Donald Trump has not been a favorite of university professors or public intellectuals, but he does have a base in some elements of political theory. What are their ideas and did they help bring us Trumpism? Laura Field tracks the intellectual parts of the movement and their relationship to mainstream political figures and activists. From the Claremont Institute to national conservatism, they were born of a deficit in defenses of liberal democracy. But there are many disagreements and odd theoretical turns. It took some opportunistic moments to unite the disparate strands. But these theorists have had a real impact in Republican politics and may shape the future of American government.
Guests: Laura Field, Brookings Institution
Study: Furious Minds
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: The intellectual support for Trumpism, this week on the Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann. Donald Trump has not been a favorite of university professors or public intellectuals, but he does have a base in some elements of political theory. From the Claremont Institute to Hillsdale College to National Conservatism, some theorists have embraced Trump and the transformation he brought to the Republican Party. What are their ideas and did they bring us Trumpism?
This week I talked to Laura Field about her new Princeton book, Furious Minds. She tracks the intellectual parts of the movement and their relationship to mainstream political figures and the activist constituencies. She finds that they were born of a real deficit in defending liberal democracy, but there remain many disagreements, and it often took some odd theoretical turns and opportunistic moments to unite the disparate strands. These theorists have had a real impact in Republican politics and may shape the future of American government. So I think you’ll enjoy Field’s insider-ish account of how their ideas developed and why they took this course. So tell us about the findings and the takeaways from your book, Furious Minds.
Laura Field: Well, thank you. Thank you for having me, Matt. So Furious Minds, The Making of the MAGA New Right is about the radicalization of the GOP between 2016 and 2024. And it really focuses on one slice of MAGA. MAGA is very big, it includes all kinds of people and little mini movements. There’s QAnon, there’s the religious right, there’s people on Capitol Hill, and there’s of course Trump. And I’m really talking about the intellectual slice of it. So the people who were providing intellectual infrastructure to Trumpism, designing policy, and shaping the culture wars.
In the first half of the book I track how this movement got started with a few intellectuals like Michael Anton, who was the first to defend an intellectualized version of Trumpism, and then it really gained momentum. So other people joined in, people started organizing during that first Trump administration, but they didn’t have a huge amount of impact. Then they were part of January 6th and organizing behind that. And honestly, I thought they would kind of leave the scene, but instead they consolidated their power. And so, the second half of the book is about how they took over some of the main political institutions. National conservatism already sort of existed and had been built up during the first administration, but then under Biden, they really gained more clout.
The Heritage Foundation came on board. The ISI, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute got on board with this stuff through new leadership and other developments. And they started working together to think about how to staff a new administration, called Project 2025, I’m sure people have heard about, and then they got JD Vance on the ticket. So they consolidated power. I think it was basically an intellectual takeover of the GOP. And that’s the story that the book tells, moving us just through the reelection of Donald Trump.
Matt Grossmann: So this is a story of that history and an engagement with the political ideas behind it, but it’s also a personal history certainly affected by your journey through this world. So tell us about how you came to know this community of intellectuals and how your views changed as you saw their reaction to Trump’s rise.
Laura Field: Sure. I studied with conservative Straussians as basically my educational formation. And that started as an undergraduate. I became captivated by political philosophy through these required courses I had to take against my will basically in political philosophy. But I’ve totally fell for it. I had these wonderful lecturers on Plato, Russo, Hobbes, and just it really changed my life and I decided I wanted to study that. So that was in Edmonton, Alberta. I went on to the University of Texas for graduate work and there I had to take public law as well. And so, in the book, I talk about the right’s ideas first, sort of mode of thinking. And I think that’s pretty common in conservative intellectual spaces. That was a pretty deliberate mode of engagement going back to Buckley and so forth.
But that was also how the Straussians thought about political philosophy. It’s like these ideas are what shape history, and I was very subject to that. But I started to get a little disaffected by that when I did my subfield in public law, just studying the history of American conservatism. So I was already moving a little bit away just in my personal thinking about politics from the ideas-based mode.
But anyway, fast-forward to 2016 and Trump gets elected. I was scandalized by that and upset about it. I had just become an American citizen and I had voted for Hillary and was full of hopes for that in some ways. She wasn’t ideal, but whatever, I was excited. And then afterwards, it came to my attention that these guys at Claremont, Michael Anton, in particular had written this essay, The Flight 93 Election. And I hadn’t read it at the time. It was published in September 2016. I didn’t really know about it, but I did know about the Claremonsters, as they refer to themselves often. I knew about the Claremont Institute and the people out there, and I had friends who had gone to graduate school out there. And I was pretty shocked to see that they had published that essay, which was so sort of hyperventilating and over the top, and just to me, displayed really poor political judgment.
