This week’s episode of Hotel Bar Sessions brings political theorist Laura K. Field (author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right) into the bar to talk about the intellectuals cranking the rhetoric up to eleven while insisting they’re just “doing Great Books.” We follow the trail from Straussian seminar rooms and conservative think tanks to Trump rallies and “no kings” protests, asking what happens when a self-styled aristocracy of the mind decides liberal democracy is played out.
Field guides us through the angry energy behind this movement, the “furious minds” driving it, and why she turns to Aeschylus’ treatment of the ancient Furies (in his Oresteia trilogy) and Abraham Lincoln’s Dred Scott speech to think about justice, vengeance, and the dangers of sacralizing politics. Along the way we talk MAGA as quasi-religion, liberalism as a way of life, why so many young men are adopting Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, and what it means to refuse the invitation to become furious.
This week’s jukebox picks:
Jen’s Pick: “Thunder” by Imagine Dragons
Leigh’s Pick: “She Just Started Liking Cheatin’ Songs” (Alan Jackson cover)
Laura’s Pick: “No Lie” by Sean Paul (feat. Dua Lipa)
Bob’s Pick: “Bella Ciao” (traditional Italian partisan song)
In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers, texts, ideas, etc:
- Laura K. Field, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton University Press, 2025)
- Laura K. Field’s essays on reactionary conservative intellectuals, including her work for The New Republic, Politico, and The Bulwark The New Republic
- The Illiberalism Studies Program at George Washington University, which studies the global rise of illiberal politics and thought
- Leo Strauss and the “ancients vs. moderns” frame in conservative political theory, as summarized in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Strauss
- Straussian networks around Harry V. Jaffa and the Claremont Institute, and their role in shaping an American nationalist conservatism Leo Strauss Center
- The ecosystem of conservative think tanks and advocacy groups—including institutions like the Heritage Foundation—that translate these ideas into policy playbooks
- Aeschylus’ Oresteia (especially Eumenides), where the Furies become the “Kindly Ones” and vengeance is slowly turned into law
- Abraham Lincoln, “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision” (1857), and his idea of a “standard maxim” of equality to be constantly approximated
- René Girard, Violence and the Sacred and the dynamics of mimetic rivalry and the scapegoat mechanism
- R. R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West, and the call to restore “thick” communal loyalties
- Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset, as a bizarre but influential touchstone for certain online-right and New Right circles
- Curtis Yarvin (a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug) and his neo-reactionary blog Unqualified Reservations, which imagines post-democratic forms of political order
- Nick Land and accelerationism, with texts like “Meltdown” circulating in the background of these conversations about modernity and collapse ia800800.us.archive.org
- Alexandre Lefebvre, Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton University Press, 2024), as a counter-vision of liberalism as ethical practice rather than technocratic boredom
- Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos—especially the “stand up straight / make your bed” style of moral formation that some on the New Right admire and remix
- Toni Morrison’s account of racism as a project of distraction—“keeping you explaining, over and over again”—as remembered in pieces like this PBS reflection on her work PBS
- The concept of illiberalism and post-liberal politics as mapped by the Illiberalism Studies Program’s research agenda