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0:01:36 If you’ve been following American politics in the Trump era, there’s a decent chance you’ve heard of something called the new right.
0:01:46 It’s a loose movement of radical intellectuals who share both a basic hostility to American liberal democracy and real influence in the current White House.
0:01:54 They all think the system is rotted, that it needs to be fundamentally overhauled, and they all think that Trump can be a vehicle for putting something better in its place.
0:01:56 But, you know, why do they think that?
0:01:58 How much influence do they really have?
0:02:01 And what would a response to their rising prominence even look like?
0:02:06 I’m Zach Beecham, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:20 My guest today is Laura Field.
0:02:22 Laura and I have followed each other’s work for a while.
0:02:26 She’s the author of a forthcoming book about the new right called Furious Minds.
0:02:30 And I’m the author of On the Right, which is Fox’s newsletter about the political right and its ideas.
0:02:36 We came together last week on a panel at the Liberalism in the 21st Century conference in D.C.,
0:02:43 and we discussed anti-liberal political thought, our shared interests about things that are deeply depressing, and so on.
0:02:50 That being said, it was a really fun time, and I’m so glad that I got a chance to meet her there.
0:02:54 I’m also really glad that I got a chance to tape this episode with her.
0:02:59 Laura’s a trained political theorist, and she spent a lot of time in the conservative intellectual world
0:03:01 tracking the trends that would eventually produce the new right.
0:03:09 She saw them firsthand while they were germinating, and got to meet a lot of the people who were involved in sort of the creation of this world.
0:03:14 Her book’s a fascinating taxonomy of the wild world of far-right thinking, and it’s one you should definitely pre-order.
0:03:21 Laura Field, welcome to the show.
0:03:23 Thank you, Zach, and thank you for having me.
0:03:27 In the book, you use the term new right to define it.
0:03:31 It’s like an umbrella term for all of these different various pro-Trump factions.
0:03:38 So what unites, in your view, like what makes the new right a cogent grouping, not just a random smattering of people who all like Trump?
0:03:39 What connects them?
0:03:46 And what differentiates them from, on substantive grounds, not just like liking Trump versus not liking Trump from the old right?
0:03:47 Sure.
0:03:54 So I think, I just want to make one little point here, which is that these terms are kind of weird and convoluted.
0:04:02 So we, in the States, it sort of took on the last few years to talk about the new right, but there are like 10 waves of new right in history.
0:04:09 So like historians go crazy when you talk like this, because there’s like an actual old right, which was in the early part of the 20th century.
0:04:13 And so just to be clear, I’m talking about the MAGA new right.
0:04:17 It’s kind of the latest iteration of a new kind of conservative intellectual movement.
0:04:34 And it contrasts with, I don’t call it the old right, I call it the Ruckley-Buckley right, or the establishment right, which is kind of what we were, if you’re not 19, you’re sort of, is your familiar conservative world, right?
0:04:45 And so the Reagan-Buckley style of conservatism is, there’s like a classic model of it, it’s called the Gipper’s stool, and it’s got these different sort of props that hold it up.
0:04:59 So you’ve got fiscal conservatism, so free market economics, social conservatism, conservative social values, and then finally, anti-communism is sort of what held this fusionist vision together.
0:05:08 And that really held a lot of sway until at least in the conservative intellectual movement, until at least the end of the Cold War and beyond.
0:05:13 So it’s something, you know, that’s when we talk about the old establishment, I think we can think that’s the substance.
0:05:16 The new right turns against a lot of that.
0:05:29 So Michael Anton, who was one of the first people to defend the new right and Trumpism from an intellectual standpoint, he has a great formula for the new right and for what Trumpism was.
0:05:43 He says it’s economic nationalism, so turning against the free market orientation of the establishment, as well as closed borders or secure borders, so that’s the anti-immigration strain, and America first foreign policy.
0:05:52 And so that’s obviously very different from the kind of liberal internationalism that grew out of the conservative anti-communism over the last, you know, 50 years.
0:06:09 So that’s Mike Anton’s formula, but I think that there’s also just a strong, hardcore social conservatism that is quite extreme, quite reactive, that is sort of the core of a lot of this, at least sort of spiritually how it gets motivated.
0:06:26 One thing I really liked that you did in the book is you brought out not just sort of these points of differentiation within the broad conservative movement between older and newer pro-Trump strains, but also I think identified some distinctive core values.
0:06:29 One is nationalism, right? I think that’s fairly straightforward.
0:06:43 There’s a deep commitment among all of these different groups to a vision of an assertive Americanness, and, you know, they may disagree on the content of what it means to be an American nationalist in different ways, but agree that something about the idea of the nation has to be front and center.
0:06:51 But there’s also another, I think, probably psychoanalytically connected thing that you bring up, which is a preoccupation with gender, right?
0:06:59 It’s not just social conservatism in general, though obviously there are concerns with race, sexual identity, trans identity, etc.
0:07:08 But there’s this real preoccupation with manliness and men and their proper relationship with women, and you also seem to notice that like actually in person, right?
0:07:20 Like you’d attend these events, and there would be some weird comment that someone would make about you or about a woman being there or about women in general, almost like designed to provoke, that would come up.
0:07:25 So what is this sort of gendered core of this?
0:07:29 And when you read the book, it’s obvious that the authors are overwhelmingly male that you’re talking about, right?
0:07:35 Like what’s the gendered core here, and how important is that to understanding what’s happening?
0:07:46 Yeah, so, I mean, this was super striking to me from the beginning, just because it’s something I’ve thought a lot about, having been part of some of these circles, or at least adjacent circles.
0:07:54 And I was treated very well in academia by my male mentors and things, so this isn’t sort of a vulnerable Me Too story.
0:07:56 Like I genuinely was treated very well.
0:08:06 But the gender dynamics in these circles, even in the best sort of most upstanding circles, are still quite strange and just traditional, right?
0:08:10 You kind of have gendered panels at conferences, that sort of thing.
0:08:16 But the extent to which the book is about, that was kind of a surprise to me.
0:08:19 Like the book doesn’t profile any women academics.
0:08:27 And that’s because there aren’t really any with that kind of profile who I thought were, sort of had the profile that warranted a whole chapter.
0:08:31 And so that, and I kept puzzling over, like, am I missing somebody?
0:08:36 Is there some, you know, is there a woman here who’s respected by these men who should be elevated?
0:08:39 And, and it just didn’t happen.
0:08:43 And so I thought, well, this is, this is, I think the reality of what this, what is going on.
0:08:45 And I wasn’t that puzzled by it.
0:08:46 I mean, they don’t really respect women.
0:08:54 They have a whole battery of intellectual formulations to, you know, exclude women and reasoning behind that.
0:08:56 And I’m familiar with a lot of those ideas.
0:08:59 So, so that happened pretty organically.
0:09:02 Being in these spaces is sort of strange.
0:09:06 I was in some of those spaces mainly after I had started writing about the new right.
0:09:10 And so part of it was they, they sort of, I think they knew who I was.
0:09:16 And so they, they weren’t horrible to me or anything, but it was, there were certainly some vibes that were strange.
0:09:17 Yeah, I know that feeling.
0:09:22 But it’s so, it’s so, it’s so dramatic, just the, the extent to which it’s mostly men.
0:09:32 I think it comes through more in their writing than in their personal behavior, to be honest, because some of their writing is so misogynist and just so, you know, so medieval almost.
0:09:36 That maybe that’s not fair to the medievalist, but it’s just backwards, right?
0:09:39 And really archaic in its thinking.
0:09:52 Okay, so one thing that you’ve alluded to, but I think is like really central to understanding what’s going on, is that while the new right has these shared sets of principles in common, or like the grouping that we call the new right, right?
0:10:03 You know, they have this preoccupation with gender, there’s strong support for Trump, a general disinterest in abiding by the traditional norms of democratic politics, a commitment to like unremitting culture war against the left.
0:10:04 Like, these are all like defining traits.
0:10:12 But there are huge divisions between the different sub-factions that make up the new right.
0:10:20 So if you were to divide them into sort of main camps, what would you say the fault lines between those camps are?
0:10:30 Sure. So I sort of have three main camps, which are the Claremonters, the post-liberals, and the national conservatives.
0:10:37 And then I talk also about the hard right, but the hard right kind of travels alongside all three of them ideologically.
0:10:41 So, but the hard right is kind of the hardcore manosphere fascist types.
0:10:45 And each of these groupings are different.
0:10:52 The Claremonters are really committed to the, or at least in theory, to the American founding.
0:11:00 And so they have this very sort of grandiose vision of what the American founding was that’s beyond even your ordinary patriotism.
0:11:02 It’s that this is the best regime of all time.
0:11:07 And things have, and they’re also at the very cutting edge of the culture war.
0:11:11 So they, it’s the best regime of all time, but we’ve completely lost the plot.
0:11:17 And liberals and liberal way of thinking has taken over to such a degree that we basically need a counter-revolution.
0:11:20 So they’re really far gone in the culture warring.
0:11:26 They’re sort of the January 6th types, right, who defended some of that, that anything goes.
0:11:26 Yeah, yeah.
0:11:33 Michael Anton, who you mentioned earlier, who’s now a Trump administration official, like a high-ranking one, is like one of the key leaders in that faction.
0:11:33 Yeah.
0:11:35 Michael Anton, John Eastman, these types.
0:11:37 So they’re pretty radical.
0:11:42 And then there’s the national conservatives, which I treat as sort of an umbrella group for everything.
0:11:50 But they’re sort of a little more vanilla with just nationalism as their core central thing.
0:12:01 And it’s, but it turns into kind of ethno-nationalism in some cases, and certainly a, also Christian nationalism, the main guy has advocated for.
0:12:03 So, but they, they’re sort of a big tent.
0:12:05 Everyone’s welcome in that grouping.
0:12:18 And, and I’ll say a little bit more about the tensions, because the tensions are clearest when you were talking about the post-liberals, who are the, kind of the high, most high brow of the new right.
0:12:21 And they tend to be Catholic, Catholic intellectuals.
0:12:29 So we’re thinking about people like Adrian Vermeule at Harvard, Patrick Dineen, who is quite a important figure in the movement now.
0:12:33 Saurabh Amari might be someone that listeners have heard of.
0:12:46 And so these are, these are serious Catholics who are more committed to the social conservatism and really want to shape the morals of the country, I think, in a much more traditional Catholic direction.
0:13:00 But they’re also, interestingly, much more sincere, I think, about the social, the economic, not economic nationalism, but kind of a more left-oriented economics.
0:13:02 So a more government-led economics.
0:13:11 And the new right as a whole speaks that way, as if they want to help the working class, create new programs, do this kind of populist thing economically.
