficult about these integralists is they're very, very savvy and smart and they sometimes use rhetoric that I think is deceptive. And the problem is that they've got a very, they've got a very radical critique of liberal democracy that they are pushing, including of individual political freedoms and civil rights.
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A
Yep.
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B
And they don't like the narratives of rights. And they don't. They say nothing to protect political freedoms. They are silent on political freedoms. And I think that they have a, you know, I think they're quite happy to undermine a lot of political freedoms. So they, but they do have a lot of interesting ideas. They're willing to shake up the. On economics and the stuff that I'm perfectly happy to, to consider or look at, I think. And they've had a lot of success. I mean, let's be frank. I think one, I was at a conference that we hosted at the Illiberalism Studies program and Matthew Schmitz from Compact magazine was there and somebody asked him, so in reality, who's the most post liberal politician out there? Like, what are we actually talking about? And he said, oh well, that's easy. It was Joe Biden. And I don't know if he was just trolling us.
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A
No, no, no. This is very deeply believed.
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B
And so I think that, and that's true that Joe Biden did take up a lot of these economic policies, the infrastructure bill. Right. That was a lot of this stuff. I mean, just kind of taking these material things seriously and taking the policies, just looking at them and just being willing to think creatively and differently about some of these questions. That's well and good. But those guys also admitted that Donald Trump would never be the the Trumpism would or the GOP would never be the true the vehicle for the working class during the Biden administration. There were several pieces that came out from, you know, Glad and Papin and others. So they were perfectly willing to admit that. But they don't care because they don't care about political rights. They care less about the economy than they do about these other moral, you know, the other moralizing part of the common good. Right. Which is this top down. They don't care much about restricting a limited government. Right. Including in its sort of spiritual dimensions. Right. Like modern liberal democracy was founded in part to push against a totalizing religious style of government and hierarchy. And the post liberals, I think, are quite eager to bring that kind of totalizing authority back into our politics.
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A
So before we get to the last category, national conservatives, I will say from a Fun facts from the 2010s theme for this episode. The Realignment Podcast was actually launched at the first National Conservatism Conference. My old co host Sagar and Jetty and I interviewed J.D. vance in the basement before his remarks. So like that is my. So I will actually just always have a soft spot for the national conservatives. Yoram Mazzoni's been on this podcast before, but I just really admire intellectuals who think the work they do actually really, really matters and then aggressively try to integrate said ideas with the way political operators and sort of the more hacky parts of things think. Because a frustrating thing I've experienced now that I'm very aggressively in center left cases is that I struggle to think of a Euromazzoni of like the center left when there's a lot of ideological opportunity who thinks that like I don't exist like adjacent to or below these sort of political people. Like we are all operating on a plane and these need to be integrated well. So like that is my separate from Yoram's ideas. Just sort of my praise of it at an infrastructure level and where you can just have stuff like the realignment come from it. But so yeah, introduce The National Conservatives.
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B
Yeah, we can get into that other stuff, right, because it's so interesting, the differences in the asymmetries here and how it all. Why that is and how it works. The National Conservatives are organized around the principle of nationalism, right. And Yoram Hazoni wrote this book in 2018 called the Virtue of Nationalism. And it was a full throated defense of nationalism in the old style of distinct nation states that are relatively homogenous, that share a religion, a history, a language, and not necessarily an ethnos. Right. That, that he explicitly sort of denies. But it easily, you could see how it easily would tip into that. And I think that it's a. And they've had a lot of controversy over the extent to which it is necessarily going to tip into that, given the real world history of this country and of countries around the world. But anyway, it's basically the National Conservative Movement, as you know, is this umbrella organizing group for the Maganu, right. And it's the place where everybody can agree they want to be nationalists and that a far more unified vision of America should be forged. And in Hazoni's view, the international order should be the place for diversity, but within a nation state, you really do want ideally homogeneity. And so it's the framework that I think is the most political. It's where politicians and donors and all of these thinkers and wonks get together and are on panels together and schmoozing and all of that. And so they've been hosting these conferences since 2019, I guess, the one you were at. And yeah, it's this sort of smorgasbord. It's also, you know, nationalism, international, right. Where they're working with other basically reactionary groups around the world to rebuild the world order in this vein. Right. As these distinct sovereign nation states.
- [30:55]
A
So I think one last quick question before we get into the how are things different then? And how should people think about this? I lived in a group house from 2017 to 2019 and we had eight people in the house. Half of us worked in the conservative intellectual space, think tanks, magazines. Throw in a Washington Post columnist writing from the right. And then the other half of the people were campaign RNC people. So they were working on elections. These were people who then went into the White House and worked in the more operational jobs. And we all got along together as friends. But when we'd throw parties, we'd like throwing parties. There'd be a clear demarcating line between like intellectual crowd and like the RNC people. So Imagine sort of like a sea of, like, SEC school polos from, like, the RNC political types, and then sort of like the intellectual media people to the side. So the question for you is, like, given like this, especially given the diploma divide, how did ideas and like, sets of ideas like this fit our event intersecting with a political environment where I do not imagine a 2015 person who'd worked for Jeb Bush, one of the roommates, thinking, yep, we're gonna let this reorient our movement into things. How did this. Actually, this is sort of a whole other podcast, but I would just love. I think that's probably just a question that someone's gonna kind of wonder, like, where. And this is a good lead into the. How. How are things then different on other sides when it comes to ideas and policy? How did these esoteric, seemingly esoteric ideas translate into actual power?
