FURIOUS MINDS:
The Making of the MAGA New Right.
Laura K Field
The American mind is faced with a terrible task: to justify the genocide of
the First People, slavery, the Jim Crow laws and the mass incarceration of
coloured people, not to mention the poverty of many of the common folk.
These are moral outrages which can be confronted only by denying them,
accepting but excusing them or recognising them as a despicable legacy which
must be expiated. Every American mind is faced with this appalling prospect.
Field is fond of referring to the Greeks, especially Euripides. One of the
things their tragedy taught us is that chickens always come home to roost,
however long it takes. Americans will have to face up to, apologise for and
rise above their past, or they will destroy themselves. Currently, they are
doing the latter.
The cast of far-right, mostly unhinged, so-called intellectuals in this
study is testimony to how lost America is, how its university system
produces highly-educated fatheads and how, faced with modest suggestions of
reform, its reactionaries flee into neurosis or psychosis and wish for
violence, mayhem and possible destruction of civilisation to defend their
delusions.
They are all wrong, in the simple sense that their ideas don’t fit the
evidence. They have Phds coming out of their ears but can’t think beyond the
end of their noses. Thinking has to be more than toying with sophisticated
notions which confirm your assumptions; it has to be what Charles Darwin
did: elaborating an intelligible theory which fits the evidence even though
it overturns your most cherished beliefs. These people simply twist their
theories to fit their preconceptions and their preconceptions arise from
their personalities, which have been forged in American conditions. Thus,
there is a totalitarian essence to their thinking: only whatever embraces
American conditions is acceptable. Those conditions, however, do not include
“liberalism”, a term Field uses freely without ever defining it, nor
“pluralism”, athesism nor, horror of horrors, socialism. The latter is a
vague and sullied term, but if we define it as the means of production in
the hands of freely associating producers such that workers control their
work and its product, the “thinkers” here would destroy the world to prevent
it.
Adrian Vermeule is a leading US jurist, a very urbane man, a professor of
law at Harvard. He came from an educated, professional family. He is a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He’s a Catholic. He
believes in Common Good Constitutionalism. He also thinks Nigel Farage is
“the defining mind of our era.” There you have the commonplace fatheadedness
of these far-right advocates. Vermeule’s sophistication is superficial.
Beneath it is a confused, weak, narcissistic mind in search of reassuring
certainty, and what he lands on is a cheap, slick demagogue accused by
people who were at school with him of vile antisemitism and racism. There is
no need for those accusations to perceive what a nasty, pusillanimous man
Farage is; but he does the trick for Vermeule because he confirms his raw
prejudices.
Field spent a decade or so in the far-right world. Her first-hand knowledge
helps her. The book is well-researched and full of useful detail; but she
seldom if ever gets to the core of what is wrong with their thinking, or
lack of it. In a late chapter she quotes Chesterton on the folly of arguing
with a madman because he has lost everything but his reason. There’s a hint
of truth here, as often in these facile formulations, but the insane are, by
definition, out of touch with reality. The important point, as Isaac Newton
showed, is the world is not intelligible: all we can do is elaborate
intelligible theories and try to prove them wrong. This is Enlightenment
thinking which sends the far-right for their automatic weapons. They are
like children told too soon that Santa is dad in a costume or medieval
Catholics in a spin because of Galileo.
One of the key thinkers behind the Maga movement is Leo Strauss, though he
died in 1973. He has been appropriated by the far-right because of his
dislike of modernism, his belief that liberalism has no moral base, his view
that the way out of the nihilism of modern life is regression. He was a
scholar of Plato and Socrates, an advocate of the “the art of writing” the
contention that the great writers concealed their ideas behind an
esotericism designed to distract the tyrant and the censor. He was a
proponent of natural law and an enemy of scientism. He upheld the fact-value
distinction: the idea that ethical conclusions can’t be derived from
arguments based on facts. He was close, for a while, to Carl Schmitt, the
Nazi jurist and virulent antisemite who lived to be 96 and never rescinded
from his adherence to hatred of Jews. It would be grossly unfair to claim
any direct link between the Maga movement and Strauss’s work, but he left a
few hostages to fortune which have been very useful. His belief in natural
law is mistaken if it is taken to mean there is a moral code written into
our nature. Rather, we are endowed with a moral faculty which permits, or
rather forces us, to make moral choices all the time; just as the language
faculty permits us to produce sentences infinitely but leaves us the choice.