0:13:21 But I think that the, the people who are closest to Trump, which are Claremont and the Natcons and sort of the Project 2025 people, they haven’t really followed through.
0:13:26 They’ve got the tariffs, but otherwise economically, they’re still doing the big tax cuts.
0:13:27 They’re still kind of beholden to donors.
0:13:38 And so that’s been a big fissure because the post liberals, I think, are quite sincere in their desire to have a more, they’re almost open to socialism, right?
0:13:50 So that’s sort of the most dramatic fissure, I think, comes along with the different versions of the economic possibilities and what people are open to and how sincerely they’re committed to that.
0:13:55 There are, there are a lot of other ones just in terms of how accepting they are of the hard right.
0:14:06 So Rabamari is someone who’s been quite outspoken against the sort of Proud Boys and that vector and the manosphere, Bronze Age pervert and those guys.
0:14:10 There are some, there are some fissures there where some people, well, there’s one fissure.
0:14:12 So Rabamari speaks out against them.
0:14:14 Everyone else is pretty much okay with it.
0:14:15 Yeah.
0:14:23 And I think another interesting one which came about just after the election was the Doge versus MAGA, right?
0:14:28 And so, of course, we could talk about the tech bros as well as kind of their own world.
0:14:30 But again, it’s kind of a holdover.
0:14:34 There’s the libertarian strain of the conservative movement.
0:14:47 And I think in some ways the tensions there might be exaggerated because Doge came in, took down, did sort of the destructive part of getting rid of the so-called administrative state or doing some of that work.
0:14:54 But a big part of the new right, what they want to do is also harness the state and weaponize it for their own purposes.
0:15:00 So sometimes I think these schisms and fissures are perhaps overstated when it really comes down to what’s happening on the ground.
0:15:10 Well, I mean, it strikes me as the sort of classic confusion of a revolutionary regime, right, is that you’ve got lots of different subcomponents.
0:15:14 They’re united behind being, broadly speaking, part of MAGA, right?
0:15:17 They wouldn’t use that language often to describe themselves.
0:15:25 But basically, they all agree that Trump is this world historical figure who has changed the nature of American politics to open the door to their kind of politics.
0:15:31 And a lot of the disagreements that are going on here is trying to fill in exactly what the content of that is.
0:15:36 I find that they’re all bound to a degree by certain elements of the Trump movement.
0:15:41 Like, you’re not going to come out and say, if you’re one of these people, actually, Trump lost the 2020 election.
0:15:44 The American electoral system is totally fair, right?
0:15:45 Nothing’s wrong with it.
0:15:58 Like, that’s not – you’re not going to say that tariffs in general are a bad economic policy and we need to return to the, you know, economics of the mainstream conservative movement prior to Trump’s ascendance.
0:16:02 But you’ll fight about things inside of that, say maybe the tariffs were poorly implemented.
0:16:03 Maybe they weren’t.
0:16:04 This seems like one area of dispute.
0:16:16 You know, maybe we need to be more aggressive in remaking the American electoral system or maybe we care about that less relative to some kind of, like, cultural war concerns.
0:16:21 And there are these specific points of tension between the different groups.
0:16:23 And then there are sort of big philosophical disputes, right?
0:16:25 You mentioned Bronzeade Pervert a second ago.
0:16:34 Well, he’s a former PhD who – I guess he still has his PhD, but he was a former academic – who basically is obsessed with Nietzsche.
0:16:39 And his philosophy is kind of a dime-store Nietzschean view of the world, right?
0:16:41 I find it very thin-gruel intellectually.
0:16:45 It’s kind of pathetic, but it really is a kind of bastardization of Nietzsche.
0:16:52 That’s very different from, you know, a Catholic who wants to build a confessional state for obvious reasons, right?
0:16:53 Given Nietzsche’s view of Christianity.
0:17:03 And so philosophically, it seems like there are huge disagreements between these different camps, even if they’re all part of the same political movement.
0:17:08 It’s interesting to see how they can operate next to each other without biting each other’s heads off.
0:17:12 Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s absolutely right.
0:17:32 They’re ideologically completely opposed to one another, and there’s a – and in sort of comical ways, right, where the – like you mentioned, the Catholics versus the Nietzscheans, or there’s a huge part of the Trump movement that’s Christian nationalist, but then there’s these manosphere types who are much more sort of pagan in their understanding.
0:17:36 So what you get is this complete tangle of ideas.
0:17:44 I think you get surprising – these men are all reaching back to surprising sources and using them in their own ways.
0:17:57 And you can have someone like Adrian Vermeule, who’s inspired by Carl Schmitt, who you can identify partly he was in the – they called him the crown jurist of the Third Reich, right?
0:18:03 Like he became a Nazi and was very important, at least at the beginning, of the Nazi regime for his legal arguments.
0:18:06 And you get someone like Adrian Vermeule who’s inspired by that.
0:18:20 So, again, I’m not saying you’re wrong that there are these big conflicts, but sometimes it’s almost like the movement is so powerful that they – the incoherence becomes its own kind of loyalty test.
0:18:31 They’re so united on some of their political propositions and some of the radicalism and their anti-liberalism that I find the intellectual distinctions very interesting.
0:18:35 And I think there are resources there for people who want to combat some of this to call them out on some of this.
0:18:37 But I don’t know how much it matters practically.
0:18:43 Well, I mean, it’s – what you’re describing are the dynamics of a united political coalition.
0:18:44 Yeah.
0:18:51 But the point is, right, what they all agree on is that right-wing politics properly construed means the demolition of American liberalism.
0:19:03 The end – not just, you know, of liberalism in the sense of the Democratic Party, but in the sense of a system that is guided by principles of individual liberty, free enterprise, at least to a limited degree.
0:19:11 And the basic ideas of, you know, state non-interference, individuals as rights bearers who can make claims against the state.
0:19:17 And that’s sort of the primary purpose of politics is to allow those people to pursue the vision of life that they choose, right?
0:19:23 And the state enables that and provides the background conditions that make people capable of being free, right?
0:19:26 That’s like, broadly speaking, the liberal vision of politics.
0:19:38 And every single one of these movements is for their own reasons, right, arranged against that, which I think is – it’s not the only American political tradition, but it’s certainly the one enshrined in the founding.
0:19:39 Can I say one more thing here quickly?
0:19:40 Yeah, please.
0:19:48 Well, I just think it’s important because – I mean, and this might be a place where you and I – I don’t think we disagree, but where my framing of some of this is different from yours.
0:19:55 One thing I think that I’m emphasizing differently is that these movements, as you’ve noted, they’ve got – there’s this huge incoherence.
0:20:10 They all have a quite – or many of them have quite a different conception of the good or of what they hold to be the ideal, whether it’s the founding of some – you know, the Republican founding, nationalism, or the Catholic conception of the good, a very traditional Catholic conception of the good.
0:20:21 But I think it’s important to recognize that they are driven by the good, in a way, and sort of these thick conceptions of the good, comprehensive doctrines.
0:20:30 And I think that that’s kind of a useful way to think about it, where I don’t think liberals quite get, in general, how driven these people are or think they are.
0:20:37 There’s plenty of politics that’s just convenience, marriage of convenience, but a lot of them really think that they are pursuing – they’re fanatics.
0:20:39 You know, they’re pursuing their own ideals.
0:20:46 They think that these ideals are in so much peril, their way of life is in so much peril that it’s – that they need to oppress everyone else.
0:20:58 And so I think just the psychology there is – it’s worth just kind of really being clear about that, that they think they’re doing something that’s good for everybody because their idea of the good is true.
0:21:03 And even when they conflict with one another, they don’t conflict enough that they can’t agree on that.
0:21:05 Yeah.
0:21:07 No, I mean, I think that’s right.
0:21:07 Right.
0:21:22 I think one of the common threads in new right thinking is that what we call liberalism is actually, you know, not a doctrine of limiting state power, but a doctrine of cultural aggression against people like them in the way that you just described.
0:21:34 But there really is a sense that they’re waging defensive culture war, even if what they’re responding to is something like the legalization of same-sex marriage, which was a seminal moment, especially for post-liberals.
0:21:37 But for most of us, I mean, I am in an opposite-sex marriage.
0:21:43 It does not – the quality of that is not degraded by the existence of same-sex marriage, right?
0:21:47 Like, that’s kind of crazy, it seems to me, to read that as cultural aggression.
0:21:49 But that is how it’s perceived, right?
0:21:51 That’s how it’s understood in these worlds.
0:21:52 Yeah.
0:22:01 One thing that frustrates me is I wish that – I don’t want liberals to, you know, fight fire with fire, but I do think we need a little more robust defensive liberalism.
0:22:09 And so that’s partly what my book is about, too, is just having a little more spine and backbone instead of caving to these things, even just ideologically.
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0:25:56 So a skeptical listener at this point might wonder, what are you guys talking about?
0:25:58 Like literally who cares about any of this, right?
0:26:10 Because these are people having arguments in small blogs and maybe it spills out into a newspaper or magazine occasionally, but it’s on podcasts, it’s on YouTube, whatever.
0:26:23 Whereas like what, you know, the actual decision makers, the people who are literally attacking American democracy and liberalism are people like Donald Trump who don’t care at all about what’s happening in this world of ideas.
0:26:26 But, you know, you’ve spent a while studying these people.
0:26:27 You’ve thought about them a lot.
0:26:31 Like, why do you think any of this is something that matters for politics?
0:26:43 Well, I think, I think that first of all, the knee-jerk reaction to think who cares is a natural one because a lot of these people are surprisingly bizarre.
0:26:48 And it is, it’s alarming to see them have wield so much power.
0:26:52 It’s alarming to see J.D. Vance have that kind of clout.
0:26:58 And so we, I don’t think we want to lose sight of that initial kind of surprise and curiosity.
0:27:01 And a lot of it has been opportunism.
0:27:06 So you have sort of weirdos coming in, but I think they’ve dramatically reoriented the GOP.
0:27:16 My book’s also about sort of just how a lot of the barriers between the far-right, the alt-right, and the establishment have completely gone away.
0:27:20 And so you have arguments that are not new.
0:27:29 We call it the new right, but a lot of these are sort of latent in the, on the conservative side going back 50 years to Goldwater, to Buchanan,
0:27:41 and the birthers and the birchers and this sort of conspiracism and racism and anti-civil rights stuff that has been a big part of the intellectual world on the right for, for decades and decades.
0:27:44 And so now it’s really, so it’s not unprecedented.
0:27:53 It’s, there’s, we could talk about continuities with the past or discontinuities and the discontinuities are there in the intellectual world where you have all these weird,
0:27:56 formerly fringe people coming in and taking over.
