"Carte Blanche for Ruthlessness"

He vowed to erect nativity scenes on government property, to enact a ​“Sin Tax” on OnlyFans creators and use state funds to promote earlier marriage and childbearing. He’s also led crowds at his campaign events in chanting ​“Christ is King” and told journalist Don Lemon he was lucky not to be publicly hanged for reporting on an anti-ICE demonstration in a Minnesota church. In a winking ad reference to Benito Mussolini, he said he was running for governor ​“to make the trains run on time.” In another winking reference, this time to George Wallace, he wrote that he’s also running ​“because we need remigration now, remigration tomorrow, remigration forever.”

Whether or not Fishback could win is unclear, Carlson wrote, but his future as the GOP’s standard bearer was not. ​“No more corporate globalism, or bowing down to the ruling class,” Carlson wrote. ​“Liberation is coming.”

How did one of the most prominent voices on the Right come to believe this? Much of the answer can be found in scholar Laura Field’s celebrated recent book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton University Press, 2025), which chronicles the rise of various interconnected Right populist movements over the last decade.

These days, the New Right’s influence is ubiquitous online, whether from candidates gaining publicity with outrage trolling or federal agencies sharing unvarnished white supremacist memes. But these are movements, Field explains, with far deeper roots on the intellectual Right, where academics and think tankers theorize about the failures of pluralist democracy and the liberalism of individual rights, the need for a ​“Red Caesar,” new forms of nationalism and laws that steer the public towards a religiously-defined sense of the ​“common good.”

The New Right Field tracks isn’t a monolith, but a handful of broad and sometimes overlapping categories: the ​“Claremonters” who advocate for a jingoistic and often revisionist account of the U.S. founding; the postliberals agitating to replace multiculturalism and individual liberties with some form of a Christian state; and the National Conservatives resurrecting a nationalism that counts who belongs by how well they align with majority cultural and religious views. Stretching across all these categories is the Hard Right, taking these philosophies to more exclusionary, bigoted and violent extremes.

The story of our current politics, Field writes, ​“is one of ideological radicalization — the mutually reinforcing radicalization of intellectuals, politicians, and the movement they led …people who sought to leverage real problems, as well as known vulnerabilities of liberalism, to impose their own homogenizing moral and political vision on the rest of the country.”

Field spoke with In These Times in January. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Almost immediately after the murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, right-wing pundits began saying that any conservatives who criticize ICE ​“don’t know what time it is” — a phrase that comes up repeatedly in Furious Minds. What does it mean when it comes to the New Right?

Laura Field: The phrase ​“knowing what time it is” is a slogan of the Claremont Institute people. It’s been batted about for most of the last decade and goes back to the argument from this famous essay by Michael Anton, ​“The Flight 93 Election.” The idea of that essay was that electing Donald Trump was a last-ditch effort to save the American Republic; that if Hillary Clinton won, it would be the final entrenchment of the administrative state and this tyrannical liberalism that has overtaken the American Constitution. So the spirit of the saying is that if you know what time it is, you understand the hour is late. And if you know what time it is, you’re prepared to do whatever it takes. It’s this phrase that gives carte blanche for total ruthlessness in politics because you understand the stakes.

What’s shocking about it is that it’s arguing for extra-constitutional action in service of presumptively saving the constitutional order. It’s like, ​“Well, you’ve got to crack some eggs. We understand real politics. It’s a messy business, but we want to get things done.” That’s the thinking that excuses what we’re seeing in these videos. It doesn’t just excuse these incidents. It’s saying more of it would be fine; there’s really no limit.

And it’s not just the Claremont Institute people doing this. There’s a tweet from Sohrab Ahmari, about the ​“terrorem” you need to implement so that people respect law enforcement — that we need to use ​“in terrorem,” the Latin, as an educative force.

The book focuses on what you call ​“ideas first” movements. Why is it important to understand right-wing intellectual movements?

I use that phrase because at some point in writing the book, I realized that was the theory of change operating under the surface for the people I was writing about. It’s traceable back to Leo Strauss, and is the conviction that ideas matter inordinately in the history of the world; that they shape history; that big thinkers are quiet powers and that history unfolds, at least in part, as a result of their reflections and discourses.

So the idea is not just that ideas matter, but the ways in which we talk about them has a culture-shaping impact. That the categories we use and stories we tell and ways in which we understand our own history really matter for how we operate in the world and for how people think about politics.

I tried to foreground that because it’s something Trump is so far away from that he has camouflaged that part of his own movement.

You write that Trump and intellectual New Right movements operate in ​“a mutually reinforcing radicalization process,” primarily targeted against what used to be the GOP establishment. What does that radicalization look like, and how does it differ from old-school Republicanism?