And I could say more about the essay. So that’s also just at a time in my life where I wanted to do more what we academics called public-facing writing. And so, I thought, “Well, I can write about this.” So I sort of started paying more attention to developments in the intellectual world on the right. And then as Patrick Deneen and other people I was sort of vaguely familiar with started joining in, I kept writing about it. I didn’t expect to write the book. I thought they’d leave the scene after January 6th, but then I was pitching a different book in 2022 and the agents were like, “I think we want the one about the Trump intellectuals.” And so, sure enough, I mean, I keep being a little surprised by how successful they’ve been, but basically I felt like I was from in a unique place to write about it because of my own background in political philosophy and ideas.
And just, I wasn’t so familiar with the history of conservative intellectualism, but I did understand the language they were speaking and the kind of mode of speech. I think they speak very differently than liberals about politics and they think very differently than most liberals and maybe even centrists about how politics works. And of course, there’s also just a lot of references to classical philosophy and the classical world. And so, I tried to weave some of that into the book too, including some of the reasons why it’s very seductive and appealing, because I do find it appealing and seductive. Even though I disagree with the core motives and ideas, I tried to show in the book why this could be appealing.
Matt Grossmann: So let’s start with the Claremont, the West Coast Straussians. What do we need to know about this kind of theoretical background for people who are more interested in the practical political implications? How much do these theoretical debates and distinctions matter and why are we still having these conflicts and controversies today?
Laura Field: So the Claremont School of Thought is… I mean, to think about why it’s important, I guess I’ll put that on the table first, is Michael Anton was the… I’ve mentioned him already, and he has worked in both Trump administrations. He started this, the defending Trumpism from the beginning, and he just was one of the main authors of this new national security strategy. So I mean, this is somebody who has had some real impact.
The Claremont Institute was founded in 1979 by a group of students of Harry Jaffa. And Harry Jaffa was a sort of very ornery, but also quite wonderful scholar of Lincoln. He wrote this very important book in the 50s called The Crisis of the House Divided that really explored the moral core of Lincolnian thought and this sort of second founding, right? This idea that Lincoln, through his commitment and understanding of the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents, was able to kind of refound the country based on these ideals and a true rebirth of freedom and so forth.
So the book was about the Lincoln Douglas debates, but Jaffa really drew out the moral philosophy of Lincoln. And so, the Claremont Institute was founded basically in his honor and its mission is to restore the principles of the American founding. And they’ve always been a think tank that is not very policy-oriented at all, right? They’re committed to culture war dynamics, though not just that. I mean, they have critiques of the administrative state, they published this journal, the Claremont Review of Books, and they’ve been… I think some of the scholars there have been impactful with the Supreme Court, but they’ve always really hung to the idea of the American founding and this very vaunting understanding of the American founding. Harry Jaffa later in his life would talk about the American founding as the best possible regime, the best possible thing you could even imagine in politics, or found, I guess, realistically in all of history.
And so, I think what that ended up meaning for them or means for them is that any departure from the perfect founding ideals, this perfect synthesis of ancient and modern thought and this perfect navigation through thorny moral issues, any departure from that is a real scandal for them and kind of this apocalyptic crisis because their ideal is so high. So I think that’s part of what has happened, because today they’re really, a lot of the time they’re arguing for the necessity of a kind of counter revolution, because they think we’ve fallen so far from the original ideals. And that’s the kind of argument that Michael Anton used in the Flight 93 election. It’s the kind of argument they used to defend part of what was happening on January 6th, and it’s what they basically used to defend everything that Trump does.
Matt Grossmann: And then let’s talk about the post-liberals, because in some ways that’s kind of coming at it from a completely other direction of more forthrightly saying that we need to move on to something new. How influential have they been in actual academic political theory debates and then in practical politics and how would you contrast their arguments?
Laura Field: Yeah. I mean, their arguments are, they’re really going for the jugular of liberal modernity, right? So it’s like the Claremonters say, “Well, whatever America was at its founding was perfect. Let’s get back to that.” The post-liberals are like, “No, liberal modernity is flawed from the outset. Liberal individualism eats away at the moral fabric and acts as like an asset on the fabric of society. Therefore, you need something much more radical in its place.” And that’s the argument basically of Patrick Deneen’s, why liberalism failed from 2018. And then he has got a newer book called Regime Change, and others like Adrian Vermeule at Harvard University who wrote Common Good Constitutionalism. So kind of providing a jurisprudential framework for a totally new way of… Well, he argues that it’s the original mode of American constitutionalism because it’s so based in other natural law traditions and older traditions of the common law and so forth, but it’s basically a way of replacing originalism with something much more substantive and conservative.
