Furious Minds

Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, by Laura K. Field

The war between what is called the rightwing and the leftwing has been going on for centuries now and is ever-shifting. There are many camps and different ideas which revolve around the two groups core ideologies, such as they may be. Laura K. Field, in her book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right does a splendid job of cataloging the various strands of rightwing thought, it’s intellectual origins, the people primarily responsible for the ideas which drive the right today coupled with somewhat restrained conjectures as to what these people are really after. All of this is written through a clearly left-leaning lens that began its journey as an enthusiastic rightwing advocate.

There are innumerable ways to parse what she’s written here, but I think if you want to get to the very bedrock of the difference between the right and left, as she seems to understand it, it revolves fundamentally around the idea of what in the end is truth, what can really be known, and what do we do with our ideas about it once we’ve arrived at our conclusions.

In something of a supplement to the book, she wrote a recent Op-Ed piece for the New York Times which clarifies her observations here even further, tracing the extreme rift between the two groups primarily to one thing: nominalism, which is primarily an esoteric and deeply philosophical idea about the nature of the world and whether it is bound by timeless universals or is grounded primarily in particulars. This line of thinking can be further traced to two basic schools of Western philosophical thought, espoused by such philosophers as Plato (a darling of the right) and Immanuel Kant (a bedrock thinker of the Enlightenment). Plato believed there were things out there that were true, unquestionable, and eternal. Kant believed this to be so as well but only from a human point of view. To him, reality as we know it is a human construct.

I know all this sounds pretty lofty when you look at MAGA and a man like Donald Trump but it’s something an American needs to fundamentally understand if he’s going to make sense of the news he reads and watches everyday. The rightwing believes in hard truths that cannot be messed with, while the left understands the world to be complicated.

What this has led to is nothing short of a war over a fundamental way of looking at life fought, at first, in the ivory towers of Ivy League institutions, before it spills finally into the messy level of the everyday world.

Field serves up a panoply of rightwing thinkers, many of whom over time became increasingly radical to the place that some of them are not convinced that America was ever meant to be a democracy and that autocracy is the real and true form of government it was built on and needs today. What this translates into practice is sometimes a bit fuzzy, but Field is generally convinced it means a white, straight, Christian patriarchy which, at its core, is authoritarian, racist, homophobic and more or less misogynistic. Primarily, it revolves around the belief that the America that was once great was fashioned, to one degree or another, by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and the mess we find ourselves in (if indeed it is a mess) is the result of the people who created the founding culture no longer fully calling the shots. Whether this is at all true is not as interesting to me as the idea that this culture, by its very design and the values it has historically espoused, brought us to where we are today, in the best and worst sense.

This could be why there is a great unsettling sense of change about the rightwing these days and their policies. I believe they are at war with America’s core beliefs, or at the very least, have discovered that these beliefs bring about the sort of change they ultimately disagree with. The ultimate logic of a free and open society does not tolerate the exclusionary principles they long for on a legal level. So the law must be stretched, twisted, changed, or ignored.

Many conservatives are alienated these days from major portions of the populace and have given up any hope of changing hearts and minds. If you can’t get people to believe in your god and your view of history then what do you do? This has led to a frustration and an anger amongst these men (and they are almost all men) who feel this to be a personal betrayal and have decided, since their arguments haven’t proven to be dispositive, that the answer is to forcefully push the clock back in a way that can’t help but favor them. Naturally, this has tended to take the form finally of personal attacks and an us-versus-them mentality. It doesn’t take much to see that this will ultimately prove to be destructive and isn’t likely to achieve their stated ends.

What this tells you is that Trump is not alway dancing to his own idiosyncratic tune, that the music, in some instances, is being played for him and he’s only going along with it because it suits his temperament and it keeps his fanbase happy. The larger overall implications the book leaves us with is that Trump is a symptom and not a cause. If you really want to see where all this is going you’d learn more from watching the likes of Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance. What you see in them is the idea that American culture is a specific inviolable thing that needs to be imposed, if necessary, on all Americans from the top down and is, at its most fundamental, an overtly masculine affair. Male power needs to be rescued and given its rightful place or society is doomed. People who aren’t on board with this don’t count. This is one reason why some Republicans feel they can’t negotiate with Democrats on something as basic as the federal budget because they have forfeited, through their belief systems, the right to do so. Where this might ultimately lead they are reluctant to say. Maybe liberals and their like are simply marginalized, maybe they lose their right to vote, or the system is rigged in such a way that their votes don’t really count, maybe they’re arrested, maybe they’re reeducated or deported. But the core of MAGA, as it’s evolving, is not fundamentally democratic in the liberal sense of a voice for all, meaning that even if Trump goes away one day the ideology isn’t. This is only the beginning.

My feeling is that when people have to be coerced, in one way or another, to believe in core cultural ideas the culture as it once was is finished, never — despite the many books, papers and conferences the eggheads on both sides attend — to return. Make American Great Again assumes that a culture can go backwards, but everything is lived going forward and nobody has any control over that.

Part of why all this is happening is that the left has run out of compelling new ideas. It’s very hard for anybody to say plainly and clearly what they stand for anymore and the right has jumped into that void. Part of the problem, in my opinion, is in the left’s methods. If you feel there are elements in American life that have suffered under the judgment of others it doesn’t really make any sense, once you’ve gotten power, to then turn around and judge those who judged you. We saw this phenomenon at its most vicious during the French Revolution where Robespierre was condemning people to death who did not believe in his “Republic of Virtue.” This is the sort of irony that brings a political movement to its knees. Cultures cannot be cut from whole cloth without doing tremendous damage to its citizens. Look no further than to the Bolsheviks for proof of that.

It’s impossible to know where all of this is going to take us. Maybe it’s simply a momentary reaction to the new ways we process information. Something similar may have happened in this country in the nineteenth century with the explosion of competing newspapers, each one with an ax to grind, devoted to a specific bias or group — the era of Yellow Journalism. Or maybe democracy as we once knew it is done, something that finally came to cannibalize itself until there was nothing left of it but an empty carcass collapsing into a succession of meaningless formalities. At any rate, a lot of this looks essentially reactionary and the fervor which is fueling it is rooted in deep feelings of dislocation brought about by such things as income inequality, globalization, a loss of a larger overall national purpose, and the so-called death of the American dream, particularly as it applies to young men. MAGA can’t solve this with nostalgia, or calls to a soft authoritarianism, and neither can a liberal materialism which has clearly run its course.

Field’s book makes a clear case for the idea that the world we once knew is over, never to return, and that it would fruitless to pine for the old days. Buckle up.