The Intellectual Forces Behind JD Vance + Vance Divorce Rumors
Brad Onishi is joined by Dr. Laura Field, author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, for a fascinating look into the intellectual roots of the MAGA movement and its rising political stars, including JD Vance. Together they trace the philosophical and theological threads that tie together the Claremont Institute, National Conservatives, and Postliberal Catholics—three camps shaping the hard right’s challenge to American liberalism. From Patrick Deneen’s critique of modernity to Adrian Vermeule’s “common good constitutionalism,” the discussion unpacks how these thinkers frame a moral and political alternative to liberal democracy, and how their ideas inform Vance’s worldview and public persona.
The conversation also explores what’s at stake when intellectuals try to fuse religion, nationalism, and governance into a single moral vision for America. Brad and Laura discuss the deep cultural anxiety driving this movement, the narratives of victimhood that sustain it, and the potential consequences of replacing pluralism with authoritarian moral certainty. They close with reflections on how to counter these ideas with honest, accessible scholarship and renewed democratic imagination.
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I'm Brad O'Nishi, author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, and the founder of Axis Moody Media.
It's great to be with you today.
I want to talk about J.D. Vance and what happened last week, and that'll lead into our interview for today's episode.
Last week, J.D. Vance appeared at Ole Miss at a TPUSA event where he was the stand-in for the late Charlie Kirk.
And we talked about this Friday on the weekly roundup, and Dan and I spent considerable time breaking down his comments and what we think they mean.
And we also broke down this now infamous hug between J.D. Vance and Erica Kirk.
And I want to touch on that because I think that may feel trivial to some of you or may feel like it's not as important as other things.
But I think there's something there that is worth talking about.
And it'll lead right into today and a very serious intellectual discussion about the philosophers and theologians who are kind of the influences on J.D. Vance, the Catholic J.D. Vance.
So my prediction on Friday, if you listened, was that when it's time for J.D. Vance to run for president, Usha Vance will convert to Christianity.
And I think that is still a possibility for sure.
Like I still think that's on the table.
And it really is a matter of Usha Vance and J.D. Vance.
And I don't know, I have no insight into their relationship on this front.
Usha Vance just may not want to do that.
She may not be a Christian.
She may not want to go that far.
But if she is a craven political actor who wants to reach the highest levels of power, then she will.
And I think that is probably the only way forward for J.D. Vance, the presidential candidate, is if he's going to stay married to Usha, she has to convert to Christianity.
And it's for all the reasons we talked about Friday, that the Christian nationalists, the Christian supremacists, the Christian ethno-nationalists, the traditional Catholics, it's just, you can only go so far with J.D. Vance not having a Christian wife.
Not to mention that she is South Asian.
She's not white.
And her parents are from somewhere else.
Like all the folks who are seeing mass deportations as part of the gospel and seeing the United States as a Christian homeland.
There's just only so far you can get with J.D. Vance not having a Christian partner, period.
There's just, there's no other way to say it.
But there's another scenario here, and I'll talk about this at the end, but there's a scenario here too, where, and a lot of you floated this, you put it in the Discord.
I've seen it all over Blue Sky.
I've seen it all over, you know, wherever else, Twitter, Instagram, is that J.D. Vance divorces Usha Vance and he gets together with Erica Kirk.
And that's a possibility too.
So I'll talk about that more at the end.
If you're a subscriber, stick around.
I'll talk about that in terms of the bonus content.
But that really does set up our today's interview.
And my interview today is with Dr. Laura Field, who has just written a fabulous new book called Furious Minds.
And it's about the intellectuals behind the MAGA New Right.
And you might be thinking, is that Oxymoron, MAGA movement's not intellectual?
But it is.
There are intellectuals.
There are political theorists.
There are philosophers.
There are theologians.
lawyers who are the intellectual foundations of this movement, even if you think that Trump and most of the people that follow him are not people who fall in the category of intellectual.
So what Laura does in this book is she examines three groups, the Claremont Institute, which is in Southern California and is famous for being the place where John Eastman came from.
But Claremont people are now at the highest levels of the Trump administration, and they have just overwhelming influence on MAGA Nation.
So Claremont is a big one.
And J.D. Vance has deep ties to Claremont.
And if you're interested in J.D. Vance and his intellectual formation, you have to take account of Claremont.
The second is NatCon, which we've talked about at length on this show over the years.
And this is something that Peter Thiel helped to bankroll and is now led by Yoram Hazoni, who is an Israeli-American person.
But NatCon is really the place for people who want a country based on social unity and homogeneity.
They hate multiculturalism.
They hate pluralism.
And they think that the only way you can have a strong, robust national life is to have a common culture.
And this connects directly to J.D. Vance because he said those very things last week.
I mean, this is the way he talks.
And this is the way so many on the MAGA right talk now too, that you can't have a strong nation that is multicultural.
Hegsef and Vance have said this over the last month.
Diversity is not a strength.
And then finally, there's the post-liberal Catholics.
And Laura and I spend most of our time today talking about them, but these are people who are theologians, constitutional lawyers, or constitutional law professors, philosophers.