Anyway, so they’ve been very busy on the intellectual plane. It’s kind of remote from real politics in some ways, because they operate… Some of this is pretty far afield. I mean, in terms of it’s very religiously-based. Adrian Vermeule identifies as a Catholic integralist. And that means a kind of willingness and arguments for the abandonment of the Catholic Church’s settlement with religious freedom and liberal democracy. And so, there’s some very radical stuff here. And I think they’ve been very important in the culture of the right. And also, they do provide arguments for something like, if you have the Claremont Institute arguing for the destruction of the administrative state, these guys come in and say, “Actually, what we want to do is commandeer the administrative state, replace the employees in the administrative state with loyalists to our cause and sort of take it over from within and use the power of the state for our ends.”
And that’s something that works quite nicely in practical politics, because you’ve got the Claremont people, that you destroy it with DOGE and then you rehabilitate it with your own people or what’s left of it. And so, I think it can work practically and it has provided some arguments in defense of some of what’s going on, but generally it’s a more esoteric kind of intellectual version of some of these arguments and more radical. But JD Vance has identified as a post-liberal. And so, it’s not like it doesn’t have real implications for American politics today.
Matt Grossmann: You also track the institutionalization of this through the nationalist conservatism, and an interesting facet here is that it’s sort of an international network of nationalists and some people have tracked this more as a growth of populism or nationalism internationally, and people trying to connect ideas transnationally, which, again, seems a little bit different than both of these intellectual traditions we’ve talked about. So, how much does that aspect matter? And how were these theories that are fairly specific to the American context graft onto this kind of international movement?
Laura Field: So, there’s this obvious international dimension to I, but there’s also National Conservatism, which is an organizing body of what I call the MAGA new right. And so, that’s led by Yoram Hazony, who is an Israeli American, was raised in the United States, went to Rutgers for his PhD, I believe is friends with Patrick Dineen, but also has lived much of his life in Israel. Right? And has been a very dynamic person in Israel, founded New Schools, and so forth, and used to work with Netanyahu for a short time.
And so, he’s a real activist and organizer. And he in 2019 started organizing National Conservatism, which is, basically, the umbrella organizing group for the new right. And so, he’s bringing together the Claremont people, he’s bringing together a lot of these Catholic post-liberals. Sometimes they come, sometimes they don’t. There are also disagreements and fissures.
But, generally, he’s a great organizer. And the idea there is that everybody can agree that they need nationalism, and that nationalism is the best way forward for the country. Yoram Hazony published his own book in 2018 called The Virtue of Nationalism, and it’s this full-throated defense of, intellectually, a kind of tribalism grounded in the Hebrew Bible is where he goes with it, and it’s against modern rationalism in a lot of ways, and it’s, sort of, contract theory, things that we associate with liberal democracy.
And his argument is that real flourishing for a country requires a relatively homogenous nation of people who have a shared history, a shared language, a shared religion, and he and I think these other groups agree that that’s the best way forward for America is a much more homogenizing world against multiculturalism, against the pluralism of liberal democracy, and those institutional provisions for pluralism.
So, that’s the framework that they are all happy to agree with. He also brings in politicians. Right? To these conferences. And so, they’ve hosted these conferences. This is where some of the policy ideas get hashed out on panels, or, at least, discussed. And that’s also part of the consolidation of power. Heritage has come over to the Nat Con worldview, and so forth.
Often you’ll see international contingents at these conferences. You have representatives from India, from I think there were representatives from Iran, Iranians in exile at the last one if I’m … I might be wrong about that. And then they have conferences also in places like Rome, Brussels, and India.
So, you have this nationalism international being developed, but it’s also tied to key policy views. The best scholar I know whose worked on this … And I’m not a scholar of international affairs, Matt, but the best work I’ve read is by my colleague at the Illiberalism Studies Program, Marlene Laruelle, who her concept is illiberalism rather than populism, but what that allows her to do is provide some real substance to the internationalist international.
And she argues that what illiberalism is is any place that it’s found is a reaction against liberal democracy. Right? By people who have experience. And so, it’s this give and take dynamic that most of these modern democracies are now facing.
And she talks about … On the international plane, I think it’s … Domestically, it stands for apprising of the executive over checks and balances, and on a majoritarian deployment against individual rights protection. So, there’s a comfort with majoritarian politics.
But then on the international plane, it stands for sovereignty. Right? Over international affairs and agreement. So, that national sovereignty is primary. And then there’s a transactional realism that she talks about rather than international … And she talks about it being based on a civilizational narrative. So, transactional realism. I just think she’s got this great list of things that they all stand for.
Also, for homogenizing anti-pluralist messaging, culturally and the restoration of old traditional hierarchies. And so, I think that’s a pretty good substantive definition. I read it after I had written my book, and I’m like, “Oh, yeah. That’s exactly what’s going on here.” So, that I think is a good framework for some of the international stuff.
Matt Grossmann: So, listeners will have some familiarity with Christian nationalism and social science research, and its been, primarily, studied through survey research of Americans, and also, to some extent, of looking at organizing among radical pastors. What does the intellectual piece of that add or change about our understanding?
