In the past decade, a new genre of diagnostic writing has made its mark in American publishing. Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works (2018), Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen (2020), Masha Gessen’s Surviving Autocracy (2020), Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (2023), and countless other public-facing accounts of far-right radicalism have become staple texts for a reading public anxious about escalating polarization, increasingly violent political rhetoric, the transformation of the media sphere, and the erosion of civic norms. The Republican Party’s mutation into “an autocratic political force” is also the object of study in Sam Tanenhaus’s Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America and Laura K. Field’s Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right.Footnote ¹ Although these books explore different historical periods, they converge thematically in their diagnostic search for the intellectual and institutional genesis of modern conservatism. Field argues that the “MAGA New Right” should be sharply distinguished from its ideological predecessors. In contrast, Tanenhaus’s biography of William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review, constructs a longer temporal frame by refracting modern right-wing politics through the life of its key architect. Together, Buckley and Furious Minds highlight important questions about the continuities and discontinuities that underwrite the American right’s slide into its present illiberal form.

Buckley is a biographical masterpiece two and a half decades in the making. Unlike John B. Judis’s William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (1988), Tanenhaus’s biography was authorized by Buckley, so he has had full access to his subject’s personal papers (which, I can attest, are copious) and other sources of intimate information. Furthermore, Buckley draws on interviews with “Bill,” as well as close family members and myriad people from his private and professional life. This treasure trove of material lends the book an aura of rare authenticity. Tanenhaus expertly reconstructs events and activities from the Buckley family’s mansion in Sharon, CT, during Bill Buckley’s school years at Millbrook and Yale University, from editorial meetings at National Review, and from various settings of political theater and drama. After reading, the reader is left with a magisterial, well-rounded portrait of a towering figure who labored to synthesize competing strands of conservatism into a counterrevolutionary movement.

Buckley is divided into five chronologically unfolding parts. Part I covers the early years of Bill Buckley’s life from birth to his Yale graduation and eventual publication of God and Man at Yale, the 1951 polemic that catalyzed his career. Part II accounts for the tumultuous 1950s, when Brown v. Board of Education and other historical watersheds challenged institutionalized forms of oppression. Peppered with eye-opening revelations about Bill Buckley’s friendship with Joe McCarthy, William F. Buckley Sr.’s financial support of a local pro-segregation newspaper in Camden, SC, and the 1955 founding of National Review, Part II offers an enlightening perspective on the circumstances that shaped Bill Buckley’s racial and anticommunist politics. In Part III, Tanenhaus chronicles how Buckley’s growing celebrity and syndicated column “On the Right” made him the quintessential conservative voice in American media. “Buckley’s Revolution,” as Part III is titled, also expounds on his budding relationships with prominent right-wing political figures who benefited from his tireless organizing and advocacy. The book’s rendering of Buckley’s behind-the-scenes involvement in Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in Chapter 31, “Open Revolt,” is particularly illuminating. Part IV surveys Bill Buckley’s transition from right-wing radical and occasional outcast to a mainstay in establishment politics, while Part V brings Buckley’s later life, including his foray into novel writing, to a close.

Unfolding over 868 pages (excluding backmatter) and involving a legion of characters, Buckley resists straightforward summation. Tanenhaus sketches a many-layered portrait of Bill Buckley’s personality and his views on race, religion, economics, liberalism, and nationalism. These views were largely molded by his upbringing in a Catholic, upper-middle-class conservative household and by interpersonal relationships with mentors such as Willmoore Kendall, a professor at Yale. While the book charts Buckley’s evolving perspective on race, Tanenhaus does not ignore the reactionary undercurrent that was baked into the cultural revolution Buckley spearheaded, nor does the biographer shy away from linking Buckley’s influence on conservative politics to the mediatized spectacle that is the twenty-first-century American right. Consider Chapter 15, “At Odds with His Time,” where Tanenhaus observes that Buckley’s steadfast commitment to McCarthyism allowed him to combine his dislike of liberal “Ivy League professors” with an aversion to not just “Communists … but the much bigger universe of treasonists, shadowy functionaries in the State Department, the CIA, even the U.S. Army – what later came to be called the ‘deep state’” (280). Or Chapter 22, “Turning the Wheels,” in which Buckley, “through skill, daring, instinct, timing, and luck … elevated a pseudo-event” – the 1960 tax evasion trial of Black New York City Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. – “into an actual [event] and in so doing had unlocked the mysteries of advocacy journalism for himself and his movement” (400). This capacity to fabricate scandals and manufacture outrage resonates in the current media environment. Crafted with an eye toward the present, Buckley is, for that reason and many others, essential reading for anyone interested in the figure of Bill Buckley, the history of National Review, the dynamics of political communication networks, and the intellectual foundations of modern conservatism.

Laura K. Field’s Furious Minds also surveys these foundations. Contra Tanenhaus, Field makes an explicit distinction between the furor of present-day illiberalism and the “Buckley/Reagan fusionist conservatism,” which she views as “a temporary and fragile settlement that masked the enduring id of old-fashioned American conservatism,” namely its “push–pull” of “extremism” (13). The “story” that Furious Minds tells of the contemporary American right “is one of ideological radicalization … of intellectuals, politicians, and the movement they led” (3). This movement – the MAGA New Right – is “not a monolith” but can rather be split “into three groups: the Claremonters, the Postliberals, and the National Conservatives,” with each group consecrating idiosyncratic but overlapping narratives about, respectively, the politico-historical significance of Christianity, the national founding, and the conception of The Good (5). In addition to these three ideological pillars, Field examines the “capacious underbelly to the New Right movement,” the so-called “Hard Right,” which spans the entire ideological terrain of conservatism while being “more hardline, racist, misogynistic, and violent in their rhetoric” than conventional Claremonters, Postliberals, and National Conservatives (7).