- [32:31]
B
Well, I think they. They saw an opportunity in Trump, and they were able to articulate things that Trump wanted and that were resonating, but they were able to give voice to that and put it down in a register that would at least be somewhat interesting to more wonky types of D.C. people. Right. And that they could write papers, they could design policy of a kind. And so gradually, I mean, I don't know that. That obviously, they didn't need these guys to win in 2016. Right. You know, Rush Limbaugh read the essay and stuff, but who knows whether that made any kind of electoral difference. I doubt it, but who knows? But I think that we saw in the first administration how, you know, the limits of some of what these. What Trumpism could accomplish, because they didn't have sort of wonks on the team, and they didn't really have people with much capacity to do this other kind of work. And so these guys saw clearly that that was necessary. They started coordinating. They started reaching out to one another. You know, Michael Anton and Deneen are on debates together that would never would have happened before. They're very. They're from different, you know, totally different universes. So they're getting together, they're going to these conferences, they're getting to know one another, and then they're building manifestos that they're all signing together. And so they're building a movement and providing, you know, against David Frenchism and good little quippy, you know, phrases and things to rally around that are going to excite young people on Capitol Hill. And then they do. I mean, then they. Then there was, like, January 6th, and you get John Eastman in the thick of this thing. And these Claremont guys just spouting off absolutely irresponsible conspiracies about election fraud, just going full on for it. And I mean, honestly, at that point, I thought that they would fail and that the Trumpism would be over. And I don't think I was the only one. You know, I think a lot of people that's not just you thought they saw the writing on the wall, but they didn't. You know, they persevered. They kept at it. They thought, no, well, who cares about Trump for a while? And they went and they organized with DeSantis and they tried in Florida and they floated their, their policies and they went after CRT with a propaganda campaign, basically. Right. Not to say that there's no truth about, you know, critical studies or that there's nothing there, but they really did openly manufacture that crisis and they were explicit about that. That's what they were doing with Christopher Ruffo. Right. So they kept at it. They start, you know, Hillsdale, did their big program about their new curriculum for patriotic education and all of this. Right. They just kept going and then they kept organizing. There were new institutions. They took over the Heritage foundation and then they, you know, NATCON became bigger and bigger even after January 6th. And so their big tent grew and grew in all kinds of terrible directions, too. Right. You've got the groipers now kind of in their weird tent and all of this. But they just, they kept at it. They were determined. And then, and then they helped Trump get back in. They did pro, and then they had Project 2025 ready to go and the country wasn't really seeing this, wasn't really ready to see Project 2025 and take it seriously. I, I mean, I, I was watching all this very closely and I didn't know whether to take it seriously, you know, because you never know what, what they're actually going to go through with. And then they got J.D. vance, they got their guy, right, to be the, the nominee, the, you know, on the ticket. So they've just had success after success. Again, I don't maybe there's probably more to it in terms of how we could articulate what the success like how they have been so successful. But, and I'm still kind of, I've written the book about it and I'm still perplexed, but I think that there's some combination of things and partly just a shameless use of rhetoric. And I'm comfortable at this point calling it propaganda. I don't so much in the book. Right. But there's a lot of indoctrination and propaganda happening here and lying that that's a kind of shamelessness that gets that I think is does help you build power.
- [36:52]
A
Well, I think you, before we get to the last big section that you and I care a lot about, you kind of actually gave you the answer to how they took power in terms of once again, not wonky, but sort of potentially esoteric ideas. Just like being in charge of everything. In 2015, 2016, Trump demolished the Reaganist, the Reaganite architecture that organized the Republican Party, right? Like Ronald Reagan's articulation of conservative principles and ideas and the way things work and what we do. Trump knocks that down, but he as an individual is interested in sort of like the bold, broader versions of knocking that down. So he's sort of like, yeah, I actually don't beef with Medicare and actually, yeah, immigration's not great and we need a wall and we do intervene in wars too often. But those are just like bullet points. Those aren't actual policies and broader things. So the reason why this magnue right was able to take power so quickly is that everything was demolished and there was this window of opportunity, especially given the staffing challenge and sort of the interest in funding a lot of his work. And frankly, just having interesting personalities like Steve Bannon to just jump into that open void in space and just talk a lot. That is actually straight up what I think happened. Because everyone else had banked on Trump losing. So because they banked on Trump losing, they did things that made them illegitimate for the next two or three years.
- [38:11]
B
So for the last, I'll add one thing. I mean, I think that the stagnancy of the overall culture, right, and the sort of shock of the whole country, or like not the whole country, but. But the centrists, the independents, the liberals just not having anything to say about so much of this, right? And just being at a loss. I mean, I guess there was a lot said. I'm not saying, I mean, I don't mean to be too critical here or too contemptuous, but there was a kind of vacuum there too, that I think really was by 2024. And by 2023 and 2024, when you have Biden running again and that whole just like slow motion train wreck of the Democratic Party leadership, I think that was, you know, they were. The new right was able to absolutely exploit that vacuum and exploit that real vulnerability. Plus, you have all the cultural stuff, right? The cultural foment. You have Covid and you still have this kind of languishing liberal culture that has had a hard time articulating its itself.
- [39:20]
A
Well, no. And so for this last section, we're going to talk about sort of how both my time in this movement, like your time going to seminar's run in this book, sort of informed the way we sort of interpret the problems of the liberal side. So like number one, I love what you just said about speaking to the culture because my biggest frustration, this is why you're right to differentiate these people from wonks. I have a deep frustration with both like center left and left wing wonkery. So Bernie Sanders populism is obviously like invigorating and obviously you have zoron, but they still only know how to talk in terms of like policy ideas. So Medicare for all, free public busing, universal daycare, these can all be good ideas on their own merits. But what the new right has at a sort of cultural propagandistic advantage perspective is they talk about culture and they talk about decline and they talk about even like the human soul and the good. And these are things that conservatism has. But I'd love you to talk about how now you've been on this tour and you've been really thinking about this. What are differences that you notice? And this could include your time in higher education. I know is something top of mind for you. What have you learned about your own spaces that you and I live in from a DC think tank perspective from this work?