Laura Field: For Christian nationalism? I think the Christian dynamic here is I’ve got one chapter on Christian nationalism, and I try to show how the intellectual slice of this connects to other parts of the Christian world that we might be more familiar with, the old Christian right, these arguments about the Christian founding, and then this new revivalism that’s going on with some of these charismatic groups that are very closely connected with Trump.
So, there’s a lot of different stuff, plus we have already talked about a little bit, the Catholic dimension. Right? And so, they all can connect on pragmatic grounds. My sense of what would be missed in survey research is just the extent to which some of this is led by the top. Right? And the ways in which the people I’m writing about, a lot of whom are of political theorists, but also just something that conservatives think a lot more about than liberals, in my experience, is this idea that you can shape and mold the culture. Right? It’s not, like, they think of themselves as puppeteers, but sometimes they get pretty explicit about that. Right?
So, they do. They think of themselves as culture shapers. There are all these mantras on the right, “Politics is downstream from culture,” “Ideas matter”. Right? “Ideas have consequences.” And so, you have that kind of mentality means that they think of themselves … It gets very explicit. And on the Christian right when I talk about these charismatics, a lot of those leaders think of themselves and call themselves prophets. Right? And apostles. So, they were seeing themselves as actual prophets in the culture. And that’s not tongue-in-cheek at all. Right? They’re trying to recreate the conditions of the early church.
The people I’m writing about are more like … Christopher Rufo would be a great example. Right? Where he’s trying to shape the discourse, and then have people take that up in their PTA meetings or whatever.
But I think that, generally speaking, what we’re talking about, including some of these Catholics and others are … And there’s consistently a religious dimension. They’re thinking about it in terms of how can we impact political opinion and shape that, and affect it. And I think that polling will show that. Right? But how it’s the causal mechanism there is lost presumably in this [inaudible 00:23:24]. Does that make sense, Matt?
Matt Grossmann: It does. So, one of the key places that this cultural influence is trying to take place is in the educational system, and, obviously, many of these people are educators. So, talk a little bit about the role of Hillsdale College and aligned high school curricula, and how they’re thinking about this as an educational intervention against the current educational system.
Laura Field: So, I think if we take a step back much of the new right is anti-elite. Right? And their idea almost universally is that the left has total control of the cultural institutions. So, educational institutions, media organizations, and corporate life now, because of all the wokeness that … That’s how they’ve perceived things. That’s how they argue.
And this really came to a head in 2018 through 2020 with the 1619 Project, and then the George Floyd protests and riots, and some of that violence. They really saw that as a radicalizing moment where they really need to push things even further.
And so, education, they saw that as an opportunity to revive a vision of patriotic education is what happened at the very end of that first Trump administration. And that began with the … Or culminated I guess in the 1776 Commission Report that was demanded by President Trump at the time. And he put some people from Hillsdale College in charge of that. There was Larry Arnn, and then Matt Spalding I believe is the person who really came up with most of that material.
That was a bit of a flop in the end, because it was so rushed, and I think they maybe presumed they would win in 2020, and they’d have more time. But they rushed it out. What’s, basically, going on is that they feel that the liberal academy and liberal culture has been peddling these critical perspectives on American history that are unpatriotic and damaging, and that that is the only story that’s being told.
And so, they want to counter that with their own version that’s much more, they think much more patriotic, but it tends to be really jingoistic and lopsided in the other direction, in my opinion. Right?
When I’m writing about this I try to talk about some of the legitimate critiques that exist, not just of the 1619 Project, but also just of higher education more generally, and how conservatives have this very longstanding critique going back to, “Bill Buckley’s got a man at Yale,” that our intellectual institutions are taken over by liberals who no longer understand the purpose of education, and on and on.
But I think there’s something silly about that, and then there’s something really true about it, and there is this I think vacuum in higher education when it comes to maintaining certain parts of the tradition or just appreciating some parts of the tradition. It gets critical maybe too fast or just doesn’t have room for these other modes of engagement.
So, I try to give some voice to that, but you want me to talk about practical things in education. Right? So, they also have charter schools at … Hillsdale is this small college in Michigan that has never taken federal funding. And so, it’s got this note of independence. But they’ve also got a very strong political engine.
And, on the one hand, it’s a pretty normal Catholic liberal arts college, and then, on the other hand, it’s this political powerhouse that has this seat in Washington D.C., is very aggressive, very anti-woke, and very ambitious in terms of policy. So, they’re ambitious in terms of making these … They’ve got a huge video online course program that they’ve had for ages that is very partisan. They’ve got charter school plans, and a whole curricula built up called the … I think it’s the 1776 curricula. So, they’ve got all this stuff, and they’ve got charter school partners all around the country, and they’re always trying to build up these relationships to implement some of their ideas.