And the basic argument from them is that there is a common good that comes directly from God.
God created the world with certain ways humans should live.
And there is a common good as to the way that human society should be.
In practical terms, that means marriage should be only between a man and a woman, that heterosexuality is the only legitimate form of sexuality, that sex is for reproduction, all kinds of things.
Pornography is bad.
Women should know their place in society, which is to submit.
The American government should be integrated into the Catholic Church as a subsidiary of the Catholic Church.
The only true religion is Catholicism.
All other religions are false.
They are idols.
They are demonic and so on.
And I think this is important because these are the people, all of these folks that I've just talked about, but especially this last group, are the formative intellectual forces for J.D. Vance.
He attends their conferences.
He writes forewords to their books.
He praises them.
He gives them big hugs as friends when he sees them.
These are his guys.
And the prevailing message that I want you to take away, if nothing else, is that they represent the end of small government conservatism.
They are the ones who want a big government who will impose God's will on you because capitalism won't do that.
Capitalism will give you money and you can spend it any way you want.
And the virtue and the morality and the religion is not there in laissez-faire Reaganite economics.
So these are the guys that are like, no, we need a big government.
We don't need a free market left to the invisible hand.
We need a strong hand that is God's hand on earth.
And we need to just shape everybody into the right kind of morality and religion and virtue.
We need to outlaw things that are not Christian.
We need to outlaw things that are not in line with God's vision for being a good person.
We need to force you into God's way of having a family, of gender identity, of gender roles, and so on.
So we start with kind of this trivial thing about J.D. Vance, but we end, and I think it leads right into these formative influences on him.
And the question of marriage, the question of will Usha Vance convert, is one that is directly entangled in the intellectual foundations I'm mentioning, because not only is it a matter of can J.D. Vance win an election with a non-Christian wife, it's also a question of how does J.D. Vance see the role of a leader?
And that leader may need to have a certain kind of family.
And maybe Usha Vance, if she won't convert to Christianity, is just not the right person to be first lady, to lead a Christian nation.
How can you be the leader of a Christian nation, J.D. Vance?
If your wife's not a Christian, people are going to ask that over and over and over again when it's time.
And so it's something to consider.
I'll have more at the end here for subscribers about all of that.
But for now, take a listen to my conversation with Dr. Laura Field about her new book, Furious Minds.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi.
It's great to be with you.
Today, I have somebody who I've been so excited to talk to, somebody whose book I've been eagerly anticipating.
If you are a nerd, if you're into political theory, if you're into this world, this book has been one that folks have been just like so ready to get their hands on.
That book is Furious Minds, the Making of the MAGA New Right, and it is by my guest today, and that is Dr. Laura Field.
Here it is.
Yes.
Holding it up.
First, Laura, thanks for coming.
Thanks for coming by.
Thank you.
I'm a fan of the podcast, and I'm so happy to be here, Brad.
I've learned it from you.
Oh, well, vice versa.
And the book is amazing.
And, you know, one of the things you do when you say openly in the book is you're basically investigating the intellectuals, the thinkers behind what we might call the MAGA New Right.
And so let me ask you like a very broad question to start.
And that is, in your book, who is the MAGA New Right?
Who are the intellectuals that you're examining?
So the book is basically the story of the coalescence of what I'm calling the MAGA New Right, which are the intellectuals who have given sustenance to Trump.
And I talk about it chronologically from 2016 to 2024.
And there are different groupings.
I have a tripartite grouping where there are the Claremont Institute groups.
I call them the Claremonters.
And they're organized around the Claremont Institute in California and sort of obsessed with the American founding.
I have the National Conservatives who are organized by an Israeli American named Yoram Hazoni.
And he has organized this coalition.
It's quite a big tent organized around nationalism is kind of their guiding principle.
And then finally is the post-liberal group who that's people like Patrick Denin, Adrian Vermiel, Sorabamari.
If you've heard those names, there's a Catholic inflection there.
There are kind of more or less aggressive forms of Catholicism built in to post-liberalism, but that's a third cluster.
And then there's also kind of a dark underbelly to the movement that I call the hard right that cuts across the different three, the three different groups.
And the hard right is more openly racist, xenophobic.
Their language is a little less intellectual and more.
Yeah, I mean, you can find some pretty, you can find some pretty gross rhetoric in all of the different camps.
And even at the higher tiers, it's not going to be racist or bigoted in quite the same way.
But yeah, the hard right is just all of that much more ferociously and sometimes openly anti-democratic or fascist.
Yeah.
I say I don't call the whole movement fascist, though.
That's just partly because I'm not a scholar of fascism, but certainly these hard right figures, many of them are.
I want to zero in on something that I think might confuse some people out there.
And I think this, like your book is a great chance and having you here on the show is a great chance to ask a question that I think will be really helpful to so many folks is, you know, if you listen to people across the camps that you have just out, just named, the Claremont Institute, Home of John Eastman or former John Eastman, Michael Anton, and many other names that people might know.
The NatCon group, Yorm Hazoni, but also Peter Thiel, a backer of the NatCon conferences.
