What Is the Glue Binding the New Right's Disparate Factions? Zack Beauchamp's Conversation with Laura Field
The political theorist says that nationalism and a nostalgia for old gender norms are part of the answer
If you’ve been following American politics in the Trump era, there’s a decent chance you’ve heard of something called the “new right.” It’s a loose movement of radical intellectuals who share both a basic hostility to American liberal democracy and real influence in the current White House. They all think the system is rotted, that it needs to be fundamentally overhauled, and that Trump can be a vehicle for putting something better in its place. But why do they think that? How much influence do they really have? And what would a response to their rising prominence even look like?
is the author of a forthcoming book about the new right called Furious Minds, and I’m the author of On the Right, a Vox newsletter about the political right and its ideas. Laura and I were recently on a panel together at the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism’s (ISMA’s) “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference in Washington, D.C., where we discussed anti-liberal political thought. It was a really fun time, and I’m so glad that I got the chance to meet her there.Laura is a trained political theorist, and has spent a lot of time in the conservative intellectual world tracking the trends that would eventually produce the new right. She saw them firsthand while they were germinating, and got to meet a lot of the people who were involved in the creation of this world. Her book is a fascinating taxonomy of the wild world of far-right thinking, and one that you should definitely pre-order.
What follows is a video of our conversation as well as a full transcript (edited for flow and clarity).
Zack Beauchamp: You’re someone who is liberal but found yourself as a professional academic and intellectual in conservative spaces—and that’s pretty unusual because there tends to be a lot of self-segregation away from that world. What pulled you into it and what was it like being an insider-outsider in the conservative world of ideas?
Laura K. Field: I wanted to go into medicine and be a doctor in the developing world. I was very, very liberal and sort of a save-the-world type. I had to take some required courses in political philosophy, and one was a wonderful course on ancient political philosophy and early modern thought. It was mind-blowing. The right today uses this language of being “red-pilled,” where you see through the lies that we are told by the regime. They use this extreme language, but something sort of parallel happened to me just reading Plato with these really great teachers. I fell in love with these books and the tradition of political philosophy and literature that these teachers were so good at explaining.
My politics didn’t change dramatically, but some of those circles were quite adjacent to the people who were the leaders of the avant-garde of defending Trumpism: the West Coast Straussians; call them the Claremont Institute people. When that started happening, I was really quite alarmed.
Beauchamp: In Furious Minds, you use “new right” as an umbrella term for all of these different pro-Trump factions. What makes the new right a cogent grouping, not just a random smattering of people who all like Trump? What connects them and what differentiates them—on substantive grounds, not just liking Trump versus not liking Trump—from the old right?
Field: So, these terms are kind of weird and convoluted. In the United States in the last few years, there’s been a lot of talk about the new right—but there are like 10 waves of “new right” movements in history. Historians go crazy when we talk like this, because there’s an actual “old right” in the early part of the 20th century. So, just to be clear, I’m talking about the MAGA new right. It’s the latest iteration of a new kind of conservative intellectual movement. And it contrasts with, I don’t call it the “old right,” I call it the “Reagan-Buckley right,” or the “establishment right,” which, if you’re not 19, is the conservative world you’re familiar with.
There’s a classic model of the Reagan-Buckley style of conservatism—it’s called the “Gipper’s Stool,” and it’s got these different props that hold it up: fiscal conservatism (free-market economics), social conservatism (conservative social values), and anti-communism, which is what held this fusionist vision together. That really held a lot of sway, in the conservative intellectual movement, until the end of the Cold War. So when we talk about the old establishment, that’s the substance.
The new right turns against a lot of that. Michael Anton, one of these Claremont Institute guys and one of the first to defend the new right and Trumpism from an intellectual standpoint, says that Trumpism and the new right is all about economic nationalism (turning against the free market orientation of the establishment) as well as closed, secure borders (that’s the anti-immigration strain), and America First foreign policy (very different from the kind of liberal internationalism that grew out of conservative anti-communism over the last 50 years). That’s Anton’s formula.
But I think that there’s also just a strong social conservatism that is quite extreme and reactive that is at the core of a lot of this—at least spiritually.