0:27:59 But it’s not just a novel thing.
0:28:11 It’s also these old strains, these old sort of archaic, what you would probably call the authoritarian traditions, right, in the American past coming up to the surface.
0:28:13 And so there’s a lot to work with there.
0:28:15 It’s not just some radically new thing.
0:28:19 And these kinds of movements, I think, can build and build energy.
0:28:30 And so young men, I think, are influenced by these circles because a lot of these people I’m writing about, I’ve sort of cordoned off the people in the sort of intellectual spheres.
0:28:34 And we could debate how intellectual, how savvy, how smart they are.
0:28:35 But they’re pretty smart.
0:28:41 And they’ve got a huge, a lot of them have PhDs, which is no marker of, you know, genius or anything.
0:28:47 But they have really a lot of education, a lot of resources available to them.
0:28:51 They’re experts in ways that we would, that would surprise, I think, most listeners, right?
0:28:52 They know a whole lot.
0:28:56 I wouldn’t want to debate some of them on, you know, their founding or other questions.
0:28:57 It’s difficult.
0:29:00 They’re very well, you know, well-learned people.
0:29:06 And they are shaping the minds of people like Joe Rogan and some of these much more popular figures.
0:29:08 So that’s kind of how it works.
0:29:12 I think ideologically there is kind of a trickle-down effect.
0:29:14 The culture war stuff has a big impact.
0:29:21 You know, we could talk about how much the economic dimensions of the economic problems of the country matter for this movement,
0:29:26 the working class populism stuff, but part of it is that they say it does, right?
0:29:28 And they argue that that’s their pitch.
0:29:33 And that’s, and they, it’s not hard to make people feel like they have economic woes, right?
0:29:34 Or that they’re suffering.
0:29:35 I mean, we all struggle.
0:29:40 And so, so I think that a lot of the culture warring is a top-down phenomenon.
0:29:43 And that’s, that’s how they think about it.
0:29:46 And they’re very good at the culture warring and it does have an impact.
0:29:48 So, I mean, that’s, those are some of the main things.
0:29:58 So, you have a, like, a really lovely phrase for a certain kind of right-wing thinking about how politics works, which is ideas first.
0:30:06 One, one thing that you suggest is distinctive about all right-wing traditions, not just the radical right, but the sort of American right in general,
0:30:10 is that they think ideas have a kind of independent causal force, right?
0:30:14 Like, they, they matter, they come from somewhere perhaps, but they can take on a life of their own.
0:30:16 They matter in and of themselves.
0:30:24 And, you know, I, I think that’s true in a really important sense in a way that’s underappreciated by a lot of people on the left.
0:30:33 And, and it almost seems like we’re, we’re living in this world where the right is proving its own theory of politics, right?
0:30:40 It’s ideas first vision that when you write things down, that that has tangible effects on what happens in the political world, right?
0:30:41 That they’re proving that through their own actions.
0:30:48 Yeah, I mean, that that’s, I call it the ideas first, but it’s also a kind of intellectual fanaticism, right?
0:30:55 Each different camp has a commitment to a certain vision of, of politics, of the good, of like, how we ought to live, right?
0:30:59 And they, they become, they’re very attached to these ideas.
0:31:03 But the conservative movement as a whole has, has for quite some time now in the United States,
0:31:10 had this similar understanding of how ideas shape the world and why ideas matter.
0:31:16 You can go back to a book called Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver, which is from the 50s that talks about.
0:31:17 Weird, weird book.
0:31:19 It’s a very weird book.
0:31:28 He traces how the, the, the fall of modernity and sort of all the problems that we have today trace back to the introduction of nominalism,
0:31:31 which is the idea that ideas don’t have permanent value.
0:31:40 It was sort of out there in the world, but rather, you know, concepts actually are, actually only exist sort of materially.
0:31:45 That there’s no sort of universal truths, that it’s all sort of embedded in our material world.
0:31:52 So they all sort of hate this modern relativism, materialism, historicism.
0:32:03 These are kind of some of the, the big ideas that they think have destroyed modern life because we don’t have an anchor in liberal modernity for our, our way of life and our belief systems.
0:32:15 We don’t have a common set of norms and values and beliefs that anchors us together and allows us to make decisions about politics or, you know, we have structures that help us.
0:32:27 We have democratic systems that help us make these decisions and negotiate these things, but they really think that you need to have a coherent sort of moral ecosystem that holds everybody together to have good politics.
0:32:30 And I think that’s a major driving force of, of the right.
0:32:32 I want to sit on that for a second.
0:32:33 That’s, that’s fascinating.
0:32:43 So what you’re saying is that ideas first, isn’t just, you know, a theory that it matters to develop ideas, to make arguments in the public realm or to make intellectual arguments.
0:33:11 It’s that ideas matter in the sense that they construct the reality, the social structure in which we live and that part of the purpose of developing or making these, these seemingly wild arguments is to redefine and reset out a set of new moral norms that shape the way that ordinary everyday people think about their worlds.
0:33:30 But more concretely, if you’re a Catholic integralist like Adrian Vermeule, who thinks that we should live in a society where the state is implementing very literally Catholic social doctrine, like doing, acting as the church’s agent in a lot of ways, what you’re doing in writing is trying to create a world in which that becomes more thinkable.
0:33:36 To create a new morality from, like, you know, the pages of sub stacks with 5,000 followers or whatever, right?
0:33:40 I’m not saying that to make it sound delusional, right?
0:33:42 Because there actually has been a lot more influence than these people have.
0:33:43 No, no, I think that’s right.
0:33:57 I mean, it sounds, that’s why it’s so interesting because, and they’re reaching back, there’s Adrian Vermeule to the Catholic tradition, but the Claremonters and a lot of these guys, like what they’re talking about is a regime that’s dedicated to being virtuous, right?
0:34:05 These are old, that’s a little Platonic language, Aristotelian language, or civic Republicanism, which is very, I mean, to me, those things are very appealing.
0:34:09 But the modern regime, liberal democracy, does not focus on that.
0:34:23 But they think that to have a healthy politics, to have a good politics that people can participate in and flourish in requires doctrines that shape us in those ways, in our education, right?
0:34:24 In our laws all the way down.
0:34:30 So you can find quotes like this, you know, about the need for a virtuous citizenry, right?
0:34:31 In John Adams and in the founding.
0:34:33 So it’s not completely foreign to the tradition.
0:34:37 But they are really running with it, I think it’s fair to say.
0:34:50 And it’s often very detached from the empirical world of what life is like in the United States, from just any sort of good faith understanding of what liberal democracy is and how liberals live.
0:34:53 They think we all live tawdry, you know, amoral lifestyles.
0:34:56 But I think they’re quite delusional about that.
0:35:00 I guess one other thing I want to say is that we do need ideas.
0:35:07 So one of the reasons I highlight that is that, as I sort of say in my conclusion, Democrats tend to put ideas last, it seems to me.
0:35:08 It’s not.
0:35:10 They’re very wonkish.
0:35:11 And I love them for that.
0:35:22 But there’s a kind of disconnect there with how the culture warring on the right and the kind of procedural, quietest approach on the left, generally speaking.
0:35:25 And so the conservatives would not agree with my assessment there.
0:35:29 They think that the left is just a complete culture warrior, juggernaut.
0:35:30 But I disagree.
0:35:33 And I think we do need ideas and we need good ideas.
0:35:43 And the American founding is often thought of as sort of a creed, America’s thought of as a creedal nation, right, where we’re united by ideas, ideas about equality and liberty.
0:35:47 And the new right rejects those ideas in particular.
0:35:51 And so part of I’m not just trying to attack an ideas first approach.
0:35:54 I think that we need some of that in our politics.
0:36:02 I really loved this passage from your book where you talked about how liberals and Democrats are putting ideas last.
0:36:12 Where you said that having incubated them into an AI lab, tested them against a dozen poles, and assigned them to a celebrity to rehearse.
0:36:28 And that one of the most frustrating experiences for any liberal observer of the new right was to witness again and again the incredible contrast between the coarse brazenness of its ideologues and the tepid intellectual reserve and cluelessness and cowardice of so many centrist and liberal leaders, both within academia and beyond.
0:36:30 Of course, there are exceptions, but not nearly enough.
0:36:38 That is a stinging indictment on your part of the sort of liberal intellectual class.
0:36:47 When you say that they’ve failed in contrast to the coarse brazenness of the new right, like what do you mean by that specifically?
0:36:54 I think I was finalizing those passages sort of in the early part of this year, right?
0:36:56 January 2025, I guess, right?
0:36:59 And so we see the administration coming in.
0:37:09 I mean, I was surprised, even though I knew I’ve written about how much more prepared they would be this time around than they were, than the new right was last time.
0:37:19 And Trump, right, Trump had a lot more, he was much, has been much more effective in his, the administration has done a lot more, I think it’s fair to say.
0:37:20 And they did a lot last time.
0:37:26 And so the response on the Democrats’ part, I mean, they’re in a difficult position.
0:37:37 They had a very rocky electoral cycle with Biden staying in so long and Harris then kind of in this awful position of having to parachute in and not being very well prepared, perhaps.
0:37:43 So, I mean, the frustration was with all of that, but I think it’s something that I’ve seen for a long time.
0:37:48 I don’t feel like there’s a much of a response intellectually to what’s going on.
0:37:50 Academics don’t have a lot to say.
0:38:00 I mean, there’s, there’s a lot of talk, I guess, but there’s, it doesn’t seem to me like the party has much to offer on this front, right?
0:38:01 On the ideological front.
0:38:05 It’s, and like you said, it’s a sharp critique.
0:38:10 I still, I think they’re in a very difficult position and I don’t know the answers.
0:38:22 So I was vague intentionally, but it is frustrating as an observer to see a sort of, Bernie and AOC were the people who went and toured the country, right?
0:38:24 And had a lot of energy in those first months.
0:38:28 But I didn’t see, you know, more centrist Democrats doing very much.
0:38:30 And I still think that’s the case.
0:38:32 They seemed very shocked, very unprepared.
0:38:37 And, and I think that that sort of comes down to a failure of imagination.
0:38:41 Maybe taking way too much for granted for a very long time.
0:38:43 And that’s part of what got us Trump in the first place.
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0:41:58 If you look at academic political philosophy and political theory, liberalism is the dominant doctrine.
0:42:09 Why hasn’t this intellectual dominance translated into a forceful ideas-first intellectual response to the new right?
0:42:15 Yeah, I mean, this is sort of getting speculative, but I guess it’s fair, because there’s some speculation in my book.
0:42:16 We’re on a podcast.