- [40:41]
B
Well, let me say add to the pile on a little bit. I mean, if you. I think I have a line at the end of the book where I talk about the. There's the poll testing, right. That the Democrats are just obsessed with. And then the Hollywood stuff. I mean, they think a good message is just going to be like George Clooney and Julia Roberts, like maybe in 2016 that wasn't like really harmful. But at this point, I think those voices, I mean, I don't think the people of America want to hear from them. You know, I don't think it's real, it's not authentic and it's really tiresome. So I think that, I mean, it just sort of, to me, when I see them doing that again and again with the montages and the whatever and the ads, it's like it just, it just, it's just like a demonstration of the hollowness, like don't they have anything to say for themselves? So anyway, just, I just wanted to say that. Okay, so the question is.
- [41:33]
A
So for example, you do a lot of work in higher education.
- [41:36]
B
Yeah.
- [41:36]
A
And I would just be curious what this sort of intellectual journey and work you've done. How is it. Because higher ed's like the. I think everything in America is about higher education. That's like sort of one of my broadest sort of theses. So what has this sort of informed your thoughts on, like, what's wrong with higher education? Because I think that. I think what the new right does really well, better than the center left and even left, is they raise good questions. And I think there have been some good questions raised about American higher education. And I think what the administration is doing is not going to resolve any of those questions in the long term. But just like, what are your sort of like within that frame then? Like, what are your thoughts on higher ed?
- [42:08]
B
Yeah, I mean, so I want to contextualize this again a little bit within the book because one of the big sub themes of the book is higher education, because I think it was a really important sub theme of what was happening with Trump and in our. In our. In our culture. Right. And in these culture wars that we've been through. You have the 1619 project put up by the New York times. Right. In 2019. And then you have this massive reaction by the people I write about. Right. Just thinking they're saying that the 1619 people were trying to destroy the culture, destroy the country. They took so much offense at these black intellectuals and journalists making their case for a different way of understanding history in the New York Times Magazine. I mean, they just lost their mind. And then you had the George Floyd protest.
- [43:00]
A
Can I say one thing, though? And this is where my right wing origins will come out, as they occasionally do. I think the thing that particularly triggered conservatives on this note was the curriculum. So remember, there was a curriculum built around the project that would go beyond the op ed page into schools. And I just like being in those circles. The idea that then American states and liberal captured governments would then impose. Because as you know, there were some very serious critiques of the 1619 Project.
- [43:33]
B
Oh, yeah. I'm not trying to, like, I'm trying to contextualize this. Not.
- [43:36]
A
Yeah, I just want to give. I want to sort of speak up for like them a little bit.
- [43:40]
B
No, and I think that. But the problem for me, and I mean this is part of the story, is they acted like this curriculum had been. Had taken over public education and as though it were a monolithic curriculum rather than a curricular, like a curriculum supplement. Right. Like it was designed as a supplement, not as like a takeover. This is going to be the new curriculum, is my understanding. I mean, I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong.
- [44:04]
A
Well, no, no. So, yeah, and this is the thing too, where I think a. Let's just posit that people who have these reactions were not reading line by line how the criteria would be implemented. But what I just wanted to say though is like talking with people as this was happening. It was not. There's a New York Times bet on that. It's that actually. But you just said it. It's a project. But let me just like push you some more too on this because this is sort of. Sorry, I just, I love talking about.
- [44:31]
B
Curricular questions are extremely. They are where these questions like manifest.
- [44:37]
A
So this is where the takeover thing is less about like conspiracy and more of it like I think they would understand 1619 as a culmination of a 50 years post 60s project that promoted. And once again, as you said, the Claremont people are rooted in the American founding that promoted skepticism of the Founding Fathers, that promoted skepticism of the American Nation, that promotes 1990. I'm a child of the 90s. I remember all the cosmopolitanism of my elementary school classroom where you have all the multi colored multinational kids with hands holding around the classroom. So they would say that actually this was. That like there actually was a takeover and we define our project as defeating this takeover. And now that Trump is our president, we don't have to put up with it. I think that's what they would say.
- [45:29]
B
Yeah. And I'd say that in pockets, in elite spaces, in certain parts of the culture across the country, there has been a kind of takeover. Right. But it certainly isn't universal. And that the, the 1619 project authors, I think conceived of themselves as still operating as a corrective against the basic mainstream way people are educated in high school and stuff in this country, that they are ignorant about all of these other ways of interpreting it and seeing that history. And so yes, at Harvard there's the takeover. Right. And certainly in our broader culture there's a kind of liberal. I guess for me it's hard to speak about because I. Partly because I grew up in Canada. Right.
- [46:11]
A
But that was a well timed about.
- [46:13]
B
You know, I think that in many parts of this country people are not educated in anything like the 16. I mean, in anything even, you know, that it's still a very, some cases backwards education in high school. And you know, you know, in the South, I had students at Texas who still thought, you know, who thought about the Civil War as a states rights issue. I don't think. I don't know. I think that there's this huge amount of diversity in the country in terms of how. And like regional variety in terms of how people are educated. And some of it leans very much in one direction and some places it's very much in another direction. And it's very hard to get any kind of synthetic like lesson about how people are educated. Right. That's part of the problem. But you need these different voices. And so the problem would be that any one of these interpretations would. If the problem comes when any one mode dominates to the exclusion of all the others. And I don't think that the 16. I mean, I think in some spaces that has happened where you can't defend anything about Thomas Jefferson without getting attacked. And that I think is a real shame, you know, And I think they overstepped some things in the 1619 project. But I think what we really need is a multiplicity.
