The story the Left tells itself about the Right’s success is wrong—and holds us back from connecting with people who can be won to liberatory politics.
What the Left Gets Wrong About the Right challenges many of the dominant frameworks through which progressives have interpreted right-wing movements. Drawing on over a decade of original research and reporting at conferences held by Turning Point USA and other right-wing groups, Daniel Martinez HoSang argues that the Left’s prevailing assumptions often miss the diverse and evolving onramps through which people—many of them previously disengaged or even sympathetic to progressive causes—are entering right-wing politics.
As HoSang shows, the Right is building multiracial, diverse coalitions grounded in spaces like wellness communities, parental rights movements, and small business networks—places that feel welcoming and inclusive for people the left and liberals assume would be alienated by the Right. The Right, for instance, rarely demands ideological purity or formal commitment. Instead, they often begin with cultural, emotional, or community-based entry points that make right-wing ideas appealing. The Right’s growth, in HoSang’s reframing, is not simply a resurgence of earlier fascist or authoritarian traditions, nor merely as the product of online disinformation or charismatic demagogues like Donald Trump.
By decentering Trump and MAGA, What the Left Gets Wrong About the Right illuminates a broader ecosystem of right-wing mobilization. As HoSang argues, only when we understand the emotional and structural forces driving the Right’s appeal can we begin to reimagine the collective democratic renewal required in response.
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.
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.