0:42:17 That’s what you do.
0:42:18 You speculate.
0:42:18 You speculate.
0:42:18 Yeah, okay, fine.
0:42:24 One of the through lines is higher education, right?
0:42:32 And how the right has attacked higher education, not just in the present, but of course going back quite a while.
0:42:38 For its liberal dominance, it’s the affirmative action, everything’s wrong with academia.
0:42:43 And so a big part of what they’ve been trying to do is to retake some of these institutions.
0:42:46 They’ve got parallel institutions that they’ve built up.
0:42:52 There’s just a lot going on there, which is, it’s just to say, that’s their take on academia.
0:43:05 And I think part of what you’re talking about in our politics does have to do with the liberal domination of academia, insofar as our politicians, it’s partly a problem of liberalism.
0:43:21 I mean, some of these things are, the new right has been able to capitalize off of all of these sort of thick moral conceptions and these big questions about how to live, partly because we don’t do that as liberals, right?
0:43:33 Liberalism sort of cordons off some of those questions and its origins were to help people navigate and get along, given huge existential differences, right?
0:43:36 And spiritual differences and strife, so religious warfare.
0:43:42 And so liberalism was invented partly to avoid some of these big ideas, questions.
0:43:51 And so I think the answer to why our politicians are not, you know, democratic politicians, liberal politicians,
0:44:00 are not better equipped to confront some of these ideas is partly because they haven’t been educated in milieus that cultivate that.
0:44:05 There’s a kind of educational formation that is lacking, I think, in some liberal circles.
0:44:10 You mentioned academic political philosophy, which is so dominated by liberals.
0:44:12 That’s pretty much true.
0:44:17 But there’s not always space in those circles to explore questions of the good life.
0:44:19 It’s almost taken off the table.
0:44:21 I mean, in philosophy, you’ll get it.
0:44:23 But in political science, you don’t.
0:44:33 You don’t get these ancient sort of Socratic questions about how best to live, what different ways of life might be choice-worthy or true.
0:44:46 I mean, it strikes me that there’s a bit of a trade-off here in sort of, like, intellectual work between rigor and relevance.
0:44:48 And I’m going to be overgeneralizing here.
0:45:00 But it seems like one of the problems, right, of the academy in general is that there are so many procedures in place for accuracy, for disciplinary precision, and stuff like that.
0:45:03 Just sort of like the way that people operate, the rules that you have to follow.
0:45:09 That you produce work that is technically well-reasoned, very thoughtful, but oftentimes extremely narrow.
0:45:26 Whereas out there in the wilds of Claremontistan or, you know, small substacks, right, like, you can just take on these huge ideas and maybe make all sorts of technical or factual errors, right?
0:45:37 I find that a lot when I’m reading New Right Arguments is, like, I have to fact-check everything because you don’t have the sort of reliability of the peer review process or the citation practices.
0:45:43 There’s just always these wild, sweeping generalizations, oftentimes without sufficient evidence to back them up.
0:45:45 And yet that makes things exciting, right?
0:45:46 It makes things fun.
0:45:52 It makes people like J.D. Vance, who are ideas-hungry politicians, latch on to them.
0:46:01 And that just, like, that doesn’t, there’s not that world out there that can foster the level of excitement.
0:46:07 I don’t know if inaccuracy is, like, necessary to excitement, like, if you have to do both of those things.
0:46:16 But I feel like the lack of strict academic norms surrounding accuracy, precision, and incrementalism-
0:46:17 You’re putting this very politely.
0:46:24 Really, really, really have contributed to the New Right’s success as, like, an ideas merchant to the political class.
0:46:26 Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right.
0:46:31 And I think one of the things I try to get at is some of the insularity in some of this work.
0:46:33 I mean, like I said, you’re putting it very nicely.
0:46:39 Some of those circles, that’s what frustrated me about my own education is it seemed quite insular.
0:46:42 I started to see beyond some of this very clearly.
0:46:52 And then when I go back and read these books, it’s a lot, you know, a lot of it’s just factually incorrect or just completely blinkered in terms of its understanding of history.
0:46:54 So it’ll take on, and that’s part of the idea’s first thing.
0:46:58 It doesn’t care about, you know, the failures of Reconstruction or Jim Crow.
0:47:00 It just runs with a certain kind of narrative.
0:47:02 And it’s kind of ugly.
0:47:10 And so that’s partly what gives them license to spout off the way they do in other quarters, right, when they’re on their substacks or on their podcasts.
0:47:18 And so it’s a mix of, you know, genuine education and a kind of formation that’s just very different from what we get in liberal academia.
0:47:27 Partly that and partly just an insularity and a failure of professional norms and standards.
0:47:34 And so in academia, you do have these conservative enclaves and some of them I do respect and I think are serious and others are not.
0:47:42 But I think in academia as a whole, if we’re going to get into the nitty gritty here, you have so many, you have a whole slew of problems.
0:47:48 But one of them really is the hyper specialization and professionalization is fine.
0:47:57 But when it becomes intellectual sort of narrow mindedness and that happens in every field and then there are trends that dominate and there’s a kind of myopia.
0:48:02 And but there’s sort of a lack of checks and against some of that.
0:48:08 And I think that in liberal academia, there’s a kind of contempt for the generalist, right?
0:48:19 There’s a real contempt for popular writing and and for journalism sometimes, right, because it’s not so fussy and it does and it has something bigger to say and it is sort of more ideas first.
0:48:29 It was hard for me to get comfortable writing even for a broader audience as an academic because it feels it’s just a very different kind of activity.
0:48:47 There isn’t a place for the sort of broad formative thing that I’m talking about, which isn’t to say we want to indoctrinate people into a particular set of values in our undergraduate programs, but at least to expose them to these other ways of thinking and sort of bigger, bigger traditions, bigger questions.
0:49:18 One thing I think that is very true about liberalism is sort of its anthropology, its sense that it is just a fact about the world, that we’re not going to agree about everything, that we are going to live in a society where people have very different beliefs, very different backgrounds, very different worldviews, very different things that they care about, and that no society can function well when it doesn’t provide room for different kinds of people to be themselves, right?
0:49:47 And it will eventually founder and collapse.
0:50:06 Trump is either term limited out or he dies, that the new right can no longer function well as a cogent political bloc because it lacks liberalism’s ability to productively brook and channel dissent and disagreement about really key issues.
0:50:30 Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the fact that they disagree with themselves and there’s the fact that they disagree with themselves and then there’s the fact that they don’t really understand and don’t know how to, I don’t think they’re very honest with themselves about the extent to which the liberal side actually is potent, disagrees, doesn’t want this, and is going to fight for itself.
0:50:48 Even if it, even if I say they’re not very good at the arguments in some extent or have been a little lackluster, I think that the right completely underestimates the power of the, even at their most sort of fanatical, they tend to underestimate the extent to which actual people are committed to liberalism and to liberal pluralism.
0:50:50 So I think that’s a real vulnerability.
0:50:57 I do think you’re right that when Trump is out of the picture, there will be a lot of uncertainty.
0:51:03 And, but I think that it’s also, it’s, it’s still very complicated.
0:51:06 And I still think that we need to do better as liberals.
0:51:09 Like you’re a very good advocate for liberalism, Zach.
0:51:10 Thank you.
0:51:11 I try.
0:51:12 And we need more of that.
0:51:21 We need, even if we don’t decide that we’re going to teach liberalism in our colleges or start new civics institutions devoted to liberal pluralism and the meaning of life.
0:51:29 We need people to be able to, to be conversant the way you are in, in these, in these values.
0:51:37 And we need, I think our politicians to be a little more on the offense in terms of what they believe in, because I think it is very appealing to many people.
0:51:46 I think you’re right in your book, when you talk about these sort of what people want out of politics and what the new right has to offer are quite different, right?
0:51:48 These are very strange ideologies.
0:51:58 And so it could throw us back in kind of like a period of deep fanatical disagreement where we’re warring with each other.
0:52:03 If sort of they get their way, I think that’s what might happen is they might start disagreeing.
0:52:07 The different cohorts within the right might start getting more combative with one another.
0:52:15 But I think more likely is that this movement will continue, but perhaps be relegated to the states sort of in a decentralized.
0:52:29 What would have happened, I think, had Trump not won this time would have been that they would have kept, they were preparing, they were building the way to, to work their way through the federal system and take over in red states and, and oppress people through their laws, right?
0:52:31 And through their new right ideas.
0:52:37 So, so I think that there, we don’t want to get too complacent just because we know that Trump is the glue holding all of this together right now.
0:52:52 I was about to say, right, like assuming the Trump movement fails and we don’t have a red Caesar who imposes some weird vision of evangelical slash Catholic law on the rest of us.
0:52:56 Again, it’s, I, I really get hung up on the contradictions in this project, right?
0:52:57 And the way in which it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
0:53:03 And it really, but, but look, Laura, I want to thank you for just a fascinating discussion.
0:53:10 And I hope all of our listeners come out and will pre-order the book if you are interested in what Laura has to say.
0:53:12 And if not, go buy it in November when it’s hitting the shelves.
0:53:13 So thanks for being here.
0:53:14 Thank you, Zach.
0:53:15 And they should do a one too, guys.
0:53:18 I think my book follows up pretty well on yours.
0:53:19 So if they haven’t, don’t have yours already.
0:53:20 That’s right.
0:53:23 The Reactionary Spirit is available wherever you purchase your books.
0:53:31 All right.
0:53:34 I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did.
0:53:39 I had a great time with Laura, like I did, by the way, at that conference, the Liberalism in the 21st Century event.
0:53:42 It was, it was a wonderful, wonderful conference.
0:53:45 And if you’re looking for something to do next year in DC, please check it out.
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0:54:27 This episode was hosted by me, Zach Beecham.
0:54:28 I’m a senior correspondent at Vox.
0:54:31 I’m the author of the On the Right newsletter, where we talk about the political right.
0:54:38 And a book called The Reactionary Spirit, which is about the rise of anti-democratic politics in the 21st century.
0:54:40 I’d hope if you liked this episode, you’d like the book too.
0:54:49 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Erica Huang, facts checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
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0:01:36 If you’ve been following American politics in the Trump era, there’s a decent chance you’ve heard of something called the new right.
0:01:46 It’s a loose movement of radical intellectuals who share both a basic hostility to American liberal democracy and real influence in the current White House.
0:01:54 They all think the system is rotted, that it needs to be fundamentally overhauled, and they all think that Trump can be a vehicle for putting something better in its place.
0:01:56 But, you know, why do they think that?
0:01:58 How much influence do they really have?
0:02:01 And what would a response to their rising prominence even look like?
