‘Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right’ by Laura K. Field and ‘The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare’ by Daniel Swift

‘Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right’ by Laura K. Field

To truly understand MAGA, you need a person who’s “from that world, but not of it,” said Alexandre Lefebvre in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Though political theorist Laura K. Field cut ties with the conservative intelligentsia several years before its factions coalesced behind Donald Trump, she earned her Ph.D. as a member of that circle. In her “smart, stylish, scathingly critical” taxonomy of the New Right, she describes the movement as consisting of four factions, including the think-tank intellectuals at the Claremont Institute, the more programmatic postliberals, the National Conservatives, and the hard right. “Whether intended or not, Furious Minds reads like Dante’s Inferno: The deeper we go, the worse everyone becomes.” Yet Field’s greater contribution is that she dispels the myth that the New Right is unified solely by its hatred of pluralism and liberalism. Instead, as she writes, “it thinks it has a monopoly on things like ‘the good, the right, and the beautiful.’”

“What should we make of the intellectual aspect of MAGA?” asked Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker. The answer matters, because if Donald Trump’s reign lasts only three more years, the movement may be sustainable only if it’s grounded in a coherent set of principles. However, while every political movement contains contradictions, “the contradictions of the New Right reflect a unique disconnect between thinking and reality.” Field attributes this to conservatism’s addiction to abstractions, and indeed, “the New Right has a lot of very abstract ideas—not just about nationhood but about human nature, God, virtue, ‘the Common Good,’ and more.” But abstractions and the complexity of the real world are often at odds. For example, Trump’s NatCon allies trumpet “nationalism” of a sort that’s rooted in monolithic cultures. But how could a centuries-old melting-pot nation become monolithic? “You can’t deport half of America.”

At times, Field’s criticisms go too far, said Richard M. Reinsch II in The Wall Street Journal. She identifies a 2022 speech by Israeli-born writer Yoram Hazony as the moment when the NatCons’ mask slipped off, revealing white supremacy and explicit Christian nationalism at the movement’s core. Alas, “the first term is a smear, the second an ill-defined shock term,” and Field meanwhile neglects to make the more salient point that the group asserts a form of nationalism divorced from the principles outlined in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Field also has little to say about the “ludicrous descent of modern liberalism into racial and sexual tribalism,” and with all due respect to the useful work she has performed here, “this descent has done far more to birth the furious minds of the New Right than the speculations of philosophers and intellectuals.

‘The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare’ by Daniel Swift

In William Shakespeare’s time, “literature wasn’t just the result of inspired genius,” said Ed Simon in The New York Times. “It also required carpenters, weavers, and brick-layers,” and Daniel Swift’s “brilliant” new book illuminates why that’s so. Swift brings us back to 1576 London, when an actor and craftsman named James Burbage took a chance and erected, just outside London, England’s first purpose-built playhouse since Roman rule. It was called simply the Theatre, and Shakespeare would apprentice there. It also premiered some of the Bard’s greatest plays, and Swift gets to that. But The Dream Factory is foremost “an indispensable account of a chaotic and creative period in which feudalism was transitioning into capitalism, with the entertainment industry one of the salient harbingers of that shift.” It all makes for “riveting reading.”

“There is plenty to interest the passionate Shakespearean here,” said Will Tosh in The New Spectator (U.K.). “Burbage’s innovation created the conditions for a new theater industry and a brand-new profession,” the one Shakespeare soon joined. “I was taken with the idea that Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream can be imagined as his ‘masterpieces’”—meaning the works he produced to finish his climb from apprentice playwright to master. Every play staged at Burbage’s theater emerged from a city where commercial activity was fueled by guilds of craftsmen and merchants. Not only did the guilds build the theaters, they also created the collectivist approach to financing that allowed the theaters to turn actors into salaried employees.

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“As Swift makes clear, the Theatre endured only because Burbage was good at improvising and snookering his partners,” said Isaac Butler in The Atlantic. He also attracted a “staggering” number of lawsuits, the source of many of the details that carry Swift’s story. In the end, the Theatre was shuttered and disassembled and its beams repurposed to construct the more famous Globe in 1599. By then, though, Burbage’s venture had given the world Shakespeare, proving that “another important kind of brilliance is necessary for the flourishing of the arts: business acumen.”