Donald Trump is not a big thinker, but his 2016 presidential victory presented a grand opportunity for people who are, and it set off a radicalization and reconfiguration of the American conservative intellectual world. In Furious Minds, Laura Field, who spent close to a decade in conservative academic circles, chronicles the rise of the New Right鈥攖he network of academics, public intellectuals, and influencers who provide ideological fuel to Trumpism. This movement includes figures such as Patrick Deneen, Christopher Rufo, Peter Thiel, and JD Vance. Their agenda is built to last, and it has dire long-term implications for liberal democracy.
The New Right has precedents in American history, but it is distinct for its youthfulness, misogyny, and extraordinary successes鈥攎ost notably the elevation of Vance to the vice presidency. The movement鈥攚hich draws together associates of the right-wing Claremont Institute, National Conservatives, Postliberals, and the Hard Right鈥攁dvocates nationalist economics, tight borders, isolationism, and reactionary social values. It helped to strategize January 6th and created Project 2025. But above all, the New Right is engaged in a vast culture war against modern liberal pluralism. It is determined to harness state power and use it in new, illiberal ways, from college campuses to the international scene鈥攁ll driven by the fantasy of restoring a pure America.
Incisive and urgent, Furious Minds tells the story of the thinkers of the New Right鈥攁nd their powerful assault on American freedoms, values, and ideals.
Awards and Recognition
- A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
- Longlisted for the Non-Obvious Book Awards
- One of Project Syndicate Commentators' Best Reads of the Year
- One of OODALoop's Top 10 Technology, Security, and Business 快色直播 of 2025
- An Observer Book of the Week
- Winner of the PROSE Award in Government and Politics, Association of American Publishers
"[An] excellent new book."鈥擬ichelle Goldberg, New York Times
"Fascinating and important. . . . Field is an excellent and intellectually honest guide. . . . Furious Minds includes some surprisingly witty and playful moments, which stand in stark contrast to the turgid moralizing and hostility she examines in the book."鈥擩ennifer Szalai, New York Times
"In the ever-growing field of books aiming to explain the rise of the MAGA movement, Furious Minds, by a political theorist with longstanding experience in conservative academia, stands out for its emphasis on ideas. Field shows how the New Right, drawing on a loose network of academics and influencers, has coalesced around a vision of America that is socially reactionary, economically isolationist and deeply skeptical of pluralism as an inherent social good."鈥�New York Times
"A fascinating taxonomy of the wild world of far-right thinking."鈥擹ack Beauchamp, Vox鈥檚 The Gray Area
"[Laura K. Field's] background perfectly positions her to deliver this lively, devastating taxonomy and critique of MAGA’s ideologues. She was originally trained in Straussian scholarship—a reading of classical political thought that criticizes the modern turn away from the sources of moral authority toward liberalism and, in Strauss’s view, nihilism. His approach has had a deep influence on leading conservative American intellectuals of the past half century. . . . Nearly a decade in these academic circles makes Field a knowledgeable guide to a subject she takes seriously. She’s also a Canadian woman, a double identity that puts her at a skeptical distance from the more and more extreme world of the American right."鈥擥eorge Packer, The Atlantic
"What should we make of the intellectual aspect of MAGA? Beginning in 2016, Laura K. Field writes, in Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, a group of 'PhDs and intellectuals'—'almost all men'—began coalescing around ideas that they attributed to, associated with, or smuggled inside Trump’s nascent movement. . . . [Field] was once a conservative, and has a lot of sympathy for various conservative viewpoints. . . . [But] unnerved by what she perceived as a newly supercharged misogyny among conservative intellectuals—in her view, they are 'obsessed with masculinity' in a way their predecessors were not—Field watched as they grew suddenly more radical."鈥擩oshua Rothman, New Yorker
"Furious Minds is the most up-to-date introduction we have to the MAGA intellectual right reshaping America with astonishing speed today."鈥擬ark Lilla, New York Review of 快色直播
"A great new book about the intellectual roots of MAGA."鈥擥reg Sargent, New Republic
"Furious Minds is the closest thing we have to a mole’s-eye view of the New Right, and it is revelatory."鈥擜lexandre Lefebvre, Los Angeles Review of 快色直播
"Field has especially rich insights. . . . [A]n indispensable starting point for anyone who hopes to go beyond a superficial understanding of the anti-liberal American right."鈥擲tephanie Slade, Reason
