How did a movement that championed America’s Founders end up backing a President who attempted to overthrow the republic the Founders established? How is it that a movement that wrapped itself in the flag presided over a dramatic weakening of U.S. power and economic strength? Why has a movement that has always claimed to have “virtue” and “religion” on its side stood by the most corrupt administration in U.S. history, and probably the most personally corrupt and compromised man ever to occupy the presidency? The failure of conservatism in America is the crisis of our time. Laura K. Field sets out to analyze this crisis in her important new book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right.

One of the mantras of the American right has been that “ideas have consequences.” Field, who was something of a fellow traveler in the formative years of her career, takes this mantra to heart. The story she tells is one of ideas—mostly, the fundamentally insidious and misguided ideas behind the disaster of American conservatism.

Some critics of conservatism might question whether there are all that many genuine ideas driving the movement. They can point to any number of social media feeds by representatives of the New Right that contain little more than adolescent satire, performative cruelty, unserious provocations, scapegoating, and no end of hateful conspiracy theorizing. But Field does not make this mistake. Conservatism draws on a long intellectual tradition, and it offers its adherents some sophisticated, even beguiling rationales for their destructive politics.

Field, an associate with the Illiberalism Studies Program at George Washington University, serves as a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and visiting scholar in residence at American University. But Furious Minds is more than an academic analysis; this is a thorough, well-researched, well-organized, powerfully written dissection of everything that has gone wrong with the intellectual side of the American right. Through 13 chapters, Field maps the New Right leadership’s dissolution from a Straussian old guard, with which she still shares some sympathies, to its current expressions. Taking on the range of factions who argue that liberal democracy won’t deliver the power or social order they crave, she delivers a scathing indictment: this is a collection backward-looking intellectuals and activists who have learned to dress up their reactionary nihilism as a forward movement into a supposedly post-liberal future.

Viewed in terms of intellectual genealogy, the conservative movement’s turn toward authoritarianism looks less surprising. As Field shows, a decisive influence on today’s New Right is the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt. The core conviction these self-anointed American patriots share with Schmitt is the first axiom of every fascist movement: that the authentic people of the nation face an existential threat from decadent cosmopolitan elites, and the threat can only be met with the application of extra-legal power. Other crucial influences on the movement included the German political theorist Leo Strauss and his student Harry V. Jaffa, both of whom combined a deep commitment to humanist inquiry with some conservative or reactionary tendencies.

Other critics of conservatism might doubt whether the New Right is any one, singular thing. But the movement has much more unity in its ideas than meets the eye, as Field ably demonstrates. In the work of Larry P. Arnn, a founder of the New Right think-tank Claremont Institute and the President of Hillsdale College, for example, the call to rescue America from the depredations of “woke” liberalism can sound vaguely genteel, like a curriculum venture of the sort he led with the benighted “1776 Commission.” Hillsdale, according to movement lore, is “the conservative Harvard,” and it runs an expanding network of charter schools dedicated to “classical education.”

In the work of Hillsdale professor Kevin Slack, on the other hand, the same basic idea doesn’t sound so pretty. “Given the promise of tyranny, conservative intellectuals must openly ally with the AR-15 crowd,” writes Slack. “Able-bodied men, no longer isolated, are returning to Republican manliness in a culture of physical fitness and responsible weaponry. They are buying AR-15s and Glock 17s and training with their friends, not FBI-infiltrated militias or online strangers, but trustworthy lifelong friends to build a community alongside.” Slack published this bit of naked aggression in the American Mind, as it happens, a journal published by the Claremont Institute but apparently aimed at those able-bodied men with their manly AR-15s.

The same upstairs-downstairs division of intellectual labor is in full evidence in conservative discussions of sexual hierarchy—a topic upon which the movement seems unable to escape. At the Claremont Institute, they hold fetes for Harvey Mansfield, the nonagenarian Harvard professor of government whose 2006 book Manliness cites Homer and Aristotle to make the case that men should continue to rule society for the same reasons they have always ruled, which is that they are manly and women are not. Meanwhile, the street-level purveyors of conservative ideas, like Costin Alamariu, the Yale graduate student and wannabe-Nietzsche who goes by the idiotic pseudonym of Bronze Age Pervert, offer direct and frankly disgusting forms of misogyny and male supremacism with undisguised appeals to overthrow democracy in favor of some vague form of fascism or military dictatorship. Alamariu’s X feed has, unsurprisingly, also functioned as a collection point for racial hate. Yet, as Field shows, Claremont itself has played a key role in disseminating the Pervert’s work—and not just in its low-brow magazine for the manly men. While Alamariu’s work is widely read within the New Right, it is so extreme that it can be easily mistaken for a kind of burlesque of grievance or snark. But, as Field warns, it should not be dismissed. “There is a parallel danger that comes with not cataloguing BAP’s ‘petty thought crimes,’ as well as with presuming that there is something ‘earnest’ and ‘serious’ undergirding Alamariu’s work that can somehow be disentangled from his rhetorical faux pas. The danger there is that, to look cool, you whitewash and elevate the genocidal writings of a maniac.”

