Posted on 12/25/2024 12:31:33 PM PST by Pelham
It has been seven years since Sam Francis died. But the years since his death merely show the accuracy of his insights. Francis’s writing was marked not only by loyalty to the people from whom he came but by an unswerving devotion to telling the truth about the way the world really is, not the way he wished it to be.
Francis knew that it was not “morning again in America” but far closer to midnight. Conservatives could not hope to achieve anything by defending elites, as conservatives have done since the French Revolution, since today’s elites are implacably hostile to all that conservatives wish to conserve. As Francis wrote in this magazine in 1994, “what really demands a radical challenge from the right” is “the domination of a hostile ruling class that uses state power to entrench itself and wreck the country, the culture and the middle class itself.” Elsewhere, Francis was even blunter: “The conservatives . . . who remain need to understand that the people and forces now in power in this country—in government, the culture, and Big Business—are the enemies of the real America and the real civilization of the West.” Francis also recognized, as he wrote in 1993, that the institutions that most American conservatives have trusted are simply not up to the task:
there is virtually no reason to think that either the Republican party establishment or the neo-conservative intelligentsia or for that matter most of the mainstream conservative establishment either wants or is able to mount an effective challenge to the dominant cultural apparatus of the left in this country.
Since then, “the Republican party establishment,” “the neo-conservative intelligentsia,” and “most of the mainstream conservative establishment” have turned themselves into cheerleaders for Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, and now Mitt Romney,
(Excerpt) Read more at chroniclesmagazine.org ...
More Sam Francis for those curious about him-
March 1, 1996 By Samuel Francis
From Household to Nation
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/from-household-to-nation/
“The reason Pat Buchanan has not been submerged is that the torch he carries illuminates new social forces that only now are forming a common political consciousness. What is important about these forces is not that a campaign centered on them does not now win major elections (indeed, it would be a fatal error if they succeeded in winning prematurely) but that the Buchanan campaign for the first time in recent history offers them an organized mode of expression that will allow them to develop and mature their consciousness and their power.
Those forces consist, of course, of the broad social and cultural spectrum of Middle America. Middle American groups are more and more coming to perceive their exploitation at the hands of the dominant elites. The exploitation works on several fronts—economically, by hypertaxation and the design of a globalized economy dependent on exports and services in place of manufacturing; culturally, by the managed destruction of Middle American norms and institutions; and politically, by the regimentation of Middle Americans under the federal leviathan.
The significant polarization within American society is between the elites, increasingly unified as a ruling class that relies on the national state as its principal instrument of power, and Middle America itself, which lacks the technocratic and managerial skills that yield control of the machinery of power. Other polarities and conflicts within American society—between religious and secular, white and black, national and global, worker and management—are beginning to fit into this larger polarity of Middle American and Ruling Class. The Ruling Class uses and is used by secularist, globalist, anti-white, and anti-Western forces for its and their advantage...
Sam Francis admired James Burnham, and some of Francis’ ideas are quite similar to how Burnham viewed the world.
Another essay on Sam Francis
By Michael Brendan Dougherty
last updated November 12, 2016
How an obscure adviser to Pat Buchanan predicted the wild Trump campaign in 1996
“[S]ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or diminish our national interests and national sovereignty, a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes, the better… [Samuel Francis in Chronicles]
Imagine giving this advice to a Republican presidential candidate: What if you stopped calling yourself a conservative and instead just promised to make America great again?
What if you dropped all this leftover 19th-century piety about the free market and promised to fight the elites who were selling out American jobs? What if you just stopped talking about reforming Medicare and Social Security and instead said that the elites were failing to deliver better health care at a reasonable price? What if, instead of vainly talking about restoring the place of religion in society — something that appeals only to a narrow slice of Middle America — you simply promised to restore the Middle American core — the economic and cultural losers of globalization — to their rightful place in America? What if you said you would restore them as the chief clients of the American state under your watch, being mindful of their interests when regulating the economy or negotiating trade deals?
That’s pretty much the advice that columnist Samuel Francis gave to Pat Buchanan in a 1996 essay, “From Household to Nation,” in Chronicles magazine. Samuel Francis was a paleo-conservative intellectual who died in 2005. Earlier in his career he helped Senator East of North Carolina oppose the Martin Luther King holiday. He wrote a white paper recommending the Reagan White House use its law enforcement powers to break up and harass left-wing groups. He was an intellectual disciple of James Burnham’s political realism, and Francis’ political analysis always had a residue of Burnham’s Marxist sociology about it. He argued that the political right needed to stop playing defense — the globalist left won the political and cultural war a long time ago — and should instead adopt the insurgent strategy of communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci. Francis eventually turned into a something resembling an all-out white nationalist, penning his most racist material under a pen name. Buchanan didn’t take Francis’ advice in 1996, not entirely. But 20 years later, “From Household to Nation,” reads like a political manifesto from which the Trump campaign springs....
bfl
Sam Francis: The Dangerous Apostle of Right-Wing Populism
Damon Linker
May 04, 2024
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/sam-francis-the-dangerous-apostle
A Proto-MAGA Nationalism
There’s much within Francis’ 1991 essay that undoubtedly influenced Buchanan’s campaign against Bush the following year. But in the 1992 essay, published as Buchanan was preparing to offer a tepid endorsement of Bush in a fiery speech at the GOP convention that summer, Francis goes further—to propose wrapping that list of policies in a broader, more syncretic appeal that reads like an excerpt from an essay one might read today in the “horseshoe” journal Compact or in a white paper published by the right-populist think tank American Compass:
What Middle Americans need is a political formula and a public myth that synthesize the attention to material-economic interests offered by the left with the defense of concrete cultural and national identity offered by the right.
