As a scholar of US foreign policy elites and their transnational networks, my research has long illuminated how non-state actors – think tanks, foundations, and intellectual circles – sustain American global dominance through the manufacture of ideological consent. From the Council on Foreign Relations’ orchestration of postwar liberal internationalism to the Rockefeller Foundation’s funding of Cold War area studies, and the Ford Foundation sponsoring the Economics discipline in India, China, Indonesia and Chile, these elites deploy “soft power” to normalise US exceptionalism, often insulating it from domestic popular resistance. Laura K. Field’s Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, a 400-page intellectual history released amid the second Donald Trump administration’s furious consolidation, arrives as a timely dissection of an insurgent elite formation. Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, Laura Fields, Princeton University Press, 2025.Yet, the American elite and establishment that I have researched and written about is very different from the part of it described in Field’s pages. The Trumpian New Right is a mutation born of elite crises made by the very men I have researched virtually all my academic career. Field catalogues the vile theories – racist, misogynistic, anti-human, violent, undemocratic and fascistic, wrapped in the ideas, ahistorical abstractions, and language of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the Founding Fathers – of the right wing intellectuals who back the fascistic blunt instrument in the White House. The book is a scholarly triumph and a public service. It catalogues the rotten decaying core of American power.Field, a political theorist with insider (observer) experience in conservative academia, chronicles the New Right’s ascent: a constellation of Straussian scholars, Catholic integralists (who demand the state serve religious ends), and online provocateurs who, after 2016, repurposed Trumpism from an incoherent series of rants into a coherent anti-liberal creed. This is no mere classification of fringe thinkers; it’s a clinical dissection of a counter-hegemonic project that weaponises elite networks against the very pluralistic multilateralism underwriting US global leadership for 80 years. Drawing on her years observing right-wing circles, Field’s narrative – incisive, urgent, and bolstered with archival depth – exposes how these “furious minds” exploit fissures in American hegemony to generate a new populist-veneered elitism that serves the billionaire class.This is a first-class achievement, although from a transnational vantage, Furious Minds underemphasises the New Right’s global ripple effects, treating it as a domestic pathology rather than a symptom of eroding US soft power abroad. Yet the book is a major intervention, essential for decoding how intellectual elites provide the philosophical and political elaboration of an elite ideology that emphasises restraint yet fails ultimately to cage the insatiable appetite of the US foreign policy establishment for global primacy. The New Right represents, justifies and legitimises a rupture in the range of methods at the disposal of the Trump presidency, yet it failed to realise that once in the White House, Trumpism is subject to a deeper imperative at the heart of an imperial warfare state. It’s a delicious irony that the populist-veneered but anti-people smoke and mirrors ideology of the New Right that provides intellectually-sophisticated cover for Trump is itself ultimately to be betrayed by their president – their blunt instrument. These ‘pure’ MAGA idealists, for all their sophistication and learned airs have failed to grasp a basic fact. Their disappointment lies only in part due to Trump the Unpredictable; it is principally due to the fundamental fact that the very heart of the American state and its foreign policy establishment is imperial, expansionist, and war-like. President Trump – who represents (mostly himself but) ‘administration’ MAGA – has been channelled. For all the complaints of liberal internationalist-imperialists about President Trump, it is his methods and blunt rhetoric, not his goals, that they object to. In short, for establishment liberals, Trump is mainly guilty of bringing American power into disrepute by openly behaving like an imperial gangster.Structure and revelatory insights: Mapping the new right’s intellectual ecosystemField structures Furious Minds to thematically reflect the New Right’s internal ‘fault’ lines: the “Claremonters,” the “National Conservatives,” and the “Post-Liberals.” This framework, honed through scores of interviews (from Claremont Institute fellows to anonymous X influencers), allows Field to trace the movement’s coalescence – from the Anton/Trump 2016 “Flight 93” election metaphor to JD Vance’s 2024 veepstakes triumph.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.The book excavates the Claremont Institute’s Leo Strauss-inspired esotericism, where “coded” readings of the Founding Fathers devolve into QAnon-like conspiracism. Field’s archival coup: leaked 2020 memos from John Eastman, the Claremont adjunct who drafted Trump’s fake-elector scheme, revealing how “patriotic education” initiatives (e.g., the 1776 Commission) serve as Trojan horses for illiberal pedagogy. Just as the liberal Carnegie Endowment’s grants shaped interwar academic International Relations, Claremont’s multi-million dollar endowment (boosted by billionaire donors like Peter Thiel) now funds a parallel academy, training a cadre for Trumpism.The morally-bankrupt and superficiality of the intellectual Claremonters is laid bare in Field’s study – the Big Lie of the stolen election of 2020 was not a Trumpian invention but was elaborated by the blunt pointy heads behind the blunt instrument. The intellectual veneer vanished in face of popular and electoral revulsion against Trump. As Field argues, “Everything these men were arguing for was completely upside down and backward… The Claremont ‘Biden coup’ narrative, as with ‘Stop the Steal,’ was rank sophistry and counterfeit.” The Nazi Big Lie technique in full swing.Bannon and the national conservativesThe middle chapters pivot to the National Conservatives – Yoram Hazony’s “natcon” faction – whose 2019 Washington summit Field portrays as a pivotal node in elite realignment. Here, she details Steve Bannon’s intellectual pivot from Breitbart rhetoric to “fourth turning” historiography, allying with Hillsdale College’s Larry Arnn to embed Christian nationalism in state curricula. Field quotes Bannon’s 2022 podcast: “We’re not conserving; we’re building a new order.” Just as post-1945 transnational