Furious Minds: The Making of the New Right
Laura K. Field
Princeton University Press (November (2025)

A thorough analysis of immensely complicated threats to traditional political  values

How and why has the current political situation in the United States become more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than at any prior time since 1789? MAGA and its New Right are often given much of the credit. Who to believe? More to the point, who to trust and thereby empower?

I agree with another reviewer, Lucretian Stranger, that “the real achievement of Furious Minds is to make clear that because Trump’s ideas barely rise above instinct, the ideologues jostling to weaponize his presidency are more, not less, dangerous. Trump does have a few fixed points—tariffs, nativist immigration policy, a belligerent ‘America First’ nationalism—but none of it amounts to a doctrine; it is a loose bundle of slogans and vendettas, all bent toward his own aggrandizement. He is a creature of appetite—vanity, payback, and ratings—and that vacuum at the center is what invites in the courtiers with plans. Under George W. Bush—an anxious, incurious president suddenly in over his head after 9/11—it was the neoconservatives and the Project for the New American Century selling him a fantasy of remaking the Middle East at gunpoint in the name of  ‘iberty’ and ‘democracy’; under Trump, it is John Eastman arriving with a coup memo, the Claremont theorists gaming out so-called ’emergency regimes,’ and the Project 2025 engineers quietly drafting a demolition manual for liberal democracy and assembling the apparatus for whatever strongman comes next. These are not mere court jesters; they are fussy little Lenins of the culture war, enraged that a diverse, egalitarian country has taken shape without their consent. They take Trump’s inchoate desire to ‘be dictator on day one’ and attach the legal rationales and personnel rosters to the enemies list he is forever updating.”

So what?

“To dismiss them because their podcasts are absurd or their prose is pompous is to miss the point about where the real danger lies. Field’s book is here to tell us, with cold clarity, that while Trump may be the ringmaster barking into the microphone, these are the people trying to choreograph the whole show. And if we are unlucky enough to see J.D. Vance inherit that apparatus, we will learn what it means for Trumpism to graduate from improvisational thuggery to a disciplined project of counterrevolution.”

This is a should-read if you strongly agree or strongly disagree with much (if not most) of what Trumpism is and does.

It is a must-read if you are determined to understand the nature and extent of MAGA’s cultural as well as philosophical infrastructure.

As Field explains. she wrote Furious Minds in order to tell “the story of ideals and grievances,  aspirations and self-delusions. It is about what the New Right was trying to achieve, how it succeeded, and how it has at times failed.”

My guess (only a guess) is that the United States after the Trump presidency will have changed more significantly than the United States did after any previous presidency, including those of Washington, Lincoln, and F.D.R.

Assuming you care, what do you think?