This week Christine Emba and Sam Kimbriel are joined by Laura K. Field, a political theorist and the author of the new book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. It’s a sharp, readable taxonomy of the thinkers, factions and subcultures that helped build the MAGA coalition—from the Claremont world and national conservatism, to post-liberal Catholicism, to harder-edged online currents.
Laura explains how she came to write about this subject, and how she became convinced the movement wasn’t going to take an off-ramp after January 6. The three trace how these ideas migrate from argument to power. They dissect liberalism’s blindspots, which somehow persist to this day. And they look at the right’s internal fractures — and what those tensions might mean for the coming succession fight in the Republican Party.
Required Reading:
* Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, by Laura K. Field (Amazon).
* Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Deneen (Amazon).
* “The Flight 93 Election,” by Publius Decius Mus (Claremont Review of Books).
* “Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State,” by Greg Sargent (New Republic).
* “Why the MAGA-DOGE Coalition Will Hold,” by Patrick Deneen (UnHerd).
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