The story of the radical conservative intellectual movement shaping Donald Trump's agenda—and how it threatens American freedoms, values, and democracy.
The most up-to-date introduction we have to the MAGA intellectual right reshaping America with astonishing speed today ... [Field] is particularly good on the less well known National Conservatives ... But the most interesting chapters are those that Field devotes to a sect of Leo Strauss admirers at the Claremont Institute in California ... Insightful.
The author’s background perfectly positions her to deliver this lively, devastating taxonomy and critique of MAGA’s ideologues ... Nearly a decade in these academic circles makes Field a knowledgeable guide to a subject she takes seriously ... Reading Field, you can see something like the current wave of MAGA anti-Semitism coming from a long way off ... A question that Field touches on but never analyzes in depth is why liberal minds haven’t produced an equally potent answer.
The National Conservatives, or natcons, emerged in 2019. Ms. Field struggles to provide a clear definition of their mission .... The idea that Jaffa’s famous pugnacity arose from his Straussian ideas rather than his personality strikes me as tendentious. More notable, though, is that Ms. Field, in a work about political theory and practice, hardly bothers to counter Jaffa or other influential thinkers with her own liberal version of a polity that upholds individual dignity while allowing civic pluralism ... Nor does Ms. Field have much to say about the ludicrous descent of modern liberalism into racial and sexual tribalism. With apologies to Ms. Field, this descent has done far more to birth the 'furious minds' of the New Right than the speculations of philosophers and intellectuals.
