Antiliberalism Unites the New Right and Disunites America

Controversy embroils the New Right – national conservatism, common-good conservatism, and postliberalism for starters – over the extent of its hospitality to antisemitism, white nationalism, misogyny, and authoritarian predilections. Those who have been paying attention and drawing distinctions should not be surprised. But too few on the right have been paying attention and too few on the left have been drawing distinctions.

Failures of critiques of the New Right – on right and left

Too few on the right have paid attention to the scorn heaped by New Right factions on liberalism in the large sense – that is, the modern tradition of freedom whose defining conviction is that human beings are by nature free and equal. Two convictions connected to liberalism in the large sense unite the New Right: The United States faces an unprecedented moral, political, and intellectual crisis that derives from the modern tradition of freedom; and rescuing what remains of the nation and saving those capable of being saved depend on overcoming liberalism’s desiccated doctrines and spirit-crushing practices. New Right factions themselves have discounted or disregarded the modern tradition of freedom’s role in countering bigotry and persecution, and the centrality of basic rights and fundamental freedoms to the common good as many Americans have understood it since before the nation’s founding.

Too few on the left have drawn distinctions among the American right’s contending camps. For decades, nothing has united the left’s critique of the right more than the belief that conservatism in America comprises one monolithic authoritarian menace. The left’s crudity cloaks the vital distinction between those who wish to conserve America’s founding principles and repair its constitutional order and those who maintain that American decline warrants revolutionary countermeasures. By conflating the sober right that aims to conserve and reform with the counterrevolutionary right intoxicated with overturning, burning down, and remaking, left-wing intellectuals squander their credibility.

A new book on the New Right

Laura K. Field has been paying attention and drawing distinctions. In “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right,” published in November 2025 by Princeton University Press, she illuminates the constellation of attitudes, ideas, and aims that in part set the stage for the controversies in which the New Right is embroiled.

Field emerged out of an academic milieu that also formed many members of the New Right. In the opening pages of her book, she recounts a discomfiting encounter at a summer 2010 conference for younger conservatives that she attended as a fifth-year University of Texas Austin graduate student in government. At an elegant dinner, a regular participant crudely flaunted his disdain for conventional norms. The experience set in motion Field’s break with the “conservative intellectualism” to which professors in both college and graduate school had introduced her.

Field’s teachers had been influenced by Leo Strauss (1899-1973), a seminal scholar and teacher who refrained from partisan debates while emphasizing careful examination of great works in the history of political philosophy, the quarrel between the classics and the moderns, and the crisis of the West. Following B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of Alberta, Field earned her Ph.D. at UT Austin with a doctoral dissertation exploring Rousseau and Nietzsche on rhetoric and political culture. Currently a visiting scholar at American University and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution, Field has written hard-hitting essays about the New Right for The Bulwark, Politico, The New Republic, and other publications.

Where the author gets it wrong

In “Furious Minds,” Field draws on her knowledge of the history of political philosophy and her journalistic skills. She traces the rise of the main New Right factions, highlights their unconservative reliance on grand theory to justify radical change, explores their appeal to angry young men who like to hold forth about manliness, surveys their divergent ambitions for fundamentally transforming America, recounts their coalescing around Donald Trump, underscores their neglect of America’s “pluralistic reality,” and throws into sharp relief their antiliberal recklessness.

Much to her credit, Field counsels readers to take the New Right’s ideas seriously and recognize where its leading intellectuals have a point. However, her scorn for much of the New Right and for President Trump often gets the better of her. For example, she suggests that preferring Trump to Clinton, Biden, and Harris was not merely mistaken or a bad bet but morally and politically indefensible. And she acknowledges but understates considerably the progressive left’s moral and political excesses that provoked the New Right’s excesses.

Where the New Right is right – and wrong

The New Right has been correct about many matters. It is correct that:

• The progressive left achieved near hegemonic control over America’s educational institutions and, in the process, purged traditional ideas, ostracized conservative thinkers, and imposed orthodox beliefs.
• The progressive left has made a habit of demonizing men and boys – especially white ones – and vilifying the moral virtues. It is correct that the progressive left institutionalized DEI mechanisms that in practice jettison merit in favor of, or equate it with, historically discriminated-against minorities and women.
• Equating freedom with power, the progressive left has sought to emancipate individuals not merely from the arbitrary will of other human beings but from the constraints of tradition and nature. It is correct that the progressive left has injected hostility to religion into law and culture. And:
• Progressive political elites – and conservative ones, too – have broken promises, governed incompetently, and trampled on the public interest, not least by neglecting the economic plight of the working class, encouraging illegal immigration, and engaging in ill-conceived overseas adventures.