0:02:06 I’m Zach Beecham, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:20 My guest today is Laura Field.
0:02:22 Laura and I have followed each other’s work for a while.
0:02:26 She’s the author of a forthcoming book about the new right called Furious Minds.
0:02:30 And I’m the author of On the Right, which is Fox’s newsletter about the political right and its ideas.
0:02:36 We came together last week on a panel at the Liberalism in the 21st Century conference in D.C.,
0:02:43 and we discussed anti-liberal political thought, our shared interests about things that are deeply depressing, and so on.
0:02:50 That being said, it was a really fun time, and I’m so glad that I got a chance to meet her there.
0:02:54 I’m also really glad that I got a chance to tape this episode with her.
0:02:59 Laura’s a trained political theorist, and she spent a lot of time in the conservative intellectual world
0:03:01 tracking the trends that would eventually produce the new right.
0:03:09 She saw them firsthand while they were germinating, and got to meet a lot of the people who were involved in sort of the creation of this world.
0:03:14 Her book’s a fascinating taxonomy of the wild world of far-right thinking, and it’s one you should definitely pre-order.
0:03:21 Laura Field, welcome to the show.
0:03:23 Thank you, Zach, and thank you for having me.
0:03:27 In the book, you use the term new right to define it.
0:03:31 It’s like an umbrella term for all of these different various pro-Trump factions.
0:03:38 So what unites, in your view, like what makes the new right a cogent grouping, not just a random smattering of people who all like Trump?
0:03:39 What connects them?
0:03:46 And what differentiates them from, on substantive grounds, not just like liking Trump versus not liking Trump from the old right?
0:03:47 Sure.
0:03:54 So I think, I just want to make one little point here, which is that these terms are kind of weird and convoluted.
0:04:02 So we, in the States, it sort of took on the last few years to talk about the new right, but there are like 10 waves of new right in history.
0:04:09 So like historians go crazy when you talk like this, because there’s like an actual old right, which was in the early part of the 20th century.
0:04:13 And so just to be clear, I’m talking about the MAGA new right.
0:04:17 It’s kind of the latest iteration of a new kind of conservative intellectual movement.
0:04:34 And it contrasts with, I don’t call it the old right, I call it the Ruckley-Buckley right, or the establishment right, which is kind of what we were, if you’re not 19, you’re sort of, is your familiar conservative world, right?
0:04:45 And so the Reagan-Buckley style of conservatism is, there’s like a classic model of it, it’s called the Gipper’s stool, and it’s got these different sort of props that hold it up.
0:04:59 So you’ve got fiscal conservatism, so free market economics, social conservatism, conservative social values, and then finally, anti-communism is sort of what held this fusionist vision together.
0:05:08 And that really held a lot of sway until at least in the conservative intellectual movement, until at least the end of the Cold War and beyond.
0:05:13 So it’s something, you know, that’s when we talk about the old establishment, I think we can think that’s the substance.
0:05:16 The new right turns against a lot of that.
0:05:29 So Michael Anton, who was one of the first people to defend the new right and Trumpism from an intellectual standpoint, he has a great formula for the new right and for what Trumpism was.
0:05:43 He says it’s economic nationalism, so turning against the free market orientation of the establishment, as well as closed borders or secure borders, so that’s the anti-immigration strain, and America first foreign policy.
0:05:52 And so that’s obviously very different from the kind of liberal internationalism that grew out of the conservative anti-communism over the last, you know, 50 years.
0:06:09 So that’s Mike Anton’s formula, but I think that there’s also just a strong, hardcore social conservatism that is quite extreme, quite reactive, that is sort of the core of a lot of this, at least sort of spiritually how it gets motivated.
0:06:26 One thing I really liked that you did in the book is you brought out not just sort of these points of differentiation within the broad conservative movement between older and newer pro-Trump strains, but also I think identified some distinctive core values.
0:06:29 One is nationalism, right? I think that’s fairly straightforward.
0:06:43 There’s a deep commitment among all of these different groups to a vision of an assertive Americanness, and, you know, they may disagree on the content of what it means to be an American nationalist in different ways, but agree that something about the idea of the nation has to be front and center.
0:06:51 But there’s also another, I think, probably psychoanalytically connected thing that you bring up, which is a preoccupation with gender, right?
0:06:59 It’s not just social conservatism in general, though obviously there are concerns with race, sexual identity, trans identity, etc.
0:07:08 But there’s this real preoccupation with manliness and men and their proper relationship with women, and you also seem to notice that like actually in person, right?
0:07:20 Like you’d attend these events, and there would be some weird comment that someone would make about you or about a woman being there or about women in general, almost like designed to provoke, that would come up.
0:07:25 So what is this sort of gendered core of this?
0:07:29 And when you read the book, it’s obvious that the authors are overwhelmingly male that you’re talking about, right?
0:07:35 Like what’s the gendered core here, and how important is that to understanding what’s happening?
0:07:46 Yeah, so, I mean, this was super striking to me from the beginning, just because it’s something I’ve thought a lot about, having been part of some of these circles, or at least adjacent circles.
0:07:54 And I was treated very well in academia by my male mentors and things, so this isn’t sort of a vulnerable Me Too story.
0:07:56 Like I genuinely was treated very well.
0:08:06 But the gender dynamics in these circles, even in the best sort of most upstanding circles, are still quite strange and just traditional, right?
0:08:10 You kind of have gendered panels at conferences, that sort of thing.
0:08:16 But the extent to which the book is about, that was kind of a surprise to me.
0:08:19 Like the book doesn’t profile any women academics.
0:08:27 And that’s because there aren’t really any with that kind of profile who I thought were, sort of had the profile that warranted a whole chapter.
0:08:31 And so that, and I kept puzzling over, like, am I missing somebody?
0:08:36 Is there some, you know, is there a woman here who’s respected by these men who should be elevated?
0:08:39 And, and it just didn’t happen.
0:08:43 And so I thought, well, this is, this is, I think the reality of what this, what is going on.
0:08:45 And I wasn’t that puzzled by it.
0:08:46 I mean, they don’t really respect women.
0:08:54 They have a whole battery of intellectual formulations to, you know, exclude women and reasoning behind that.
0:08:56 And I’m familiar with a lot of those ideas.
0:08:59 So, so that happened pretty organically.
0:09:02 Being in these spaces is sort of strange.
0:09:06 I was in some of those spaces mainly after I had started writing about the new right.
0:09:10 And so part of it was they, they sort of, I think they knew who I was.
0:09:16 And so they, they weren’t horrible to me or anything, but it was, there were certainly some vibes that were strange.
0:09:17 Yeah, I know that feeling.
0:09:22 But it’s so, it’s so, it’s so dramatic, just the, the extent to which it’s mostly men.
0:09:32 I think it comes through more in their writing than in their personal behavior, to be honest, because some of their writing is so misogynist and just so, you know, so medieval almost.
0:09:36 That maybe that’s not fair to the medievalist, but it’s just backwards, right?
0:09:39 And really archaic in its thinking.
0:09:52 Okay, so one thing that you’ve alluded to, but I think is like really central to understanding what’s going on, is that while the new right has these shared sets of principles in common, or like the grouping that we call the new right, right?
0:10:03 You know, they have this preoccupation with gender, there’s strong support for Trump, a general disinterest in abiding by the traditional norms of democratic politics, a commitment to like unremitting culture war against the left.
0:10:04 Like, these are all like defining traits.
0:10:12 But there are huge divisions between the different sub-factions that make up the new right.
0:10:20 So if you were to divide them into sort of main camps, what would you say the fault lines between those camps are?
0:10:30 Sure. So I sort of have three main camps, which are the Claremonters, the post-liberals, and the national conservatives.
0:10:37 And then I talk also about the hard right, but the hard right kind of travels alongside all three of them ideologically.
0:10:41 So, but the hard right is kind of the hardcore manosphere fascist types.
0:10:45 And each of these groupings are different.
0:10:52 The Claremonters are really committed to the, or at least in theory, to the American founding.
0:11:00 And so they have this very sort of grandiose vision of what the American founding was that’s beyond even your ordinary patriotism.
0:11:02 It’s that this is the best regime of all time.
0:11:07 And things have, and they’re also at the very cutting edge of the culture war.
0:11:11 So they, it’s the best regime of all time, but we’ve completely lost the plot.
0:11:17 And liberals and liberal way of thinking has taken over to such a degree that we basically need a counter-revolution.
0:11:20 So they’re really far gone in the culture warring.
0:11:26 They’re sort of the January 6th types, right, who defended some of that, that anything goes.
0:11:26 Yeah, yeah.
0:11:33 Michael Anton, who you mentioned earlier, who’s now a Trump administration official, like a high-ranking one, is like one of the key leaders in that faction.
0:11:33 Yeah.
0:11:35 Michael Anton, John Eastman, these types.
0:11:37 So they’re pretty radical.
0:11:42 And then there’s the national conservatives, which I treat as sort of an umbrella group for everything.
0:11:50 But they’re sort of a little more vanilla with just nationalism as their core central thing.
0:12:01 And it’s, but it turns into kind of ethno-nationalism in some cases, and certainly a, also Christian nationalism, the main guy has advocated for.
0:12:03 So, but they, they’re sort of a big tent.
0:12:05 Everyone’s welcome in that grouping.
0:12:18 And, and I’ll say a little bit more about the tensions, because the tensions are clearest when you were talking about the post-liberals, who are the, kind of the high, most high brow of the new right.
0:12:21 And they tend to be Catholic, Catholic intellectuals.
0:12:29 So we’re thinking about people like Adrian Vermeule at Harvard, Patrick Dineen, who is quite a important figure in the movement now.
0:12:33 Saurabh Amari might be someone that listeners have heard of.
0:12:46 And so these are, these are serious Catholics who are more committed to the social conservatism and really want to shape the morals of the country, I think, in a much more traditional Catholic direction.
0:13:00 But they’re also, interestingly, much more sincere, I think, about the social, the economic, not economic nationalism, but kind of a more left-oriented economics.
0:13:02 So a more government-led economics.
0:13:11 And the new right as a whole speaks that way, as if they want to help the working class, create new programs, do this kind of populist thing economically.
0:13:21 But I think that the, the people who are closest to Trump, which are Claremont and the Natcons and sort of the Project 2025 people, they haven’t really followed through.
0:13:26 They’ve got the tariffs, but otherwise economically, they’re still doing the big tax cuts.
0:13:27 They’re still kind of beholden to donors.
0:13:38 And so that’s been a big fissure because the post liberals, I think, are quite sincere in their desire to have a more, they’re almost open to socialism, right?