And so, some of that is maybe a useful counter to … Or, at least, could be a supplement or a useful … There’s some useful material there, but it’s pretty lopsided. And part of what happens here is they’ll give no … They see the opposition or the Democratic side or wokeness or whatever as completely illegitimate, which I think is farcical. In a liberal society, you have to be able to entertain these different views of history.
So, that stuff it matters, but I don’t know that they’ve been able to implement the educational policies as much as they would like, though, you have places like in Florida where a lot of this is happening.
Matt Grossmann: So, you track the relationship between these intellectual trends and some of the more popularizing trends among the Trump movement. But some of our listeners might think there’s … We’re pretty far from intellectualism when we get to crude memes or some of the alt-right tendencies in online discourse. So, connect those for us. How much does the intellectual background matter for the development more on the online media and cruder side of this movement?
Laura Field: Yeah. These are good questions in terms of too just how much of the policy stuff matters, because this movement started as almost anti-isolationist and, certainly … Right? Trump ran on the restrainer stuff, and here we are in Iran. But maybe we can come back to that.
In terms of the cruder stuff, there’s a whole other faction I talk about that spans the other three substantively that I call the hard right, and that’s also got a ton of overlap with the old alt-right. And I think about it like this, the new right has, obviously, had a huge impact on personnel. Right? And I think quite a big impact on-
A huge impact on personnel and I think quite a big impact on policy. So they’ve got JD Vance in there. They were planning with Project 2025. They had, I think, a pretty important impact on staffing. Claremont was bragging within the first couple weeks of the new administration of all the former fellows who they had installed in the new administration. But then I think what matters with this sort of influencer groups, many of whom, I focus only on those who have PhDs or almost exclusively, are all these old Straussians who have gone on to become fascists online. I’m exaggerating just a little bit, but there are several. And I think where they matter is in impacting culture and in sort of dragging things to the far right and shifting the Overton Window. And you have someone like Bronze Age Pervert who was pretty big on the internet and still continues to be with his body building, pretty much explicit violent fascism is what he’s recommending for people.
And he’s arguing with Nick Fuentes about Israel and antisemitism. That was going on too this whole time. Plus you had Calvinists like Stephen Wolfe writing this book called The Case for Christian Nationalism that also has these weird references to kind of memes from Alexander Dugin or Raw Egg nationalist. All of this sort of overly mode of speech that I think has impacted the culture of young men, not all men obviously, and not all Republicans, but there is this sort of radicalizing element that I think matters. I was skeptical about how much this mattered and have been, and I continue to be shocked at how some of this is unfolding, including the Nick Fuentes stuff. And you have something by Rod Dreher saying… In the first administration, there was reporting that young staffers on Capitol Hill were all reading Bronze Age mindset.
This time around, we hear from Rod Dreher that he suspects 30% to 40% of the staffers on Capitol Hill are Groypers. I was really skeptical about that. And then I spoke to some young people I know who are closer into the movement and have real access, and they did not think that was an exaggeration. So who knows, but that’s pretty disturbing. And I do think we’ve clearly seen a cultural shift happening in the GOP, and that is a real struggle for them. It’s not smooth sailing when you have all these crazy problems and these people like Nick Fuentes being sort of welcomed in some parts of the movement. It’s pretty disturbing.
Matt Grossmann: So as you note, these are people who believe that ideas do come first and have consequences, but how much should we believe that? In other words, these theories seem pretty pliable, and this might look to some more like other kinds of practical politicians and interest groups who are just contorting themselves to align with the current leadership of the Republican Party. How much should we see it that way versus the ideas actually came first and got them where they are?
Laura Field: Well, I don’t think that the ideas come first all the time, but they sort of think that they can. And I think it’s too easy to dismiss this stuff. And that’s partly why I wrote the book. You’ve got Trump is not an intellectual. I’m under no delusions about that. He’s pretty canny and it’s also easy to underestimate him. But these guys came in and they saw that he represented something that was stewing and festering on the Republican right in the conservative world. And that has old, old roots, right? Back to the old right of the 20th century, Barry Goldwater, the paleocons, and even the Tea Party. That they saw that in Trump. They saw, “This is our guy. He can take things in a very different direction.” And they were sort of right about that and sort of wrong.
It’s not easy to just totally take over this old establishment. And you can see these fissures continue to matter, right? People don’t like the antisemitism on the right. People don’t like the new… They don’t like economic nationalism all that much, right? So they’ve tried, but a big part of this package substantively was a commitment to a totally different kind of economics that would abandon the old free trade and sort of laissez faire. And that I think is one of the most serious parts of the New Right that is often connected to these post-liberal Catholics and this engagement with Catholic social teaching and this idea that we need a social safety net and maybe to redesign family policy. And I think that mattered much more for the Biden administration in some ways with their infrastructure bills and some of those policy changes that happened than it maybe does for Trump though.