There are three players here: the old GOP establishment; Trump coming in from the outside and blowing it up; then the intellectuals on the sidelines. One surprise for me was that the thinkers I write about have a real affinity for paleoconservative thinking and [Pat] Buchananite ideas of limited or isolationist foreign policy and nationalist or nativist homogeneity in the culture. When Trump came on the scene, he was breaking all these rules in a way that wasn’t intelligible to most of us, but they saw that he fit very nicely with these old paleoconservative views and strains of conservatism that had been shoved under the surface by the fusionist establishment for many decades. They saw that, even if he didn’t know it himself, Trump represented an opportunity for them to get this fringe stuff back on the table. He became their vehicle.

He was so dramatic in his breaking free of norms, whether it’s the stuff about groping women or the economic norms or how we talk about immigrants. He blew it all up, and they were like, okay, he’s our guy because he lets us totally reorient things, he gives us cover to bring in all these ideas we’re well-versed in. Then they fed him or the administration policies. They come up with the narratives and he’s always pushing the envelope.

The only limit there is his taste for popularity, because they don’t seem limited by anything.

What is the liberalism that the New Right opposes?

They oppose it on all kinds of levels. They oppose what they call the foundations of liberalism. They think in politics you need a much more unified history and language, so they’re quite opposed to the pluralism of liberalism, and also its equalizing promise. They’re much more in favor of traditional hierarchies.

Parts of the New Right framed their opposition to liberalism in economic terms, sometimes even claiming they’ve made Republicans the ​“new party of the working class.” How much of that talk has actually been borne out?

It seems like a lot of that was pretty sincere at the beginning, at least with some of the more serious people. Even if we don’t buy the economic despair arguments for Trumpism, he was able to give some recognition to people who were really unhappy with what’s going on in the economy. Trump might have not been sincere, but I think a lot of people on the New Right were. Some of them are Catholics who believe in Catholic social teaching and a big part of that early movement was a turn against economic liberalism and free trade globalism — which obviously gets coded in all kinds of ways — but their first premise was that the economy is not working in the ways that were promised, and somebody’s got to take responsibility and do something different.

Some of this was built out into new ways of thinking about policy by people like Julius Krein and American Affairs, or in Oren Cass’s book, The Once and Future Worker. There were ideas that borrow from the Left, like Sohrab Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc., that are sensitive to some working-class issues. And they also built out industrial policy stuff.

Later, several of these guys came out, in the middle of the Biden administration, and said, ​“We were wrong, the GOP will never be the party of the working class.” They recognized Trump didn’t care in the same way they did about this. And certainly the rest of the GOP. But I think there were some sincere efforts to cut against the pieties of libertarian thinking.

But it doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot of evidence of that mattering now. There has been so much destruction of the administrative state, plus a lot of just old-fashioned corruption happening.

Other parts of the New Right have focused primarily on rehabilitating the idea of nationalism. You discussed how the National Conservativism movement, in some regards, just seems like justification for the most exclusive version of Israeli ethnonationalism — ​“a reason-giving exercise in the denial of human rights, or worse, to the Palestinians.” Can you talk about that, and the implications that has for other countries adopting NatCon ideology?

If you follow [National Conservatism founder] Yoram Hazony’s work, this has been a big question from the beginning. It’s hard to not read his book, The Virtue of Nationalism, as a justification for a Jewish ethnostate in Israel. I don’t know if that’s how he thinks about this. He consistently rejects the idea of an ethnostate in other contexts. And they did reject it at the National Conservatism conference in 2019. At the time, Trump was saying all these racist things about the Squad, so they came out and said, ​“If you’re a racist, you’re not welcome here.” And they preened about how they had excluded some well-known white supremacists from the conference. [Anti-immigrant activist and VDARE founder] Peter Brimelow was the person they had in mind and he published this stuff about how he was surprised to be excluded because he’d read Hazony’s book and thought, ​“Yes, this is all exactly what I think.”

That’s not a surprise, because of how Hazony describes the nation state as the ideal political system that every country should aspire to be part of. That there can be pluralism between nation states, but each one ideally should turn toward a homogenous ideal, including a shared history, shared religion, shared language. At a certain point, it’s hard not to ask what about shared ethnicity, because those things tend to travel together.

There’s this big gaping question there: what does that mean for a place like America, whose past is so complicated, so multiracial? That’s a massive weakness in Hazony’s plan, or just a massive signal of his authoritarianism, because you cannot accomplish that in this country without a very hard turn towards a much more hierarchical state that privileges some people over others.

I think he would deny it and say we just need to prop up Christianity to bring the one true American nation to the fore and privilege that, and everybody else can still be treated decently even if they don’t have equal rights. But he’s offering a framework that excuses different tiers of citizenship. So he can say the ethnic dimensions aren’t what he intends, but it’s pretty clear that the people around him don’t care. Plus, over the last few years, some very questionable people have been welcomed at the National Conservatism conferences, as I list in the book.

Does that relate to the infighting on the Right over the last few months, including after Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts defended Tucker Carlson for platforming extreme far-right figures like Nick Fuentes?

