The Making of the MAGA Right

As the old baseball saying goes, sometimes “You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.”  This became especially true since Curt Flood opened the floodgates to free agency more than fifty years ago when he refused to be treated as disposable property by the owner of the St. Louis Cardinals, one August A. Busch, Jr.  Although Flood never benefited, current players should thank him every time their pay gets deposited in their bank accounts, and good for them. [1]

These days it is also difficult to tell political players without a scorecard, and this seems to be particularly true among conservatives.  Laura K. Field (LKF) has remedied this situation with her Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, which was published by Princeton University Press earlier this month.  LKF is a former academic with a PhD in government from the University of Texas.  She is very good at explaining the philosophical and political backgrounds of current conservative thought.  The precipitating event of her “long, slow process of extricating myself from the world of conservative intellectualism” is recounted in the brief preface.  She had good reason, based on that one experience.  Furious Minds is excellent and very fair throughout its 406 pages, including endnote and index (both extensive and very useful).

The signal question answered in Furious Minds is “How did Donald J. Trump unite the Right?”  This he has done, from the election of 2016 up until now.  And while the demise of MAGA has been forecast recently, in keeping with a recent theme here that is not the way to bet.  The MAGA New Right has the will to power and plans to use it.  And why not?  They have the field to themselves.

The story is one of ideological radicalization – the mutually reinforcing radicalization of intellectuals, politicians, and the movement they led.  The men [and they were virtually all men] of the New Right saw Trump as a major opportunity; they egged him and his supporters on, and they brought others into the fold. They saw that he shared some of their extremist, old-school conservative views, and they appreciated that he would use whatever means necessary – including unconstitutional means – to gain and exert power.  They are people who sought to leverage real problems, as well as the known vulnerabilities of liberalism, to impose their own homogenizing moral and political vision on the rest of the country.  They wanted to turn back the clock on pluralistic liberal democracy, and even on modernity itself.  Many were also articulating new visions of the future: new laws, new schemas for education, modes of constitutionalism, traditional communities, and technological utopias.

The various New Right policy prongs are organized around a traditionalist (usually white, Christian, and patriarchal) social vision meant to counter and replace pluralistic liberalism.  The New Right views mainstream liberal America – the “woke” America that embraces plurality and equality, including across various formerly marginalized [pathological] identities – as an all-encompassing monolithic regime of elite oppression (which they often also refer to as the “enemy”).  Culture warriorism – which we might define as an excessive emphasis on rhetoric and media performance over policy formulation and real-world political negotiation – plays a major role on the New Right because at bottom this is a movement driven by reactionary social values and principles, not specific policy concerns.

This is an apt description.  Some believed in Trump, some used Trump and means to an end. And these men were not reluctant to take advantage of the abject fecklessness of conventional liberals of the notional Right and Left, whose solutions to real problems of political economy and society always answer the needs of the rich and well-off.  Their rice bowls on both sides of the divide between hard right and soft left are not to be touched, ever.

Who are these people, and where do they get their ideas?  According to LKF the New Right as a defining core but is not a monolith and includes three major groups.  “The Claremonters idealize the American founding, the Postliberals a particular (religiously inspired conception of the ‘Common Good,’ and the National Conservatives the myth of the traditional American nation.”  The Hard Right Underbelly is also present, in the form of a fascinating self-reverential nihilism.

Much of the theoretical apparatus of these three groups goes back to the big “little book” written by Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (1948).  Weaver is in interesting study and his work repays the effort.  He was from the small town of Weaverville, North Carolina, and taught in the College of the University of Chicago for his entire academic career.  Weaver is one source of the “Ideas First” approach to politics that is common on the New Right.

Ideas are important, but they do not exist outside of context.  For Weaver, the context was the rural American South of the first half of the twentieth century, which is much more than the conventional presentist view of the South as the one and only one benighted region of the United States. [2] Other philosophical sources for the New Right include Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, who published one of the ur-texts of the modern conservatism in 1987, The Closing of the American Mind, to acclaim from the Right and criticism from the notional Left:

The New Right generally agrees with Weaver…but they also show why the Ideas First approach is confused.  Too often, New Right thinkers find themselves in the awkward position of using intellectual abstractions to defend nativism, rootedness, and love of one’s own.  Too often, the recitation of moral ideology is privileged over the practice of good and virtuous deeds…highbrow abstractions smother straightforward real-world truths – about, say, who won which election, who invaded which country and when, or which demographic is being abused and oppressed.  And in many instances, “intellectual abstractions” and Ideas First are too generous as phrases, for we are in fact talking about, myths, ideology, and lies.

This is also true of the notional left described so well, initially by Barbara Ehrenreich and more recently by Musa al-Gharbi in We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.  The Professional Managerial Class of Ehrenreich is much the same as the Symbolic Capitalists in al-Gharbi’s analysis.