Language is endlessly creative. Almost every sentence has never been spoken
or written before and never will be again. This infinite, but limited
capacity (they are not the same, there is a possible infinity of melodies,
but music doesn’t include algebra) doesn’t prescribe our sentences. We
choose them, but do so only because biology has endowed us with the faculty.
Our moral nature is analogous: the biologically endowed faculty, for which
there is some evidence, doesn’t make the moral choices for us, it gives us
the capacity. Natural law misses this distinction between inherent moral
positions and the faculty to choose. It’s true that there are intrinsic
responses which seem consistent across populations; virtually everyone
agrees murder is wrong. That might impel us to conclude the prohibition is
inborn, but people do kill one another. They may have a powerful aversion,
but other powerful forces can overcome it, even in the perfectly sane.
Natural law is attractive to the far-right in its suggestion of fixity. They
are inimical to change in the direction of greater equality, less
authoritarianism, but not in the opposite direction. Everything can be as
labile as you like, so long as it moves towards greater control by the rich.
Strauss is right about writers facing persecution having to hone a style
which protects them, but Scott Fitzgerald didn’t face proscription or the
censor in any serious way, yet his writing is slant, ironic, enfolded in a
certain way. It’s given in the nature of literature to be indirect because
only by being so can it penetrate. The case for liberalism having no moral
base, however, is dubious. Classical liberalism, that of Adam Smith for
example, is intensely concerned with moral questions. Smith’s most famous
work after The Wealth of Nations is The Theory of Moral
Sentiments. Preceding the economic tome, it can reasonably be said to
create the framework in which the latter should be interpreted. Smith
believed, that as the world was governed by a beneficent deity, evil could
only ever be “partial”. Morality was written into the order of things and
the first sentence of the book outlined what he meant by morality: “How
selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in
his nature which interest him in the fortune of others and make their
happiness necessary to him, though he derive nothing from it but the
pleasure of seeing it.” Of course, much debate can be had about the meaning
of “the fortune of others” or “their happiness”. Vermeule would argue that
everyone’s happiness lies in Catholicism, but therein lies an essential
fallacy of the far-right: people can’t be trusted to know what is good for
them. If they are given the time and space to do so, they can, but not if
they are bombarded endlessly by consumer advertising and political
propaganda.
Field divides the Maga right into four categories: National Conservatives,
Claremonters, Postliberals and the Hard Right Underbelly. There are
distinctions, but the groups converge in their hatred of democracy, whose
threat, of course, is unpredictability and the possibility of liberalism
(however defined) or socialism. They are all curiously unhistorical.
American democracy and the liberalism it includes, didn’t come out of
nowhere. It arose as a response to the inequities of American capitalism.
John Jay, one of the Founding Fathers, took the view that those who own the
country should govern it. Democracy is the means by which the rest could
have a say. Curtis Yarvin, who Field characterizes correctly as a very bad
writer and worse thinker, invented the notion of the “Cathedral”, a blend of
media, government and academia under the control of the liberal elite and
the gynocracy. His prescription as he envisages the future: “They were
simply liquidated – rounded up, shot, dumped in a ditch soaked with
gas and burned.” There you have the regressed fantasy life of the
far-right on parade. There’s no need for Freudianism to see this is
pathological. You can have has many Phds as you like, but if your mind is
buzzing with dreams of burning people in ditches, you need help.