Beauchamp: One thing that you did in the book that I really liked is you brought out not just points of differentiation within the broad conservative movement between older and newer pro-Trump strains, but also identified some distinctive core values. One is nationalism, the deep commitment all these different groups have to a vision of an assertive American-ness. They may disagree about what it means to be an American nationalist, but they all agree that something about the idea of the nation has to be front and center.
But there’s also a real preoccupation with gender—with manliness and men and their proper relationship with women. You also noticed this in person—you would attend an event from this crowd and there’d be some weird comment someone would make about you or about a woman being there or about women in general, almost like it was designed to provoke. And, of course, the authors you talk about in the book are overwhelmingly male. So, what’s the gendered core to this and how important is that to understanding what’s happening?
Field: This was super striking to me from the beginning. In academia, I was treated very well by my male mentors. But the gender dynamics in these new right circles—such as, for example, gendered panels at conferences—are quite strange. My book doesn’t profile any women academics because there really aren’t any within that world who warranted a whole chapter. I kept asking myself, “Am I missing anybody? Is there a woman in this space who’s respected by these men who should be elevated?” And there wasn’t.
I guess I wasn’t that puzzled by it. I mean, they don’t really respect women. They have a whole battery of intellectual formulations to exclude women. It’s dramatic the extent to which this movement is mainly made up of men.
Beauchamp: The new right has shared principles: a preoccupation with gender, strong support for Trump, a general disinterest in abiding by the traditional norms of democratic politics, and a commitment to unremitting culture war against the left. These are the new right’s defining traits. But there are huge divisions between the different sub-factions that make up the new right. If you were to divide the new right into camps, what would you say the fault lines are?
Field: I have three main camps: the Claremonters, the postliberals, and the National Conservatives. I also talk about the hard right, but the hard right travels alongside all three of them ideologically. The hard right is the hardcore, manosphere, fascist types. Each of these groupings are different.
The Claremonters are the West Coast Straussians that I was speaking about before. They are really committed, at least in theory, to the American Founding. They have this very grandiose vision of what the American Founding was that goes beyond even ordinary patriotism. It’s that this is the best regime of all time. They’re also at the very cutting edge of the culture war. So, to them, America is the best regime of all time, but we’ve completely lost the plot and liberals—and the liberal way of thinking—have taken over to such a degree that we need a counter-revolution. They’re really far gone in the culture warring. They’re the Jan. 6 types.
Beauchamp: Michael Anton, who you mentioned earlier, is now a Trump administration official, a high-ranking one. He’s one of the key leaders in that faction.
Field: Yeah, Michael Anton, John Eastman, these types are pretty radical.
Then there are the National Conservatives, which I treat as an umbrella group. They’re a little more vanilla, with nationalism as their core thing. But it turns into ethno-nationalism in some cases and Christian nationalism. They’re a big tent.
The tensions are clearest when we are talking about the postliberals, who are the most highbrow of the new right. They tend to be Catholic intellectuals: people like Adrian Vermeule at Harvard, Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame, and writer Sohrab Ahmari. These are serious Catholics who are more committed to social conservatism and really want to shape the morals of the country in a much more traditional Catholic direction. But they’re also more sincerely interested in left-oriented economics, a more government-led economics.
“I want to make clear that I think we do need ideas. One of the reasons I highlight that is because Democrats tend to put ideas last. They’re very wonkish, and I love them for that, but there’s a disconnect that exists between the culture warring on the right and the procedural, quietist approach on the left, generally speaking. Conservatives would not agree with my assessment—they think that the left is just a complete culture warrior juggernaut. But I disagree.” — Laura K. Field
The new right as a whole speaks as if they want to help the working class, and create new populist programs. But I think that the people who are closest to Trump—the Claremont, NatCon, and Project2025 people—haven’t really followed through on this. They’ve got the tariffs, but otherwise, economically, they’re still doing the big tax cuts, they’re still beholden to donors. So that’s been a big fissure, because the postliberals are almost open to socialism.
A lot of other fissures have to do with how accepting they are of the hard right. Ahmari has been quite outspoken against the Proud Boys, the manosphere, and Bronze Age Pervert and those guys.
So what you get is this complete tangle of ideas. These men are all reaching back to surprising sources and using them in their own ways. You can have someone like Adrian Vermeule, a Catholic integralist, who is inspired by Carl Schmitt, the crown jurist of the Third Reich.
