U.S. President Donald Trump makes an announcement regarding his administration's policies against cartels and human trafficking, from the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 23, 2025.
Brookings Institution nonresident fellow and philosopher Laura Field says a 77-year-old book can explain the MAGA new right, and much of it deals with the rejection of truth.
Author Richard Weaver wrote a book in 1948 that describes the basic contours of the New Right’s closed philosophical approach. Field said you can hear the book’s title, “Ideas Have Consequences,” as a popular catchphrase among conservatives.
Field said Weaver explored a philosophical concept called nominalism, which involves the “rejection of universal concepts and absolute truths — including transcendental moral truths.” Nominalism believes that there is no universal objective moral reality, and “it does not exist as an expression of the divine,” said Field.
By challenging the idea of universal objective moral reality, Weaver said modern man had “succumbed to individualism, relativism, materialism, historicism and politics as will to power.”
“In my research on the MAGA New Right and in the countless hours I’ve spent in conservative academic circles, I’ve heard this Weaver-esque refrain again and again,” said Field. “It is hard to think of a single significant thinker of the MAGA New Right who would disagree with his assessment of the ways in which modern thought is inherently corrosive or who would dissent from his insistence that we must restore some kind of transcendental moral orthodoxy to our politics.”
But when Weaver argued that modern ideas are evil, Field said “he helped legitimate the repression of anyone who thinks about truth differently.”
“When the thinkers of MAGA New Right suggest that only conservatives — or as some put it, heritage Americans — have access to America’s founding principles or that America is a Christian nation, they are providing a justification for authoritarian actions on the part of the government.”
Israeli political theorist and conservatism advocate Yoram Hazony promotes Christian dominance in the United States, arguing that “the only thing that is strong enough to stop woke neo-Marxism, the religion of woke neo-Marxism, is the religion of biblical Christianity.”
“These ideas, to [Hazony], justify limiting immigration as a way to maintain cultural cohesion,” said Field.
Similarly, Field argues that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance seek “to dominate a nation and impose their politics on those who don’t share [their] vision.”
“It is not the model that America’s founders aspired to,” said Field. “That country is a liberal democracy, and one of its major aspirations — and sometimes its achievement — is that it allows people who have different orientations and belief systems to live together in relative peace and freedom. That is the vision for our country that we must strive to achieve.”
Read the New York Times report at this link.