The Intellectual Origins of Postliberalism

The burgeoning collection of books and podcasts about right-wing thought also testifies to its growing appeal. Field describes the impulse among liberals, prevalent during the first Trump administration, to mock “Trumpy intellectuals” as “mistaken and counterproductive,” noting that since his reelection it has become even more important to understand where his policies come from, the thinkers behind them, and the whole intellectual history of the Right.

Furious Minds maps out the movement in three camps: “the Claremonters idolize the American founding, the Postliberals a particular (religiously inspired) conception of the ‘Common Good,’ and the National Conservatives the myth of a traditional American nation.”

The first chapter opens with Barry Goldwater’s speech at the Republican Convention during his 1964 campaign for the presidential nomination. Jaffa wrote the speech’s most notorious passage: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The thought, borrowed from Cicero, shows how philosophy can help seemingly unsophisticated populist candidates.

Leo Strauss looms large in the book. Born in Germany 1899, he migrated to the United States in 1937 and eventually settled in Chicago. Best known for his theory of “esoteric writing,” Strauss argued that philosophers concealed secret truths within their published works. He taught his students to recover these ancient truths, among which was a deep-seated skepticism about democracy. Many of those students went on to become professors, public intellectuals, and politicians in the Reagan and Bush administrations.

Jaffa, who was one of Strauss’s first doctoral students, extended Straussian methods to America’s political thinkers. In his magnum opus, Crisis of the House Divided (1959), Jaffa interprets a series of debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas during their 1858 contest for the Senate. Jaffa argues that Lincoln had grounded the United States in the “sacred principle” of equality, effectively refounding America. “For the republic to live,” Jaffa writes, “the act of creation or founding must be repeated.”

His students took this to heart. In 1972, four of them set up the Claremont Institute, a think tank in a suburb of Los Angeles, near Claremont McKenna College, where their mentor taught. Departing from Jaffa, who died in 2015, the Claremont men promote a radically right-wing concept of equality, treating it more as a privilege than a natural right. This is the logic behind Trump’s migration policy.

One of their most prominent associates is Michael Anton, now policy director at the White House. He describes the Claremont ideology as “secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy.” As Jaffa did for Goldwater, Anton wrote a histrionic defense of Trump, “The Flight 93 Election.” Published anonymously in The Claremont Review of Books, the essay compared the 2016 election to the plane on 9/11 where the passengers rushed the cabin and heroically averted disaster. Anton was rewarded with a job in the new administration.

It is partly thanks to Strauss and Jaffa that there is such a high premium placed on classical philosophy in the archipelago of right-wing universities and colleges, most notably Hillsdale College in Michigan and the New College of Florida. Charlie Kirk took more than thirty online courses at Hillsdale, which helped provide him with the quotations from Aristotle and Aquinas that he used in his public debates with college students. The thinkers of the New Right have none of Leo Strauss’s academic restraint and make even the rebarbative Jaffa appear liberal.

Field is well versed in the classical tradition, and this enables her to see how the Right misuses its own intellectual authorities. In one bravura passage, she shows how Anton misuses Lincoln’s speech on the Dred Scott decision, which in 1857 ruled that black Americans were not citizens. In his essay “Toward a Sensible, Coherent Trumpism,” Anton quotes Lincoln as saying people are “not equal in all respects” in order to argue against mass migration. Field writes: “Anton, like a sophist, took Lincoln’s description of the empirical (but in Lincoln’s view, very bad) reality of inequality and used it to defend the normative ideals of inequality and exclusion.”

The other two factions appear more respectable than the Claremonters, but Field shows how they have collaborated with and enabled the excesses of the New Right. The leading postliberal thinker is the Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen, author of Why Liberalism Failed, a book ironically made famous by Barack Obama’s 2018 reading list. Deneen argues that the American founding was an expression of liberalism, a tradition that has failed, and calls for a new “epic theory” to imagine a postliberal society. Another postliberal, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, criticized Deneen for his lack of ambition, calling for a movement that could “co-opt and transform the decaying regime from within its own core.” This call was answered by the right-wing revolution in the second Trump administration.