"Fascinating. . . . This is a very troubling moment for American democracy, such as it is, and the path forward is unclear to many of us. Furious Minds may help by showing readers, in stark detail, the obscure path that led us to where we are. It’s a work of intellectual history, not a polemic, but it offers an important warning to those with ears to hear: the anger and resentment driving our current agonies can end in only one place."鈥擬att McManus, Commonweal
"Furious Minds is an outstanding intellectual history of the present."鈥擪enan Malik, Observer
"[An] unexpected page-turner. . . . Furious Minds is an unparalleled intellectual history of the present. Field’s research, range, and intimacy with her subjects yields many important insights and discoveries, from the serious to the ridiculous."鈥擮rlando Reade, Jacobin
"[Laura K. Field] might be described as a latter-day Athena soothing today’s Furies to rescue American democracy. . . . Readers will benefit from the best researched and most comprehensive account of the New Right that has appeared—or is likely to."鈥擶illiam Galston, The UnPopulist
"In Furious Minds, Laura K. Field offers a sharp examination of the intellectual and cultural roots of the ‘Make America Great Again’ movement that has coalesced around Trump’s two administrations. She pairs her analysis with a moving, sometimes outright infuriating, personal account of navigating male-dominated far-right spaces as a female thinker."鈥擩an-Werner Mueller, Project Syndicate
"A perceptive history and analysis, bolstered by the author’s proximity to the subject. . . . a valuable guide to understanding that ideology and countering it."鈥擪enneth Silber, Splice Today
"A meticulous and unsettling revelation of a right-wing plan for a 'new old-fashioned world.'"鈥�Publishers Weekly聽(Starred Review)
"A meticulous, nuanced study of the patchwork of the US’s far right."鈥擩eff Fleischer, Foreword聽(Starred review)
"A revelatory, at times horrifying deconstruction of the New Right; it shows how we arrived at this moment, and it discusses the intentions of those who hope to push it further. Understanding their intellectual underpinnings is crucial to organizing an effective response. . . . We recommend her book for the essential knowledge it contains—and for its important advice."鈥擬ichelle Anne Schingler, Foreword
"Remarkable. . . . Readers of Furious Minds will congratulate Field on a fluently written book, and thank her for immersing herself first-hand in a cesspit so they don't have to."鈥擬ichael Burleigh, Literary Review
"A nuanced and sophisticated look at MAGA’s intellectual and institutional infrastructure."鈥擠avid Austin Walsh, Washington Monthly
"Furious Minds covers an enormous range of figures and ideas. This means that despite being more than four hundred pages long, it moves at an appropriately furious pace."鈥擬att McManus, Commonweal
“A pathbreaking intellectual history from the world’s preeminent researcher of the contemporary American right. Furious Minds scrupulously chronicles the coalescence of a modern movement that took place as much online as in the seminar room or the corridors of power. Essential reading to understand today’s political situation.”—John Ganz, New York Times–bestselling author of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
“Why should we care about the obscure and often fanatical right-wing intellectuals that populate Furious Minds? Because as Laura Field deftly shows, they now have access to the corridors of power, with many now serving as advisers to President Trump and designing his hard-right policies. Readers should be rushing to this book to understand how and why conservative elites embraced extremism.”—Elizabeth Anderson, University of Michigan
“No one has done more than Laura Field to shine a spotlight on the arcane but enormously important ecosystem of New Right intellectuals that now drives the second Trump administration. Writing with precision and passion, she makes clear why liberals have grievously underestimated these thinkers and their ideas, and why the New Right’s radical plans for remaking the world are appealing, ambitious, and extremely dangerous.”—Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party
“Every now and then, a book comes along that makes precisely the inquiry called for by the times. Furious Minds is one of those books. It is rich and relentlessly probing, yet at the same time altogether fair. Field has done several remarkable things: She has taken the ideas that lie behind Donald Trump seriously and held them up for moral and critical scrutiny. This is a genuinely important book.”—Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of Lawfare and coauthor of Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office
“Laura Field’s Furious Minds is a literary event of the highest order. With seriousness, care, and precision, Field mines the depths of the ‘MAGA mind.’ There is no Ivory Tower tall enough or corner of the internet dark enough to escape her critical eye. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the thinking that led to this era of American politics.”—Nicholas Buccola, author of One Man’s Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle over an American Ideal