0:13:50 So that’s sort of the most dramatic fissure, I think, comes along with the different versions of the economic possibilities and what people are open to and how sincerely they’re committed to that.
0:13:55 There are, there are a lot of other ones just in terms of how accepting they are of the hard right.
0:14:06 So Rabamari is someone who’s been quite outspoken against the sort of Proud Boys and that vector and the manosphere, Bronze Age pervert and those guys.
0:14:10 There are some, there are some fissures there where some people, well, there’s one fissure.
0:14:12 So Rabamari speaks out against them.
0:14:14 Everyone else is pretty much okay with it.
0:14:15 Yeah.
0:14:23 And I think another interesting one which came about just after the election was the Doge versus MAGA, right?
0:14:28 And so, of course, we could talk about the tech bros as well as kind of their own world.
0:14:30 But again, it’s kind of a holdover.
0:14:34 There’s the libertarian strain of the conservative movement.
0:14:47 And I think in some ways the tensions there might be exaggerated because Doge came in, took down, did sort of the destructive part of getting rid of the so-called administrative state or doing some of that work.
0:14:54 But a big part of the new right, what they want to do is also harness the state and weaponize it for their own purposes.
0:15:00 So sometimes I think these schisms and fissures are perhaps overstated when it really comes down to what’s happening on the ground.
0:15:10 Well, I mean, it strikes me as the sort of classic confusion of a revolutionary regime, right, is that you’ve got lots of different subcomponents.
0:15:14 They’re united behind being, broadly speaking, part of MAGA, right?
0:15:17 They wouldn’t use that language often to describe themselves.
0:15:25 But basically, they all agree that Trump is this world historical figure who has changed the nature of American politics to open the door to their kind of politics.
0:15:31 And a lot of the disagreements that are going on here is trying to fill in exactly what the content of that is.
0:15:36 I find that they’re all bound to a degree by certain elements of the Trump movement.
0:15:41 Like, you’re not going to come out and say, if you’re one of these people, actually, Trump lost the 2020 election.
0:15:44 The American electoral system is totally fair, right?
0:15:45 Nothing’s wrong with it.
0:15:58 Like, that’s not – you’re not going to say that tariffs in general are a bad economic policy and we need to return to the, you know, economics of the mainstream conservative movement prior to Trump’s ascendance.
0:16:02 But you’ll fight about things inside of that, say maybe the tariffs were poorly implemented.
0:16:03 Maybe they weren’t.
0:16:04 This seems like one area of dispute.
0:16:16 You know, maybe we need to be more aggressive in remaking the American electoral system or maybe we care about that less relative to some kind of, like, cultural war concerns.
0:16:21 And there are these specific points of tension between the different groups.
0:16:23 And then there are sort of big philosophical disputes, right?
0:16:25 You mentioned Bronzeade Pervert a second ago.
0:16:34 Well, he’s a former PhD who – I guess he still has his PhD, but he was a former academic – who basically is obsessed with Nietzsche.
0:16:39 And his philosophy is kind of a dime-store Nietzschean view of the world, right?
0:16:41 I find it very thin-gruel intellectually.
0:16:45 It’s kind of pathetic, but it really is a kind of bastardization of Nietzsche.
0:16:52 That’s very different from, you know, a Catholic who wants to build a confessional state for obvious reasons, right?
0:16:53 Given Nietzsche’s view of Christianity.
0:17:03 And so philosophically, it seems like there are huge disagreements between these different camps, even if they’re all part of the same political movement.
0:17:08 It’s interesting to see how they can operate next to each other without biting each other’s heads off.
0:17:12 Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s absolutely right.
0:17:32 They’re ideologically completely opposed to one another, and there’s a – and in sort of comical ways, right, where the – like you mentioned, the Catholics versus the Nietzscheans, or there’s a huge part of the Trump movement that’s Christian nationalist, but then there’s these manosphere types who are much more sort of pagan in their understanding.
0:17:36 So what you get is this complete tangle of ideas.
0:17:44 I think you get surprising – these men are all reaching back to surprising sources and using them in their own ways.
0:17:57 And you can have someone like Adrian Vermeule, who’s inspired by Carl Schmitt, who you can identify partly he was in the – they called him the crown jurist of the Third Reich, right?
0:18:03 Like he became a Nazi and was very important, at least at the beginning, of the Nazi regime for his legal arguments.
0:18:06 And you get someone like Adrian Vermeule who’s inspired by that.
0:18:20 So, again, I’m not saying you’re wrong that there are these big conflicts, but sometimes it’s almost like the movement is so powerful that they – the incoherence becomes its own kind of loyalty test.
0:18:31 They’re so united on some of their political propositions and some of the radicalism and their anti-liberalism that I find the intellectual distinctions very interesting.
0:18:35 And I think there are resources there for people who want to combat some of this to call them out on some of this.
0:18:37 But I don’t know how much it matters practically.
0:18:43 Well, I mean, it’s – what you’re describing are the dynamics of a united political coalition.
0:18:44 Yeah.
0:18:51 But the point is, right, what they all agree on is that right-wing politics properly construed means the demolition of American liberalism.
0:19:03 The end – not just, you know, of liberalism in the sense of the Democratic Party, but in the sense of a system that is guided by principles of individual liberty, free enterprise, at least to a limited degree.
0:19:11 And the basic ideas of, you know, state non-interference, individuals as rights bearers who can make claims against the state.
0:19:17 And that’s sort of the primary purpose of politics is to allow those people to pursue the vision of life that they choose, right?
0:19:23 And the state enables that and provides the background conditions that make people capable of being free, right?
0:19:26 That’s like, broadly speaking, the liberal vision of politics.
0:19:38 And every single one of these movements is for their own reasons, right, arranged against that, which I think is – it’s not the only American political tradition, but it’s certainly the one enshrined in the founding.
0:19:39 Can I say one more thing here quickly?
0:19:40 Yeah, please.
0:19:48 Well, I just think it’s important because – I mean, and this might be a place where you and I – I don’t think we disagree, but where my framing of some of this is different from yours.
0:19:55 One thing I think that I’m emphasizing differently is that these movements, as you’ve noted, they’ve got – there’s this huge incoherence.
0:20:10 They all have a quite – or many of them have quite a different conception of the good or of what they hold to be the ideal, whether it’s the founding of some – you know, the Republican founding, nationalism, or the Catholic conception of the good, a very traditional Catholic conception of the good.
0:20:21 But I think it’s important to recognize that they are driven by the good, in a way, and sort of these thick conceptions of the good, comprehensive doctrines.
0:20:30 And I think that that’s kind of a useful way to think about it, where I don’t think liberals quite get, in general, how driven these people are or think they are.
0:20:37 There’s plenty of politics that’s just convenience, marriage of convenience, but a lot of them really think that they are pursuing – they’re fanatics.
0:20:39 You know, they’re pursuing their own ideals.
0:20:46 They think that these ideals are in so much peril, their way of life is in so much peril that it’s – that they need to oppress everyone else.
0:20:58 And so I think just the psychology there is – it’s worth just kind of really being clear about that, that they think they’re doing something that’s good for everybody because their idea of the good is true.
0:21:03 And even when they conflict with one another, they don’t conflict enough that they can’t agree on that.
0:21:05 Yeah.
0:21:07 No, I mean, I think that’s right.
0:21:07 Right.
0:21:22 I think one of the common threads in new right thinking is that what we call liberalism is actually, you know, not a doctrine of limiting state power, but a doctrine of cultural aggression against people like them in the way that you just described.
0:21:34 But there really is a sense that they’re waging defensive culture war, even if what they’re responding to is something like the legalization of same-sex marriage, which was a seminal moment, especially for post-liberals.
0:21:37 But for most of us, I mean, I am in an opposite-sex marriage.
0:21:43 It does not – the quality of that is not degraded by the existence of same-sex marriage, right?
0:21:47 Like, that’s kind of crazy, it seems to me, to read that as cultural aggression.
0:21:49 But that is how it’s perceived, right?
0:21:51 That’s how it’s understood in these worlds.
0:21:52 Yeah.
0:22:01 One thing that frustrates me is I wish that – I don’t want liberals to, you know, fight fire with fire, but I do think we need a little more robust defensive liberalism.
0:22:09 And so that’s partly what my book is about, too, is just having a little more spine and backbone instead of caving to these things, even just ideologically.
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0:25:56 So a skeptical listener at this point might wonder, what are you guys talking about?
0:25:58 Like literally who cares about any of this, right?
0:26:10 Because these are people having arguments in small blogs and maybe it spills out into a newspaper or magazine occasionally, but it’s on podcasts, it’s on YouTube, whatever.
0:26:23 Whereas like what, you know, the actual decision makers, the people who are literally attacking American democracy and liberalism are people like Donald Trump who don’t care at all about what’s happening in this world of ideas.
0:26:26 But, you know, you’ve spent a while studying these people.
0:26:27 You’ve thought about them a lot.
0:26:31 Like, why do you think any of this is something that matters for politics?
0:26:43 Well, I think, I think that first of all, the knee-jerk reaction to think who cares is a natural one because a lot of these people are surprisingly bizarre.
0:26:48 And it is, it’s alarming to see them have wield so much power.
0:26:52 It’s alarming to see J.D. Vance have that kind of clout.
0:26:58 And so we, I don’t think we want to lose sight of that initial kind of surprise and curiosity.
0:27:01 And a lot of it has been opportunism.
0:27:06 So you have sort of weirdos coming in, but I think they’ve dramatically reoriented the GOP.
0:27:16 My book’s also about sort of just how a lot of the barriers between the far-right, the alt-right, and the establishment have completely gone away.
0:27:20 And so you have arguments that are not new.
0:27:29 We call it the new right, but a lot of these are sort of latent in the, on the conservative side going back 50 years to Goldwater, to Buchanan,
0:27:41 and the birthers and the birchers and this sort of conspiracism and racism and anti-civil rights stuff that has been a big part of the intellectual world on the right for, for decades and decades.
0:27:44 And so now it’s really, so it’s not unprecedented.
0:27:53 It’s, there’s, we could talk about continuities with the past or discontinuities and the discontinuities are there in the intellectual world where you have all these weird,
0:27:56 formerly fringe people coming in and taking over.
0:27:59 But it’s not just a novel thing.
0:28:11 It’s also these old strains, these old sort of archaic, what you would probably call the authoritarian traditions, right, in the American past coming up to the surface.
0:28:13 And so there’s a lot to work with there.
0:28:15 It’s not just some radically new thing.
0:28:19 And these kinds of movements, I think, can build and build energy.
0:28:30 And so young men, I think, are influenced by these circles because a lot of these people I’m writing about, I’ve sort of cordoned off the people in the sort of intellectual spheres.