An extended treatment of each representation of the New Right as described by LKF must await the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books treatment, but here we will discuss two primary subjects of Furious Minds as representative of the type.  The first is the Postliberal Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame.  The second is Adrian Vermeule, also a Postliberal, who is a professor at Harvard Law School.

Deneen is the author of Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change (2023).  As someone who has never thought much of Liberalism, primarily because its individualism works only for the rich who had the good sense to choose the right parents, I read Why Liberalism Failed in the hopes of understanding its fundamental flaws better.  I was disappointed, but the book was an eyeopener.  Deneen, as described by LKF, believes that:

Liberalism’s latent individualism has destroyed political life and ransacked the natural order.  Eventually, Deneen argues, the liberal desire for freedom leads, through paths of “deracination,” “depredation,” and “disintegration,” to despotism.  It’s a vicious circle of individualism and statism, of political atomism that fuels state tyranny.  And whereas Bloom (in The Closing of the American Mind) presents his story as a warning (one that made a lot of sense), Deneen offers his as an inevitability.  This is pure Ideas First determinism: We are doomed because of the ideas that have shaped our lives (and since, for Deneen, liberalism has a static definition, it cannot be ameliorated).

There is some truth here.  Liberal politics was supposed to mediate between and among conflicting worldviews after the political strife of Early Modern Europe while protecting the individual’s rights and autonomy.  And it has had “disintegrative effects on some dimensions of modern social life and community, especially if one considers liberal economic policies as part of the ledger.”  This, of course, depends on the perspective of the observer regarding the economic policies that morphed into the Neoliberal Dispensation.  It is difficult to disagree with LKF here:

Deneen…views…the dizzying social, political, and technological changes of recent decades and all he can see is chaos and instability.  Meanwhile, many of us – especially those whose lives have benefited from progressive social changes – see reconfiguration rather than destruction and wonder when things have actually been better.  I often look around today and compare it to the world of my grandmothers inhabited, and I can’t help but shake my head at men like Bloom and Deneen. [3]

Regime Change was much the same, only more.  The title suggests repudiation of our liberal democracy, however lame it has been, especially in the Age of Citizens United in which one dollar equals one vote because “freedom of speech.”  Deneen argued for something called:

‘Common-good conservatism,’ which involves a revival of Aristotelian ‘mixed constitutionalism’ and something he called ‘Aristopopulism,’ which means rule by a better class of elites…One of the postliberal changes that Deneen advocated in this vein was the embrace of an overtly Christian state, with holy holidays and tax-funded religious public works.

A “better class of elites” defined by Deneen or anyone else is exactly what we do not need.  Patrick Deneen is a professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame.  These recommendations sound as constitutional as Donald Trump’s implied intention to run for a third term as President despite the 22^nd Amendment, which was ratified in February 1951 when Harry Truman was President:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.

One other thing.  Deneen can get quite exercised by the failing (in his mind) Institution of Marriage, which he apparently views only as a sacred trust between a man and a woman.  It has been a while since I read his two books mentioned here, but I cannot remember that he ever admitted that marriage is also a civil instrument that governs the relationship and legal responsibilities (e.g., inheritance, medical care, power of attorney, end-of-life decisions) between two spouses (if I missed this, I apologize).  This is simple willfulness combined with solipsistic meanness and nothing more.  But that is common on the New Right.  Solipsism is just as common on the notional Left, which is utterly clueless, but not intentionally mean.

Adrian Vermeule is Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School.  Professor Vermeule converted to Roman Catholicism in 2016 and is a Catholic Integralist.  As described by LKF, “Catholic integralism is a way of thinking about religion and politics that, in opposition to the modern separation of church and state, and in opposition to dominant strains of contemporary Catholic political thought, advocates for church-state integration and unity.”  According to Kevin Vallier, author of All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism, Oxford University Press (2023):

Catholic integralists say that governments must secure the earthly and heavenly common good.  God authorizes two powers to do so, they assert.  The state governs matters temporal, and the church in matters spiritual.  Since the church has a nobler purpose that the state (salvation), it may authorize and direct the state to support it with certain policies, such as enforcing church law.  At times, the church may need assistance to advance its objectives.

We do not have time for JD Vance today (but he is not going away), who has been supported by Peter Thiel among others, but note that the new edition of All the Kingdoms of the World “includes a new introduction that spotlights the political rise of JD Vance and religious anti-liberalism in America.”  The current MAGA Vice-President is a recent Catholic convert.

Professor Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism (2022) is meant to “reground American constitutional law on its true foundation” rather than on “originalism” or the “living constitution” [4]:

For Vermeule, the conservative the conservative originalist mode is too constrained and needs to be unbound, whereas the liberal mode is too active and individualist and needs to be bound down.  Common Good Constitutionalism is the Goldilocks of judicial interpretation since it offers both scope and traditional grounding: If you need to determine whether a law or action, you ask, “Does it serve the common good?” and voila, you have your decision.