networks like the Mont Pelerin Society had nurtured neoliberalism, the natcons, conversely, forge a parochial transnationalism, linking US paleoconservatism to Hungary’s Orbán via the Danube Institute. Field’s on-the-ground reporting – attending a 2023 Claremont conference – uncovers funding flows: millions of dollars from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation to natcon outlets like “American Mind”, subsidising anti-DEI screeds that prefigure Trump’s 2025 executive orders.Post-liberalism and the end of democracyField dissects the post-liberal integralist vanguard – Adrian Vermeule’s “Common Good Constitutionalism,” Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018), and Sohrab Ahmari’s “against the dead consensus” manifesto. Field positions these as Trumpism’s theoretical core, rejecting a “constrained executive” bound by liberal checks. This deftly provides intellectual cover for Trump’s fascistic authoritarianism by rejecting congressional, judicial or any other constraints on presidential power.Field’s analysis of Vermeule’s Harvard tenure – where he mentors JD Vance’s policy shop – highlights elite capture: post-liberals now staff the Claremont McKenna think tank, churning out briefs for Trump’s “America First” reboot. Field’s prose crackles, blending Foucauldian genealogy with journalistic verve, as in her dissection of Bronze Age Pervert’s (Costin Alamariu’s) X-fuelled nihilism infiltrating Vance’s circle. These revelations position Furious Minds as historiography at its sharpest, illuminating how intellectual elites now catalyse populist rupture.Theoretical engagement: Hegemony, elites, and the transnational blind spotThrough a Gramscian lens, Furious Minds reveals the New Right as a “counter-hegemonic bloc,” contesting liberal pluralism’s consent apparatus. Field argues that Trumpism’s violently racist and misogynistic “brain trust” rejects Reaganite universalism for a “pure America” fantasy, harnessing state power for cultural revanche: banning CRT in Florida or defunding USAID’s gender programmes. Corporate-foundation-driven ideology – such as the Bradley and Olin foundations – once liberal hawks’ patrons, now bankroll post-liberal salons, with $200 million redirected post-2016 toward “anti-woke” endowments. Field quantifies the shift: New Right citations in GOP platforms surged from 2016-2024, underscoring ideas’ material force.Yet, Field’s domestic focus invites critique from a transnational perspective. Furious Minds marginalises the New Right’s international architecture. She nods to natcon ties with Europe’s Identitarians (e.g., Hazony’s Jerusalem summit with Geert Wilders), but underplays how post-liberals like Gladden Pappin (Hungarian government advisor) export “illiberal democracy” models, eroding US soft power in the EU. Consider Vermeule’s integralism: its Schmittian sovereign, untrammelled by judicial review, mirrors Putin’s “Russian world” doctrine, which Field mentions but doesn’t connect to Trump’s 2025 Ukraine aid freeze. This omission risks parochialism; populist intellectuals are but nodes in a rival transnationalism, amplified by Elon Musk’s X algorithm (which Field profiles as a “force multiplier). A deeper dive into these circuits – perhaps via network analysis of Claremont’s Brussels offshoots – would elevate the book from taxonomy to geopolitics.Moreover, Field grapples unevenly with gender and race in New Right thought. Deneen’s lament for “household labour” as women’s “bondage” escape is skewered, but she soft-pedals how Straussian esotericism launders white grievance – e.g., Eastman’s “birthright citizenship” screeds echoing 1924 quotas. From my vantage on elite reproduction, this sustains hegemony’s racial hierarchies, much as Ford Foundation “diversity” grants tokenised dissent in the 1970s. Field gestures toward this but prioritises philosophical explanation, diluting the critique.Cultural resonance and implications: From ideas to imperial perilFurious Minds resonates amid Trump 2.0’s whirlwind policy machine: Vance’s post-inaugural purge of “deep state” holdouts, scripted by Claremont alumni, validates Field’s prescience. She speculates on the movement’s horizon – a “new old-fashioned world” of confessional states and trade walls – warning of pluralism’s demise. As US unipolarity frays (e.g., BRICS expansion), domestic intellectual insurgencies compound external challenges, alienating allies like the UK Labour government. Field’s vignettes humanise the abstract – Alamariu’s bodybuilding tweets infiltrating MAGA gyms; Rufo’s Substack as “Claremont 2.0”.At its core, the book is a clarion: liberals underestimated these thinkers, mistaking Trump for a cipher. Field’s access – gleaned from UT-Austin seminars and natcon happy hours – yields granular insights, though impressively copious footnotes could cite more non-US sources. Prose-wise, it’s taut and passionate.Essential for decoding elite upheavalLaura Field’s Furious Minds is a pathbreaking chronicle of the New Right’s intellectual and political machinery, unmasking how elite networks propel Trumpism from X to White House tenure. These intellectuals are revealed as directly linked to and part of the lowest lying type of politics in an age of mendacity behind a president whose lying is legendary. Their ideas, sophistical as they are, are part of the elite’s weapons in the war of position against the mass of ordinary Americans. While its US-centric lens limits global scope, the book’s urgency makes it indispensable for IR scholars probing hegemony’s domestic fractures. For those tracking elite cosmopolitanism’s populist shadow, it’s a vital, if partial, map. But read the book to grasp why furious lying extreme right-wing minds – symptomatic of the rot within the American foreign policy establishment, the political class and its corporate and billionaire paymasters – may yet unmake the American century, and destroy the best of America in order to save it?Inderjeet Parmar is a professor of international politics and associate dean of research in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City, University of London and St George’s, University of London, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and writes the American Imperium column at The Wire. He is an International Fellow at the ROADS Initiative think tank, Islamabad, on the board of the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences, USA, and on the advisory board of INCT-INEU, Brazil, its leading association for study of the United States. Author of several books including Foundations of the American Century, he is currently writing a book on the history, politics, and crises of the US foreign policy establishment.