It might be argued that Yarvin is the extreme and much of the Maga right is
far more reasonable, but the unrestrained violence of Yarvin’s vision
underpins the entire movement. When Yarom Hazony wrote a tribute to Meir
Kahane after his assassination in New York in 1990, he added a caveat that
his admiration didn’t mean he embraced Kahane’s methods. Kahane, of course,
stood for violence against critics of Israel, the forced expulsion of Arabs
from Israel and engaged in terrorism. Hazony’s disclaimer is a little like
praising Stalin but saying you don’t agree with the slaughter of the kulaks.
How could you have one without the other? The fantasy of extreme violence is
central to the mentality of the people behind the Maga movement.
John Eastman was a law professor at Chapman University. On 6th
January 2021 he spoke to the crowd at the Capitol, telling them the
Democrats had stolen the election the previous November. He was revealed at
length as the author of the “coup memos”, advice to Trump on how to subvert
the peaceful transfer of power. Eastman spent 4th and 5th
January trying to persuade Mike Pence he had the right to interfere in the
Electoral College arithmetic. Had Pence agreed, would America now be
democratic? The violence on 6th January was held back from
murdering elected representatives by the courageous action of police
officers. It is no exaggeration to say that ordinary men and women in police
uniforms saved America from dictatorship, while a law professor tried to
assist it.
Field’s book is excellent on the detail of these matters. What is missing,
though, is some sense of how this has come about. Why does an apparently
fairly sober-sided law professor, albeit a conservative one, rant wildly
about the need to overturn the constitution to defend the republic? Why do
some of the common folk of America launch a frenzied, murderous assault on
the seat of government? At the close, Field offers her prescriptions. She’s
a liberal, but she has little to say about how liberalism has failed. People
voted for Obama twice and what did they get? Unfortunately, Sarah Palin was
right: “touchy-feely” stuff. The Democratic Party has effectively abandoned
the white working-class which therefore becomes prey to the culture-war
rhetoric of a Republican Party which has ceased to be a political party in
any reasonable sense, and become an insurrectionary force. Obama had a
chance to introduce a UK style health system, but didn’t even try. His
smooth rhetoric delivered very little for the people at the bottom. The
far-right feeds on the despair of those who vote for change and don’t get
it, which is true everywhere. There is no way out of this but to face the
fact that gross inequality of wealth and power have to be tackled. There’s
no evidence that’s what Field means by liberalism. Rather, her conclusion is
a little touchy-feely itself.
The Maga right has won because of a spectacular failure of the left over the
past half century. This is not because the American people are opposed to
policies which favour greater equality, openness and democracy. On the
contrary, polls consistently show them sympathetic. It’s because those who
claim to stand for the common folk have failed to pursue their interests. At
its core it’s a moral question: what is the moral justification for
employment? It’s no more morally justified than slavery. Of course, such a
philosophical position can’t be the basis of a political campaign, but
measures which grant working people a grater share of what they produce and
a greater say in how things are done can be. The Democratic Party has
identified itself as the party of middle-class professionals, of
“aspiration” and at the same time has embraced culture-war stances which
permit the far-right to mock it as “woke”. It has set its face against
fundamental change: the existing economic system is the right one, just a
dash of sympathy is required. This re-hashes the sentimentality of Charles
Dickens and his belief that “fancy” could be enough to lift the Victorian
poor from their misery. He had nothing but disdain for the trade union
movement by which they were doing something practical. The Democrats are
stuck up the same cul-de-sac, which is not to say they haven’t enacted some
good legislation, nor that cumulatively small changes can’t bring
transformation; but there has to be a moral decision that things need to
change radically, or backsliding is inevitable.
It's important to point out the failure of the Marxist-Leninist left.
Bolting the two together is dishonest. Marx was not responsible for Lenin
and no one can know what his response to the Bolsheviks might have been, but
it’s unlikely he would have thought Russia a sensible place to try a
revolution for socialism. When he was asked, towards the end of his life,
which country he thought ripest, he said the USA. Lenin was simply a brute.
His boast in 1920 that the Bolsheviks had shot thousands and would shoot
thousands more was psychopathic. He was a rank hypocrite, claiming to stand
for workers’ autonomy but slaughtering the Kronstadt sailors as soon as they
showed any. None of his violence and authoritarianism can be justified by
“the needs of the revolution”. That’s nothing but the end justifying the
means, which is moral depravity.