Oftentime at NatCon, you get people like Doug Wilson or Al Muller or others that folks listening will be familiar with.
And then these post-liberal Catholics that are so, so influential to me at least, and you might disagree on our vice president on JD.
All these groups see liberalism as like the big bad other.
And is that true?
And what is their liberalism, like their version of liberalism that makes it the thing that has ruined everything and everyone and all of our lives are terrible because of liberalism?
I think we can kind of go through the different camps and think about why and how they hate liberalism because they all hate liberalism.
And again, it kind of comes in all these different flavors, but the Claremonters, they think of the American founding.
They are inspired by the work of this man named Perry Jaffa, who is a Lincoln scholar and who took a very sort of declarationist view of the founding.
Like the truth of who we are as a people comes from the Declaration of Independence.
The high principles, universalism, these universal principles of freedom and equality, those are kind of the touchstones for him and for Lincoln.
And oddly, this gets taken up by many of his students and by Jaffa as well.
That's kind of the nice part of that tradition.
But then there's also this part that is so jingoistic and sort of fanatical about the American founding.
And their particular interpretation of the founding is as somewhat as an illiberal regime.
Like they wouldn't see it as a modern liberal constitutional order.
They see it as much more of a, that there are these reservations or these reserves of ancient virtue seeking in the American founding that they think is really important to preserve.
And so for them, the founding itself was kind of illiberal.
And so the liberal interpretation that we have now, which is also less Christian, is a betrayal of the original.
And so that's how they see it.
Okay, so that's one little group.
It's a betrayal of the sort of more virtue-seeking classical founding.
So they would link the American founding to like ancient Rome.
They would talk about us having a republic rather than a democracy.
Exactly.
And yeah, go ahead.
Well, and they emphasize some of these quotes about how you need a virtuous people to sustain the republic.
Got it.
And I think they think about the religion as really as important in a way that is questionable.
And so they see, and then constitutionally, they think living constitutionalism, the New Deal, progressive constitutionalism has been a complete flop, very dangerous.
And so that's part of, that's their, the way they talk is that we need a counter revolution to sort of take us back to the true founding.
That was going to be my question.
What makes the modern era so quote unquote liberal?
And it is things like the New Deal, the civil rights movement, other things that would afford more and more people rights, more and more people protections by the government, the growth of the government.
The growth of the government is what they talk about.
But I think it captures a lot of these other things too, especially.
And you have different people making different arguments, but the Civil Rights Act was a big problem for some of these guys.
Civil Rights Act.
Okay.
And then I think it is that hierarchy and the loss of status fueling a lot of this in every quarter.
So they want a hierarchy of classes with people at the top who are the virtuous defenders of American of the American Republic.
And that trickles down to the masses.
And it's not that we're all living in a democratic society.
Everybody has the same rights and sharing of power.
It's this neoclassical idea that there are classes of people.
There are folks who need to be at the top of the hierarchy to ensure that the plebeians and the Hoi Paloi are not running amok.
Yeah, I think they probably wouldn't use that language, Brad.
I mean, they might in some places, but I think that's the core of it.
Though, how they would frame it is that some people's traditions are more conducive to Republican virtue than others.
And so, you know, if you, and so they really hate immigrants, and I should say that this is, I think, a real departure from Jaffa.
I don't want to get defensive of Jaffa.
I don't really care about this, but there is a kind of departure from that declarationism.
And there's been an explicit turn towards paleoconservatism in this group.
It is inevitably a reestablishment of hierarchies.
And then it bleeds into kind of the nationalism that we see in some of these other camps.
So what about the nationalists, the NatCon group?
Why do they hate liberalism?
So they hate liberalism because of multiculturalism, I would say, is sort of the easy way through it.
They think that to, if you look at Yoram Hazzoni's work, he believes quite sincerely that to have a flourishing nation, like a flourishing politics, you need to have a nation state.
And it has to be pretty homogenous and has to share certain beliefs, customs, language, religion, and that you simply can't function as a country.
Even in America, which has obviously a very dynamic pluralistic history, he suggests that we need to sort of jettison all of that.
In all of these quarters, you get the anti-woke, anti-DEI push.
And so they really are looking for something much more homogeneous.
So liberalism is akin to multiculturalism and pluralism.
Liberalism is this idea of a cosmopolitan country and people can travel all over the world and be jet-setters.
And you're going to have neighborhoods that are filled with people from India and from Germany and from China.
And there's going to be no social unity.
There's no social fabric.
There's no sense of a shared culture.
We are simply a bunch of atomized individuals who are trying to unite diverse cultures.
And by the way, and tell me if I'm wrong, not all cultures are created equally.
Maybe some of these nations and people groups are superior to others and have a superior way of life.
And they probably would be more careful about saying it.
We're careful, but I think that's all true what you said.
I think that almost takes us into the next group with the post-liberalism.
But I think there's a lot of bleeding here and of categories.
And the natcons, like Hazzoni himself, and I think if you go to those conferences, which they haven't let me in, but if you go, you can see that, well, I watch a lot online.
