What I'm Reading
a taxonomy of the New Right
The book is called Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. It is by Laura K. Field, and it will not be available until November. Princeton University Press sent me a galley copy.
Field profiles a number of scholars who are on the Trump train. Several of them are in the Administration. Famous names include Michael Anton, Christopher Rufo, JD Vance, and Patrick Deneen. There are about two dozen others.
Ms. Field disapproves of their politics. I am not a fan of any of them, either, but Ms. Field is coming from a standard lefty academic point of view, which by the time I reached the middle of the book had really turned me off.
So who do I like? I guess I am more of a fan of the older libertarians and mainstream conservatives. Give me the GMU economists (none of whom appears in the book), or some of the AEI scholars, or Rob Henderson, or Virginia Postrel, or Coleman Hughes, or Greg Lukianoff.
To get on Ms. Field’s radar, you seem to require an impressive academic credential, and preferably an academic institutional affiliation. This made me realize what a challenge this is for someone on the right. Other than George Mason, Claremont, or Hillsdale, is there a well-known college or university where you could populate even a small lunch table with faculty conservatives? No wonder the world of conservative intellectuals looks to Ms. Field like a tightly-networked conspiracy. You could fill the whole lot of them inside a meeting room in a Garden State Parkway motel.
The best part of the book is the opening chapter, where she divides her subjects into three groups. Each group has a slightly different reason to support Donald Trump.
First, there are the Postliberals, including Adrian Vermuele and Deneen. Their distinguishing characteristic is that they hate neoliberal economics. They see market competition as too cruel and individualistic. Like Barack Obama, the Postliberals think that government is the things that we do together. I think that markets are the things that we do together. Of the three major groups, Field dislikes the Postliberals the least, and I dislike them the most.1
Another group is the Claremonters. Their distinguishing characteristic is catastrophism. They include Michael Anton, author of a notorious essay called “The Flight 93 election,” which suggested that like the men who on 9/11 had no choice but to rush the cockpit of that doomed airliner, conservatives had no choice but to support Mr. Trump in the 2016 contest with Hillary Clinton. The Claremonters are the mirror image of the Progressives who view Mr. Trump as the end of democracy.
The third group is the National Conservatives. Their distinguishing characteristic is their antipathy toward the international progressive elite.2 They are the most politically adept of the three groups, trying to make a mark in electoral politics in many nations.
Field seems to believe implicitly in the academic pecking order. She spends a lot of time respectfully criticizing Vermuele, who as a Harvard Law Professor is near the top. At the other end of the pecking order, she relegates one Nathan Pinkoski to a fourth group, that she calls the Hard Right Underbelly, where in her telling he occupies a position adjacent to Bronze Age Pervert, an online troll. I have no way of verifying her evaluation, because Ms. Field does not quote a single phrase of what the poor man has written or said.
Ms. Field is quite fond of academic political philosophy in general, which is how she came to write this book. That may be why I found the book hard to digest. I have to say that for all of the negative things I have written about Mr. Trump, I think I like him better than academic political philosophers, left or right.
I wrote a critique of Deneen.
See my essay NatPros and NatCons
A long time ago, around when Moldbug was still writing Unqualified Reservations, there was some discussion about the structure of the then-emerging neoreactionary movement. Nick Land among others wrote about it.
Land's observation was that progressivism is a value system which treats equality as the highest good. The groups opposed to progressivism then either rejected this value system entirely or had some other values that they considered equally important.
These were capitalists (which generally accept wealth and income inequality), religious or traditionalist conservatives (which accept that not all behaviors or lifestyles are equally valuable) and nationalists (which accept that we should have unequal loyalties toward or attitudes to different people groups).
Looking at your discussion of the book, I think group 1 fits fairly well onto the traditionalist wing, while group 3 is clearly influenced by nationalism. The capitalist wing, which was clearly influential in the form of the "tech right", is missing. I suppose most of this group is found in private industry instead of in university departments or think tanks.
I agree with Kling's critique of Deneen. The failure in our current culture is Illiberalism. It is the refusal to allow criticism and disagreement. The virtue of "being nice" has become a vice and the consequence is a society that is incredibly mean and intolerant of nonconforming opinion.
We all know of the vitriol between the "Right" and the "Left". Unfortunately meanness exists everywhere. Being nice is actually a weapon used to pummel people, including people that are supposed to be allies - witness the observation that the "safe & friendly" BlueSky social media platform invites ugliness and bitterness as participants become ever more intolerant of disagreement.
American society would benefit from a change in priority from "being nice and conforming" to "being excellent". What is missing from 21st century society is the recognition that excellent people make society better - we need individuals to be more excellent. We need institutional leaders with the wisdom and courage to openly recognize that some ideas are superior than others. Liberalism has allowed people to choose many different paths. But it is not the fault of Liberalism that people are scared of speaking openly that some paths are superior and some are inferior - Illiberalism did that!