But these figures and groups are so united on some of their political propositions, on their radicalism and anti-liberalism, that it makes the intellectual distinctions among them very interesting [but less salient]. So I don’t know how much it matters, practically speaking.
Beauchamp: Well, what you’re describing are the dynamics of a united political coalition, right? But the point is that what they all agree on is that right-wing politics properly construed means the demolition of American liberalism. Not just the end of liberalism in the sense of the Democratic Party, but of a system that is guided by principles of individual liberty, free enterprise, state non-interference, and individuals as rights bearers who can make claims against the state. Under liberalism, the primary purpose of politics is to allow those people to pursue the vision of life that they choose. The state enables that and provides the background conditions that make people capable of being free. That’s, broadly speaking, the liberal vision of politics. And every single one of these movements is, for their own reasons, arranged against that—which is interesting because, while liberalism is not the only American political tradition, it’s certainly the one enshrined in the Founding.
Field: There’s this huge incoherence among and across these movements, as you’ve noted, where many of them have a different conception of the good, or what they hold to be the ideal—whether it’s the Founding, nationalism, or a very traditional Catholic conception of the good. It’s important to recognize that they are driven by the good, or these thick conceptions of the good, these comprehensive doctrines, and I think that’s a useful way to think about them.
“Even though I knew, and had written about, how much more prepared Trump’s people would be this time around than the new right was the last time, I was surprised at how much more effective they’ve been. I think it’s fair to say that Trump has done a lot more in his second term than he did in his first. … And I don’t feel like there’s much of a response from the left, intellectually at least, to what’s going on. It doesn’t seem to me like the party has much to offer on the ideological front.” — Laura K. Field
I don’t think liberals quite get, in general, how driven these people are—or think they are. There’s plenty of politics that is mainly just a marriage of convenience. But a lot of them are fanatics and are pursuing their own ideals. They think that these ideals, and their way of life, are in so much peril that they need to oppress everyone else. The psychology there is worth being really clear about: they think they’re doing something that is good for everybody because their idea of the good is true. And even when they are in conflict with one another, those conflicts aren’t big enough where they can’t agree on that.
Beauchamp: Yeah, I think that’s right. One of the common threads in new right thinking is that what we call liberalism is actually not a doctrine of limiting state power but a doctrine of cultural aggression against people like them. They [operate with] a sense that they’re waging a defensive culture war, even if what they’re responding to is something like the legalization of same-sex marriage. For them, especially for postliberals, this was a seminal moment. For most of us—I mean, I am in an opposite-sex marriage—the quality of traditional marital arrangements are not degraded by the existence of same-sex marriage. To me it seems crazy to read that as cultural aggression. But that is how it’s perceived, that’s how it’s understood in these worlds.
Field: One thing that frustrates me is that, while I don’t want liberals to fight fire with fire, I do think we need more robust forms of defensive liberalism. That’s also partly what my book is about—just having a little more spine and backbone instead of caving to these things, even just ideologically.
Beauchamp: So, a skeptical listener at this point might wonder, “What are you guys talking about? Who cares about any of this?” These are people having arguments in small blogs and maybe it spills out into a newspaper or magazine occasionally, but it’s on podcasts, it’s on YouTube, whereas the actual decision makers—those who are literally attacking American democracy and liberalism—are people like Donald Trump, who don’t care at all about what’s happening in the world of ideas. But you’ve spent a long time studying these people. You’ve thought about them a lot. Why does any of this matter for our politics?
Field: The knee-jerk reaction to think “who cares” is a natural one, because a lot of these people are bizarre—weirdos. That’s why it’s alarming to see them wield so much power, to see JD Vance have that clout.
I think they have dramatically reoriented the GOP. My book is partly about how a lot of the barriers between the far right, the alt-right, and the establishment have completely gone away. We call it the new right, but a lot of it has been latent on the conservative side going back 50 years to Goldwater, Buchanan, the birthers, the Birchers, the conspiracism and racism and anti-civil rights stuff that has been a big part of the intellectual world on the right for decades. So it’s not unprecedented. We could talk about continuities and discontinuities with the past. Certainly one discontinuity is that all these weird, formerly fringe people are coming in and taking over. But it’s not a wholly novel thing. Many of these are old strains, they are the authoritarian traditions from the American past coming up to the surface. It’s not just some radically new thing.
