An Anatomy of the MAGA Mind

"'In the United States at this time,' the critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950, 'liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.' Conservatives and reactionaries, Trilling added, had no ideas, only impulses-'irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.' Whether the point was true in mid-century America-the reactionary writer Richard M. Weaver published Ideas Have Consequences, an attack on the modern West, two years before Trilling's The Liberal Imagination-today it is obviously false."

"In Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, the political theorist Laura K. Field organizes the ideas that have coalesced around Donald Trump into several schools of thought. At the Claremont Institute in California, the disciples of Leo Strauss, the intellectual guru to several generations of conservatives, combine Platonic philosophy, biblical teachings, and a reverence for the American founding into a politics of ethical and religious absolutism. Post-liberal Catholic thinkers, such as Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame and Adrian Vermeule of Harvard, believe that the liberalism of the Enlightenment has led to civilizational collapse, and only the restoration of the beloved community under Christian governance can save the West."

Multiple intellectual currents have coalesced into the MAGA New Right, including Straussians at the Claremont Institute, post‑liberal Catholics, national conservatives, techno‑monarchists, and online macho influencers. Straussians fuse Platonic philosophy, biblical teachings, and reverence for the American founding into ethical and religious absolutism. Post‑liberal Catholic thinkers view Enlightenment liberalism as causing civilizational decline and call for restoration of a Christian beloved community under religious governance. National conservatives advance anti‑immigrant, protectionist, isolationist, and socially traditionalist policies tied to ethnic and religious identity rather than democratic values. Techno‑monarchists reject democracy in favor of entrepreneur elites, while internet figures promote aggressive masculinity and reactionary aesthetics.

Read at The Atlantic