Contained in Regime Change, the provocatively titled book by Patrick Deneen concerned with the perceived failures of America’s liberal political system, is the curious line: ‘Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.’ The phrase – a plea to embrace political ruthlessness in pursuit of supposed higher moral aspirations – felt like an abstract provocation when published in 2023. Today, it reads more as a guiding mantra for a new class of right-wing intellectuals who have moved from the shadowy corners of academia and dark fringes of the internet to the upper echelons of power, cannibalizing long-standing conservative institutions and consolidating power within the Republican Party.
Deneen, a professor of political science at University of Notre Dame, is a central figure in what political theorist Laura Field has called the MAGA New Right in her recent book Furious Minds: The Making of the New Right (Princeton University Press, 2025). Loosely bounded by the period between the start of the first Trump administration in 2016 and end of the Biden administration in 2024, Furious Minds presents an intellectual portrait of the MAGA New Right – the key thinkers, texts, and factions. It chronicles the explosion of its affiliated institutions, media organizations, political conferences, and academic programs that underpin the MAGA political movement.
At its core, the New Right is an illiberal and reactionary project, consumed by countering what it perceives as progressive overreach into all facets of life. It is unified by the belief that liberalism has failed to properly legislate morality by granting individuals and communities too much freedom to decide how to live their lives. Adherents of the New Right are effective at exploiting this moralistic pluralism. To its advantage, the New Right has no qualms proclaiming the way life ‘should’ be lived and ruthlessly instrumentalizing its ideas to reach these ends.
Its proponents are ‘opposed to pluralism in principle and do not believe in the egalitarian, multicultural, pluralistic democracy,’ Field writes. ‘The New Right is openly minoritarian and antidemocratic in its theoretical foundations’ (p. 16). More concretely, Field describes the New Right as resting on four pillars: social conservatism, economic nationalism, isolationist foreign policy, and anti-immigration. The movement’s corpus of work is often anti-elitist, laced with racism and misogyny, untethered to truth, and critical of neoliberal economics, she writes.
Field, who received her PhD in Government from the University of Texas, spent much of her early academic journey traversing the esoteric world of Straussian thought and, more broadly, conservative intellectualism. Disenchanted by the misogyny in certain conservative circles and catalysed by the election coup events of 6 January 2021, Field decided to write Furious Minds, emerging as one of the New Right’s deftest chroniclers and antagonists. The book leaves one with a sharper understanding of the authoritarian turn that has gripped the United States under the second Trump administration. The following conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Michael Wakin (OPR): To kick us off, could you briefly discuss the characteristics of the New Right’s intellectual class? What are the unifying threads?
Laura Field (LF): There’s one simple definition of what I call the MAGA New Right – and it’s important to be clear that this is just one slice of MAGA, this intellectual dimension that I focus on. It’s unified by its desire to escape modern liberal norms and internationalism and replace it with nativist populism.
There are a lot of different ways to unpack the details of what they stand for, but one way in is the contrast between the old Reaganist fusionism, which is the version of conservatism that almost anyone older than, say, 25 is going to be very familiar [with]; the old establishment. That was a coalition built intentionally over the second part of the last century that stood for free trade, free market economics, social conservatism, and anti-communism abroad. This was during the Cold War, and it also morphed at times into a liberal internationalism and the rules-based international order.
In the book, I call this Reagan-Buckley Fusionism or just the Reagan-Buckley establishment. MAGA New Right from the outset stood in contrast to this establishment very explicitly and instead embraced these older threads of conservatism that are sometimes described as the old right or paleo-conservatism. We can identify this with someone like Pat Buchanan.
Michael Anton defined Trumpism back in 2016 as nationalist economics, secure borders, and America-first foreign policy. They’re also doubling down on social conservatism. That’s a useful contrast. That’s what they stand for. There are other ways into it, but I think Anton’s was actually a very good definition of Trumpism.
OPR: Straussian thought is a very big piece of this book. You call it ‘seductive,’ which has stuck with me. Could you briefly expand on the idea of the seductive nature of this school of thought and its influence on the New Right intellectual class?
LF: I come from this background of the Straussian world, which obviously follows in the footsteps of Leo Strauss. Strauss was an important German-Jewish thinker who emigrated to the United States in the Weimar period and was a close reader of classical texts. He brought them to life. He believed that these books had multiple, esoteric layers – messages for different kinds of readers and those who felt free thinking and philosophers were persecuted. Thinking carefully about what happened to Socrates was a big part of what Strauss was up to.
I studied in those circles and was seduced by those teachings. I certainly do not renounce all of it. But when I was writing this book, I had the impulse to include Straussian thought because the first defenders of Trumpism, including this Michael Anton fellow whom I’ve already mentioned, represented the West Coast Straussian School. There are all these factions, but they identify closely with Straussianism. I think they’re very wrong about how they understand some of it and that was my way into the book. I wanted to capture a descriptive account of the key moments but also convey the seductive character of some of these Straussian ideas.