These kinds of movements can build energy, and young men are influenced by these circles. A lot of these people I’m writing about are in the intellectual spheres. They’re pretty smart. A lot of them have PhDs, which is no marker of genius, but they have a lot of education and resources available to them. They’re experts in ways that would surprise most listeners. They know a whole lot. I wouldn’t want to debate some of them on the Founding or other questions. These well-learned people shape the minds of people like Joe Rogan. Ideologically, there is a trickle-down effect. The culture war has a big impact. You see the impact of someone like Christopher Rufo.
We could talk about how much the economic dimensions of the country’s problems matter for this movement—the working class populism stuff. But part of it is that they say it does—that’s their pitch. And it’s not hard to make people feel like they have economic woes, right? Or that they’re suffering. I mean, we all struggle. I think that a lot of the culture warring is a top-down phenomenon. That’s how they think about it. And they’re very good at the culture warring. It does have an impact.
Beauchamp: You argue that the right—not just the radical right, but the American right in general—operates with an “ideas first” approach, believing that ideas have a tangible, causal impact on politics. I think that’s true in a really important sense—in a way that’s actually underappreciated by a lot of people on the left. It almost seems like we’re living in a world where the right is proving its own theory of politics, its ideas-first vision, that when you write things down it has tangible effects on what happens in the political world. They’re proving that through their own actions—through influencing people like JD Vance, through getting people like Michael Anton into high-level state department positions. It’s like the world we live in now is in large part being shaped by them.
Field: Yeah, I call it “ideas first,” but it’s also a kind of intellectual fanaticism. Each different camp has a commitment to a certain vision of politics, of the good, of how we ought to live, and each camp becomes very attached to its ideas. But in the United States the conservative movement as a whole has had, for quite some time now, a similar understanding of why ideas matter and how ideas shape the world.
“The knee-jerk reaction to think “who cares” is a natural one, because a lot of these people are bizarre—weirdos. That’s why it’s alarming to see them wield so much power, to see JD Vance have that clout. I think they have dramatically reoriented the GOP. … These kinds of movements can build energy, and young men are influenced by these circles. A lot of these people I’m writing about are in the intellectual spheres. They’re pretty smart. A lot of them have PhDs, which is no marker of genius, but they have a lot of education and resources available to them. They’re experts in ways that would surprise most listeners. They know a whole lot. … These well-learned people shape the minds of people like Joe Rogan. Ideologically, there is a trickle-down effect. The culture war has a big impact. You see the impact of someone like Christopher Rufo.” — Laura K. Field
You can go back to a book from the ’50s called Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver who traces the fall of modernity, and all the problems that we have today, to the introduction of nominalism, which is the view that ideas don’t exist independent of our material world. The idea is that modern life has been destroyed because, in liberal modernity, we don’t have an anchor for our way of life and our belief systems. We don’t have a common set of norms and values and beliefs that anchors us together and allows us to make decisions about politics. We have structures—such as democratic systems—that help us make these decisions and negotiate these things. But [these critics of liberal modernity] think that you need to have a coherent moral ecosystem that holds everybody together to have good politics. That’s a major driving force of the right.
Beauchamp: So, what you’re saying is that “ideas first” isn’t just a theory that it matters to develop ideas, to make intellectual arguments in the public realm, and then to have some reason to believe that those ideas and arguments filter downstream. Rather, it’s that ideas matter in that they construct the reality, the social structure, in which we live, and that part of the purpose of making these seemingly wild arguments is to redefine and set out new moral norms that shape the way that ordinary, everyday people think about their worlds.
More concretely, if you’re a Catholic integralist like Adrian Vermeule, who thinks that we should live in a society where the state, very literally, is implementing Catholic social doctrine—basically acting as the church’s agent in a lot of ways—what you’re doing in your writing is trying to create a world in which that becomes more thinkable.
