Controversy embroils the New Right – national conservatism, common-good conservatism, and postliberalism for starters – over the extent of its hospitality to antisemitism, white nationalism, misogyny, and authoritarian predilections. Those who have been paying attention and drawing distinctions should not be surprised. But too few on the right have been paying attention and too few on the left have been drawing distinctions.

Too few on the right have paid attention to the scorn heaped by New Right factions on liberalism in the large sense – that is, the modern tradition of freedom whose defining conviction is that human beings are by nature free and equal. Two convictions connected to liberalism in the large sense unite the New Right: The United States faces an unprecedented moral, political, and intellectual crisis that derives from the modern tradition of freedom; and rescuing what remains of the nation and saving those capable of being saved depend on overcoming liberalism’s desiccated doctrines and spirit-crushing practices. New Right factions themselves have discounted or disregarded the modern tradition of freedom’s role in countering bigotry and persecution, and the centrality of basic rights and fundamental freedoms to the common good as many Americans have understood it since before the nation’s founding.

Too few have on the left have drawn distinctions among the American right’s contending camps. For decades, nothing has united the left’s critique of the right more than the belief that conservatism in America comprises one monolithic authoritarian menace. The left’s crudity cloaks the vital distinction between those who wish to conserve America’s founding principles and repair its constitutional order and those who maintain that American decline warrants revolutionary countermeasures. By conflating the sober right that aims to conserve and reform with the counterrevolutionary right intoxicated with overturning, burning down, and remaking, left-wing intellectuals squander their credibility.

Laura K. Field has been paying attention and drawing distinctions. In “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right,” published in November 2025 by Princeton University Press, she illuminates the constellation of attitudes, ideas, and aims that in part set the stage for the controversies in which the New Right is embroiled.

Field emerged out of an academic milieu that also formed many members of the New Right. In the opening pages of her book, she recounts a discomfiting encounter at a summer 2010 conference for younger conservatives that she attended as a fifth-year University of Texas Austin graduate student in government. At an elegant dinner, a regular participant crudely flaunted his disdain for conventional norms. The experience set in motion Field’s break with the “conservative intellectualism” to which professors in both college and graduate school had introduced her. Field’s teachers had been influenced by Leo Strauss (1899-1973), a seminal scholar and teacher who refrained from partisan debates while emphasizing careful examination of........

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