The National Conservatives — associated with the conference of the same name that gathers right-wing leaders from across the world, including Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Britain’s Nigel Farage — share many of the policies and some of the same members as the first two groups. They inveigh against liberal values, champion a return to Christian ethics, and call for a more autocratic government. A key part of their strategy is an assault on universities. In a bizarrely contemporary scene, Field describes how a user of Clubhouse — an app used during the pandemic for social activities including karaoke and sexual groaning contests — found a room in which a group of National Conservatives, including Christopher Rufo, proposed elevating the marginal discourse of critical race theory into an all-encompassing threat to the nation. This added fuel to the culture wars that played a large role in Trump’s reelection.

Looking at the Mirror

Field traces the interactions between these seemingly discrete groups, describing their differences and their common cause. At some of their conferences, she sits in the front row; many of the figures she discusses are people she has met in person. Nevertheless, she doesn’t hold back. She offers a frank, passionate, and sometimes moving defense of liberal and secular values against the often hysterical screeds against liberal America. In response to Deneen’s argument that secular people have no moral compass, she writes: “Reading this from my in-laws’ basement in Wichita, with my newborn and a three-year-old underfoot, I could only laugh.”

Even as Field dissents from the policies of the Right, she admits sympathy with aspects of their educational program like studying the classics of the Western tradition in order to think about the good, the true, and the beautiful. She agrees with some of their more liberal theorists, notably Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, that “liberals have for far too long accepted a minimalist self-understand that avoids all talk of virtue and ethical vision.” One of the solutions to polarization, she argues, is a hybrid, bipartisan curriculum, which would allow for thinking critically about different worldviews.

Alongside the three main constituencies of the New Right is a fourth, which Field calls the “Hard Right Underbelly.” This includes the semi-anonymous Twitter accounts Raw Egg Nationalist and Costin Alamariu (aka “Bronze Age Pervert”), who have a large following among young and the terminally online. Field is less confident in categorizing them, but she offers insightful remarks on their intellectual training. Alamariu’s Straussian doctoral dissertation, published as Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, was condemned as the work of a Nazi by one of his PhD advisors but commended by Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield Jr who praised it as “full of sparks and fire.”

Field doesn’t dwell on the aesthetic appeal of these figures. But this is, at least partly, the reason for their popularity online and among the post-woke writers associated with New York’s Dimes Square. This appeal is partly to do with the Right’s defiance of the culture of liberal hegemony, which translated the politics of anti-racism into elitist, bureaucratic, and puritanical codes. For a time, saying the unacceptable became aesthetically interesting, and right-wing writers like Alamariu exploited this and played their part in a culture war that, after the 2024 election, they appear to have won.

Field describes how the “Hard Right Underbelly” was promoted by the podcast Red Scare, the most notorious denizens of Dime Square, who morphed from Bernie Sanders supporters to boosters of the Right. Field characterizes Red Scare as representative of the “hard left,” which they are not. More important, she might have explored how the Democratic Party’s sidelining of Sanders and other left-populist candidates helped the rise of the Right.

Field’s criticisms of Kamala Harris’s bizarre campaign are noticeably restrained, lacking the passion and specificity with which she describes the failings of the Right. While not the ostensible subject of this book, the decisions of the gerontocratic and inert Democratic leadership might help to account for the New Right’s seeming monopoly on intellectual novelty.

Field’s prescriptions for a reenergized liberalism, which could appeal to a broad swath of Americans, includes aspects of left populism. Zohran Mamdani’s triumphant campaign for New York City mayor might also provide a blueprint for this. The New Right would not accept a Muslim candidate who won over a city of migrants with an optimistic egalitarian politics, but a nation that twice voted for Obama might. As Field reminds us, the United States has always been egalitarian and pluralistic. The “big ideas,” as both Beyoncé and Jaffa maintain, can never be the preserve of an elite.

Furious Minds is an unparalleled intellectual history of the present. Field’s research, range, and intimacy with her subjects yields many important insights and discoveries, from the serious to the ridiculous. She unearths an article in which Anton compares Socrates to a pickup artist. This is representative of the New Right in general, which has answered Deneen’s call for an “epic theory” with both high-brow ambitions and base contrarianism, inspired not only by Leo Strauss but also by Neil Strauss, author of a self-help book about how men can manipulate women into sleeping with them. It seems fitting that Trump’s court philosophers are pickup artists.