0:28:34 And we could debate how intellectual, how savvy, how smart they are.
0:28:35 But they’re pretty smart.
0:28:41 And they’ve got a huge, a lot of them have PhDs, which is no marker of, you know, genius or anything.
0:28:47 But they have really a lot of education, a lot of resources available to them.
0:28:51 They’re experts in ways that we would, that would surprise, I think, most listeners, right?
0:28:52 They know a whole lot.
0:28:56 I wouldn’t want to debate some of them on, you know, their founding or other questions.
0:28:57 It’s difficult.
0:29:00 They’re very well, you know, well-learned people.
0:29:06 And they are shaping the minds of people like Joe Rogan and some of these much more popular figures.
0:29:08 So that’s kind of how it works.
0:29:12 I think ideologically there is kind of a trickle-down effect.
0:29:14 The culture war stuff has a big impact.
0:29:21 You know, we could talk about how much the economic dimensions of the economic problems of the country matter for this movement,
0:29:26 the working class populism stuff, but part of it is that they say it does, right?
0:29:28 And they argue that that’s their pitch.
0:29:33 And that’s, and they, it’s not hard to make people feel like they have economic woes, right?
0:29:34 Or that they’re suffering.
0:29:35 I mean, we all struggle.
0:29:40 And so, so I think that a lot of the culture warring is a top-down phenomenon.
0:29:43 And that’s, that’s how they think about it.
0:29:46 And they’re very good at the culture warring and it does have an impact.
0:29:48 So, I mean, that’s, those are some of the main things.
0:29:58 So, you have a, like, a really lovely phrase for a certain kind of right-wing thinking about how politics works, which is ideas first.
0:30:06 One, one thing that you suggest is distinctive about all right-wing traditions, not just the radical right, but the sort of American right in general,
0:30:10 is that they think ideas have a kind of independent causal force, right?
0:30:14 Like, they, they matter, they come from somewhere perhaps, but they can take on a life of their own.
0:30:16 They matter in and of themselves.
0:30:24 And, you know, I, I think that’s true in a really important sense in a way that’s underappreciated by a lot of people on the left.
0:30:33 And, and it almost seems like we’re, we’re living in this world where the right is proving its own theory of politics, right?
0:30:40 It’s ideas first vision that when you write things down, that that has tangible effects on what happens in the political world, right?
0:30:41 That they’re proving that through their own actions.
0:30:48 Yeah, I mean, that that’s, I call it the ideas first, but it’s also a kind of intellectual fanaticism, right?
0:30:55 Each different camp has a commitment to a certain vision of, of politics, of the good, of like, how we ought to live, right?
0:30:59 And they, they become, they’re very attached to these ideas.
0:31:03 But the conservative movement as a whole has, has for quite some time now in the United States,
0:31:10 had this similar understanding of how ideas shape the world and why ideas matter.
0:31:16 You can go back to a book called Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver, which is from the 50s that talks about.
0:31:17 Weird, weird book.
0:31:19 It’s a very weird book.
0:31:28 He traces how the, the, the fall of modernity and sort of all the problems that we have today trace back to the introduction of nominalism,
0:31:31 which is the idea that ideas don’t have permanent value.
0:31:40 It was sort of out there in the world, but rather, you know, concepts actually are, actually only exist sort of materially.
0:31:45 That there’s no sort of universal truths, that it’s all sort of embedded in our material world.
0:31:52 So they all sort of hate this modern relativism, materialism, historicism.
0:32:03 These are kind of some of the, the big ideas that they think have destroyed modern life because we don’t have an anchor in liberal modernity for our, our way of life and our belief systems.
0:32:15 We don’t have a common set of norms and values and beliefs that anchors us together and allows us to make decisions about politics or, you know, we have structures that help us.
0:32:27 We have democratic systems that help us make these decisions and negotiate these things, but they really think that you need to have a coherent sort of moral ecosystem that holds everybody together to have good politics.
0:32:30 And I think that’s a major driving force of, of the right.
0:32:32 I want to sit on that for a second.
0:32:33 That’s, that’s fascinating.
0:32:43 So what you’re saying is that ideas first, isn’t just, you know, a theory that it matters to develop ideas, to make arguments in the public realm or to make intellectual arguments.
0:33:11 It’s that ideas matter in the sense that they construct the reality, the social structure in which we live and that part of the purpose of developing or making these, these seemingly wild arguments is to redefine and reset out a set of new moral norms that shape the way that ordinary everyday people think about their worlds.
0:33:30 But more concretely, if you’re a Catholic integralist like Adrian Vermeule, who thinks that we should live in a society where the state is implementing very literally Catholic social doctrine, like doing, acting as the church’s agent in a lot of ways, what you’re doing in writing is trying to create a world in which that becomes more thinkable.
0:33:36 To create a new morality from, like, you know, the pages of sub stacks with 5,000 followers or whatever, right?
0:33:40 I’m not saying that to make it sound delusional, right?
0:33:42 Because there actually has been a lot more influence than these people have.
0:33:43 No, no, I think that’s right.
0:33:57 I mean, it sounds, that’s why it’s so interesting because, and they’re reaching back, there’s Adrian Vermeule to the Catholic tradition, but the Claremonters and a lot of these guys, like what they’re talking about is a regime that’s dedicated to being virtuous, right?
0:34:05 These are old, that’s a little Platonic language, Aristotelian language, or civic Republicanism, which is very, I mean, to me, those things are very appealing.
0:34:09 But the modern regime, liberal democracy, does not focus on that.
0:34:23 But they think that to have a healthy politics, to have a good politics that people can participate in and flourish in requires doctrines that shape us in those ways, in our education, right?
0:34:24 In our laws all the way down.
0:34:30 So you can find quotes like this, you know, about the need for a virtuous citizenry, right?
0:34:31 In John Adams and in the founding.
0:34:33 So it’s not completely foreign to the tradition.
0:34:37 But they are really running with it, I think it’s fair to say.
0:34:50 And it’s often very detached from the empirical world of what life is like in the United States, from just any sort of good faith understanding of what liberal democracy is and how liberals live.
0:34:53 They think we all live tawdry, you know, amoral lifestyles.
0:34:56 But I think they’re quite delusional about that.
0:35:00 I guess one other thing I want to say is that we do need ideas.
0:35:07 So one of the reasons I highlight that is that, as I sort of say in my conclusion, Democrats tend to put ideas last, it seems to me.
0:35:08 It’s not.
0:35:10 They’re very wonkish.
0:35:11 And I love them for that.
0:35:22 But there’s a kind of disconnect there with how the culture warring on the right and the kind of procedural, quietest approach on the left, generally speaking.
0:35:25 And so the conservatives would not agree with my assessment there.
0:35:29 They think that the left is just a complete culture warrior, juggernaut.
0:35:30 But I disagree.
0:35:33 And I think we do need ideas and we need good ideas.
0:35:43 And the American founding is often thought of as sort of a creed, America’s thought of as a creedal nation, right, where we’re united by ideas, ideas about equality and liberty.
0:35:47 And the new right rejects those ideas in particular.
0:35:51 And so part of I’m not just trying to attack an ideas first approach.
0:35:54 I think that we need some of that in our politics.
0:36:02 I really loved this passage from your book where you talked about how liberals and Democrats are putting ideas last.
0:36:12 Where you said that having incubated them into an AI lab, tested them against a dozen poles, and assigned them to a celebrity to rehearse.
0:36:28 And that one of the most frustrating experiences for any liberal observer of the new right was to witness again and again the incredible contrast between the coarse brazenness of its ideologues and the tepid intellectual reserve and cluelessness and cowardice of so many centrist and liberal leaders, both within academia and beyond.
0:36:30 Of course, there are exceptions, but not nearly enough.
0:36:38 That is a stinging indictment on your part of the sort of liberal intellectual class.
0:36:47 When you say that they’ve failed in contrast to the coarse brazenness of the new right, like what do you mean by that specifically?
0:36:54 I think I was finalizing those passages sort of in the early part of this year, right?
0:36:56 January 2025, I guess, right?
0:36:59 And so we see the administration coming in.
0:37:09 I mean, I was surprised, even though I knew I’ve written about how much more prepared they would be this time around than they were, than the new right was last time.
0:37:19 And Trump, right, Trump had a lot more, he was much, has been much more effective in his, the administration has done a lot more, I think it’s fair to say.
0:37:20 And they did a lot last time.
0:37:26 And so the response on the Democrats’ part, I mean, they’re in a difficult position.
0:37:37 They had a very rocky electoral cycle with Biden staying in so long and Harris then kind of in this awful position of having to parachute in and not being very well prepared, perhaps.
0:37:43 So, I mean, the frustration was with all of that, but I think it’s something that I’ve seen for a long time.
0:37:48 I don’t feel like there’s a much of a response intellectually to what’s going on.
0:37:50 Academics don’t have a lot to say.
0:38:00 I mean, there’s, there’s a lot of talk, I guess, but there’s, it doesn’t seem to me like the party has much to offer on this front, right?
0:38:01 On the ideological front.
0:38:05 It’s, and like you said, it’s a sharp critique.
0:38:10 I still, I think they’re in a very difficult position and I don’t know the answers.
0:38:22 So I was vague intentionally, but it is frustrating as an observer to see a sort of, Bernie and AOC were the people who went and toured the country, right?
0:38:24 And had a lot of energy in those first months.
0:38:28 But I didn’t see, you know, more centrist Democrats doing very much.
0:38:30 And I still think that’s the case.
0:38:32 They seemed very shocked, very unprepared.
0:38:37 And, and I think that that sort of comes down to a failure of imagination.
0:38:41 Maybe taking way too much for granted for a very long time.
0:38:43 And that’s part of what got us Trump in the first place.
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0:41:58 If you look at academic political philosophy and political theory, liberalism is the dominant doctrine.
0:42:09 Why hasn’t this intellectual dominance translated into a forceful ideas-first intellectual response to the new right?
0:42:15 Yeah, I mean, this is sort of getting speculative, but I guess it’s fair, because there’s some speculation in my book.
0:42:16 We’re on a podcast.
0:42:17 That’s what you do.
0:42:18 You speculate.
0:42:18 You speculate.
0:42:18 Yeah, okay, fine.
0:42:24 One of the through lines is higher education, right?
0:42:32 And how the right has attacked higher education, not just in the present, but of course going back quite a while.
0:42:38 For its liberal dominance, it’s the affirmative action, everything’s wrong with academia.
0:42:43 And so a big part of what they’ve been trying to do is to retake some of these institutions.
0:42:46 They’ve got parallel institutions that they’ve built up.
