The Left’s Radicalism and the Rise of the New Right
Laura K. Field could not have timed the release of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right any better. November opened with a political brushfire after Kevin Roberts leapt to defend Tucker Carlson, sparking renewed debate within the activist class about whether the “new right” has drifted too far right—or whether, in fact, it simply represents the direction conservatism has been heading for years. Commentators revived old arguments about national conservatism, postliberalism, and the ideological fringes associated with figures like Nick Fuentes and Curtis Yarvin. For a brief moment, the question of what “the right” even is became a national fixation.
Against this backdrop, Field’s book promises an inside look at the ideas and personalities shaping the MAGA-era right. What readers get instead is a guided tour of familiar controversies—Flight 93, the Ahmari-French debate, “knowing what time it is,” common-good constitutionalism, Red Caesarism, Nate Hochman’s sonnenrad, and Tucker Carlson’s foray into testosterone supplements. For anyone steeped in the past decade of right-wing intellectual churn, Furious Minds will feel less like analysis and more like a curated scrapbook.
Entertainment value? Certainly. Insight? Limited.
A Who’s Who With Little “Why”
Field divides the new right into three categories—Claremonters, postliberals, and national conservatives—and suggests that their common flaw is an “Ideas First” mentality, meaning an overreliance on grand abstractions and sweeping theories detached from empirical reality. There is truth in this critique; many of the right’s loudest intellectual voices do operate at 30,000 feet. Yet Field never defines the concept with enough rigor to make it useful. Too often, “Ideas First” simply becomes a shorthand for anyone who doesn’t treat progressive assumptions about inequality, LGBTQ issues, or systemic racism as unquestionable realities.
The result is a book that scolds more than it investigates.
Still, Furious Minds is undeniably entertaining. It is difficult not to smirk at the spectacle of a political movement whose thought leaders include a man calling himself “Raw Egg Nationalist,” whose chief preoccupation appears to be the protein intake and aesthetics of other men. There is a dark humor in watching a decade of pseudo-intellectual internet performance art catalogued between hardcovers.
But entertainment is not the same thing as illumination, and Field misses several crucial opportunities to explain the new right’s real ascent.
The Book’s Narrow Lens and Missing Players
Field focuses almost exclusively on individuals who operate between the worlds of academia and online agitation. This means Jack Murphy receives more attention than Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, or Ben Shapiro—figures with demonstrably more influence but less proximity to the Claremont orbit.
Tucker Carlson, arguably the single most important media force shaping the new right, appears mostly as a gateway to “manosphere” microcelebrities rather than as a central figure in his own right.
This narrow lens leaves the book unable to satisfy the promise of its subtitle. It also obscures a major explanation for the new right’s success: the economics of attention. The modern right has risen in parallel with monetized social media, which rewards the outrageous and the provocative. Some new-right influencers succeeded not because of philosophical sophistication but because audiences will click on the shocking, the transgressive, and the theatrically masculine.
Bronze Age Pervert may have a PhD, but he also knows how to sell tickets.
Field never grapples with the possibility that much of this movement is driven by grift, not conviction.
The Most Obvious Cause: The Radicalization of the Left
The book’s most glaring omission is its failure to acknowledge the role of the left’s own radicalization in fueling the rise of the new right.
Ask people why they gravitate toward the postliberal or national conservative movements, and the answer is rarely “Straussian political theory” or “online Nietzschean cosplay.” It is almost always some version of: “The left already broke the system.”
From Obergefell and Bostock, to Obama’s “Dear Colleague” letter, to the weaponization of civil rights law, to the DEI takeover of institutions, to the administrative state’s expansion through unilateral executive action—conservatives watched decades of procedural norms and constitutional restraints erode. For many, the new right’s radicalism feels less like revolution and more like retaliation.
Field mentions left-wing influence occasionally, but her criticism softens noticeably when discussing economic planning or state intervention. She even praises Sohrab Ahmari’s support for industrial policy while ignoring similar authoritarian logic on the left.
To explain the rise of the new right without seriously examining the left’s transformation is to explain only half the story—if that.
A Missed Opportunity for Intellectual Excavation
Field is at her strongest when discussing the intellectual roots of the Claremont School. Yet even here, the analysis feels incomplete. She examines Jaffa, Bloom, and Mansfield—intellectual ancestors of the modern right—but neglects the Catholic integralists, the Traditionalists like Evola and Guénon who have influenced figures like Steve Bannon, or even the explicitly anti-liberal literature that has shaped postliberal politics.
Nor does she offer a serious engagement with the possibility that certain strands of Jaffa’s thought—particularly his binary moral framing of political conflict—may have unintentionally fertilized later Caesarist thinking.
Field’s ideological priors remain the axis around which much of her commentary turns. This is not uncommon, but it limits the book’s analytical depth.
Conclusion: A Book for the Academy, Not the Moment
Ultimately, Furious Minds is a book written by a center-left academic for other center-left academics. It documents the new right’s greatest hits and most eccentric personalities, but offers little insight into why the movement has gained such traction—or why it continues to appeal to a growing number of frustrated conservatives.
It is not likely to persuade anyone flirting with the new right. Nor is it designed to prompt introspection among those on the left who helped create the conditions for its rise.
America’s civic life is spiraling because both sides have abandoned restraint, constitutional limits, and the habits of a free people. Pinning the blame solely on right-wing ideas is not just inaccurate—it is a missed opportunity to understand the deeper political and cultural forces reshaping the country.
Furious Minds is entertaining, but in the end, it’s a snapshot—not an explanation.