So that's how I feel like I have a sense of it.
And I've been in the hotel room, like in the lobby or whatever.
In Hazoni's work, there's a rejection of modern rationalism, right?
Like he bundles all this stuff together.
So liberal rationalism, universalism, these principles.
He thinks that anytime you're talking about anything universal, that it's a kind of liberal imperialism, because he's always juxtaposing nationalism and imperialism as though the two things never go together.
So it's quite a weird theory.
And so that's important to him too, is kind of the hatred of liberal rationalism.
Let's go to the common good Catholics, the post-Noman Catholics.
Why do they hate liberal liberalism?
So they hate liberalism because, and I think you got at this a little bit already.
And they all sort of share this critique, though they would apply it in different ways to the American founding, but they don't like the liberal anthropology.
And their understanding of the liberal anthropology is, you know, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes said that there was in the state of nature, there was a liberal individual and that that little, like, and that that took ontological priority.
So individuals matter in a new way in the early modern times.
And that's, that's terrible.
So individual rights, individual kind of that whole structure of consent-based organizing that we see in the early moderns that is somewhat this foundation of modern liberal constitutionalism, they think that has these sort of inherent disintegrative effects on society.
And so that's, you can hear Patrick Denine say this in every podcast interview he ever does.
And it's like this mantra he repeats, is that it has, it has disintegrative solvent effects on social ties, on communities, on our politics.
And that has these devastating effects because it destroys all of our communities and the associations we're a part of.
And the prioritizing of the individuals means ultimately that we yearn for a strong man to kind of hold things together because it creates this kind of chaotic vacuum.
And so, I mean, you can hear something there.
Like you can say, well, yeah, there's some truth to that.
Like we have problems in modernity with meaning and with social connection.
And I think there's some truth to this critique of a kind of strawman, atomistic anthropology that we can, but I don't, I don't think that's actually the truth about Locke or Hobbes or any of this.
So I think it's a bit, it's a bit fussy that way.
So we won't go, we don't have to go into all of the sort of problems with that, but I think that's basically they just, there's a kind of deep hatred of liberal, the kind of premises of liberalism, right?
And so from there, they launch a pretty radical attack on the current order.
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I want to make sure we get to that radical attack.
And let me frame it this way.
And I was, the only reason I hang out on Twitter these days is for research purposes.
I follow all of the Christian nationalists and the tech bros and the ethno-nationalists and everyone.
Yesterday was Diwali.
And, you know, there's a lot of people in my neighborhood celebrating Diwali.
And there was a lot of folks pushing back on Cash Patel who posted about Diwali and were like, go back to where you came from and you are not welcome and you're the worst and blah, blah, blah.
And then a lot of them noticed that J.D. Vance did not post about Diwali, despite the fact that his wife is South Asian, parents from the Indian subcontinent and so on.
I bring that up why.
I bring that up because J.D. Vance is like this heir in waiting of the MAGA throne, supposedly.
He has a South Asian wife.
His kids are brown.
His kids are mixed race, like me.
They have an Asian American mom whose parents are immigrants.
And he's also a Catholic who is deeply influenced by the post-liberals you just talked about.
So yeah, their radical attack on the current order to me is one that J.D. Vance is hearing and listening to.
And there's evidence of this that he's really taking to heart.
So I want to dig further into that so people can understand how these post-liberal Catholic thinkers really are some of the influences, at least in my mind, on our current vice president.
And so in order to do that, let's start with Patrick Denine.
You mentioned Patrick Denine in a minute ago.
Can I just say one thing, Brad?
Just like that.
Of course, say whatever you want.
I just want to be careful that we don't launder J.D. Vance and suggest that he's only connected to the post-liberals who are the like super elite Harvard Notre Dame group that are very, very smart.
But he's also got these connections all the way through the whole mattering of this world.
So just anyway, but let's talk about Denine.
No, no, no.
It's a great point.
I mean, if there's anything we know about J.D. at this point, he's online a lot.
He seems to like following white nationalists.
He cites Curtis Yarvin.
I mean, he's funded.
I mean, he's got Teal.
He's right there in thick with the Claremont Institute people.
So we just, yeah.
He's really a Renaissance man in this way.
But let's get to the Catholic elite post-liberal philosophers that are part of J.D. Vance's kind of circle of influence.
Patrick Denin, philosopher at Notre Dame.
He's a hero to many.
He's a best-selling author.
Give us the like one-minute version of like, what do I need to know about Patrick Denine?
Okay.
Patrick Denine, as you've just noted, he's got this deep critique of modern liberalism.
And he wrote this book in 2018 called Why Liberalism Failed, which was the full analysis of this critique of liberal anthropology and sort of early modern liberal thought, then applied to different sort of parts of the American public realm.
So he goes through why this matters in education, why this matters in the economy.
And so he, and that book really took off because it seemed the decay that he described in America that he's traced back to liberalism.
And he says liberalism is the cause of its own decaying and demise because it naturally sort of cannibalizes itself in this way.
That book was published in 2018 and I think really struck a nerve because we did see this problem.
