Am I Truly the Furious Mind?
For decades, I've been advocating reasonableness.
From the Los Angeles Review of Books:
Alexandre Lefebvre reads “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right” by Laura K. Field.
By Alexandre Lefebvre, November 14, 2025
Alexandre Lefebvre is a professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney. His most recent book is Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton University Press, 2024).
… Field credits [Michael] Anton—author of the galvanizing 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election” and now a senior Trump administration figure—with distilling MAGA’s three-point creed: “secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy.” But this, she shows, is only surface politics. The deeper point of Furious Minds is to reveal a near-consensus on a social vision and a set of moral ideals for what a postliberal United States should look like. “However much it rejects liberalism,” Field explains, “the New Right does not understand itself in strictly negative terms. It thinks it has a monopoly on things like ‘the good, the true, and the beautiful.’”
It’s this hope that liberals can’t or won’t grasp. Their entire worldview is set against it. Whatever their differences, the core conviction of liberals is that the state should not interfere in the private lives of its citizens or dictate the terms of the good life. Yes, a liberal state should teach its members what good citizenship looks like. But when it comes to how to spend one’s time and money, whom to sleep with and marry, or whether to have children and how many, the liberal conviction is that the state should back off. The refusal to define the good life is the heart of liberalism—and, in a pluralistic world, what liberals are proudest of.
Uh …
As usual, I would prefer to come down from the highest realms of abstraction and think about some concrete examples down where there’s more oxygen.
For example, consider the California law the Supreme Court took action against this week. From the New York Times news section:
Supreme Court Sides With Religious Parents, Blocking California’s Trans Student Policy
Christian teachers and parents challenged the state’s policies, which they say require schools to hide students’ transgender status from their parents.
By Ann E. Marimow
Reporting from Washington
March 2, 2026
The Supreme Court on Monday sided with a group of religious parents, temporarily blocking California from using policies that generally bar public-school teachers from outing transgender students to their parents.
A group of Christian teachers and parents asked the justices to intervene on an emergency basis, contending that the state had adopted a policy that requires public schools to hide students’ transgender status from their own parents and to facilitate their social transition, even over their parents’ objections.
Obviously, the liberal California legislature does not in fact have principled, disinterested opinions upon objective questions of the age at which parents cede rights to their students. Instead, like Stalin’s interpretation of Lenin, it instead has extremely strong opinions upon Who? Whom?
Paywall here.