0:42:52 There’s just a lot going on there, which is, it’s just to say, that’s their take on academia.
0:43:05 And I think part of what you’re talking about in our politics does have to do with the liberal domination of academia, insofar as our politicians, it’s partly a problem of liberalism.
0:43:21 I mean, some of these things are, the new right has been able to capitalize off of all of these sort of thick moral conceptions and these big questions about how to live, partly because we don’t do that as liberals, right?
0:43:33 Liberalism sort of cordons off some of those questions and its origins were to help people navigate and get along, given huge existential differences, right?
0:43:36 And spiritual differences and strife, so religious warfare.
0:43:42 And so liberalism was invented partly to avoid some of these big ideas, questions.
0:43:51 And so I think the answer to why our politicians are not, you know, democratic politicians, liberal politicians,
0:44:00 are not better equipped to confront some of these ideas is partly because they haven’t been educated in milieus that cultivate that.
0:44:05 There’s a kind of educational formation that is lacking, I think, in some liberal circles.
0:44:10 You mentioned academic political philosophy, which is so dominated by liberals.
0:44:12 That’s pretty much true.
0:44:17 But there’s not always space in those circles to explore questions of the good life.
0:44:19 It’s almost taken off the table.
0:44:21 I mean, in philosophy, you’ll get it.
0:44:23 But in political science, you don’t.
0:44:33 You don’t get these ancient sort of Socratic questions about how best to live, what different ways of life might be choice-worthy or true.
0:44:46 I mean, it strikes me that there’s a bit of a trade-off here in sort of, like, intellectual work between rigor and relevance.
0:44:48 And I’m going to be overgeneralizing here.
0:45:00 But it seems like one of the problems, right, of the academy in general is that there are so many procedures in place for accuracy, for disciplinary precision, and stuff like that.
0:45:03 Just sort of like the way that people operate, the rules that you have to follow.
0:45:09 That you produce work that is technically well-reasoned, very thoughtful, but oftentimes extremely narrow.
0:45:26 Whereas out there in the wilds of Claremontistan or, you know, small substacks, right, like, you can just take on these huge ideas and maybe make all sorts of technical or factual errors, right?
0:45:37 I find that a lot when I’m reading New Right Arguments is, like, I have to fact-check everything because you don’t have the sort of reliability of the peer review process or the citation practices.
0:45:43 There’s just always these wild, sweeping generalizations, oftentimes without sufficient evidence to back them up.
0:45:45 And yet that makes things exciting, right?
0:45:46 It makes things fun.
0:45:52 It makes people like J.D. Vance, who are ideas-hungry politicians, latch on to them.
0:46:01 And that just, like, that doesn’t, there’s not that world out there that can foster the level of excitement.
0:46:07 I don’t know if inaccuracy is, like, necessary to excitement, like, if you have to do both of those things.
0:46:16 But I feel like the lack of strict academic norms surrounding accuracy, precision, and incrementalism-
0:46:17 You’re putting this very politely.
0:46:24 Really, really, really have contributed to the New Right’s success as, like, an ideas merchant to the political class.
0:46:26 Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right.
0:46:31 And I think one of the things I try to get at is some of the insularity in some of this work.
0:46:33 I mean, like I said, you’re putting it very nicely.
0:46:39 Some of those circles, that’s what frustrated me about my own education is it seemed quite insular.
0:46:42 I started to see beyond some of this very clearly.
0:46:52 And then when I go back and read these books, it’s a lot, you know, a lot of it’s just factually incorrect or just completely blinkered in terms of its understanding of history.
0:46:54 So it’ll take on, and that’s part of the idea’s first thing.
0:46:58 It doesn’t care about, you know, the failures of Reconstruction or Jim Crow.
0:47:00 It just runs with a certain kind of narrative.
0:47:02 And it’s kind of ugly.
0:47:10 And so that’s partly what gives them license to spout off the way they do in other quarters, right, when they’re on their substacks or on their podcasts.
0:47:18 And so it’s a mix of, you know, genuine education and a kind of formation that’s just very different from what we get in liberal academia.
0:47:27 Partly that and partly just an insularity and a failure of professional norms and standards.
0:47:34 And so in academia, you do have these conservative enclaves and some of them I do respect and I think are serious and others are not.
0:47:42 But I think in academia as a whole, if we’re going to get into the nitty gritty here, you have so many, you have a whole slew of problems.
0:47:48 But one of them really is the hyper specialization and professionalization is fine.
0:47:57 But when it becomes intellectual sort of narrow mindedness and that happens in every field and then there are trends that dominate and there’s a kind of myopia.
0:48:02 And but there’s sort of a lack of checks and against some of that.
0:48:08 And I think that in liberal academia, there’s a kind of contempt for the generalist, right?
0:48:19 There’s a real contempt for popular writing and and for journalism sometimes, right, because it’s not so fussy and it does and it has something bigger to say and it is sort of more ideas first.
0:48:29 It was hard for me to get comfortable writing even for a broader audience as an academic because it feels it’s just a very different kind of activity.
0:48:47 There isn’t a place for the sort of broad formative thing that I’m talking about, which isn’t to say we want to indoctrinate people into a particular set of values in our undergraduate programs, but at least to expose them to these other ways of thinking and sort of bigger, bigger traditions, bigger questions.
0:49:18 One thing I think that is very true about liberalism is sort of its anthropology, its sense that it is just a fact about the world, that we’re not going to agree about everything, that we are going to live in a society where people have very different beliefs, very different backgrounds, very different worldviews, very different things that they care about, and that no society can function well when it doesn’t provide room for different kinds of people to be themselves, right?
0:49:47 And it will eventually founder and collapse.
0:50:06 Trump is either term limited out or he dies, that the new right can no longer function well as a cogent political bloc because it lacks liberalism’s ability to productively brook and channel dissent and disagreement about really key issues.
0:50:30 Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the fact that they disagree with themselves and there’s the fact that they disagree with themselves and then there’s the fact that they don’t really understand and don’t know how to, I don’t think they’re very honest with themselves about the extent to which the liberal side actually is potent, disagrees, doesn’t want this, and is going to fight for itself.
0:50:48 Even if it, even if I say they’re not very good at the arguments in some extent or have been a little lackluster, I think that the right completely underestimates the power of the, even at their most sort of fanatical, they tend to underestimate the extent to which actual people are committed to liberalism and to liberal pluralism.
0:50:50 So I think that’s a real vulnerability.
0:50:57 I do think you’re right that when Trump is out of the picture, there will be a lot of uncertainty.
0:51:03 And, but I think that it’s also, it’s, it’s still very complicated.
0:51:06 And I still think that we need to do better as liberals.
0:51:09 Like you’re a very good advocate for liberalism, Zach.
0:51:10 Thank you.
0:51:11 I try.
0:51:12 And we need more of that.
0:51:21 We need, even if we don’t decide that we’re going to teach liberalism in our colleges or start new civics institutions devoted to liberal pluralism and the meaning of life.
0:51:29 We need people to be able to, to be conversant the way you are in, in these, in these values.
0:51:37 And we need, I think our politicians to be a little more on the offense in terms of what they believe in, because I think it is very appealing to many people.
0:51:46 I think you’re right in your book, when you talk about these sort of what people want out of politics and what the new right has to offer are quite different, right?
0:51:48 These are very strange ideologies.
0:51:58 And so it could throw us back in kind of like a period of deep fanatical disagreement where we’re warring with each other.
0:52:03 If sort of they get their way, I think that’s what might happen is they might start disagreeing.
0:52:07 The different cohorts within the right might start getting more combative with one another.
0:52:15 But I think more likely is that this movement will continue, but perhaps be relegated to the states sort of in a decentralized.
0:52:29 What would have happened, I think, had Trump not won this time would have been that they would have kept, they were preparing, they were building the way to, to work their way through the federal system and take over in red states and, and oppress people through their laws, right?
0:52:31 And through their new right ideas.
0:52:37 So, so I think that there, we don’t want to get too complacent just because we know that Trump is the glue holding all of this together right now.
0:52:52 I was about to say, right, like assuming the Trump movement fails and we don’t have a red Caesar who imposes some weird vision of evangelical slash Catholic law on the rest of us.
0:52:56 Again, it’s, I, I really get hung up on the contradictions in this project, right?
0:52:57 And the way in which it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
0:53:03 And it really, but, but look, Laura, I want to thank you for just a fascinating discussion.
0:53:10 And I hope all of our listeners come out and will pre-order the book if you are interested in what Laura has to say.
0:53:12 And if not, go buy it in November when it’s hitting the shelves.
0:53:13 So thanks for being here.
0:53:14 Thank you, Zach.
0:53:15 And they should do a one too, guys.
0:53:18 I think my book follows up pretty well on yours.
0:53:19 So if they haven’t, don’t have yours already.
0:53:20 That’s right.
0:53:23 The Reactionary Spirit is available wherever you purchase your books.
0:53:31 All right.
0:53:34 I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did.
0:53:39 I had a great time with Laura, like I did, by the way, at that conference, the Liberalism in the 21st Century event.
0:53:42 It was, it was a wonderful, wonderful conference.
0:53:45 And if you’re looking for something to do next year in DC, please check it out.
0:53:48 As always, we want to know what you think about what we just recorded.
0:53:53 If you think that we should change the name of the show to the Zach area without Sean nailing, let us know.
0:53:56 Sean and the rest of the team read and listen to everything that you said.
0:53:58 And he would definitely hate if you changed it to the Zach area.
0:54:01 So, I mean, come on, let him know that we should do that.
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0:54:27 This episode was hosted by me, Zach Beecham.
0:54:28 I’m a senior correspondent at Vox.
0:54:31 I’m the author of the On the Right newsletter, where we talk about the political right.
0:54:38 And a book called The Reactionary Spirit, which is about the rise of anti-democratic politics in the 21st century.
0:54:40 I’d hope if you liked this episode, you’d like the book too.
0:54:49 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Erica Huang, facts checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
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A loose movement of radical intellectuals is driving American politics. They’re called the “New Right,” and they share a basic hostility to American liberal democracy, a real desire to fundamentally overhaul it, and real influence in the White House. But why do they think that? How much influence do they really have? And what would a response to their rising prominence look like?
Today’s guest is Laura Field, a political theorist who’s spent a lot of time in the conservative intellectual world cataloging the wild world of far-right thinking for her book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right.
She speaks with guest host Zack Beauchamp, author of Vox newsletter On The Right, about why ordinary Americans should really, definitely, and absolutely care what a handful of thinkers are putting out on obscure Substacks and YouTube channels.
Host: Zack Beauchamp
Guest: Laura Field
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