It’s very hard for people who don’t have this background to understand what is going on in these elite Republican circles. I think Trump has almost given them cover because he’s kind of an anti-intellectual. It’s important to convey that I am not giving them the benefit of the doubt or trying to elevate them, but there is something that they’re tapping into that is contributing to their successes. There’s a transgressiveness to it. They are tapping into traditions in political philosophy that they are persuaded by and make them think they are doing the right thing. There are these secrets and they’re the ones who truly understand the complexities of politics – the grand historical problems that they are attending to. I feel like I had some access to that.
OPR: As someone who has spent so much time with these texts and thinkers, how would you assess the general quality of the scholarship produced by these New Right intellectuals?
LF: I think a lot of it is shoddy and half-baked, and some flat out intellectually dishonest. But there’s a real trap here. One thing the New Right is good at is tied to their shamelessness. They are happy to be generalists and because I think much of academia is so specialised and narrow-minded, it is very hard to untangle some of their work. There’s so much condescension towards a lot of this work that’s really unwarranted. While I want to acknowledge that some of this stuff is not super rigorous scholarship, some of it is very thoughtful. It is talking about really big questions that liberals tend to shy away from. They are exploiting liberals’ ignorance about a lot of history, too.
If you read the Claremont Review of Books , it’s actually pretty thoughtful generally. Scholarship I disagree with, but these people know a ton about history. They read it differently. It’s very insular and not rigorously in conversation with other parts of academia, which I think is a huge problem right now.
OPR: My background is in political economy – I am not in the political philosophy tradition – so I am trained to almost instinctively ask: ‘what are the material interests here?’ But I found that this frame was not helpful when reading your book, and I was left with the question: what motivates these thinkers?
LF: That’s one of the biggest puzzles of our politics right now. What’s driving so much of this? And my book tries to at least expose the extent to which it’s ideological; that these are people who are fanatical and have convictions that are driving them. But it isn’t a full answer because a lot of it is material. I think they are exploiting a lot of insecurity in our politics, economic but also spiritual and cultural insecurity. These demographic changes are alienating white men, apparently, right? You have so much going on and I think that your question is important. I would have written a different book if I had your background. I think that the economic interests of these people are absolutely important. It’s just not how I think.
OPR: Taking a step back – why should we care about these thinkers? Why are they important?
LF: These thinkers have had remarkable staying power over the last decade. They started out on the fringe, and they have had one success after another. They hyped up January 6th. They have taken over many of the institutions in Washington, D.C., including the Heritage Foundation. There has been a proliferation of new institutions. They were testing policy at the state level during the Biden administration and consolidated their power in the GOP.
At this point, it’s fair to say that they’ve basically taken over the upper echelons of the [Republican] party. J.D. Vance is their darling. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are all bound up in this. It’s remarkable how much they’ve achieved. It is also important to understand that they have had a huge impact on a slice of culture in the manosphere and the podcast world. One of the reasons I wanted to write the book is to expose how radical and extreme a lot of this is so that people could understand. I don’t think MAGA voters signed up for a lot of this stuff.
OPR: I thought one of the most extraordinary and frightening chapters was your analysis of Adrian Vermeule, a legal scholar at Harvard Law School. Could you talk about his common good constitutionalism?
LF: Reading Vermeule reminds me of reading Carl Schmidt. There’s a clarity and terrifying fanaticism that is subtly presented. Among the characters in my book, Vermeule is by far the most sophisticated and smart. He’s a legal theorist who has had a stunning career and is hugely productive. He lives above the world of the MAGA New Right.
By 2015, Vermeule was involved in the Catholic integralism movement, which has reinterpreted Catholic doctrine to say, ‘The church has a much greater role in politics than you think. The state should be subsumed under the church. Politics should be oriented towards the common good, or the Catholic social good.’ It’s quite a radical movement that is arguing for a dramatic departure from liberalism that has an authoritarian flavour. Vermeule had this radical streak already back in 2015, and he saw how Trump could potentially be a vehicle for this.
OPR: What did you find as most surprising writing this book?
LF: I was surprised by how they kept winning. I was surprised by the extent they were marinating in these paleoconservative ideas. They saw Trump for what he was, which is a return to some of these ideas. I was also frankly surprised by the misogyny. I knew it would be a theme of the book, but I was surprised at how it kept escalating.
MW: There is this line that you quote in the book: ‘Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.’ What does this mean to you?
LF: This is a line from Patrick Deneen’s last book, Regime Change. He’s arguing that basically politics is messy, and we should have the right ends in mind – Aristotelian ends of flourishing. Machiavelli is famously ruthless. His argument is that we need a ruthlessness and disregard for liberal pieties about how to proceed. Think of something like the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), right? You come in and destroy and fire hundreds of thousands of people. This is the kind of thing Deneen had in mind, I would assume, and thinks is necessary. Things I would think are extremely imprudent and destructive are quite comfortable with them.
It gives them an excuse for not just unconstitutional action, but for certain kinds of brutality in politics – all justified by these supposedly higher purposes. [The phrase] basically stands for unleashing a kind of brutality into politics. I think the phrase also signals a willingness to lie and deceive. It is one of the most destructive things happening right now.