LGM Book Club: Furious Minds

This thread is for a discussion of Laura K. Field’s recent book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right.

I’ll kick things off with some general observations.

What Field is describing is a classic pattern of cumulative radicalization, in which the various ideological strands of what she calls the MAGA New Right are constantly egging each other on toward more extreme positions. She emphasizes the Straussian roots of much of this, in which radically reactionary intellectuals self-consciously take on a sort of quasi-Marxist identity, in which they appoint themselves the vanguard of the herrenvolk (these terms are my interpretation of her argument).

The key drivers here are ethno-nationalism, anti-Enlightenment theocratic ideology, personalist authoritarianism, and misogyny, with the latter being an increasingly overt factor in the context of what Field identifies as a bitter masculinist revolt against the pieties of the liberal democratic Mommy state.

I’m struck by the extent to which Field’s analysis tracks what might be described as the paranoid’s transformation of his fantasies into reality. For example, Michael Anton’s infamous Flight 93 essay argued explicitly that the election of Hillary Clinton would mean the final destruction of liberty and freedom, and the end of the true or legitimate American project. The implications of that argument, since made very explicit by the MAGA New Right, is that it was necessary to destroy things like the rule of law and democracy in order to ultimately save them. Patrick Deneen, for instance, argues that “we” must use Machiavellian means for Aristotelian ends, which ultimately is just a tarted up version of Lenin’s dictum that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.

The ironic twist here is that while Anton’s vision eleven years ago was at the time nothing but a classic paranoid right wing fantasy, he and his comrades in arms have since succeeded in creating a world in which it’s becoming increasingly likely that any hope of restoring any sort of constitutional order will require a certain willingness to — what’s the phrase I’m looking for here — ah yes, “use Machiavellian means for Aristotelian ends.”

In any case, it’s a fascinating and disturbing book, which makes an excellent companion with John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke, that looks back to the politics of the DavidDuke/Pat Buchanan/Ross Perot/Murray Rothbard/Sam Francis hard right 35 years ago now, while tracing the roots of the Trumpist cumulative radicalization of the contemporary Republican party.