As the essay unfolds, Francis makes it clear that the “appropriate formula for the expression of Middle-American material interests and cultural values is nationalism.” Though he also makes very clear that he intends it in a sense very different from the style of nationalism familiar to many Americans from the words and deeds of Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln, both of whom advocated a deracinated form of national cohesion that infuses the bureaucratic-managerial state with a universalist moral vision Francis dubs “managerial globalism.” Francis doesn’t mention Reagan in this context, but it’s hard not to hear the following passage as a repudiation of the 40th president’s habit of speaking of the country as a refuge for all human beings who long for freedom—and a politics based on such aspirations:
The myth of the managerial regime that America is merely a philosophical proposition about the equality of all mankind (and therefore includes all mankind) must be replaced by a new myth of the nation as a historically and culturally unique order that commands loyalty, solidarity, and discipline and excludes those who do not or cannot assimilate to its norms and interests.
This is a form of nationalism that is “essentially populist in tactics, locating the cultural and moral core of contemporary American society in a stratum that is the main victim of the regime that now prevails in the United States.”
When it comes to practical aims of governance, Francis limits himself to proposing that a new nationalist right should seek to seize, rather than abolish, the bureaucratic-managerial state. Anticipating Donald Trump’s efforts, late in his presidency, to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants from the federal bureaucracy and replace them with ideological and personal loyalists, Francis advocates the political right undertaking the “displacement of the incumbent managerial elite of the regime by its own elite drawn from and representing the Middle-American social stratum.”...
You sure are comfortable bringing up such a disgusting thing. I wonder why that is?
As far as I know, Francis also coined the term “ The Stupid Party” to describe establishment Republicans.
Thanks for posting this!
Let’s not forget the late, great Angelo Codevilla either. I was so saddened at his death, and it was especially tragic that we lost him on the eve of the war in Ukraine when his wise counsel was so sorely needed:
Angelo Codevilla, Whose Writings Anticipated Trumpism, Dies at 78
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/obituaries/angelo-codevilla-dead.html
RIP, Angelo Codevilla, the conservative thinker who took on the ruling class
https://nypost.com/2021/09/22/rip-angelo-codevilla-conservative-thinker-who-took-on-ruling-class/
Why We Will Miss Angelo Codevilla
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/09/why-we-will-miss-angelo-codevilla
The Great and Good Angelo Codevilla
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-great-and-good-angelo-codevilla/
He wasn’t wrong.
Burnham and Francis argued that there was no “center” or “moderate” position.
Either we held power or the left held power.
There was no possible equilibrium in the middle.
It was the left that persuaded me this was true—because those were their rules.
Sorry, and you're right. My remark was meaningless without context, which I failed to establish.
My point was that I've been following conservative thought since I was 19, when I was introduced to Ayn Rand by a college classmate. That was almost exactly fifty years ago. A few years later I encountered National Review for the first time, and became a consumer and subscriber to that magazine.
I thought I was aware of all the main currents (so to speak) of conservatism as it developed in the years after the Kennedy assassination. Admittedly, there were some writers whom I thought boring; either because I couldn't relate to their point of view, or because I thought they were stating the obvious without adding anything useful. Joe Sobran and Pat Buchannan were two of those. Perhaps Sam Francis was another.
Correct.
My father was a dedicated reader of “The Remnant” Catholic newspaper. Because of that I became very familiar with Joseph Sobran and Samual Francis, among others.
Originated the term Anarcho-Tyranny.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=anarcho-tyranny
Damn straight he was
Derbyshire too
I can’t be the only one dying to know what those “Comment removed by moderator” entries said!
“As far as I know, Francis also coined the term “ The Stupid Party” to describe establishment Republicans.”
It’s an older jibe, Francis borrowed it, maybe from H.L. Mencken.
“Let’s not forget the late, great Angelo Codevilla either.”
Yes, he was excellent, I always looked for his work.
Another guy who spotted this trend very early on was Jeffrey Bell, who wrote Populism and Elitism back in 1992. He was already arguing that liberal vs conservative was outdated, that the real division was populists vs elites.
https://www.amazon.com/Populism-Elitism-Politics-Age-Equality/dp/0895265176
Thank you! I was familiar with Francis and Codevilla, of course, and a fan of both, but don’t recall Bell. I appreciate the introduction!
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