Field: I think that’s right. What they’re talking about is a regime that is dedicated to being virtuous. That’s old Platonic and Aristotelian language; its civic republicanism. And there’s a sense in which it’s very appealing, but the modern regime, liberal democracy, does not focus on that. But these types think that to have a healthy politics, to have a good politics that people can participate in and flourish in, requires doctrines that shape us in those ways, in our education, in our laws, all the way down. You can find quotes from the Founding, from John Adams and others, about the need for a virtuous citizenry. It’s not completely foreign to the tradition—but they are really running with it.
But it’s also fair to say that their perspective is often very detached from the empirical world of what life is like in the United States, from just any sort of good faith understanding of what liberal democracy is and how liberals live their lives. They think we all live tawdry, amoral lifestyles, but they’re quite delusional about that.
I want to make clear, though, that I think we do need ideas. One of the reasons I highlight that is because, as I say in my conclusion, Democrats tend to put ideas last. They’re very wonkish, and I love them for that, but there’s a disconnect that exists between the culture warring on the right and the procedural, quietist approach on the left, generally speaking.
Conservatives would not agree with my assessment—they think that the left is just a complete culture warrior juggernaut. But I disagree. And I think we do need ideas. We need good ideas. The American Founding is often thought of as a sort of creed; America is thought of as a creedal nation, where we’re united by ideas about equality and liberty. The new right rejects those ideas in particular. I’m not trying to attack an ideas first approach. I think we need that in our politics.
Beauchamp: I really loved the passage from your book where you chided liberals and Democrats for putting ideas last—where you described them as having incubated them into an AI lab, tested them against a dozen polls, and assigned them to a celebrity to rehearse. And you recounted how one of the most frustrating experiences for any liberal observer of the new right has been to witness again and again the incredible contrast between the “coarse brazenness” of the right’s ideologues and the tepid intellectual cluelessness and cowardice of so many centrist and liberal leaders both within academia and beyond. Of course there are exceptions, but not nearly enough.
“Michael Anton, one of these Claremont Institute guys and one of the first to defend the new right and Trumpism from an intellectual standpoint, says that Trumpism and the new right is all about economic nationalism (turning against the free market orientation of the establishment) as well as closed, secure borders (that’s the anti-immigration strain), and America First foreign policy (very different from the kind of liberal internationalism that grew out of conservative anti-communism over the last 50 years). That’s Anton’s formula.” — Laura K. Field
That is a stinging indictment, on your part, of the liberal intellectual class. Where are you coming from here? When you say that they’ve failed in contrast to the coarse brazenness of the new right, what do you mean?
Field: I was finalizing those passages in the early part of this year, as the new administration was coming in. Even though I knew, and had written about, how much more prepared Trump’s people would be this time around than the new right was the last time, I was surprised at how much more effective they’ve been. I think it’s fair to say that Trump has done a lot more in his second term than he did in his first. And the response on the Democrats’ part ... I mean, they’re in a difficult position: they had a very rocky electoral cycle with Biden staying in so long and Harris having to parachute in and perhaps not being very well prepared. There was frustration with all of that.
At the same time, this is something that I’ve seen for a long time. I don’t feel like there’s much of a response from the left, intellectually at least, to what’s going on. It doesn’t seem to me like the party has much to offer on the ideological front.
I don’t have all the answers. But it was frustrating, as an observer, to see that Bernie and AOC were the people who went and toured the country, and had a lot of energy in those first months, while more centrist Democrats didn’t seem to be doing very much. And I still think that’s the case. They seem very shocked and unprepared. And I think that that comes down to a failure of imagination—taking way too much for granted for a very long time. And that’s part of what got us Trump in the first place.
Beauchamp: If you look at academic political philosophy and political theory, liberalism is the dominant doctrine. Why hasn’t this intellectual dominance translated into a forceful ideas-first intellectual response to the new right?
Field: What I’ll say is sort of speculative, but one of the through-lines is higher education and how the right has attacked it—not just in the present, but going back quite a while—for its liberal dominance, affirmative action, and so on. So a big part of what they’ve been trying to do is retake some of these institutions. They’ve got parallel institutions that they’ve built up. That’s their take on academia.
I think part of what’s wrong with our politics does have to do with the liberal domination of academia. Part of the reason the new right has been able to capitalize off of these thick moral conceptions and these big questions about how to live is because we don’t do that as liberals. Liberalism sort of cordons off some of those questions; its origins were to help people navigate huge existential differences and get along in light of them. Liberalism was partly invented to avoid some of these big ideas and questions.