We’ve got the tariffs, but they’ve still got the tax cuts. So you’ve got this kind of mess, but I think it’s clearly had an impact of some kind in American politics. It’s just a question of how much integrity is to any of that. And I’m not going to defend the kind of principled integrity. I think that it is a lot of pragmatic sort of compromise or willingness to just go along with whatever, but there are some serious ideas here. But in real politics, I’d say Trump has given sort of camouflage to the intellectual side of this. But the intellectual side of this is probably more the future of the Republican Party than Trump is, if they can maneuver through it and sustain it without him, which is a big time question.
Matt Grossmann: So as you say, Trump probably doesn’t care very much about post-liberal political philosophy or great books curricula or the Straussian readings of classic political philosophy. And that’s in some contrast, you can see Ron DeSantis or even like Scott Walker’s sort of views of universities and changing the educational institutions really develop, even JD Vance, in their backgrounds, but none of it is there in Trump. So I wonder how much that is a vulnerability. How stable is this alignment if there really isn’t any buy-in from the top, and not necessarily a lot of evidence that that is what brought its political success?
Laura Field: Yeah. I think you’ve sort of spelled out the answer to this question, which is it’s pretty unstable. But there are these politicians who happen to be basically the… I think they understand themselves to be the future of the party, and that’s probably right, unless something goes really haywire. It will be JD Vance on the ticket in 2028, or it will be, probably not DeSantis, but maybe Rubio, and he seems pretty bought in, right? And there’s others who are committed to this stuff, Josh Hawley. And so I don’t expect those guys to be… I don’t expect it to be anyone else who takes the mantle of Trumpism or even tries. I think MAGA is sort of here to stay, and it’s a question of what inflection it has and whether it can survive without Trump. And again, I think that’s a big question, but I do think that things have shifted.
It’s not going back to the old Republic. It’s not going back to Mitt Romney anytime soon would be my guess. And so part of why I wrote the book, Matt, was to shine a light on how radical some of these ideas are and how out of step they are, not just with Trump, right? Because Trump is so unpredictable and strange. And a lot of it is pretty consistent with Trump. I think that’s the part that I found surprising. There is this paleocan history. There are these sort of radical right stuff that’s pretty consistent with what Trump wanted and wants. But I do think it’s out of step with the old GOP, obviously. It’s a huge sort of attack on that, and pretty out of step with a lot of the ideals of just ordinary American voters, including Republican voters, including MAGA voters, who I think are not really on board with some of the more radical stuff that the New Right stands for.
And so part of the intention of the book was to show that radicalization and that extremism because I don’t think… Trump is also hugely unpopular, right? And I think that’s no small part to these ideologues who have perhaps driven him to do things that are more extreme than he would’ve had the stomach for on his own, and are not necessarily the best gauge of where the country actually is.
Matt Grossmann: So some is new, but there’s a long history of course, of the [inaudible 00:39:25], and even research on the Tea Party movement, for example, has found some long roots from the kinds of people who were most involved. So there’s always been a radical right that has been a little bit less institutionally connected, but also a history of people who’ve tried to, if not justify at least smooth, the association between the radicals and the population and the more institutional structures. So how much is it an evolution from that versus a new thing?
Laura Field: Well, I don’t know. It felt very new in 2016. I think it feels pretty shocking to most people who are familiar to the old establishment. But the more I read about some of these other strains of conservatism, the less surprising it is. I’m reading the Bill Buckley biography right now, and it’s like, oh my God. I sort of name him, I call the old establishment the Reagan-Buckley conservatism, but even that was really quite a bit messier than we might’ve expected. But I think what you have here is the old establishment did try to keep up some guardrails against the antisemites to keep out the racists, to make peace with the New Deal. They made peace with the civil rights movement in many, many respects. Some of them came to regret their earlier rejection. Goldwater came to regret, I think, his vote against the Civil Rights Act.
So you have this sort of evolution, you have some guardrails. And I think now we’re seeing what happens when you let go of all of that. That’s what I track in the book, is sort of getting rid of those guardrails, opening up this, they’ve got a name for it, “No enemies to the right.” It’s been quite a deliberate push to just not care about that anymore. And I think they’re sort of reaping the rewards of that, and it’s not nice. You have the Nick Fuentes problem. Now they’ve got Islamophobia to use, and it seems to me that they’re going to dive back into that. So I think what we’re seeing is what happens when that faction gets total hold of the party, and that is a difference from what came before, because they know… I talk about in the book how that’s different from those older forms of right-wing populism because it’s more misogynist, it’s more youthful and sort of media savvy, and it’s just more successful. And so I think that’s held up pretty well.
Matt Grossmann: So the international dimension of this though does suggest that there’s some more fundamental roots. There’s rising anti-elitism and populism, rising anti-immigration and anti-trade and anti-international institutions, movements all over the rich world. Maybe that’s evidence that, I guess, some of what the right says here, which is that this is about increasing liberal dominance, culturally liberal moves across the rich world, and out of step political elites that laid the groundwork for this more than them. They’re reacting.