- [47:31]
A
And to be clear, and this is why I wanna emphasize that my sort of pushback to you is transitioned from the 1619 Project specifically and more to the takeover thing. So this is also where my background is relevant. So a funny thing that me and my buddies used to comment on in the 2010s is that the most aggressive and ambitious New Right people came from blue states, from upper middle class, graduate school educated families. So this is why this is not a counter to you. But there's a Texas and a Daleks excerpt, someone who, somewhere who goes to Texas Tech, who has like retrograde views on America's racial history. But the thing about the New Right is because the New Right is such an elite movement, they don't care. That person is actually not actually the. That person's kind of like a foot soldier who will vote Republican, but they're not ultimately their community. And then the other thing, and this is why, like I'm realizing we're not even. It's not that we're talking past each other other, but I think both of our articulations are compatible and that what they would basically say is like, and this is why the right was well established to sort of fit into this. A huge part of the New Right project is pushing back on the control by elite liberals over culture, education, government and politics and the sort of liberal hegemony that's existed in the first place. And even before the New Right came about, like think of all the fun funding for a lot of these conservative programs in the 60s and 70s. It was like old rich dudes who aided the New Deal who said like liberalism controls everything. Nixon is proposing universal health care. We need to do something different and be more.
- [49:05]
B
And they're saying we should study gender in our universities.
- [49:08]
A
Exactly. It's entirely. Which should be understood through the context of the 60s revolution, which is, put it this way, even while you're bringing out my right wing Marshall translator here, sort of the key and Peel joke with the Obama translator. So this is right wing Marshall speaking. I think if URA came up in the New Deal beer era, experiencing the difference between the America of 1962 and 1973, I could actually see myself saying the horror over what sort of happened versus sort of like how we sort of feel about this today. Like, I think that was like a maybe like unhelpful or an incorrect. But I understand the kind of feeling there. So like they're just so focused on this elite project that they're going to basically say like, so you're right, Laura. If you go to like, you know, second or three tier state universities in like the broad swath of the country, you're not going to see the 1619 Project in those ideas. But like if you go to the flagship research university of every single state and you go to all of the top 50 schools, you're going to see academic departments that are run entirely by 16, by the audience that's supposed to consume the 1619 project. And then that's why we see New York City. They remove the Thomas Jefferson statue from the city council meeting. So like that is the story and the dynamic that they're operating in that they would then acknowledge privately because I will say, having interacted with them and this isn't the sort of like, oh, they have black friends. I do not think that the people we're describing are like racist and would like, would say there are. I luckily never like, because I'm Jewish and black, I had a good sort of aura of like, I'm not going to interact with spaces with the part of these people who are anti Semites and are racist. So there are people here who sort of would advocate against 1619 who I could credibly say like, are not people who I would define as like being racist. And just like one other side note, like, just to make this tangible for people, I was once at a party where like I mentioned that my wife and I are Jewish and someone was like, you shouldn't have said this to that person. So like, this is the level to which, this is the level to which like I was actively thinking about this, which is not A good defense of 2021, Marshall's social scene. But my point is, like, they would say it's bad that a Daoist excerpt kid thinks slavery didn't happen in a way that it happened. But also 1619 project is really wrong. So that's just the delineation I wanted to make.
- [51:28]
B
Yeah, no, and I try to capture some of that in the book and some of that nuance in terms of just like, setting up the context for some, you know, that did. The 1619 project happened, the George Floyd protests happened and a lot of, you know, destructive rioting and stuff. Right. And the new right guys really reacted very, I think, extravagantly to a lot of that and made these big generalizations. And I think some of it was maybe not individually rounded in race, but the overall flavor of it I thought was pretty offensive and, you know, dismissive of some of this scholarship, which I think wasn't trying to take over everything, was trying to, I think, that act as a corrective on the. The mainstream sort of mode of understanding of Americans and sort of basic American jingoistic, you know, history just. Anyway, but I also, like. So I tried to say, you know, this is. Some of this is a racist reaction, but then I tried to dig a bit deeper, deeper and be like, why are these people getting triggered by this? And I. And I tried to give voice to some of my own frustrations with some of this stuff in the broader academy. Right. And how certain sort of critical modes or deconstructive modes or postmodernist modes of inquiry have taken over the universities.
- [52:46]
A
Can you define those real quick for people?
- [52:48]
B
Well, I mean, I just.
- [52:51]
A
What's the vibe you're basically talking about?