So I think the answer to why liberal and Democratic politicians are not better equipped to confront some of these ideas is partly because they haven’t been educated in milieus that cultivate that. There’s a kind of educational formation that is lacking in some liberal circles. You mentioned academic political philosophy, which is so dominated by liberals. That’s pretty much true. But there’s not always space in those circles to explore questions of the good life. It’s almost taken off the table.
Beauchamp: It strikes me that there’s a bit of a trade-off here, in intellectual work, between rigor and relevance. I’m going to overgeneralize here, but it seems like one of the problems of the academy in general is that there are so many procedures in place for accuracy, for disciplinary precision, and stuff like that; just sort of the way people operate, the rules that you have to follow. You produce work that is technically well-reasoned and very thoughtful. But the work is oftentimes extremely narrow. Whereas, out in the wilds of Claremontistan, or among small Substacks, you can just take on these huge ideas and maybe make all sorts of technical or factual errors.
“There’s a classic model of the Reagan-Buckley style of conservatism—it’s called the “Gipper’s Stool,” and it’s got these different props that hold it up: fiscal conservatism (free-market economics), social conservatism (conservative social values), and anti-communism, which is what held this fusionist vision together. That really held a lot of sway, in the conservative intellectual movement, until the end of the Cold War. So when we talk about the old establishment, that’s the substance. The new right turns against a lot of that.” — Laura K. Field
I find that a lot, when I’m reading new right arguments; I have to fact-check everything because you can’t rely on a peer review process or citation practices being in place. There are always these wild, sweeping generalizations, oftentimes without sufficient evidence to back them up. And yet that makes things exciting; it makes things fun. It makes people like JD Vance, who are ideas-hungry politicians, latch onto them. And, [on the other side,] there’s not that world out there that can foster the level of excitement. I don’t know if inaccuracy is necessary to excitement, but I feel like the lack of strict academic norms surrounding accuracy, precision, and incrementalism really has contributed to the new right’s success as ideas merchants to the political class.
Field: I think you’re absolutely right. That’s something that frustrated me about my own education—it seemed quite insular. I started to see beyond some of this very clearly. And then when I went back and read these books, a lot of it was just factually incorrect or just completely blinkered in terms of its understanding of history. That’s part of the “ideas first” thing—it doesn’t care about the failures of Reconstruction or Jim Crow; it just runs with a certain kind of narrative and it’s kind of ugly. That’s partly what gives them license to spout off the way they do in other quarters, like when they’re on their Substacks or on their podcasts. So it’s a mix of genuine education and a kind of formation that’s just very different from what we get in liberal academia. Partly that and partly just an insularity and a failure of professional norms and standards.
So, in academia, you do have these conservative enclaves—and some of them I do respect and think are serious and others are not. But I think, in academia as a whole, if we’re going to get into the nitty gritty here, you have a whole slew of problems. One of them is the hyper-specialization ... professionalization is fine, but when it becomes an intellectual narrow-mindedness—and that happens in every field—there are trends that dominate and [it leads to] a kind of myopia.
But there’s also a lack of checks against some of that. And I think that in liberal academia, there’s a kind of contempt for the generalist. There’s a real contempt for popular writing and for journalism sometimes—because it’s not so fussy and it has something bigger to say and it is more ideas first. It was hard for me to get comfortable writing for a broader audience as an academic because it’s just a very different kind of activity. There isn’t a place for this sort of broad, formative thing that I’m talking about, which isn’t to say we want to indoctrinate students into a particular set of values in our undergraduate programs, but at least to expose them to these other ways of thinking and bigger traditions, bigger questions.
Beauchamp: One thing that is very true about liberalism is its anthropology: its sense that it is just a fact about the world that we’re not going to agree about everything, that we are going to live in a society where people have very different beliefs, very different backgrounds, very different worldviews, very different things that they care about, and that no society can function well when it doesn’t provide room for different kinds of people to be themselves. In fact, such a society will eventually founder and collapse. This is valuable for liberalism.