Laura Field: They’re reacting. Yeah, I think that’s probably true. That doesn’t mean that the liberals were wrong, right? It just means that they’re going to provoke a reaction and that they might… It does seem that the liberals have been wrong in so far as they didn’t predict this and they seem completely flatfooted in response to it. So there’s a lot of stagnation, there’s a lot of lack of self-awareness. I think there was a lot of taking things for granted. That’s what I would identify as the problem more than the kind of mistaken direction of the left, but there’s plenty to argue about there. And I think… I’ll just leave it at that. I think there’s plenty to say about all of that. There is this internet… Liberals have to do better at having a vital culture that people can attach themselves to and care about, because the New Right is sort of trading off of this discontent, exploiting the vulnerabilities of liberalism and generating quite a lot of excitement for themselves.
Matt Grossmann: So this is a critique of most of these people and ideas, but you definitely don’t treat liberal political theories as sacrosanct. So what are the critiques we should take most seriously that are kind of reasonable threats to the assumptions and perspectives of liberalism? Or I guess to put it more practically, if you were teaching these theorists for students, but for more substance rather than their impact on politics, what would you want to get across?
Laura Field: So I’d really want to focus on the vulnerabilities of liberalism that are identified. And I think the post-liberals are probably the best at articulating some of this, the critique of liberal individualism, the critique of sort of modern liberal economics. I’m not on board with all of that, and I think that a lot of it is sort of attacking liberalism. It’s ahistorical with regards to what liberalism could be, and it’s bad political philosophy in some ways because it’s assuming that liberalism is one thing that cannot evolve, cannot deal with some of its vulnerabilities, and I think that’s wrong, but I still think there are these vulnerabilities. Liberal individualism is a problem. There is a way in which our liberal democracies are coasting off the fumes of old traditions, and those are problems. We need to find ways to regenerate culture, community, family life. I think everybody cares about those things and can recognize that there’s a problem of loneliness and corporate, whatever. There are a lot of problems. So I think that there’s a lot of good ideas there about diagnosing the vulnerabilities of liberalism.
I think that some of the economic ideas are worth taking seriously. I’m not an economist and I’m not a big policy person, but it seems like there are some ideas about how to move forward with things like family policy and how to think about just the economy writ large and how politicians should be navigating some of this and thinking about the good life and thinking about what it means to flourish. So I think some of that, there’s some generative energy on the right that’s useful, and then finally, I guess liberal education. I’m not a conservative and I don’t love the way that people like at the Claremont Institute talk about the American founding. I think it’s sort of juvenile and they almost believe that we need noble lies, that we need to embrace these lies about our history and avoid any unpleasant truth so that we can all feel good and comfortable in the supremacy of America.
And I don’t think that works in a liberal country, in a liberal democracy. I don’t mean in capital Democrat. I mean in a free country, but I do think that there’s been a real failure to sustain sort of robust forms of liberal education and liberal arts education and humanities, education in history, education in the great books, tradition that I love so much, and in civics, but civics in the sense of what it means to be a free person, right? What it means to be well-educated, good at critical thinking, and also at understanding history and appreciating the different figures and the contested ways of thinking about history. So I think that’s a pretty important thing to look at for liberals, for conservatives to think about higher education, to think about K through 12 education, and to do better for young people. I think now’s the time to think about this because we’ve got AI, we’ve got all these big problems, and it would be great to kind of do a restart and have some big ambitions with regards to how we educate the youth, Matt.
Matt Grossmann: That did make me think that a lot of this is quite out of step with the artificial intelligence promotion of the second Trump administration and the sort of role of the tech right now. So on the other hand, there is a lot of personal crossover, I guess. So tell us about that. How much of a big tension is that, or is there some kind of a reconciliation?
Laura Field: Well, I mean I would think there’s a huge tension, but J.D. Vance seems to be the man who can kind of smooth out all of these issues, and well, there was some talk in the first part of 2025 about the Doge versus MAGA attention and how these different parts of MAGA, the tech world versus the other parts couldn’t be reconciled, but there was also a wonderful piece by Patrick Deneen talking about how actually that was all way overstated, and J.D. Vance comes from both the Thiel, tech right, and the venture capitalism, and also is a solid Catholic and so he will repair all of those fishers. So I mean I’m overstating it maybe a little bit what Deneen said, but that was an essay and unheard that people can go look up for themselves, but it’s hard to know.
I think those tensions are real. I don’t think that the tech right, I think that Musk and Thiel and maybe a few others are sort of red pilled and ideologically committed to something like MAGA and this right-wing populism, but most of them just want to exploit it however they can, would be my guess and are pretty fickle when it comes to actual commitments to political actors, and so I don’t know. I think the tensions are real with the tariffs and so forth, but it’s all very unpredictable.
