The Dark Side of Trump’s Moon

People are familiar with the Molotov-cocktail throwers of Trump’s MAGA, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Laura Loomer, and Steve Bannon. They see on television every day the ugly public personality of the Trump administration in the faces of Kristi Noem of the Department of Homeland Security, Pam Bondi of the Justice Department, and Vice President JD Vance.

What they don’t see are the shadowy networks that are responsible for formulating the ideological foundations of the administration’s agenda. In Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, Laura Field throws light on the dark side of Donald Trump’s moon. And she brings to this task impeccable credentials. She went to college and graduate school with some of the key figures of these networks, personally knows quite a number of them, and has studied them for years. Indeed, many on the far right probably think she knows too much about them, which may account for her being refused entry into the National Conservatism Conference 4 in Washington, DC, in July 2024.

MAGA’s ideological apparatus consists of networks, organizations, and movements such as the Post-Liberals, National Conservatives, Catholic Integralists, Christian Nationalists, and “Claremonters” or intellectual satellites orbiting the ultra-conservative Claremont College in southern California. These groups and individuals are not in the public eye, but they probably prefer it that way since they have power and influence, which is more important than publicity. They are very well educated, with PhDs and other postgraduate degrees, and quite a few are tenured professors at leading universities, like Adrian Vermeule, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. Other key figures on the intellectual far right are Michael Anton, Patrick Deneen, Costin Alamariu, and Christopher Rufo, all of whom are profiled in detail in the book.

These networks and individuals are well funded, being in close contact with folks like Peter Thiel, the multibillionaire founder of Paypal, who shares their ideological radicalism.

Liberalism as the Enemy

What unites these networks and individuals is a hatred for liberalism, the rights-based political tradition inspired by John Locke. Liberalism disembedded the individual from the community. Liberalism enshrined pluralism, which promoted the coexistence of communities with different beliefs and discouraged the search for the “One Truth,” relativizing truth instead. Liberalism also promoted equality when in fact people and communities are unequal, and they cite Lincoln, of all people, to advance this. Liberalism for the Catholic Integralists destroyed what should have been the unity of Church and State. Liberalism for the Christian Nationalists replaced the original Christian inspiration of the Republic with one based on the Enlightenment, and here some of the “founding fathers” like Jefferson, a champion of reason and Lockean democracy, must bear part of the blame.

Who unites them is Donald Trump, whom some of them see as the anti-democratic Caesar that would set the United States on the right path: towards “virtue” and towards the original American project that united religion and the state. Some of them are classicists and champion Plato’s rule by an enlightened elite, with some seeing Sparta with its authoritarian ways as superior to democratic Athens. So, how does this square with their enthusiasm for Trump? They may hold their noses when considering some aspects of Trump, like his vulgarity, narcissism, and behavior toward women, but they see him as a necessary instrument for bringing about their goals and a personality that beneath his superficial coarseness is philosophically one with them.

Some of them are disciples of Carl Schmitt, the German Nazi philosopher, who saw politics as a battle to the death between enemies, with no quarter given, which is why most of them endorsed—in contrast to traditional conservatives like Dick Cheney—the “Stolen Election” myth and became supporters of the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

They have been, in Field’s view, imbued with a “Long March” vision, aiming to capture one institution after another, beginning with the Republican Party, then moving to the Supreme Court, Congress, and the different agencies that are key to furthering their ideological and political agenda. And, of course, the ultimate prize: the presidency. They have been extraordinarily successful in this mission.

Although some see “no enemies to the right,” others prefer to keep some distance from the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, and white nationalists like Richard Spencer or Nick Fuentes, not for ideological reasons but because some of them fear the image of the latter might derail their message and tactics. Their preferred approach was on display in their assault on critical race theory, which mobilized white parents to demand the revision of curricula on American history in local schools by shrouding racism with calls for “patriotic education.”

This approach was also successful in dealing with the “threat” of the LGBTQI+ movement: they successfully stirred up the homophobia in the grassroots by painting alarming images of transgender people using school toilets for prurient purposes and portraying parents who had a liberal view on gender socialization as fostering gender confusion.

Against “Gynocracy”

Their leading lights are almost all men, and these people are almost uniformly of the belief that women have gained too much influence and need to be put in their place. One of their key theorists is someone who calls himself “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP). Field sums up his views on women expounded in his book Bronze Age Mindset.

For him, the Bronze Age was a golden age of human history because it represented the hard suppression of what supposedly came before—which was the womanly, proto-socialist age of the communal “longhouse”…Bronze Age man in BAP’s telling, revolted against the feminine tyranny of the Iron Age, exerted his power, and invented political order and rule, and this was exceptional and great. Sadly, in the West today, mankind has succumbed once more to something like the older natural state of ‘gynocracy.’ So, it is time for the manly men to rise up and take action.

Bronze Age Pervert, who has a PhD from Yale, is a serious nutcase, Field says. But people like him have to be taken seriously since they are influential is spreading nutty theories. One up-and-coming New Right figure claimed that every junior staffer in the Trump administration has read Bronze Age Mindset.

Combating “Right-Wing Gramscianism”

If there is a term that captures what these people are all about, it’s what some have called “Right-wing Gramscianism,” after the left-wing thinker Antonio Gramsci, for they believe that between interests and ideas, ideas come first. Capturing the commanding heights of culture, achieving cultural hegemony, thus becomes the key to the transformation of society.

Gross underestimation of the influence and power of nutcases like Bronze Age Pervert and the many borderline nutcases like Anton and Deneen has resulted in the surprise and dismay of liberals at the successive blitzkrieg moves of the second Trump administration in its first year. They just did not anticipate how radical these people are.

Field is a militant liberal, and she says it’s time for liberals to fight back. She calls for a reinvention of the liberal imagination to push back against the “New Right’s Schmittian filth about friends and enemies and America being irreparably divided.” Providing concrete steps for this fightback, however, is where the book is weakest.

But perhaps that is too much to ask of one book. Just providing an unparalleled close look at the nutcases in power and exposing their agenda is already achievement enough.

I share many of Field’s concerns, though I do not classify myself as a liberal. I feel that if there is a must-read book for progressives as we move into 2026, it is Furious Minds.

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