On the flip side, it means that the new right has this real problem with its doctrinal disagreements because everybody is asserting that, “My vision of the world is good and true, and if you don’t agree with it, you’re a heretic and justifiably can be persecuted.” So I wonder whether you see a possibility on the horizon when Donald Trump is gone that the new right can no longer function well as a cogent political bloc because it lacks liberalism’s ability to productively brook and channel dissent and disagreement about really key issues.
Field: I think that’s the latent vulnerability here: there are deep disagreements among this set. There’s the fact that they disagree with themselves, and then there’s the fact that they’re not very honest with themselves about the extent to which the liberal side actually is potent, disagrees with them, doesn’t want this, and is going to fight for itself. Even though I said liberals have been a little lackluster in their arguments, I think that the right completely underestimates the extent to which actual people are committed to liberalism and to liberal pluralism. I think that’s a real vulnerability.
I do think you’re right that when Trump is out of the picture, there will be a lot of uncertainty. It’s still very complicated, and I still think that we need to do better as liberals. You’re a very good advocate for liberalism, Zack, and we need more of that. Even if we don’t decide that we’re going to teach liberalism in our colleges or start new civics institutions devoted to liberal pluralism and the meaning of life, we need people to be able to be conversant the way you are in these values. And we need our politicians to be a little more on the offense in terms of what they believe in. Because I think it is very appealing to many people. I think you’re right in your book when you say that what people want out of politics and what the new right has to offer are quite different. These are very strange ideologies.
So, it could throw us back into a period of deep fanatical disagreement. They might start disagreeing [with each other more publicly and forcefully]. The different cohorts within the right might start getting more combative with one another. But I think more likely is that, when Trump is gone, this movement will continue but perhaps be relegated to the states, in a decentralized way. What I think would have happened, had Trump not won this time, is they would have kept preparing and building to work their way through the federal system and take over in red states and oppress people through their laws and through their new right ideas. So we don’t want to get too complacent just because we know that Trump is the glue holding all of this together right now.
Beauchamp: Laura, thank you for a fascinating discussion.
I had a great time with Laura at ISMA’s “Liberalism for the 21st Century” event. It was a wonderful, wonderful conference, and if you’re looking for something to do next year in D.C., please check it out.
An earlier version of this post was first published in Vox.
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An interesting interview with a thoughtful analyst I'd like to hear more from. The flaw, however, is failing to distinguish more clearly between liberals and the left. One reason that liberals, in the Democratic party sense, seem to lack ideas is that they have coasted for decades (or more?) on the assumption that their ideas--technocratic governance, some form of welfare state, and, yes, the broadly liberal ideas of tolerance, rule of law, free speech, free inquiry, etc.--were safely in charge where it mattered. They thus found themselves unprepared or unwilling to resist the intolerant and propagandistic left as it corrupted the academy. Too often, especially in academic circles, liberals regarded the left as liberalism in an identitarian hurry when in fact it was "My vision of the world is good and true, and if you don’t agree with it, you’re a heretic and justifiably can be persecuted.” Now they find themselves similarly ill-prepared to resist the destruction of normal politics by the Trumpist right.
This was very interesting - thank you. I’m a GenX woman who has known I was a Democrat since I was 10 yo, despite being raised by a very Reagan Republican father. Your description of Gipper’s Stool was so helpful because it’s how I understood Republican and conservative core political beliefs until Trump came on the scene in 2015/2016. I didn’t agree with the philosophy but I understood the through lines; they made sense.
During Trump’s first term and even more so during his second, I have been shocked not only by how thoroughly Gipper’s Stool has been rejected by the current Republican Party but also the hypocrisy of them doing so. When I am more alarmed than my now-Trump loving father about tariffs, exploding deficits, attacks on the independence of the Fed, pardons for criminals who attacked the police, cuts to the research which helped create American exceptionalism, and an American President kowtowing to Putin and attacking our European allies, there is a serious problem. Not just with my relationship with my dad and friends who were also former Reagan Republicans but now are now MAGA ones, but with the upside down nature of political thought and discourse right now. Perhaps Congressional Democrats have been slow to act because this shift is just as shocking to them as to many of the rest of us.
When I read about the New Right, I’m not seeing a coherent philosophy which explains why and when these particular thinkers/writers/influencers have shifted from this historical background. I have some personal theories but would be curious if there would be anything you might recommend on this topic.