The story the left tells itself about the right’s success is wrong—and limits our ability to connect with people who can be won to liberatory politics
In this timely and incisive book, Daniel Martínez HoSang challenges many of the dominant frameworks through which progressives have interpreted right-wing movements. Drawing on more than a decade of original research and on-the-ground reporting at conferences held by Turning Point USA and other conservative groups, HoSang shows how prevailing assumptions on the left often overlook the conditions that are reshaping political life. Across the United States, experiences of institutional failure, dislocation, and isolation are leading many people to withdraw from collective projects and disengage from public life, creating new openings for right-wing appeal.
Rather than relying on older models of conservative mobilization, the contemporary right has learned to navigate this terrain in distinct ways. It builds forms of belonging and political identity that resonate with those who feel unmoored, cultivating multiracial and socially diverse coalitions that often present themselves as welcoming and inclusive. This ecosystem extends far beyond Trump and MAGA, drawing in people who were once disengaged or even aligned with progressive causes.
Moving beyond familiar diagnoses, HoSang argues that only by understanding the emotional and structural forces driving the right’s appeal can we begin to imagine an effective response. The book ultimately asks what it would take to rebuild and reimagine collective democratic projects today, offering a framework for renewing public life and forging new pathways for shared purpose, participation, and liberation.
Daniel Martinez HoSang is Professor of American Studies at Yale University, with secondary appointments in the Department of Political Science and in the Yale School of Medicine’s Section of the History of Medicine. HoSang is the author or co-editor of eight books, including A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone and, with Joseph Lowndes, Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity. His analysis of the contemporary Right has been featured in the New York Times and other national publications.
ISBN: 9798888907283
Publication date: March 30, 2027
The Introduction: “What We Miss When We Laugh at MAGA” opens the book by focusing on progressives and their interpretations of right-wing politics that have prevailed since Trump's ascension into national politics a decade ago. These frameworks cannot explain the success of the Right today.
Chapter 1: “Onramps” describes the diverse ways that right-wing groups create points of entry for new constituents, often by laying claim to issues that have historically been the domain of the Left. This chapter explores the ways that organized groups on the right have sought to fashion such inroads, and why growing numbers of Americans have responded.
Chapter 2: “Affect” explores the ways that feeling, emotion, and desire operate on the contemporary Right. This chapter explores the affective appeals of the far right including political rallies and gatherings and media spaces, including many people that don’t necessarily identify as conservative.
Chapter 3: “Inclusive Nationalism” takes up a central paradox on the Right. How has the conservative movement grown increasingly multiracial and diverse even as they moved sharply to the right on a wide range of racialized policy issues, including affirmative action, voter rights, immigration, public safety, housing, and reproductive justice?
Chapter 4: “The Globalization of Anti-Globalism” explores the increasingly fertile exchanges between right-wing formations outside the United States and the MAGA right today.
Conclusion: “New Political Homes” considers how the Left and progressive organizations can and must fashion spaces and movements for the large sectors of populace who face growing experiences of material precarity and cynicism about the future and have turned away from the incrementalistic and technocratic vision of the Democratic Party and mainstream liberalism.
“This is one of the most important and most timely books ever written about organizing and social change. Daniel Martinez HoSang spent nearly a decade inside the rooms most organizers never enter—rallies, conferences, community meetings, campaign trainings—studying how authoritarian movements build belonging, recruit the disaffected, and turn institutional distrust into durable loyalty. What he found is a challenge to anyone committed to multiracial democracy: it isn’t enough to name the threat. You have to out-organize it—offering people real community, real attention, and real solutions before someone else does. Field-tested and unsparing, this is a book for organizers who want fewer surprises and more power.”
—Deepak Bhargava, coauthor, Practical Radicals
“This lean and lucid book is a wake-up call to never underestimate your opponents—especially when they are studying you to outsmart you by recruiting people you dismiss too hastily. Daniel Martinez HoSang deftly explains how the right has been able to capitalize on the pervasive dislocation its own policies have helped produce by creating new forms of belonging to attract anxious newcomers in these lonesome perilous times.”
—Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
"This is the rare book that busts open assumptions in a way that invites people into a new conversation—one that forces all of us to look more closely at how we understand and practice politics in the twenty-first century."
—Hahrie Han, author, Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church
“This book is an immense gift. By focusing intently on the texture and ethos of everyday organizing spaces where MAGA activists convert amorphous dissatisfaction into conviction, recognition, and identity, Daniel Martinez HoSang’s book provides novel answers to old and uncomfortable questions—especially about why people of color, immigrants, sexual minorities, and the working class are drawn to right-wing political movements. Indispensable.”
—Sam Adler-Bell, cohost, Know Your Enemy Podcast
“Daniel Martinez HoSang has long distinguished himself as an astute, impassioned, and strategically brilliant champion of the people’s right to run their own lives. In What the Left Gets Wrong About the Right he shows that the rise of right-wing politics emerges in part from the lack of connection, participation, and democratic action in society.”
—George Lipsitz, author, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
“What the Left Gets Wrong About the Right cuts through the comfortable myths we often tell ourselves about who our opponents are and offers a pathway back to connecting with the disaffected communities that the right has, erroneously, claimed for itself."
—Shane Burle, author, Fascism Today
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