We had a lot of fun at our happy hour last week chatting with Daniel Hosang, Professor of American Studies and Political Science at Yale, whose work focuses on the changing landscape of American politics, democracy, and political identity.
While there’s no shortage of scholarship and analysis on right-wing politics these days, surprisingly little of this work is rooted in research, interviews, and observations within right wing spaces. Dan and his students have been studying the rise of the multiracial right and has spent years doing on-the-ground field reporting inside conservative and right-wing spaces (as in, actually attending and hanging out at events) to understand how these movements are evolving from the inside. This work led to a multimedia essay for The New York Times published last July on the politics of the multiracial right which challenged many conventional assumptions about contemporary conservatism — some of which we touch on in our conversation.
The rest will be in Dan’s forthcoming book, What the Left Gets Wrong About the Right (Haymarket, 2027), which draws on years of field research to argue that many of our assumptions about the contemporary right no longer fit the political terrain. You can also learn more than you ever wanted to know about MAGA and the new right at Dan and his team’s Substack, What’s Going On? A Notebook on Political Transformation, which includes reporting from conservative spaces like Turning Point USA and Mom’s for Liberty, essays by young writers on the connections between pop culture, relationships and political change, work on MAHA and the heterodox politics of health, and guest essays about divisions within immigrant communities over Trump, right-wing Latino politics, and more. Their most recent piece, about the attempt to export CPAC, is a fascinating read on the aspects of MAGA that do and don’t work across the Atlantic.
I hope you enjoy this conversation — I think you might be surprised by some of Dan’s observations!
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