The Furious Minds of MAGA (w/ Laura Field)
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
Laura K. Field's Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, published earlier this month, is a book we simply had to discuss. Listeners to this podcast will recognize its cast of characters—conservative intellectuals like Patrick Deneen, Michael Anton, John Eastman, Adrian Vermeule, and Harry Jaffa, among others—whose ideas and influence Field carefully categorizes and evaluates, bringing order to an unruly decade of intellectual history. Topics include: Leo Strauss and the problem of great teachers; the use and abuse of grand narratives by the right; how the Claremonters went all in on Trump; the permission given by postliberals to some of the nastiest impulses on the right; and more!
Sources:
Laura K. Field, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (2025)
— "Revisiting Why Liberalism Failed: A Five-Part Series," Niskanen Center, Dec 21, 2020
Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (2018)
— Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023)
Matthew Sitman, "Liberalism and the Catholic Left," Commonweal, Dec 3, 2018
Publius Decius Mus/Michael Anton, "The Flight 93 Election," Claremont Review of Books, Sept 5, 2016
Adrian Vermeule, "Integration from Within," American Affairs, Spring 2018
The Editors, "The Fight is Now," The American Mind, Nov 5, 2020
Anemona Hartocollis, "On Campus, Trump Fans Say They Need 'Safe Spaces,'" New York Times, Dec 8, 2016
Further Listening:
KYE: "Rise of the Illiberal Right," July 12, 2019.
KYE: "Midnight in the Garden of American Heroes (On West Coast Straussians)," Feb 11, 2021.
KYE: "Unraveling Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow," June 21, 2021.
KYE: "The Afterlife of January 6," July 19, 2021.
...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!
All right welcome listeners to episode a hundred and twenty five of no your enemy i'm at sitman your podcast cohost and i'm here is always with my great friend sam other bell is a map how are you doing i'm good i'm good i've come out of it we switch places i was yes ill last week and now you're real coming down with something i hope i can ward off it's that time of year the listeners are probably ill too yes but despite some illness and uh insomnia the new your enemy boys continue we soldier on yes exactly trudging forward for the end of the year and what a year it's been but this episode if you're looking for a very like happy hopeful episode this might not be it but it is one that we've been really looking forward to we had on laura k field who is the author of the new book furious minds the making of the magga new right it was very fun to talk with her because we share very similar backgrounds she's a political theorist by training taught by strawsians she was in that orbit just out of roads college george town american university but she's currently a scholar in residence at american university a senior advisor for the liberalism studies program at george washington and a non resident fellow with the brookings institution some listeners may have read her work at the scannon center and some listeners probably have read her work at the bulwark at the new republic but the occasion as i mentioned was the release of furious minds which uh sam as you put it it's kind of like part of the podcast in book form yeah for those listeners who enjoy it when we talk about like the kind of people who have provided since 2016 and before the intellectual scaffolding for trumpism justifications for his politics from the ivory tower and the think tanks this is the book for them and this is the episode for you yes we're talking clamonters post liberals national conservatives all the gang is here and laura has an incredibly interesting perspective similar to mattes in that you know she kind of was educated by some people associated with this world or who became part of this world and so that made for a very interesting way into their biographies and intellectual trajectory yes indeed well shall we get some housekeeping items yeah as always we're grateful to our partners at dissent one thing they do for us by sponsoring the podcast is if you subscribe to know your enemy on our patreon at patreon.com slash know your enemy for ten dollars a month you not only get access to all of our bonus episodes but you get a free digital subscription to dissent and i think you know the upcoming issues on sewer socialism there'll be some stuff on zoron on kind of the left in this moment in our cities i think that'll be one you want to check out yeah if you're hopeful about zoron you want to get some historical intellectual kind of antecedents for his project you can find it in the new issue of dissent yes of course also for ten dollars a month if you subscribe at that level you get access to know your enemy discord and if you subscribe for five dollars a month you of course can listen to all of our bonus episodes of which we continue to put out some really great ones including listener favorite the response has been overwhelming positively overwhelming for our recent bonus episode with Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell fame on architecture mega architecture trumps big beautiful ballroom it was a lot of fun so if you want to listen to conversations like that subscribe oh and i should give a little kudos here the idea for that episode actually came from a discord member so that's to say there's a lot of good conversation happening in that discord and if you're in there you might be able to convince us to do particular episodes yes yes that is your best shot frankly yeah ignore a lot of dm suggesting ideas for episodes but if you're in the discord then you're a true head well as always we also want to thank Jesse Burnham and our intrepid producer did a great job with this episode and will Epstein who does the music for the podcast and look out for Will's new record coming in the new year we may have something more to say about that in the future but you can listen to two of the tracks from his new record from Fat Possum the album is called yeah mostly and I've heard the whole thing and it's unbelievably good stay tuned for more on that I can't wait we will keep you apprised of its impending release all right shall we get to it yes here is our conversation with Laura Field about her new book Furious Minds The Making of the Maga New Right Enjoy [Music] all right i'm so excited for this conversation welcome to know your enemy Laura Field thank you thank you for having me i'm really happy to be here it's amazing to have you it seems like it's been a long time coming yes Matt's probably about to say the same thing but the crazy thing about this book is it's like I don't think there has been any book that I've read since we've started the podcast that is more know your enemy the book yeah other of you could have written this book i'm not sure either of us could have i think what you've done is very very distinctive but it was a wild experience because it was like this is what we've been talking about since we started the show the title of the book before we go any further is furious minds the making of the maga new right published by Princeton University