Right, the common good.  I suppose it would be churlish and too literal minded to ask if the common good of John C. Calhoun (Nullification, among other outrages) and James Henry Hammond (Mudsill) could ever be congruent with the common good as understood by Frederick Douglas or Sojourner Truth or Abraham Lincoln.  According to LKF, the book does cover originalism versus the living constitution well.  But going back to Plato and Aristotle:

Abstract questions like “What is the good?” are treated as multifarious and difficult.  Abstract answers (happiness, flourishing, virtue, social cohesion) are offered by never settled, and tensions between the good of individual persons are always kept alive (think of Athens vs. Sparta)…Adrian Vermeule treats the good differently…as a straightforward and uncontroversial dogma.  The common good is, “for the purposes of the constitutional lawyer, the flourishing of a well-ordered political community.

For him this includes justice, peace, abundance, health, safety, and security, as it did for Thomas Jefferson in June-July 1776 and the writers at the Constitutional Convention during the summer of 1787.  No one can argue with these six desiderata.  But Vermeule did leave out freedom, which is at best a secondary good in his view.  I would think freedom (both positive and negative, depending on one’s view of Isaiah Berlin) would be at the top of the list among the New Right.  When I think of common good constitutionalism, cost-benefit analysis immediately comes to mind: Whose good, whose benefit?  These are entirely contingent on the real world, rather than the world of ideas.

In the past few days there has been much talk about the crackup of MAGA over the Epstein Files, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the failure of MAGA to achieve any of its goals to make life better for Americans not at the top of the income distribution (when you have lost The Spectator…) while sowing discord and beating the war drums based on a misunderstanding of the Monroe Doctrine (but that has been a constant of American history for 200 years).  The New Right doctrine of NETTR (No Enemies to the Right) will be put under strain.  The Ballroom Builder calling MTG “Marjorie Traitor Greene” is of a piece with much of the New Right in its distemper that will not really help MAGA in the long run.  Whatever happens, and a week is a long time in politics, Furious Minds is the essential scorecard for identifying the players of MAGA, and there is much more than can be covered here.  LKF brings a deep understanding to the currents and undercurrents of American politics in the Age of Trump.  The section on “Bronze Age Pervert” is especially good for those of us who do not click in those circles.

Notes

I do not generally do commercials, but Furious Minds is still available at a 30% discount using the code “PUP30” on the Princeton University Press website.  Or better yet, ask your local library to order it, if you still have a local library.

[1] No one deserved to be subject to the Reserve Clause for his entire career, but Curt Flood was a star I remember well from my Little League days.  From the Wikipedia link, Flood “was a three-time All-Star, a Gold Glove winner for seven consecutive seasons, and batted over .300 in six seasons. He led the National League (NL) in hits (211) in 1964 and in singles, 1963, 1964, and 1968. Flood also led the National League in putouts as center fielder four times and in fielding percentage as center fielder three times. He retired with the third most games in center field (1683) in NL history, trailing Willie Mays and Richie Ashburn.”  A very strong case can be made for his inclusion in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown as a player and prophet, but this is unlikely.

[2] For example, in the Statement of Principles of I’ll Take My Stand (1930), which was written by the Agrarian poet, essayist, and critic John Crowe Ransom, later of Kenyon College and The Kenyon Review.  Later several Agrarians contributed to Who Own’s America: A New Declaration of Independence (1936, OP).

[3] Not so very long ago when I was a postdoctoral fellow my mentor was the first woman to be granted tenure in a basic science department at one of the best medical schools in the world.  This happened only when the department was evaluated by outside evaluators, who asked “Why has she not been promoted, based on her outstanding research and teaching?”  Apparently this had never occurred to the Old Boy Network in charge, which included one Nobel laureate.  The current entering class in the medical school at which I work during my day job is 63% women/37% men.  When I considered medical school back during the early-1980s, the typical entering class in professional schools was 25-30% women.  Today is much better, however “untraditional” it is to privileged white men.

[4] Patrick Deneen’s predictable blurb: “You are holding that rarest of books, one that will change minds, change the terms of debate, and change the future. Adrian Vermeule has written the most important and original book on constitutional theory for this generation. Future scholars, lawyers, and citizens will look back at this book for having sounded the death knell of the seemingly unassailable camps of conservative ‘originalism’ and progressive ‘living constitutionalism,’ revealing them to be exhausted sides of the same devalued liberal coin. More importantly, this book charts a new and better path – a common good constitutionalism grounded in the classical tradition but repurposed for the revitalization of a declining but redeemable republic.”

Yes, all we must do is join the Catholic Integralist Brigade to redeem our republic.  Do any of these white men remember the history of Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe?  Religion and politics do not mix, then or now, anywhere on planet Earth.