New book reveals the 'rot of the MAGA mind'

FILE PHOTO: Supporters of Donald Trump gather outside a polling station on Election Day in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 5, 2024. REUTERS/Marco Bello/File Photo

In Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, political theorist Laura K. Field explains how "under [President Donald] Trump, post-liberal intellectuals have abandoned tradition for radicalism and scholarship for vulgarity," according to a review in The Atlantic.

"For the past decade or more, the intellectual energy in American politics has been on the right," writes George Packer.

"The MAGA ideologues who provide America’s new ruling elite with any claim to having a world view should be understood as offspring of a shared parentage, not unlike the Lovestoneites, Trotskyites, and Shachtmanites of 1930s and ’40s communism," he continues.

"More reactionary than conservative, their political ancestry is in the underground of the American right — Strom Thurmond, Joseph McCarthy, Patrick Buchanan — rather than the forward-looking Reaganite libertarians who dominated the Republican Party for four decades," he adds.

MAGA's modern hero, Packer says, aren't philosophers or even a Nazi theorist of authoritarianism.

"They share a revulsion toward liberalism and pluralism, which, they believe, have corroded the moral and spiritual fiber of America by accommodating false ideologies and harmful groups. Their modern hero is Viktor Orbán," he writes, of the authoritarian Hungarian president.

Field's book explains how this affects American democracy today.

"The American experiment in egalitarian, multiethnic democracy fills these intellectuals with anxiety, if not loathing," Packer writes.

"As Field notes, they often express undisguised hostility toward women, sexual minorities, the 'woke Marxists' of the left, and the cultural elites of the 'soulless managerial class,'" he explains.

The mood of MAGA intellectuals, Packer notes, is "overwhelmingly negative."

“The movement is, in many respects, untethered from the ordinary decency and common sense that characterize America at its idealistic best, and from the pluralistic reality of the country as it exists today," Fields says.

Packer says that Field's "background perfectly positions her to deliver this lively, devastating taxonomy and critique of MAGA’s ideologues."

"She was originally trained in Straussian scholarship — a reading of classical political thought that criticizes the modern turn away from the sources of moral authority toward liberalism and, in Strauss’s view, nihilism," he explains.

Packer notes that "anti-liberal intellectuals made a Faustian bet that this coarse real-estate developer and reality-TV star would be the vehicle for realizing the Good, the Beautiful, and the True."

"Trump was the strongman brought to bring liberalism to heel,” Field writes.

Packer says that "in attaching themselves to MAGA, they did less to influence the new regime than Trump did to corrupt them."

"The MAGA right has filled a vacuum created by popular disenchantment with globalization, neoliberal economics, mass immigration, political corruption, technological power and democracy itself," Packer adds.

There's one thing Field doesn't have the ability to explain in her book, Packer writes.

"A question that Field touches on but never analyzes in depth is why liberal minds haven’t produced an equally potent answer" to the MAGA right.

"Liberals are in the necessary but untenable position of having to defend democracy from right-wing assault in an age of broad discontent," Packer explains.

"They need their own theorists and influencers, their own institutes and manifestos, to undertake the historic task of not only reversing America’s self-destruction, but showing the next generation why liberal democracy offers the best chance for a good life," he concludes.

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