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Field’s work is the intellectual synthesis it provides of the various pieces of the conservative movement in the United States today. It may all look like undifferentiated howling to the liberal eye, but the movement is, in fact, comprised of distinct groupings, such as the supporters of “National Conservatism,” a global movement that champions the return to the ethnosupremacist nationalism of your choice; the hard-right Catholic integralists, who have given up on the liberalism that supplies them with tenured faculty positions and argues for a return to theocracy grounded on their (cramped and neurotic) idea of “the common good”; Christian nationalist leaders, who look forward to a more theocratic political and legal order and whose movement functions in election cycles as a giant get-out-the-vote machine; low-brow conspiracy mongers and agitators like Jack Posobiec and Steve Bannon, who specialize in stoking paranoias about stolen elections and elite pedophiles; and, of course, the high-brow, frequently secular intellectuals at places like the Claremont Institute—many of whom adore “religion” in the abstract but otherwise seem to worship nothing more than power and their own fortunes. These varieties of conservatism certainly emphasize different priorities; in the main, however, they complement rather than contradict one another. They are best viewed as the distinct ways in which a common set of misguided ideas present themselves to distinct audiences, as Field shows.

Field is especially strong in her dissection of of the authoritarian-fantasy echo chamber that allows the leaders and thinkers of the New Right to confuse sadism-for-kicks for manly wisdom. In fact, as she points out, the freedoms and security these men enjoy were made possible by the liberal democracy they despise. “You take the liberal world for granted, too,” she rebukes her former fellow travelers, a passage that was highlighted in Jennifer Szalai’s review of Furious Minds in The New York Times. “This has allowed you to don the language of grievance and oppression far too lightly, without having given enough thought to what oppression actually means—the kind of oppression that doesn’t let you love who you want to, or vote in free elections, or not be disappeared.”

A particular strength of Field’s account is the story of personal growth in which it is embedded. As a student of political theory and public law at the University of Texas, Austin from 2006-2011, she was no stranger to American conservatism. Throughout her book, she expresses sympathy for many of the concerns with modern society that conservatives raise, and she searches their work for meaningful solutions in a charitable spirit. Although Field denies that she was ever an active member of the movement, she was close enough to it to study Nietzsche and participate in gatherings of conservative intellectuals funded by right-wing billionaire types.

It was at one such gathering, in 2018, that she had her version of the Road to Damascus conversion. In her preface, she tells us that she was seated at an elaborate meal with a leader of the well-funded think tank sponsoring the event when the subject of Michelle Obama came up. Field’s interlocutor then made a disgusting and inappropriate remark indicating his desire to do to the then-First Lady the kind of thing that manly men are thought to want to do to women they find attractive but do not especially like. It suddenly dawned on Field that this was a movement of assholes. She soon embarked on “the long, slow process of extricating myself from the world of conservative intellectualism.”

If there is a perceived limitation in Field’s account at the outset, it is the obvious one programmed in it from the beginning. Ideas certainly matter. But are they the thing that matters most? The sheer awfulness of the ideas of today’s conservative movement—like the sheer assholishness of so many of its practitioners—might instead be taken as evidence that this was just the best that the money of a few paranoid billionaires could buy. But, as Field duly acknowledges in the course of her work, the appeal of these ideas might likewise have more to do with economic factors and disinformation than their internal or logical content. “Growing right-wing extremism has not emerged in a vacuum but in many instances is a response, however misguided, to real problems,” as she points out. “It reflects some of the actual failures of modern liberal politics and economics, of modern liberal culture, and of the corporate neoliberal academy.” Quite right. Those who perceive their economic power and privilege slipping away can be more likely to fall for an authoritarian movement, however cleverly or stupidly the case is made. Explaining the catastrophic failure of conservatism is no simple or easy task; Field’s intellectual history is a vital contribution.