Nevertheless, nothing that is correct in the New Right’s assessment of progressive-left excesses requires – contrary to much New Right doctrine – rejection of the American experiment in ordered liberty in favor of government that assumes major responsibility for cultivating virtue and supervising the pursuit of happiness.

Examining the Claremont Institute

The most outspoken fellows at the Claremont Institute tend to espouse less radical positions than other New Right factions. Nevertheless, the “Claremonters,” as Field calls them, condemn the current iteration of the American experiment in ordered liberty, which they believe has betrayed the American founding’s principles. Convinced that moral decay and political corruption had brought America to the brink, Claremont Senior Fellow Michael Anton ostentatiously reminded in 2022 that the nation’s founding principles encompass the right of revolution. He also hinted that the time may be approaching fast – or have arrived – when fidelity to the nation’s founding principles obliges citizens to exercise the right to “throw off” the current government and institute a new one.  

But he gave too little consideration to the Declaration of Independence, according to which only the looming threat of “absolute despotism” justifies revolution. Contrary to the right that despises the left as well as to the left that despises the right, the disorder, discord, and resentment that afflict the nation do not signal the need to lay the foundations for new government. Rather, these hard times call for citizens to rally around, renovate, and fortify the 250-year-old undertaking in free and democratic self-government that it has been our good fortune to inherit.

Religious liberty for all

National Conservatives led by Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony – and Christian Nationalists such as Stephen Wolfe more so – maintain that Christianity is woven into the American national spirit and that therefore government should uphold and promulgate it. But that contravenes the dominant strand in the American national spirit. America was founded by Christians. But they founded it not as a Christian nation but rather as a rights-protecting democracy that, by safeguarding religious liberty for all, enabled its many Christian denominations to serve God in their characteristic ways.

Common-good conservatives like author and podcaster Josh Hammer fault fellow conservatives for failing to appreciate that law and public policy should advance the common good. And so it should. Hammer, however, conflates the common good, which in America consists in the first place in safeguarding the unalienable rights that all Americans share, with the greatest good, including moral excellence and salvation, which the Constitution leaves to citizens and their reason and conscience.

Postliberals such as Notre Dame University Professor Patrick Deneen and Harvard Law School Professor Adrian Vermeule contend that the modern tradition of freedom has always been destructive, is now moribund, and must be replaced by a regime that forms and directs citizens’ souls in accordance with Christian teaching. Postliberals tend to neglect how little resonance such opinions have outside of elite-university right-wing enclaves and how much common-sense convictions about individual freedom, human equality, and limited government have shaped American sensibilities.

Conflating classical liberalism with progressive politics

Then there is what Field calls the “Hard Right.” Costin Alamariu, who holds a Yale Ph.D. in political science and published “Bronze Age Mindset” under the pseudonym “Bronze Age Pervert,” exemplifies it. A poor man’s Nietzsche, BAP reviles America as a “garbage world”; extols physical beauty and strength, natural hierarchy, and the warrior ethic; and despises equality in basic rights as slave morality. Yet BAP overlooks Nietzsche’s self-professed piety (“The Gay Science,” section 344), delight in the “dangerous ‘maybe’” (“Beyond Good and Evil,” section 2), and ranking of “free spirits” and “philosophers of the future” high above conquerors and rulers (“Beyond Good and Evil,” sections 22-44).

While clarifying the loathing of liberalism that binds much of the New Right, Field wrongly equates that loathing with “conservative intellectualism.” And she misleadingly suggests that liberalism in practice coincides with progressivism. Consequently – and notwithstanding her dedication to a decent politics that grapples with America’s manifest problems while respecting the nation’s entrenched pluralism – Field obscures the liberalism in the large sense that provides the foundation on which right and left in America can see themselves as engaged in a common enterprise.

In a 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, President George Washington praised America’s “enlarged and liberal policy” that “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” That liberalism in the large sense united Americans almost 250 years ago and is essential to reuniting Americans today. 

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.