In the fall, I was reading We have never been woke by Musa al-Gharbi, a sociological Bourdieu-inspired analysis of the American academic left. Now, I am following up with Furious minds by Laura K. Field, a book about the intellectuals and academics of the MAGA movement, their philosophical thinking and their connections to the Trump administration. We encounter people like Harry Jaffa, Peter Thiel, Patrick Daneen, Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Yoram Hazony, Adrian Vermule, Curtis Yarvin /Mencius Moldbug, Costin Alamariu /Bronze Age Pervert (in some cases the word “intellectual” is more within quotation marks than in some others), various 'neo-reactionaries', 'National Conservatives', and 'aristo-populists', as well as the more distant influences of theorists such as Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt. What emerges is a distinctly authoritarian vision. Both al-Gharbi and Field offer perspectives that are noticeably underrepresented in most analyses of the respective groups. Musa al-Gharbi is of course himself a left-leaning American academic. Field is politically a liberal, but also a political theorist trained in academic contexts dominated by Straussians. Much as al-Gharbi’s perspective is rooted in modern sociology, Field’s is rooted in a focus on ideas first.
These are two seemingly academic books written by academics in despair about the academic traditions in which they have been trained. Al-Gharbi despairs about how the academic left has lost touch with the very real problems with which large parts of the American population are struggling, focusing instead on abstract theories (useful for academic publication) and the symbolic issues of the culture war (useful as non-threatening campaign issues and identity building. Field appears chocked that so many of her colleagues have abandoned their philosophical love for serious study, truth, and virtue to embrace the hypocrisy of the Trump administration while making loud proclamations about the common good. In spite being so academic, or perhaps because of this, both books add significantly to understanding what is happening in America right now.
For example, thinking about Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference a few days ago, I found that it makes far more sense if understood in the context of the new American nationalism. The talk about a united Western civilization as the basis for NATO cooperation should then not be understood as celebratory phrases but as the ideological core of the current American perspective. This is about a common cultural memory and sometimes literal kinship, a cultural or civilizational community, not about abstract principles or ‘values’. The fact that he uses his own European ancestry as an example underlines how literally this kinship should sometimes be interpreted (although it may also be interpreted as addressed to a domestic audience skeptical of the European background of Latin Americans). This means that, for example, European immigration policy is directly relevant to the alliance. This is a perspective that is foreign to many European countries, but which is at least partly closer to others, such as to the governments of Poland and Italy (cf. comments from Sikorski and Meloni). The fact that Rubio visited Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic only a few days later, explicitly supporting Orban in the middle of an election campaign, is also telling, especially about how the relationship between party politics and foreign policy is now viewed in the United States.
This speech may not change much, mostly because European leaders now know that Trump can change his mind at any time, and that the American public was willing to elect someone like him twice. Nor are many European leaders likely to appreciate the American tendency to try to dictate the policies of their allies. These are practical reasons why Rubio’s speech is not going to be politically successful. If we instead focus on and study the ideas, it does help to understand the now dominant ideologies in the USA that is now struggling against itself in an increasingly destructive culture war. This ideology appears what frames and shapes American policy today.
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