- [52:53]
B
Well, the vibe I'm just talking about. About, like, deconstruction and critique, where you take an old text and you. I mean, in my. When I was young, it was, you know, everybody would talk about. I would tell somebody I was reading or studying Plato, and they'd be like, oh, and all the other dead white guys. Right. I mean, okay, yeah, that's sort of like. And they wanted to take. They might be reading Plato too, right? But. But they're doing it in a mode that wants to deconstruct the social history there, that wants to say, okay, who's being neglected by this? Who's being opposed to oppressed by this. This way of thinking, rather than saying, okay, what is Plato telling us about the structure of our souls or about, you know, the structure of reason in the universe or, you know, what have you. Or, like, the critique of the Homeric religion and what might be a better, you know, model for people in Greece? Whatever. Like, there's just. There's so much rich stuff in Plato, and there's a reductive. I think it's a reductive, generally a lot of this criticism, or like, the critical studies. Right. And in like. Which was very devo de rigueur in when I was a. When I was an undergraduate, I think it has been for many, many years. There's something that can be very reductive about that. I also want to be clear. Like, I love that stuff. Like, I think critical race theory. I mean, that's a legal form of, you know, it comes from the legal world. It's very valuable. It has a lot of, like, important insights. Insights. Postmodernism is tied to kind of this deconstructive mode where you're sort of looking for the power dynamics and thinking that stuff through. I think that stuff can be valuable. I'm not here to dismiss, like, all the postmodern scholars out there or, like, give Foucault a hard time, but I think it's lopsided. I think that it also. It can and it can't be the only thing that is offered at a university, and it isn't. Right. There are always other people exploring other modes. But I think there has been a real preponderance of this critical approach that often turns into a kind of identity politics, or that at least is bound up with people who were oppressed, trying to reassert themselves in the academy or at least assert themselves and find space in the academy. Right. You have feminine, you know, gender studies programs and race studies programs, African American studies. These are all happening in the 60s and 70s by people who, I think were trying very rightly to find space. Space for their own traditions, their own, you know, study their own people. Right. Those are all worthwhile things. But I think that over time, it became the habit. It became the only mode of inquiry. And again, I'm speaking very broad strokes. It was never the only mode. This is a massive country with, you know, thousands of universities and all kinds of serious scholarship. So we do have to be careful. But there's a kind of tendency that got, I think, in trouble, entrenched, certainly in the Ivy leagues that became very, you know, they talk about the hermeneutics of suspicion. Right. And kind of critical, tearing things down, mode of inquiry. And instead of something that might investigate, you know, in the Plato. I've already given the example from Plato. Right. That you might explore what's the meaning of the good, what drives us as, as human beings, what the state of our souls do you need to have a soul that's in, you know, that's like integrated, whatever. You've got all these like rich spiritual questions and scientific questions. But there are all, there are so many different versions of that, right? Of a more formative kind of education rather than. That celebrates some of the achievements of the past. Whether we're talking about like great man history or there's all different, there's many different idioms in which to speak about these other kinds of education. The New Right is very good about speaking about other styles of education, about different styles of formation, virtue seeking. I mean, the Hillsdale people, all they talk about is the good, the true and the beautiful. And they talk about it as if it's one thing that you can study and draw charts about. But that's a powerful thing. And, and I think that in academia we are sort of tongue tied. I'm tongue tied, right, to describe some of the things I've experienced that are maybe about the good and the true and the beautiful, but they're also about reason. They're also about appreciating, you know, greatness. They're also about appreciating, you know, beautiful styles of literature or. And they're also about critique, right? I mean, the school of thought I come from when I, I mean, it's the Straussian thing, you can read all about it in the book. But what I loved about my Straussian teachers was that they basically red pilled us, right? They were just like, you need to question everything you've ever been taught about liberal democracy because you're being. Because otherwise you're getting indoctrinated into a cave, right? Going back to Plato. And you're not. You won't have self knowledge, you won't know why you think the things you think, think. And you won't be, you won't be a good citizen and you won't be. And you won't be a thoughtful person and you'll just be taking everything for granted. And so it's super critical, super deep, like critique in a way that's not. I think there's a way of understanding Plato as having a kind of radical postmodernism even built into that. So I'm not saying we should abandon critique or critical race theory or any of that stuff, but I'm saying we need to become more, much more deliberate about our, our modes of interpret, of interpretation and of education and to foster other things, right? Like, I mean, I, I could go on and on, Marshall, as you know, right. About the great books and about different parts of our history that we need to understand and explore. But I think that that is something that, I mean, to just sort of situate us again in our conversation.
- [58:36]
A
Yeah.
- [58:36]
B
I think one thing that the MAGA New right has done so well is exploit this deep vulnerability in liberal democracy about meaning making. Right. Liberal democracy was born of an effort to combat religious tyranny, to combat entrenched hierarchies of various kinds. And part of that project was to sort of lower the temperature and, you know, have commerce and different things to occupy people so that they wouldn't be killing each other over the meaning of the Trinity or whatever. But part of that meant sort of actively turning people away from questions about the good life. Right. And sort of, I mean, I'm speaking obviously very broad historical strokes, but I think that was part of what happened. And part of the intention of the early modern thinkers was to like actively like say, okay, let's think about science, let's think about invention, let's think about commerce. And so that has led, I think, for a long time. I mean, the post liberals will say, oh, we coasted on the fumes of these old religions and now it's all died out and we were just left floundering in our amoral degeneracy. And I don't think that's right, but I think there has been a kind of benign neglect and staleness that's set in right, where we don't really know how to think about the good and about morality and we don't know how to talk about it or deliberate about it. So there's a kind of brittleness that comes into our politics where we're very self righteous and also completely incapable of speaking about things like literature and religion. But we're very sure that we're right a lot of the time. So anyway, that's kind of a sub theme of the book because I think that the. We don't really. Liberals have a hard time talking about some of this, about knowing their own self themselves, right. And, and then the new right comes along and they're like, oh, well, we don't have any trouble. We know, we know, we know what a good life is. We know what a good moral authority, what a good vision of moral authority looks like, and we are happy to impose that and we're happy to give all you men, you know, 25 podcast hours worth of answers. And so when you're faced with this sort of stale, stagnating old liberals, right, or the old establishment. And then you're faced with these, with like Joe Rogan and Josh and the Tate brothers or what have you and then all of these young MAGA new right guys. I mean the contrast is pretty striking.
- [61:16]
A
So one last quick response and then just like one broader question to close us out. So I think it was helpful to hear in your articulation of like your higher ed perspective, which is, is obviously regardless of my disagreements. Cause we should talk about the sort of society we wanna live in. And I wanna live in a society where if a professor wants to teach CRT or critical theory or 1619 project, they can do it. It gets a little more complicated with K through 12 education because there are school boards and whatever. But I'm not that you're proposing this, but I'm sort of really thinking hard about then what was so triggering about, about that period for people in ways that sort of attracted me to the right. And I think what it was was you have these sets of ideas which on their own are like any other idea. But there was genuinely a identity politics driven illiberalism to that era. And that is what triggered people and really read people. So the example I would give is so I went to the University of Oregon, like a, you know, more than decently good, like flagship research university. And I remember the first time I was introduced to a privilege walk. It is like privilege walks are stupid. Sorry, I'm just gonna say it's a stupid idea. And sorry, if your brain, if you require this cultural revolution style exercise of walking forward, if you have more privileges than someone else to understand the idea that given our country's history white people are gonna have more wealth than other people, then you're an idiot. Sorry, we don't need to. It's one of those things where, where like you could explain the entire set of lessons from the privileged walk in one tidy paragraph. Making people then not just hear that paragraph but go through the exercise feels like a like illiberal. No, not feels like. Is like an illiberal imposition that is often conducted by people who work for the university. And that's what my experience was. Right, right.