There’s certainly that and also that they’ve been delusional about the kinds of people and stances they were welcoming into their coalition. They were talking about not having racists at their conference, and meanwhile, antisemitism is bubbling up right within their movement.

There’s been a whole bunch of self-denial about the racism and misogyny within the movement that they haven’t confronted, are not confronting and don’t really seem to care about. Not to mention Islamophobia.

Where does the Right’s rising misogyny fit into these movements — whether from influencers like Fuentes, the Right’s increasingly common talking point about repealing the vote for women, or statements from JD Vance about childless women?

Yeah, you can see how the wheels have come off. It’s getting pretty bad out there with the repealing the 19^th Amendment stuff. Those are some of the extreme versions of it, but there are also cultural and ideological elements to the misogyny. There’s an intellectualized misogyny that I trace in the book back to a basic belief that women aren’t the intellectual equals of men and that, generally speaking, they’re better off out of the public eye and the workforce. Even those who are more liberal on some of that think it’s fine if society privileges men and their careers. That’s almost an unspoken norm in conservative circles.

You get all of that piled up then with this Bronze Age Pervert, over-the-top hatred of women; this ruthless attack on women’s equality and women having any power in society; and this bizarro idea that all of our institutions are dominated by the female hivemind. It’s pretty childish, but there’s something so transgressive about it that you can see how it has an appeal to young men and how the sensationalism of it has created an audience.

You discuss how the aesthetic of the New Right is ​“youthful, bitter, masculinist and counterrevolutionary.” Where does the Right’s idea of counterrevolution come from?

That’s one of the surprising things I didn’t expect to find but that became a unifying theme: from the Claremont people talking about the need for a ​“Red Caesar” and their work as a counterrevolution against the progressive Constitution, to the postliberals inspired by old Catholic reactionary thought and a resistance to not just the French Revolution but also then the Catholic church’s settlement with religious pluralism. You have these very smart people deriving their arguments from long traditions that really are anti-Enlightenment, anti-modern at their core. There’s a deep anti-Enlightenment dimension to all of this.

Some of the figures you write about, particularly integralism theorist Adrian Vermeule, argue that they can achieve their goals without popular support if they use state power to force the changes they want to see happen. Has that happened?

It’s not just Vermeule. He’s just the most explicit about leveraging state power towards conservative ends. Some of these guys want to destroy the administrative state, others want to harness it. They’re all very pragmatic, so you can do a bit of both: it’s not just harnessing the power of the state, it’s also a willingness to abuse the power of the state to break through constitutional norms, laws and procedures. The line that best captures that is Patrick Deneen’s ​“using Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.” It’s a very pretentious way of saying, again, ​“You’ve got to break some eggs.” That somebody’s got to be decisive and take action and the true statesman must not be afraid to use power that way.

There may be times in politics, even liberal politics, where a leader needs to do something like that, but we’re talking about Donald Trump or JD Vance, so I think it’s a pretty dangerous proposition. And what frustrates me about a lot of these guys is that they also seem willing to lie. So when they talk about using Machiavellian means towards Aristotelian ends, that can involve deception and dissembling in a way that I find repulsive. JD Vance is the case in point there.

Where do you think things are going next? With apologies for being cute here, what time do you think it is?

I have been surprised by them again and again. They keep landing on their feet. They were able to consolidate their power even after January 6^th, take control of these key Republican institutions, get JD Vance on the ticket, then execute much of Project 2025 with the help of Elon Musk. So there’s no part of me that isn’t worried about what they’ll do next and all the damage that’s being done and already has been done to the country and to the people who are subject to the cruelty and viciousness of this.

With that said, I have been really heartened by the protests in Minnesota. I think that, for good reason, the American people didn’t really understand the threat of Trump. People weren’t ready to hear about Project 2025 in the lead up to the 2024 election. Now they’re paying attention; now they know it was real. They’ve seen people laid off, they’ve seen this nonsense with Greenland. I don’t think anyone’s taking anything for granted anymore. And that’s heartening because I think people really have to be active and attuned to things to get through the next few years. I’m hopeful for the long term. I’m perplexed by the Democratic Party, but that’s a whole other story. 

Part of what I care about is higher education, and civics education in the very broad sense of having people understand their own history and the institutions that shaped them — and the limits of those institutions and what that means for us as human beings. For now, I want people out on the streets, protesting and witnessing, and doing all of that. But at some point, there’s been a lot of neglect and taking things for granted in terms of how we understand ourselves. And there’s a huge opportunity there to do better. 

It would be great if we had more basic courses in liberal political philosophy in universities. But also something much bigger than that, which is that you need to have an education that’s suited for a free people. You need an education that allows people to think for themselves, to deliberate with one another. Understanding history is so important too, so that you can have an informed response to the things we’re seeing online and in the manosphere and on the New Right. Long-term, that’s what I hope for.