Furious Minds crafts an intellectual–institutional genealogy of the extremist forces that inhabit the center of political power in the United States. The book comprises thirteen chapters. Chapters 1–5 outline its three ideological anchor points. Starting in chapter 6, “From Alt-Right to Hard Right,” Field begins to narrativize what she takes to be conservatism’s ideational demise. One senses a melancholic tone in Field’s representation of the right’s deteriorating theoretical roots. The antihero of Furious Minds, Leo Strauss, may have had something insightful to say about the foundational texts and ideas of modernity. Increasingly, however, his intellectual offspring do not. The book’s melancholia also stems from Field’s own background. Even though she proclaims, “I am not a conservative and never have been,” readers might readily wonder about the book’s political message (22). Field states that she believes in “multiracial, pluralistic, liberal democracy” (22), but, somewhat confusingly, the “Preface” recounts her attending an upscale conservative “banquet” during the fifth year of her graduate school education alongside “others who might have a hand in shaping my career” (xxiii). This institutional setting was, Field remarks, so submerged in misogyny that it sparked “the beginning of the long, slow process of extricating myself from the world of conservative intellectualism” (xiv). Other borderline retrograde statements are scattered across the text. Consider, for instance, “If I squint a little, I do not have trouble understanding why the New Right says we are at a point of civilizational crisis as concerns education in this country” (169). Yet it is surely the MAGA New Right that is experiencing something akin to a “civilizational crisis.” Field professes to like big ideas, and so the American right’s conversion to a full-blown reactionary faction “full of madmen” who are “not held back by a sense of humor, or by charity, or even by reality” (306) – as opposed to the merely mildly reactionary “defenders of ‘family values,’ high culture, and Christianity,” I presume (1) – becomes a source of tacit mourning.

Furious Minds elevates its author’s infatuation with ideas to the register of methodology. Field deploys what she calls an “Ideas First” approach, which takes “for granted the notion that ideas – and not just or even primarily material conditions – have power in shaping our world” (20). This methodological outlook constitutes a recurrent source of tension. Where one page might exalt the faculties of mind, the next page may, perplexingly, “take it for granted that historical context matters a great deal, both for interpreting texts and ideas and for understanding – and evaluating – the relationship between theory and action” (21). Which is it? Are we supposed to take for granted the impact of ideas or the conditions of their formation and dissemination?

Furious Minds is admirable in scope and ambition. However, the book’s governing premise that “the New Right’s questions, ideas, and arguments … are effective in their contexts, and it’s not like they are easy to refute” (24), falls flat, in part because Field shows how easily such refutation follows from even the slightest nod toward historical contextualization. Repeatedly, she critiques right-wing tracts for misrepresenting or downplaying the collective suffering of marginalized groups. The book’s thorough dismantling of the logical cohesion of the MAGA New Right thus makes me wonder whether it is necessary to read more than three hundred pages of ideological explication to conclude that the thought leaders of illiberal nationalism have a warped perspective on the racial, sexual, and gender politics of multiracial democracies. Several times, Field attempts to commend even bad-faith invocations of history – in a telling moment, she remarks that “Patrick Deneen, to his credit, acknowledged racism in his book Regime Change (2023), but the result is nearly as conspiratorial and intellectually tenuous as what we find in the 1776 Commission Report” (188, emphasis added) – which suggests to me that Field is well aware of her subject matter’s wanting depth and philosophical rigor. Near the end of Furious Minds, to that point, she revealingly asserts that “each of” the “Ideas First visions” examined in the book “refused to contend honestly with the realities of historical change and contemporary pluralism” (306).

Furious Minds is at its best when describing the networked form of the MAGA New Right ideology. Chapter 8, “Patriotic Education,” provides a genuinely incisive overview of the institutionalization of radical dogma in charter school programs and regional pockets of higher education. Likewise, although Field maintains that her project is about ideas rather than the material conditions that enable their transmission, chapter 11, “The End of Men,” uses conspiratorial documentaries and podcasts to reflect on the mainstream success of “Bronze Age Pervert” Tucker Carlson, and other extremists who exert an ever-increasing authority over the ideological precepts of the American right.

In the conclusion to Furious Minds, Field urges that “our era calls for a liberal renaissance and reinvention,” including “political and practical work that involves … talking to one another, and acting together in the world” (318). Ultimately, this call to action fails to persuade this reader. Much like the MAGA New Right should be charged with misrepresenting history, so Furious Minds must be criticized for romanticizing the core ideas of Western modernity while refusing to seriously grapple with the violence practiced under their mantle. I am, accordingly, not convinced by the conclusions Field reaches in Furious Minds. Even so, when read in tandem with Buckley, the book performs important diagnostic work that will prove valuable to readers seeking to understand American conservatism’s transformation into an antidemocratic force.