press earlier this month so the hardback came out so congratulations Laura and as Sam said i mean reading this book was wild for me to in part not just because it is sort of at least part of the know your enemy podcast in book form but so many of my former teachers and associates are in this book which we will get to and do course but it was in that sense a very I was a disorienting but vertiginous yes yes one of the things that really struck me about your book is the the kind of personal beginning to it at the very start of your book you tell a story about being at a summer program and how to teach the American founding populated by these people right and the person sitting next to you at your table one of the mentioned meeting Michelle Obama recently and then saying he wanted to fuck her and you describe going into the bathroom of you know where this dinner was being held and kind of looking in the mirror and saying what am I doing here it was also what what a total asshole yes in your book you say that it was quote the beginning of the long slow process of extricating myself from the world of conservative intellectualism and I think you know that experience of having a moment like that is not uncommon for those of us who similarly have extricated ourselves you like me were trained as a political theorist and sort of moved in some of the same circles knew many of the same people and so I just thought to start you know could you tell listeners sort of your way into this book are you kind of landed on this project and why it was so personal for you. Okay so I started my trajectory into this world at the University of Alberta where I studied with these kind of amazing professors Leon Craig and Heidi Studer who were Stroudsians and were conservative but they were mostly just these wonderful lectures and they were amazing teachers of the great books meaning they took them really seriously drew you in as if you could understand the nature of sort of the history of the world through these ideas as if the ideas mattered and treated them as beautiful works of art and philosophy and so it was just captivating for me I didn't see it coming but I really fell hard you know and so I did an undergraduate degree at the University of Alberta in political science like I changed my major I did a graduate degree and then I went to Texas to get even more of it and did my doctorate at the University of Texas and I guess the short version of this is that when 2016 happened I was pretty scandalized by Trump's victory and even more scandalized to discover that all these people at the Claremont Institute or Michel Anton in particular had written the Flight 93 election essay and that I didn't find out until 2017 and then I started watching much more closely what was going on on the right, the sort of current people and the intellectuals involved in the MAGA movement who sort of signed to those petitions early on and then got invested in it but one kind of way of summarizing the trajectory you're describing it that I think applies to my experience too came from a friend of mine who I was talking about this book with him yesterday and he said you know you fall in love with Plato's Republic and next thing you know you're in a ballroom in California and someone has argued about why women's reason lacks the authoritative principle or to date myself that the post office should be a private enterprise that is kind of the story in a way like you fall in love with the great books, the ideas Straussians as we've said many times great teachers great teachers because they make you think the secret to life can be found in these books perhaps I mean that's not the full story of you know the meaning of life or anything but I do think there's a lot to be gleaned from our rich literary traditions and they take it more seriously than a lot of people in that respect but I think that's absolutely right I mean in my case it was in the aughts and you fall in love with Plato and the next thing you know you're sitting in a bar watching the invasion of Iraq with a bunch of people who are really excited about it I mean I think we talked about this on the show a lot like I wasn't taught by any Straussians I was taught by some great teachers but reading Strauss I feel this way I feel like you know Saul Bello really captures this aspect of Alan Bloom in the novel scene like these are great teachers you know and there is something really indispensable about somebody giving young people that feeling of like the excitement about ideas and about books and that they might be able to figure it all out I think it's really admirable and I don't think that that capacity is like symptomatic of their bad political judgment we could talk about whether it is but I don't think so because I just think it's great to have a great teacher yeah I do too I mean it's a double edged sword in a way and I try to in the book I try to convey some of that excitement and some of their own how they eulogize their teachers right you've got Jafa eulogizing Strauss and you've got Anton eulogizing Jafa and you've got these moments where I it really did resonate with me I've had those moments with my teachers where you just feel that gratitude for the fact that they've opened up this world for you in a way that you know doesn't really happen in most cases but it can sour it's a kind of hero worship and it gets pretty cultish in a lot of these circles I think that happens in every part of academia right because you become sort of enraptured of these people who are so influential on you when you're young talking about Straussians your book essentially begins with Leo Strauss Straussians that approach to the history of political thought and I just wondered if you could say why you started that way and what you tried to distill from Strauss that was relevant to this book about the making of the new mega right I started there because Michael Anton was so important to the beginning of this movement right just who's Michael Anton oh Michael Anton is the author of the flight 93 election essay that was published in 2016 and was the first sort of intellectualized defense of Trumpism and I didn't realize it you point out that Rush Limbaugh before he died thought this essay was like the greatest thing ever he read like the whole thing yeah promoting his radio show that was such a fascinating kind of like you know the most self understood that's so symptomatic and emblematic I think of what we'll see throughout this book yeah there's this kind of mix of high brow and low that that is I think somewhat new to the current iteration of American populism on the right the flight 93 essay the argument is basically like you are on that flight and so you can either charge the cockpit and possibly die and save the Republic right that's that's the best outcome but you know the alternative a certain death so go for it and I think that argument of Anton's gave structure to the whole kind of way these intellectuals could justify their support of Donald Trump right kind of the apocalyptic mannequin language painting the alternative is so dire
Transcription truncated.
Matt and Sam talk to Laura Field about her new book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right.