Matt Grossmann: So maybe a bit too insider-y, but we have a lot of political science listeners, and so I wanted you to ask you about the influence of this on our field or just why it is that political theory within political science came to be a bastion for a small number of political scientists who sort of remained on the right during the rise of Trump at a time when the field isn’t growing overall, and maybe a departure from, obviously there was always a right part of that, but why is it that that’s where the Trumpists are in our field now?
Laura Field: Well, I mean this is a question partly of where I’m coming from and what I focused on writing the book. So I’m going to see certain patterns because that’s where I came from, and so it’s probably skewed a little bit towards political theorists and the political theory role within Trump. That said, I mean I think that you can think about in academia generally, the conservatives in academia are kind of isolated and insular, and partly that’s their own doing, and they’re also constantly lashing out at the rest of academia, and so people don’t always get along, and that creates a kind of resentment that can fuel this kind of embrace of the anti-elite more generally in MAGA. So that’s I think a causal thing, but I think more generally, what have political scientists done to preserve a healthier political theory field?
Not much, right? And so political theory is dying. You can’t get a job. I mean I’m going to exaggerate, but you can’t really get a job teaching Rawls or John Locke or Russo. I mean you can, but it’s very hard. The job market’s always very hard for everybody, but it’s especially hard for political theorists, and I think we’re seeing now theory really does matter. It’s a problem that we don’t have troops of liberal political theorists or just great books people and people who understand this tradition to argue with the Claremont people, to argue with Patrick Deneen. I’ve been pretty disappointed to see how few people even take this stuff seriously enough to bother engaging, and so I mean maybe I’m wrong about the state of the field. It’s been a while since I was sort of in academia in that way and paying attention, but I think it’s pretty shameful.
And I mean what are we doing? And I’m not blaming actual political scientists because I know administrations have a lot to do with this. These are historical problems, and by the way, I’m not anti-critical race studies and post-modernism. I love that stuff, but there’s got to be a push to preserve some of these things. It does have political ramifications when you don’t have people in the academy who can speak to these problems really to a bigger audience.
Matt Grossmann: Anything else we didn’t get to that you wanted to include or anything you want to tout about what’s next?
Laura Field: So Matt, I’m basically planning to pivot away from critiquing the new right and reading so much of these guys and towards sort of working on revitalizing liberal democracy and working in a sort of more pragmatic vein to help rebuild a big coalition of people who can become a little better at defending liberal democracy and liberal ideas, but we’ll see. I’m not exactly sure how that’s going to take shape.
Matt Grossmann: Well, what about I guess the sort of practical considerations within universities and talking to students? Because I think part of what appealed to you originally as you said, and appeals to lots of students is they also see academia as insulated, liberal, not having as much conversation, and so these people have been in places that provide that to some extent or at least provide ideas about it. What is the way forward there?
Laura Field: Well, I mean I conclude the book with some ideas about how to build new institutions into higher ed, and there are these new programs on the right in a lot of red state, these big civics programs that are hiring some really good people. I mean it’s kind of hit or miss as far as I can tell, but just to regenerate interest in history, in political theory, I think, and I think there’s a big worry there that they’re going to be just seen as these conservative holdouts, and many of them, a lot of these places are kind of framing themselves this way, whereas I see the problem as one of a failure to provide places where people can really get together across, I don’t mean across divides in a nice way, right? I mean get together and hash it out and have real contestation and real argument.
I love Jonathan Rauch’s phrase coercive conformity, where there’s this sort of these prevailing orthodoxies, and I agree with a lot of the orthodoxies in their substance half the time, but it’s a real problem when you’re not even really allowed to get practice explaining why, right? That you’re not forced to argue it out, and so my own vision, it’s less grounded in civics, which I don’t really think is the role for universities and more grounded in just restoring the liberal arts, but that means real contestation, and so the institutes I would design, I mean you read it. I’m pretending to be the goddess Athena here, so it’s a little fantastical, but I mean the institutions I would design would be headed by people who oppose one another in their politics and still have to design a curriculum that would vary enormously across the country.
It would be different in Texas than it is in California or Michigan or Idaho, but you design a program where you have very different books on the agenda. You include very different outlooks and ways of seeing the world. It would be critical race theory and Thomas Jefferson, and you would allow students to really talk about it and you would have real engagement and robust contestation. So that’s the kind of thing I’m excited about, and I don’t know if anyone else is, but that’s what I would like to see because I think that’s suitable to people who actually are free and who are free citizens in a liberal democracy.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available biweekly from the Niskanen Center, and I’m your host, Matt Grossmann. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website, How the Tea Party Paved the Way for Donald Trump, What Became of Never Trump Republicans, How the Left and Right Undermined Trust in Government, Threats to Democracy in the Second Trump Administration, and Putin’s War and Populist Authoritarianism. Thanks to Laura Field for joining me. Please check out Furious Minds and then listen in next time.