- [63:16]
B
Professors or was it an administration making people do that?
- [63:19]
A
These were, these were university funded student groups with their university affiliated leaders of like the multicult are making us do this. Here's the thing, what made this illiberal though was the fact that you clearly could not object to any of this because there are liberal again because a If you objected, you'd be described as like a conservative or like a Republican. And why I really focused on the word illiberalism and I didn't have this language until recently. The reason why these were bad and were, I think, justifiably triggering without requiring you to become fully maga New Right is the idea that as a college student, as an adult, if you find yourself in an environment where you. And obviously I would never have raised my hand and said this is stupid, but I should have felt like I could have said without being tarred with the conservative label, hey, actually I'm very skeptical of this exercise and I'm willing to hear your argument, but I'm not really comfortable participating. That's illiberal. Right. So I think that is what. So I think it's so important. I think you. And given your work here, I think you're great at doing this. I think you were just able to separate critical theory and CRT in 1690. So these actual sets of ideas from the clearly illiberal. And once again, it just stemmed. This was rooted in identity politics just in the sense of sort of like. And I think the way this sort of operationalized itself, which is if a person within sort of like 2010's liberal racial hierarchy is lower on the totem pole or has less privilege, whatever they say basically goes. That's my interpretation of like identity politics.
- [64:53]
B
In this context and how it manifests in many. Any of these contexts. Right. Yeah, yeah.
- [64:58]
A
So I just wanted to really call that out.
- [64:59]
B
Forced disclosure. Right. It's a forced disclosure and like that of something that should be your own private thing that's really nobody's business. Especially when you. I mean, I think generally I would never. I don't think those things are valuable. Right. That sounds. In any context. I can't imagine a context in which a privilege walk. Unless you're maybe part of some group therapy thing. Right. I mean, and you.
- [65:19]
A
That's a good one. I could actually see.
- [65:22]
B
But whatever. I mean, even. And then like, why. I mean, maybe you go for training with d' Angelo or whatever. If you're voluntarily going for that, then good for you. But. But no, you've got. I, I mean, there's a kind of ill liberalness to. Absolutely. To that kind of forced disclosure of the, of the self. And that's why even. Like, I think for young people there are a lot of really thorny questions here, even about pronouns. Right. Like, or even about just a lot of these gender based things where it's like you, you don't need to know what those things about yourself at 20 years old, let alone disclose them to others in a forest environment. I mean, I, I mean I haven't thought through all of this super carefully, but I think it's. I agree there's something very liberal about that. And I mean my own experience is just with like diversity statements which go back, you know, a really long time. And I mean I've written some, but. And I've never, I mean I was writing authentic like things I believed in that I think probably were met the approval of the committee or whatever. But I think, but it did feel like a kind of, of forced, you know, disclosure where it's like it's none of. It's not. Or like, and like a litmus test. Like I think that's just absolutely true about those things and it's a big problem. And it, and I mean we can minimize the effects of that on young people or like, you know, young men or anybody who disagrees or anybody. But it is a kind of coercive conformity is a phrase I love from Jonathan Rauch. That's really dangerous. I mean you're always going to have some of that in a democracy, right? You're always, you're gonna have groupthink, you're gonna have some of these fads. But, and we could talk about which is worse, blah, blah, blah. But, but no, I think that stuff's really harmful. And so that, that's useful to me to think about. Marshall, the way you.
- [67:00]
A
Yeah, just really just sort of giving because you have to offer. Because, because the thing that's hard is that like everyone has this sort of baby with the bathwater out sort of approach to this right now. So like I'm just trying to think how could I give. I'm not gonna continue convince a higher ed administrator at the University of Oregon to ditch crt. It's just not gonna happen without the force of the Trump Education department, which is not something I endorse. So I'm trying to say you do need to make some sort of change. And the change you can make is what ways are we implementing this that are liberal and what are illiberal? And it's very clear what the illiberal version is. So the last quick question for you would just basically be, I'd like you to sort of, without asking you to do advocacy here, I've just encountered over the past year my sort of reaction of center left spaces then is that center left spaces are party first spaces. So you say I'm A Democrat this, I'm a Democrat that. And what I love about your book is that the word Republican very rarely comes out unless it's in a very specific Trump context. Instead, it's very much, much more ideological. So I'm just trying to get folks to think more ideology actually matters, matters. It's not academic, it's not esoteric. And because you've just written a book how these people who spent 20, 30, 10 years thinking about deep ideology and now have taken power, I would just raise this book to any person who says, marshall, you're just doing your DC think tanky thing again. When I'm like, no, we literally saw this happen. And just in the same way that Trump knocked down Reaganism, so there was an ideological opportunity. I think now that liberalism suffered. The 2024 election and just the broader unpacking of the past 15 years, I think there's just as much good ideologically centered work to be done that should bring in new types of people who aren't just your typical sort of political science or philosophy PhD. So I'd love you to just close on ideology and why. I hope at least I've picked up that you care about it, why that matters.
