The minds and money behind MAGA

“I love the poorly educated,” Donald Trump said in 2016. This wasn’t just rhetoric. His administration has attacked universities and worked to dismantle the Department of Education. Nevertheless, some extremely well-educated people support this fundamentally anti-intellectual movement.

Two recent books help clarify why. Laura Field’s Furious Minds offers a close study of the new right academics and influencers who became the intellectual arm of MAGA, and Jacob Silverman’s Gilded Rage looks at the far-right tech oligarchs funding the MAGA agenda. The movements these books document have wildly different values, ideological roots, and visions for the future. Yet the people behind them share a desire to dismantle our democratic republic.

Field is a political theorist with a deep understanding of the new right intellectuals, in part because her academic background is similar to theirs. In Furious Minds, she identifies political philosopher Leo Strauss, who taught at the University of Chicago for many years, as a key figure for understanding how they operate. For Strauss, any appeal to historicism was a gateway to relativism. His approach to criticism involved extracting the text from its cultural context and reading it in a vacuum, seeking secret teachings about politics or morality, placed there by the Great Books authors and somehow as intelligible to a 20th-century American as to an ancient Athenian.