We did sort of see our politics fomenting in this way and this strong man coming in.
And so it gave everybody a kind of diagnosis and articulation of what was happening.
And so it became a bestseller.
Barack Obama put it on his best, on his list of books for that year.
And so it's been quite impactful.
The arguments he's getting are not really new.
They're kind of these reactionary Catholic arguments and conservative arguments from older thinkers and that are sort of pervasive in the conservative mind, I think.
But he really did a kind of clear and lucid job of articulating them and then applying them to the American public.
So when he was doing this, I mean, he got a lot of attention.
And I think he was organizing with some of these other similarly minded people and sort of flirting with people in these other intellectual circles.
And so then it kind of became a little cluster of a movement with these post-liberals.
They started talking about themselves as post-liberals.
He wrote another book called Regime Change a few years later.
He organizes with, or he at least, I think there are some little cleavages here.
I don't know what's going on with these men, but there are the, you know, he was for a while writing a sub stack with Adrian Vermuel.
He's close with Sora Bamari.
And so there's this cluster of people.
And they're really doing the trips to Hungary.
They're fully behind some of those kinds of transformations where you get a sort of majoritarian populist election and then they advocate basically taking over the liberal structures and infusing them with a kind of sort of using them to reorganize the state towards conservative traditionalist ends or even Catholic
ends, though they don't usually speak in those terms, though sometimes they do quite explicitly.
So it became part of this more radical movement of sort of government takeover, basically, which I don't think Patrick Deneen does not speak super explicitly about this, but Adrian Vermeule does.
And there are these connections to Hungary, you know, throughout the movement and other illiberal states around the world.
You write in the book that Deneen's core argument and why liberalism failed is that liberal democracy is doomed from the start because it is based on the destabilizing philosophical premises of individual autonomy and the conquest of nature, which together act as solvents on the social fabric and culture at large.
You've written so much about Patrick Deneen.
I've learned so much from you about Patrick Deneen in my own writing, in my own work.
And my understanding, and this is where I'm really deferring to you, is for Deneen, liberalism is so bad because it says this.
You, human being, are an individual.
You are not part of a clan or a family or a tradition.
You are just an individual in the state of nature who has free choice and autonomy over yourself with no other responsibilities.
And nature is nothing but your playground or an object for you to use, however you would like, whenever you would like.
And liberalism starts in this way by telling the human being, you're not part of a larger story.
You're not part of a larger narrative.
You're not an extension of your ancestors or part of a tradition like Christianity or the church, meaning Catholicism.
But you are simply one free agent out here making whatever choices you want.
And the story of liberalism is that we have just been given more and more freedom to act in this kind of libidinous, debaucherous way.
You know, you can get out here and do whatever you want.
You can marry whoever, have sex with whoever, do drugs, make choices, spend your money on frivolous things like water parks and pornography.
Who are the kids?
What are they up to now?
What are they going to do next?
Get on an electric scooter and do some vaping?
You know, you can imagine Patrick Deneen saying, get off my lawn.
But that's the story he's telling of liberalism.
And that's why he thinks it's so evil.
Is that fair?
Yeah, that's right.
That's what it is.
It's the moral decadence that follows from the autonomy in their mind.
That all of these choices have unleashed a kind of freedom that is just shallow.
It's materialistic.
They are theologically committed to Catholicism.
So it is a betrayal of our true nature also.
I mean, the reproductive rights or the fact that we try to control our bodies really bothers them.
And because it's a betrayal of what we are by nature and what we should naturally be seeking.
As you can tell, I'm very critical, but I try to thread through some of the more serious arguments or the places where I think they're getting at something that really matters in our culture or a real vulnerability of liberalism.
And Patrick Denin is interesting because of his critique of higher education.
He really, if he had his drothers, he would have us all in sort of old-fashioned classical Christian schools.
And I would not if I had my drothers, but I would like some of that in there, right?
There's no, I would like some sort of happy medium where we are reading the great books and the Bible and all of these things in a kind of critical mode, but not fully critical.
And I think what he really hates about liberalism, and he is an academic and he's quite obsessed with these kinds of questions, is that it provides no moral formation.
Any formation that happens in our liberal democracy, I mean, this is an exaggerated way of putting it, but it's just sort of happenstance.
I don't think it's true that you can't have moral formation, obviously, but liberals are kind of left up to their own like willy-nilly.
I was as a child, right?
I mean, I had wonderful parents.
I had a moral formation, but it's not explicit.
It's not sort of, it's not very deliberate.
And so, and that is something that all of these characters, but I think Patrick Denine really does talk about this.
They are really frustrated by the lack of moral formation in our education.
That leads to something that I've tried to convince people on this show for a long time now.
And your book is so amazing at showing us is that if I'm Patrick Denine and liberalism is nothing but a bunch of free agents choosing to do whatever, and that means all kinds of spurious go to Walmart on the weekend and buy things you don't need from China and then go to Subway Sandwich and go home and watch Netflix.
That's all modern life is to Patrick Denine.
And people are just making a mockery of what it means to be a human being.
They're dressing up as furries.
They're going to go to a rave.