- [68:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, I talk in the book about what I call the ideas first approach to politics, right? And I say that this is a major strength of the MAGA New Right and also a liability because of the ideas they're putting first are pretty radical, pretty against the mainstream, but they do have this facility with the traditions that we all kind of know about, but they have a kind of much richer investment in it. Right. Whether it's the founders or the Catholic social teaching or basic ideas about political philosophy or American conservatism, as you know, they've got these cultural institutions that propagate this stuff, that it's quite insular or tight knit maybe is a nicer word, right? Where you've got these different communities of young people who have these opportunities to go to these programs and to be educated and formed in the conservative tradition. And that means there's a kind of unity of purpose. They can get together and there's all this institution building and networking and so. And they also recognize that ideas matter in such a way that they build institutions out from that. And so the example that we see right now is all of these civics institutions, which I think are quite well meaning and led by people who think that they're conservative civics institutions that they're building in red states all across the country, right? These sort of humanities liberal arts programs that they think that that's one way through to help combat some of the extremism on the right. To find a way through that. Like that's. That's richer and that's just more grounded. Right. I think some of them are pretty maga. I think they're facing all kinds of problems. And I'm not. I'm not, you know, overall necessarily a partisan of exactly that model. But you don't see. I mean, you're more familiar with the liberal sort of organizing world here in D.C. and those spaces.
- [70:51]
A
I mean, there. There isn't. And the key thing is there isn't one.
- [70:53]
B
The thing is, there isn't that. Right? There isn't that. And there's. There's all kinds of reasons. It's because it's very diffuse. I think it's because liberal culture is dominant. Right? And DC Institutions are very liberal. They're comfortable with that. They take it for granted. They talk the way they do. They have the priorities. They do. They care about policy. Good for them. I mean, we should care about policy. Right. But it's. There's also just this very difficult to articulate absence. And it's there in higher ed. And it's there, like this gaping hole, right. That I think you and I both can intuit it. It's there in higher ed. It's there in. In our spaces, in our political organizing spaces. And it's a kind of. I think it stems from the taking things for granted history here. That in higher education has meant the rise of a lot of these critical approaches and to the neglect of more sort of traditional form, you know, familiarity with basic history, with sort of, you know, you gotta know what. You've gotta understand things. You've gotta know the tradition before you start critiquing it. Right. You gotta understand it from the inside. And I think that some of that work has been neglected. But what we have now is the. My sense is, in higher ed, the Democrats don't really have a response to these civic institutions. No, they could. A lot of the professors are.
- [72:12]
A
Deal with.
- [72:13]
B
They have. Have.
- [72:14]
A
They have a version, which they don't. The response that they would think about is like, oh, here's the key thing. They don't quite understand what these civic institutions are. So, for example, when they think of, like, civic. And I've had these conversations, they think, okay, so we need to teach people how government works. Because look at the studies. The studies show that, like, no one knows how the three branches of government works when they graduate. So they Think about it. See, they even Wonka fight that one. They turn it into like, here are the facts that people need to learn. It's policy making, structure, but they do not understand. Like, and to be fair, this isn't me dunking on them because if I had not gone through this right wing world that you're describing, I would not understand sort of what they're saying there either. So I think it's really important.
- [72:59]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think a. They have no response except for like, yeah, a kind of nuts and bolts civics course or something. But that's not what we're talking about. Right. And I think that the worst problem though is they won't engage with these new civic institutions. I mean, I think there's a lot of.
- [73:13]
A
I know that, yeah.
- [73:14]
B
I mean they will and they won't. I don't mean to. I mean, I try to keep an eye on this stuff, but I think that there's a kind of, I mean, among professors, there's a real skepticism of these civics institutions and for good reason. They're being funded by this new Department of Education. That's, you know, like it's kind of a crazy situation. Right. So there's all kinds of hostility, which I understand, but I think is sort of misguided because what really needs to happen is a. I mean, by, I don't mean bipartisan, but you need some real engagement on these questions and you need to have some version of this that, like a regeneration of the liberal arts and of the humanities of, you know, all of these areas of inquiry and a better approach. I mean, higher education is a mess for all kinds of reasons. But I mean, what I wish we could see is an old style, sort of mixed mode of education that's celebrated by the left and right. And maybe this is too idealistic, but that is grounded in an old fashioned humanism that embraces, embraces a lot of different traditions and will have different emphases in different regions of the country, obviously, and they'll be constituted differently. But what the new right understands is you need formative education. And I love the language of Aristotle. I mean, Aristotle's understanding is that we need education that is fit for free people. Right. When we talk about liberal education, that means like an education that sort of is a training in free thinking, in deliberation with one another and questioning, and that means a study of our own traditions, including not just Thomas Jefferson, though he should be included, and George Washington and the Founding fathers and the Federalist Papers, but also Frederick Douglass and the 1619 project should have a place in this education. Right. It should be full of contestation and different perspectives. And I mean, then the great books and on. I mean, that's where I sort of conclude my own book is in the higher ed spaces. To say, you know, we do need some vision of this. We need to know what the purpose of education is. And it can't just be career training. There can be, and there also need to be spaces for different. I mean, I'm all for different kinds of, you know, support for the trades. Right. And different. My focus is so much on higher education because that's what I'm familiar with. But community colleges, there's a lot that needs to happen. But I think the kind of liberating education where you become sort of freer and more capable of being a citizen, that's the kind of thing we're talking about. When I'm talking about civics, that's part of it. I mean, also part of it is certainly learning about why the administrative state is important, Congress's role in government. Those things matter, too. And maybe that's more suited to high school. But. But that's how I see it. The void in higher education, for all kinds of reasons, I mean, is, I think, what I've just described, a kind of common culture, common core, that could be very different in different places. It doesn't have to be singularly common.
- [76:16]
A
You know, pluralism.
- [76:17]
B
A pluralism. I'm excited about that kind of possibility. I mean, I think that ideally the moment's right for something for projects like that to be built out. Because I think. I mean, here's the one example I'll give is you've got Jordan Peterson, right? You know Jordan Peterson?
- [76:32]
A
Yes.
