The New Right

Reflections on Contemporary Manichaeism

One person’s view: It isn’t at all fun, these days, to write about current politics and current issues. One reason is the company that you keep. You might write about raging people; rage is contagious, and you might be tempted to rage back. (See Wayne Booth’s terrific book, The Company We Keep.) You feel like you are being punched (or like you are punching).

But the deeper and more specific problem, at least to me, is the pervasiveness of the Manichaean sensibility. It’s harsh. It’s contemptuous. It’s ugly. It’s horrible. It’s sneering. It’s vicious. (It feels as if it has something like murder on its mind.)

You can find that sensibility in many places. The words often, and the music more often, cry out: There are the forces of darkness, and the forces of light.

Some people on the right certainly think that, and so do some people on the left. Maybe they are correct. But if you enter into a Manichaean world, you might get really tired, or drown, or get sick and start vomiting. It’s a horrible world to visit. It saps the soul. It tries to make you a Manichaean, too.

It’s like a Stephen King novel. At least that’s how I feel.

(Obviously, some people love living there. I don’t know why. Maybe it gives them energy, or a kick? Maybe it makes them feel alive?)

Notwithstanding the above, I wrote a long review of Furious Minds, by Laura Field. And notwithstanding her topic, I like her sensibility. She’s good company. She’s tough on the people she discusses, but she’s also somehow sympathetic to them. She’s not at all Manichaean.

She also captures, better than anyone I have read, some of the core thinking behind the MAGA right. The owl of Minerva, as they say, flies only at night, and it isn’t night yet. (Which is to say something like: The meaning of some period of history isn’t clear until that period of history has ended. Which is also to say something like: Intellectual accounts of, say, the Warren Court, or the Roberts Court, can be given only retrospectively. John Hart Ely was a high-flying owl.)

Right now, it’s not evening. But it’s not the morning, either.

Sometimes it takes a very long time for reviews to appear, and my long review is still in the queue. But some authors are impatient, so here are some glimpses:

In some ways, Field is offering an exercise in political anthropology. A political theorist herself, she writes of her subjects with ease, familiarity, and occasional fondness, even admiration. Still, hers is a lament. “In short order, the conservative intellectualism I thought I knew had all but vanished from the discourse that dominated the Republican Party.” By 2024, conservative intellectuals had become enthusiastic “about ending liberal democracy.” Some of them adopted a doctrine of “No Enemies to the Right” (NETTR). Note well: Field wrote well before current controversies over whether fans of Adolf Hitler should be condemned by those on the right and excluded from conservative circles.

Importantly, Field’s focus is not on politicians, but on “PhDs and intellectuals,” who turn out, in her view, to “matter greatly because they articulated the ideas that have shaped a movement.” This focus is what makes her book distinctive. She offers a tale not of policymakers and politicians but “of ideological radicalization” among like-minded academics who formed echo chambers, or information cocoons, with grand narratives that reinforced one another. Her intellectuals are now committed, she says, to “a traditionalist (usually white, Christian, and patriarchal) social vision and homogenizing nationalism meant to counter and replace pluralistic liberalism.” These are not your parents’ conservatives.

. . .

Because the New Right is striking such a nerve, it must be onto something. But what? One answer is a sense, on the part of many, that political elites have contempt for them. Another is a sense that longstanding sources of identity, pride, and self-respect (including patriotism) are under assault. In important respects, North America and Europe are indeed ailing. [Patrick] Deneen is entirely right to emphasize the importance of traditions, norms, virtues, values, and faith. But in my view, members of the New Right are least convincing when they argue that some abstraction called “liberalism” is responsible for the demise of those things. Liberalism is not a person or a thing; it is not Voldemort. When traditions and norms are at risk, it would be good to focus less on high-falutin’ claims about what abstractions do, and to explore, in a more systematic way, what kinds of economic, technological, and cultural forces have been at work, and how best to respond to them.

What Field captures beautifully is that notwithstanding the immense diversity of the members of the New Right, they are unified by one thing: a Manichaean sensibility, a sense that the forces of darkness are assembled against the forces of light. For many members of the New Right, the Manicheanism is like a form of chanting, almost hallucinatory, a prelude to something. It’s the Two Minutes Hate. It’s primal. The repetition, the mutual reinforcement, the nodding, and the occasionally raised middle finger seem thrilling, even erotic. Say it once, say it again: “If we must have a Caeser, who do you want him to be? One of theirs? Or one of yours (ours)?”

Sure, Field’s subjects describe the forces of darkness differently: wokeness, rootlessness, cosmopolitanism, experts, the administrative state, critical race theory, progressivism, godlessness, the Department of Education, internationalism, DEI, transgenderism, elite universities, open borders, modernity, liberalism, liberalism’s natural unfolding, liberal democracy. But in a deep sense, the New Right sees these things as the same, as an “it.” They are – it is – a hijacking, a form of terrorism, an existential threat, something that must be destroyed, something that is now being destroyed, even if the whole plane ends up crashing.