They're going to, you know, God knows what's up.
The problem then is that capitalism won't save us.
And this is why in your book, you argue so persuasively that this group of conservatives, the post-liberals and everyone else in your book, is different than the Reagan conservative or the Buckley conservative because they're like, you know, laissez-faire economics, not going to do it.
Because what that leads to is everybody having money and spending it at corporations that have no say in their moral formation, as you just outlined.
Capitalism actually leads to the vacuum of virtue that you just said Denine hates.
So you know what we need?
We need more than laissez-faire.
We need more than small government.
We need more than Reagan.
We need the common good.
And how does that work?
Yeah, that's excellent.
And I wanted to add that too, that this group especially, they all sort of say that they're against capitalism, but you've got, well, these guys are more academic.
And so they're actually a little unburdened by the donors and the, you know, the old people and the GOP that other constituencies still have to kind of contend with.
So these guys, like, I think they're sincerely opposed to capitalism.
They believe in sort of the Catholic social teachings, the way they talk about it.
But where they go with this is a much more state involvement in the economy.
Yes.
And not just the economy.
And I mean, this Catholic integralism, sort of offshoot of post-liberalism is basically where you'll find the idea of sort of getting rid of the church and state, having the state in charge of more moral formation.
But on the question, so and what they've kind of called this or the language that they're using is the common good.
And you'll hear that language throughout the new right.
But Adrian Vermeule is the thinker who has given the new right this constitutional framework and sort of the legal language to be thinking about this new endeavor.
and it's to be juxtaposed with originalism.
It's basically a critique of originalism.
So it's his way of sort of smuggling in all the things that he loves and that he thinks politics should aim for.
It's his way of putting that into a constitutional mode of thinking for the American right.
So he's got this.
So yeah, I'll go ahead.
So in one sense, it's like, if I'm Patrick Denin or I'm Adrian Vermeel, and Adrian Vermeule is a Harvard law professor who's a Catholic convert, who's very much even more radical than Patrick Denine, in my mind, at least.
Yes.
So Patrick Denin and Adrian Vermeule are like, liberalism ruined everything.
Capitalism won't save us because capitalism just allows people to get money and spend it on, you know, spurious, immoral things and not create disciplined, virtuous people.
So what we need is the state to enforce the common good.
The state needs to be this agent that is forming moral citizens and it needs to impose virtue and morality and even religion on people so that we have the kind of republic that the founders and others envisioned.
For Denine, the law professor, that means a move away from originalism and a move toward common good constitutionalism.
What's the difference between originalism and common good constitutionalism?
I think a lot of folks are familiar with originalism and they hate it, but they know what it is.
What's the difference between originalism and common good constitutionalism?
Common good constitutionalism is a so it's there was a book published in 2022 by Adrian Vermeule and it's called Common Good Constitutionalism.
And it's a critique of originalism, which is this idea, there are different forms of originalism, but the basic idea is that the Constitution has a certain text or a certain, or laws have a certain text or origin, and that we defer to that origin or to those texts when we are interpreting the law and making law, and that we have to operate within these textual constraints.
And Vermeel's critique of that, his book, Common Good Constitutionalism, is a response to originalism and an effort to replace it.
And it's also a response to progressive constitutionalism.
And his argument is that originalists have a terrible fear.
I think he calls it like a horror of moral values or a horror of judgment because they refuse to make judgment, moral, moral judgment calls in their adjudications.
They say the text has to tell us, if the text doesn't tell us what's right, then we just have to defer to this sort of very limited document or set of documents.
And it doesn't tell us what's right.
It doesn't tell us a truth.
And Adrian Vermeel says, and then progressives say, no, we can just impose our own truths and whatever those are are true.
And that's way too much freedom for Adrian.
And so common good constitutionalism comes along and he says, this is not just my version of things.
This is the classical legal tradition.
This is the founder's understanding of the law.
We just have to recover this because it has been forgotten.
And what it is, is it provides us with that substantive core, the aims for government, which are embedded in this thing he calls the common good.
So we don't have to defer to the text necessarily.
We don't have to defer to the democratic majority.
We know these truths.
We know what the common good is.
Our judges have common sense and they can read Thomas Aquinas, so they can know too.
And he can explain it to us.
So it's this way of liberating the conservative justice or the conservative judge, the whole conservative legal movement, if they want to.
It's a way of liberating them from the constraints of those original documents.
And he does, he gives us some definitions.
So for him, the common good involves justice, peace, and abundance.
Yes.
It's what he calls the ancient triptish.
And then he's got security, health, and like the environment as this other three.
So that's what it is.
And that's objective.
Like he says, this is the truth.
Everybody knows this.
This is the objective truth of what the common good is.
And I mean, that's, that's fine, but it's not, it's not true in a way.
I mean, these are contested categories.
As I write in the book, I mean, this is the contested categories.
What is the good?
What is the relationship between the common good and the individual good?
Where are the principles of the Declaration in his definition of the common good?
I mean, it's an extremely audacious move on his part to be claiming that this is the classical legal tradition.
Everybody knows that.
