A Jan. 11 article in Nouvel Obs examines the intellectual currents shaping Trumpism, based on an interview with Laura K. Field, author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. The piece argues that the MAGA movement is supported by a dense network of thinkers and ideologues, and the same ideas that hold MAGA together may eventually tear it apart.
Those who believe that Trumpism has no intellectual substance are wrong, says Field, who then lists the “brilliant ideologues” who constitute MAGA, divided into four ideological camps.
The first group, the West Coast Straussians, followers of Leo Strauss who became pro-Trump before 2016, clustered around the Claremont Institute, which was created in 1979 by Harry Jaffa, a Strauss disciple. They claimed they wanted to restore moral values, but little by little they became totally sectarian, and often completely racist. Today they are so radically for Trump, that one of their spokesmen, Michael Anton, described the election: “To vote for Trump is like the passengers who ran to the cockpit of Flight 93 on 9/11 to try to eliminate the hijackers!” That is, this is an emergency and anything is justified.
The second group, the “national conservatives,” are known in France for their association with Steve Bannon and as defending “a sort of international of nationalists.” The key figure cited here is Yoram Hazony, an American-Israeli philosopher who in 2018 wrote The Virtue of Nationalism, which reportedly had a big impact among nationalists in Europe and elsewhere. (Hazony is credited as the pioneer of the alliance between Jewish supremacists and Netanyahu, and is said to exert great influence on Donald Trump and JD Vance.)
A third group, described as more sophisticated, comprises post-liberal Catholic thinkers like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule. The former published in 2018 Why Liberalism Failed. According to him, liberalism brought about the atomization of the social body, relativism, and the reign of ultra-liberalism. Vermeule is a Harvard professor. He defends the “constitutionalization of the ‘common good,’” claiming to seek a spiritual salvation of the state.
The final group is the most radical: hard-right activists and writers. According to Field, “it’s a motley crew made up of true fascists and misogynists using violent rhetoric. Among them Costin Alamariu, who claims in the Bronze Age Mindset: An Exhortation, that the Bronze Age was a golden age which brought to an end the so-called Feminine and proto-socialist era of communal long houses. … Further, there is Curtis Yarvin, a blogger inspired by the Dark enlightenment who hopes for the advent of a ‘CEO king’; and Nick Fuentes, the supremacist. At the White House, those people can count on Stephen Miller, one of the main advisors to Donald Trump.”
The article concludes that, while these factions currently coexist under the Trump banner, deep tensions—over democracy, religion, nationalism, and power—raise doubts about the long-term cohesion of the Trumpist coalition.