- [76:32]
B
He's this pretty bizarre guy who writes, you know, who has his issues with pronouns and then becomes absolutely, you know, just a superstar and writes a book about 12 Rules for Life for young men. Right. That's a very, like, pretty weird set, but, you know, kind of wholesome. Right. And inspires a lot of young people. And he's one of the more sort of. Now he's sort of lost his.
- [76:56]
A
He was the. This is like really the best case scenario for that, at least that period.
- [77:00]
B
Something like this. I mean, you have this guy who's sort of doing something sort of wholesome, but he's got this tremendous following. There's clearly a deep yearning for this kind of thing, and there's not much of that happening anywhere except on the. Right.
- [77:16]
A
And once again, this is because. So, like, you know, you're doing your higher ed thing. Like my project is really. And I added this really helpful conversation with someone like really getting to. Because there have been a lot of articles about like why isn't there a. A liberal center left version of the Claremont Institute, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And what this person I was speaking with, who will be a guest on this podcast soon, hopefully is basically that you have to just understand that all of this conservative infrastructure that people could look at and be envious of now, because now everyone is envious of this. It happened in opposition. So like I said in the 60s and 70s when you saw liberal hegemony in the middle of the New Deal war border, you could just be a rich person and say, wow, we are just out of power. We don't have the thing. So now we're going to build the thing. And we're going to build the thing outside of higher education because we're always going to lose there. There was not a political environment where they could fund and support sort of civic like center right coded civic centers. So I think the opportunity now is for people on the sort of center to center left to left side of the autobase. We say say, hey now, our ideology on a variety of levels is not the dominant one. Therefore the opportunity is ideological and therefore we should build in those spaces. I would love to see an American compass of the center left. Do you know American compass? The funniest thing, I don't know if I mentioned this to you, but I know so many center left people who are in American compass and I'm like, what are you doing there? And they're like, oh, it's just the only place I can engage if I ideas on. Because it's not like.
- [78:48]
B
And get some money.
- [78:50]
A
Well, no, this is like members who go to lunch to dinners, like not. It's. It's.
- [78:54]
B
That's fascinating.
- [78:55]
A
They're just. See, they're just. This is. Yeah. So these are not stipend fellows. These are people who just like want to go to dinners where we say hey, what's up with Venezuela? And have ideas that is not rooted in. And the Democratic Party needs to really come back in the midterms in 2026 or what's message test this. So I just want funders to really realize they're like on paper this may seem esoteric and weird, but now you are in an oppositional space at an ideological level, therefore you should engage ideologically. So I think it's like a fascinating.
- [79:26]
B
Sort of dynamic and we need people who are conversant. Right. And who enjoy this kind of ideological contestation.
- [79:32]
A
Yeah, no, totally. And it's like the actual crescendo here is what's funny about this is there have been a couple books about how. How people have tried to sort of replicate the right wing ideology for philanthropic thing over the past two decades. Every once in a while some big donors try to do it. And reading one of these books, I just sort of realized, oh, these all failed because you didn't have someone like me who actually spent time in the right wing space, or frankly, someone like you, because they would just read a book about how these right wing funders in the 70s did X and they would try to then reconstruct it from that sort of idea. Idea. But then they'd be talking about their conversations and they would talk about these billionaires. George Soros is one of them would be talking. And George Soros would be like, okay, do I give money for ideology stuff or do I give money to support Democrats in the 2006 midterms? I have to choose between these two things. And the people who were trying to get these projects funded did not have the language that I have from being on the right to say, hey, you know how you were interested in doing what the right did? The right would conceive supporting liberalism and supporting the Democratic Party as two different things in the same way that the person who was supporting the Republicans to sort of come back after Watergate was not the same person funding wackadoodle libertarian scholars who ended up underwriting conservative neoliberalism. Right. These are two different projects. But I was like, so you're just reading these transcripts? You're like, no, there's an answer. Answer. It's an easy answer. They couldn't come up with the answer because they were not coming from spaces that have actually already gone through these debates and have delineated. Like, it's funny, like, when you're raising money on the right, like you get money, you know that some donors are party people, some people are ideology people. And you never pitch ideology projects to a party person. You never pitch party projects to an ideology person. So I just. This is what I'm trying to really get to people. So, Laura, I've rented for two long.
- [81:25]
B
Well, I want to add one more thing to you, Marshall.
- [81:27]
A
I don't want to take too much of your time.
- [81:29]
B
No, I know we got to go soon, but I think there's something here too that just speaks to like, what it means to be a citizen and what it means to have principles and to understand one's history. Right. And I think that there's a. There's all the funding stuff, and there's talk about the elections and how to win that and what to invest in. But I think there's also a point at which, like, it's kind of a civic duty to. To have these formative programs, not for the Democratic Party and not even necessarily for, like, liberalism per se, but for, like, civic. I don't even. I don't know about the language of civic education because I think it kind of sounds cloying. Right.
- [82:07]
A
Yeah.
- [82:07]
B
But for, you know, for a kind of formative education in political reality and contestation and just in political history, I think. I think there's a. I mean, I just want to say. I think that as citizens, we need that not as party members. Members. Right. But as citizens of the future. So I would just add that. I don't think it has to be. I mean, I know you're talking beyond partisanship, and that's part of your point with the importance of ideology, but I just think, like, people need to understand that this matters for, like, the future of the country to have citizens who understand what they're fighting for. Right. And why it matters on a level of principle. Right. That they can articulate that, you know, right now on the steps of the Capitol or whatever. Whatever. So that they can articulate what's going wrong. Right. And confront that and use examples from our history to speak to it.
- [82:56]
A
That is well said, Laura. Thank you for joining me. The book is Furious Minds. Thank you for joining me on the realignment.
- [83:04]
B
Thank you, Marshall.