And then to say, and it's the American tradition also.
And I think the thing that drives me crazy about it, you could see I get worked up about this guy.
He fudges it so that like liberty is no longer really one of the foundational principles of the American political order.
And if you read carefully, like a Straussian like me, you can see he's writing that out of the tradition.
You don't even have to read it carefully, but there are places where he'll point you to arguments he's made in other contexts where it basically says we need to replace the liberal understanding of freedom, which is that kind of negative liberty that you just, that you did the Denine version of so beautifully.
We have to replace that with the more sort of traditional Catholic understanding of liberty, which is a kind of virtuous submission to this other kind of thing, to God and the moral order.
So that's what makes me crazy about Adrian Vermiel.
Well, rightfully so.
And so again, I'm going to try to summarize this, see if I got it right.
And I think what Adrian Vermeel does is say, all right, originalism is this loser's game of trying to figure out the original meaning of the founders, the original intentions of the founders.
And we have to follow the letters, the words, the texts so closely that often we're hindered.
But let me tell you, friends, instead, we should realize that the founders were coming out of this classical tradition.
And that classical tradition was heavily informed by Catholic theology, people like Thomas Aquinas and others.
And so when they say this, this, or this, it's coming out of a tradition that's rooted in the common good going from St. Augustine to Thomas Aquinas to others.
And that gives us license to have a much wider interpretive lens.
Instead of sticking to the original intent and the letter of the law, the letter of the text, we can basically just say, well, we all know what the common good is anyway.
So we should just implement that in our laws because that's what the founders would have wanted, regardless of what the text says.
And as you're saying, when he says common good, he's assuming that the common good is this very Catholic understanding of what a human being is, what freedom is, the ways that we're all created by God, the ways that gender and family and everything work together.
And so his notion of the common good, if you look behind him, comes straight from someone like Thomas Aquinas, like a 13th century Dominican theologian.
Yeah.
Rather than anyone else, here's my take.
He's smuggling in medieval theology into American jurisprudence and trying to convince us that this has been the common good all along.
And if you don't agree, you're just a heathen, deviant sinner.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
And I think Patrick Denin, to his credit, would not, I don't think if you were to sit them down and get them to talk honestly about this together, I don't think he would agree that those are the principles of the American founding, that the true principles are Catholic legal, the Catholic legal tradition or the classical legal.
Like that's just, right?
He says that America is the quintessential liberal democratic regime and was from the from the get-go.
But I think there's something a little more complicated here that if you if you pay attention to like public law, that's my sort of subfield from grad school.
So I like this stuff.
And if you think about how legal scholars and legal thinkers understand the Constitution, originalism and living constitutionalism are pretty hollow in a lot of ways.
Like they don't give you maybe the kind of philosophical resources that you might need to have a sort of much more, to have a more robust mode of interpretation.
And that's because that's a very hard thing to come by.
So what Vermuel is doing is sort of leveraging that weakness, because there are all kinds of really thoughtful legal philosophers out there who can do this work and can do what he's doing and sort of try to understand what kind of like legal principles, what are our assumptions when we're interpreting the law, when we're trying to understand the constitutional order, when we're trying to apply the law in different contexts historically.
And what are the principles that we need to really lean on?
What are sort of the deeper principles of the founding and of the law as such in our tradition?
And those are really important questions.
And there are a lot of deep scholars who do that work and philosophers, but they're not really in the law schools necessarily.
And it's not, it's like we don't, there's always going to, I mean, I don't know.
My personal view is that there could be a lot more of that kind of work being done.
And so, but Vermuel is really leveraging that weakness in the kind of current, I think, academic world to his own, to the benefit of his, of his, his preferred way of understanding this.
Does that make sense?
Well, it does make sense.
And I want to ask one more question before I let you go.
And that is that, you know, Vermuel seems to be taking advantage of the fact that he's a towering figure in constitutional law.
He holds an incredibly prestigious position at Harvard.
And he's also taking advantage not only of his stature in the field, but also the fact that the story he's telling about American law and its foundations is a different story than we're used to.
The originals tell one story about where we got our Constitution and how the laws should be implemented subsequently.
Those who argue for, you know, however we might want to frame it, a living constitution, a progressive constitutional interpretation, they have another story.
Vermuel's taking advantage of what I take you to be saying is a kind of an opening or a vortex where he can come in with a pretty cunning legal theory that in my mind is nothing but crypto theology.
He's just smuggling in Catholic theology.
But nonetheless, it has been very convincing to many people.
I think that's post-liberal Catholicism in general.
So hear me out.
My last question is like, they're telling you a story about why everything went so bad.
They're showing up and are like, everything's terrible.
And let me tell you why.
And here's what we should do to fix it.
What we should do to fix it is a radical reinterpretation of the American ethos.
We should impose through big government morality and virtue and religion on everyone.
That's what will fix this.
And what they're taking advantage there is, and I think you hint at this in the book several times, is there's not another story from liberals or others that is convincing right now.
And that people are like, no, no, no, no, that's not the story.
It's this one.
Here's what happened.
Yeah, yeah.