Marx wasn’t directly responsible for anyone’s death (except perhaps his
children) but his theory is marked by serious mistakes, the most disastrous
being what Noam Chomsky calls “empty organism theory”. Marx insists the
essence of being human (Das menshcliche Wesen) does not inhere in each
individual, but is rather the product of historically developing economic
and social circumstances. It’s unlikely he believed it, as the idea is so
hopeless. Probably it was retained for reasons of intellectual ambition.
Clearly, it makes no sense to claim
our physiology is a product of developing historical circumstances:
our endocrine system didn’t alter between feudal and capitalist conditions,
our visual system was the same five thousand years ago as today, we respire
as we did in hunter-gatherer societies. If that’s true of our physiology,
why wouldn’t it be true of our higher cognitive capacities? There has been
huge economic and social change since Chaucer, but is there any evidence his
cognitive capacities were different from ours? We are linguistic by nature.
Language in use changes every minute, but the language faculty doesn’t. Of
course, also, our ideas change, but the means by which we engender them
doesn’t. We are historical through our biological endowment. We have evolved
to choose how to act and history is simply the story of those choices.
Marx’s mistake has appalling consequences because if we are nothing but what
prevailing conditions make us, where is the moral boundary to people in
power making others whatever they choose? The moral boundary is our given
nature. Without it, we are morally lost.
Leninism has done enormous damage to the cause of working people and Marx’s
mistakes enabled it. The Marxist left, lost in fantasies of revolution, more
interested in ideological purity than practical measures, rehearses
Robespierre’s tragedy. The radical change needed will not arrive on winds of
inevitability, but when most people are convinced it is both necessary and
possible, and that takes patient work and creative thought. It will not
arrive in a single cataclysm. There are sure to be reverses. Hope rather
than optimism is necessary.
Richard Beck, in his recent study, Homeland, argues that Trump
couldn’t have won without the war on terror. In his review of Beck’s book,
Jackson Lears wrote: “American history has been animated by efforts to
imagine the local network of believers as a righteous community.” It is this
fantasy of righteousness which powers the Maga movement. Beck writes:
“America’s whole mythology from Mary Rowalndson down through the cowboys and
the Texas Rangers is an attempt to justify..dispossession and to manage
attendant guilt.” Natty Bumpo and Davy Crocket are alive in the imaginations
of the Maga supporters who aren’t making rational choices on the basis of
evidence but rest on a mythology whose primary assumption is white
supremacism. Richard Slotkin observed: “..the most significant peculiarity
of the American environment was its substitution of racial and cultural
division for the traditional English divisions of class and race.” This is
one of the reasons the left has failed so drastically: its standard theory
foregrounds class conflict but it is somewhat flummoxed by an assumption of
biological superiority. In America, as in Europe, the organs of
working-class organisation have been hollowed out to give free rein to the
corporates, and the response has been the election of a pathologically
self-centred billionaire.
It isn’t clear there’s an easy or any way out of this. The people behind the
Maga movement are not of good faith but faulty thinking; bad faith is their
motivation. They exhibit no regret for measures which limit people’s
freedom, and wouldn’t even if they were unavoidable. They love them.
Whatever offends those they disagree with, they celebrate. Conflict is their
lifeblood. Their enemies (anyone who dissents) burning in a ditch is their
fond fantasy. Of course, the majority of Americans aren’t like this, but
enough are and probably only thoroughgoing change in America’s economic
arrangements to give the common folk real control which frees them for the
need for retrospective, childish fantasies, can bring relief.
Field’s book is valuable for its rich detail and for making us aware of just
how vicious the Maga movement is. Her style can be a little redundant:
“..but the problems of American campuses are not small. They are big.” She
is a little too present personally. The book would gain from being strictly
as objective as possible. If you care for the survival of democracy, or
indeed the species, you need to know what is revealed here.