Like the Kamala Harris campaign to me was just like strong in vibes, strong in if you vote for me, I'll let you be you.
And weak on here's how everything went wrong.
And here's how I'm going to offer you a different story is how to fix it.
They are taking advantage of a dearth of narrative that is convincing to people.
And that's why they've found this footing.
Do you buy that?
What do you see when I pose that idea?
I just think that's right, Brad.
And I try to hint it.
I try to kind of get at this throughout the course of the book in different areas because I think it's not just true of the post-liberals.
It's kind of what's going on broadly in our culture.
There's the, there's this vacuum of morality and meaning.
I don't think there, just to be clear, I don't think there actually is a like a vacuum of moral living in our country.
I think people, I think these guys are like way less Aristotelian than they think they are because I see if you can just be a little more pluralistic in your understanding of morality, then you can recognize liberals are living moral lives.
They just have a different conception of it than you.
And so I think everybody's kind of driven and moral.
They're seeking the good.
They're trying to, they're doing their best.
It's, there's real disagreement about what that is and about what kind of beings we are and what we're trying to, you know, how we're trying to live our lives.
But what there is a vacuum of is conversation about that, serious inquiry into that, collective understandings of that and contestation.
I'm a political theorist.
I have ideas about why that is.
And I think you can trace them back to the origins of liberalism.
It's sort of a baked in problem with liberalism because liberalism, and I know it's very hard to talk about it as a single thing, but it was kind of, it did originate as a solution to or a sort of way forward from an era of religious warfare, right?
And deadly disagreement about morality and how we should understand the Trinity and all of these things that people were killing each other over.
And so from that, you have liberalism, which was basically an effort to say, let's turn down the temperature.
Let's focus on, you know, commerce and some, let's decide on some procedures that we can use to make some decisions.
Let's give everybody sort of some freedom to make their own rights, some freedoms.
But that also meant actively sort of saying, and let's not talk about politics and let's not talk about religion.
Let's turn that down.
Over time in our universities, I think that there has been less attention to those big questions.
They're great books.
That's my sort of one of the angles I'm trying to work in in my book to think, well, maybe it's time that liberals became a little more deliberate about these things, more welcoming of sort of other forms of inquiry.
And in our academies, started sort of taking these questions up because if we don't, it's these other four, you know, Jordan Peterson's going to be the people that our young men are learning from.
And that's really, that's really like terrible.
So that's, there's a whole lot.
That's the question I'm driven by mainly, because I do think they're leveraging the vacuum of morality.
And their response is to impose a Catholic theology, you know, a Catholic theocracy of some kind and or what, you know, a Christian nationalism of some other flavor.
They don't actually care too much.
I think that we would be kidding ourselves to see that the schisms between these different versions of Christianity are going to matter very much.
They are.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyhow.
No, I appreciate that perspective so much because you and I have both made these weird choices in life where we've had to read all these books by Patrick Denin and Adrian Vermeule.
And what I've taken from that, spending good minutes of my life doing, doing that, is that I disagree with their solutions so much.
And I see them as so dangerous and I see them as so hurtful to so many people.
I also see this as such a white male perspective.
Like Patrick Denine thinks there's no more social ties.
Well, have you ever been to an immigrant community, dude?
Have you ever hung out with folks like who are queer?
Because there's a lot of ways people form community and solidarity and kinship.
You know, there's a lot.
Their solutions to me are so bad, but their diagnosis, especially Denine, does have some real bite.
And it's what you just said.
If there's a moral vacuum, who's going to step in to tell you the story of what is good, what is right, what is virtuous, what is beautiful, what we should all fight for.
And liberalism structurally has a hard time with that.
So we get all these others who are always telling us what is good and beautiful and right.
And that is Patrick Denine and Adrian Vermeel, but it's also Elon Musk and J.D. Vance and it's also Curtis Yarvin and it's also Peter Thiel and it's also Doug Wilson and Pete Hexeth and right?
They are willing to say that.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's partly because they're going to be a bit shameless about this and just say, because they're willing to in a way that a lot of people aren't, right?
And it's hard for a pluralistic liberal to get anywhere near this stuff without sounding like a total reactionary.
That's right.
It's really, it's really, really tricky.
I completely agreed.
And we can't solve it today, but I totally agree.
All right.
Dr. Laura Field, thank you so much for stopping by.
Thank you for this book that is rich and full and detailed.
One of the things I love about this book is you really focused on the intellectuals and their thoughts, their texts, their writing.
And that is kind of my natural place to be.
So I did enjoy that so much.
Thank you, Brad.
Where can people find you?
Where can people link up with anything you might be doing?
I'm on Blue Sky.
I've got a sub stack that I've started.
So if people want to follow my sub stack, it's called LK Field Notes, and they can just contact me through my website, lkfield.com.
That's great.
And the book stores out on November 4th.
Furious Minds, The Making of the Maga New Right from Princeton University Press.
Check it out.
As always, friends, we'll be back later this week with its in the code in the weekly roundup.
And you can catch my live streams on YouTube almost weekly and look for other things.
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