Sam Francis: The Dangerous Apostle of Right-Wing Populism

This prescient critic of "the regime" opposed Reaganism and wanted to steer the right toward something resembling Trumpism

I used to work on the intellectual right, so I’ve known the name of Samuel Francis for a long time. Back when I was an editor at First Things, I associated him with Chronicles magazine, where he published many of his essays. But I didn’t take him very seriously. First Things was founded in the wake of a rather dramatic clash with the circle of writers and funders behind Chronicles, so I viewed the magazine through the lens of that conflict. We were the good guys, defending American democratic universalism (in Catholic-Christian terms); they, by contrast, were racists, xenophobes, and anti-Semites.

This impression persisted for a long time—all the way down to the opening of the Trump era, when my conservative colleague at The Week, Michael Brendan Dougherty, wrote a powerful and illuminating column about Francis as a herald of the right-wing populism that seized control of the GOP in 2016 and went on to win the White House. I learned from the essay, but I didn’t follow up by diving deeply into Francis’ writings.

That finally changed as I began preparing to teach the final segment of my Contemporary Political Theory course at the University of Pennsylvania. The final unit would be devoted to “Right-Populist Reaction.” Though the students would read bits of Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, and Christopher Rufo, I wanted to start them off with some Francis. But what to assign?

I asked John Ganz, my favorite lefty Substacker, for some advice. Ganz’s excellent forthcoming book on the early 1990s refers to Francis at several points, so I asked for suggested readings. He gave me the name of two Chronicles essays: “Beautiful Losers” from 1991 and “Nationalism, Old and New” from 1992.

Reading and teaching them has been a revelation.

The Old Right Reborn

Before there was a “New Right” that culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan, there was the “Old Right” of aristocratic “WASP” privileges, nativism, economic protectionism, and “America First” unilateralism. This Old Right didn’t vanish. It just got subsumed into the ascendent “conservative movement,” in which it served as junior partners, seated several rows behind the intellectuals surrounding National Review, who had been fashioning the New Right’s “fusionist” ideology since the late 1950s, and the neoconservative newcomers, who crafted the arguments during the 1970s that went on to animate the Reagan administration in both domestic and foreign policy.

The junior partners kept quiet through most of the 1980s. But almost immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they became restive. While George H.W. Bush (whom they despised as an ideological poseur) was dreaming of forging a “new world order” led by the United States, and Francis Fukuyama was writing his great book about the culmination of human history into American-style liberalism, a cranky counter-ideology was forming on the anti-liberal right.

Dubbed “paleoconservatism” to distinguish it from neoconservatism, it repackaged many of the Old Right’s positions for a new moment, and Patrick Buchanan tried them out on the stump during his surprisingly potent but ultimately unsuccessful primary challenge to Bush’s bid for re-election in 1992. Paleoconservatism blended hard-edged social/religious conservatism with hostility to immigration and free trade, opposition to an internationalist foreign policy, and a call for Republicans to reconnect to the economic and cultural struggles of the white working class.

---

The Right's Infatuation With Fascist Strongmen Is Nothing New

---

All of that was influenced by the writings of Sam Francis. But Francis went farther and deeper in his thinking than what could be discerned from Buchanan’s stump speeches.

Middle America vs. “the Regime”

The “Beautiful Losers” in the title of Francis’ 1991 essay are conservatives who at that point were 11 years into the so-called Reagan Revolution but had, Francis claimed, nothing to show for it. The “bureaucratic-managerial” state bequeathed to us by the New Deal remained firmly in place, not even noticeably smaller than it was on the eve of Reagan’s election. Pernicious socioeconomic and cultural trends had continued from the preceding decades unabated. For these failures, Francis calls the Reagan administration “hapless.” It thought its mandate was to conserve the American present when, instead, it should have understood the need to adopt a “counter-revolutionary” stance to reverse the course of a history gone badly off-track.

That’s standard reactionary rhetoric. But Francis’ polemics rise above mere rant in offering, in this and the essay from the following year, a relatively sophisticated sociological analysis to back up the jeremiad. Conservatives should be championing “middle America,” he claims, and he defines it with considerable precision. It is “middle” in several senses: It’s the (white) middle/working class; it’s found in greatest numbers and homogeneity in the Midwestern region of the country; and, in hierarchical terms, it’s pinched by an urban “nonwhite underclass” below it and, above it, “the elite” or “intelligentsia that designs the formulas and policies of the left.” Decades before J. D. Vance began using the term to defend Trump and denigrate his enemies, Francis sometimes described the latter elite class as “the regime.”  

Where Reagan and his neoconservative apologists went wrong was in convincing the right that its “natural allies” were in “Manhattan, New Haven, and Washington” when in fact its “values and goals” should be understood to “lie outside and against the establishment … in the increasingly alienated and threatened strata of Middle America.”

As long ago as the late 1960s, the deepest thinkers of the New Left, such as Herbert Marcuse, recognized (and worried about) the emergence of this sociological alignment, with college-educated “knowledge workers,” “symbolic analysts,” or “corporate cogs” aligned with impoverished minorities in the urban core of many American cities. These allied left-leaning groups stood poised to square-off politically against largely white blue-collar factory workers, who were drifting away from the Democratic Party and toward the right as their status and economic prospects declined in an emerging post-industrial society. Many of these latter voters supported George Wallace’s right-populist third-party campaign for president in 1968. Many more would become the “Reagan Democrats” during the 1980s. And according to Francis, they and their sociological descendants would form the material core of a new, more ferocious form of right-wing politics in the future.

To reach and mobilize these alienated and threatened voters, Francis claimed the right should craft a message emphasizing:

crime, educational collapse, the erosion of their economic status, and the calculated subversion of their social, cultural, and national identity by forces that serve the interests of the elite above them and the underclass below them, but at their expense. A new right, positioning itself in opposition to the elite and its underclass ally, can assert its leadership of alienated Middle Americans and mobilize them in radical opposition to the regime.

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.”

---

Stopping a Rogue Executive from Abusing the Massive Powers of the Presidency

---

Francis insists that this purge of elements from the regnant regime should be combined with bolder moves to shut down arms of the bureaucratic-managerial state that “exist only to serve the interests of the incumbent elite and its underclass allies.” This includes “the arts and humanities endowments, and most or all of the Departments of Education, Labor, Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services, and the civil rights enforcement agencies in various departments.” A populist-nationalist government should “seek their outright abolition, as well as that of those agencies and departments in the national security bureaucracy that serve globalist and anti-nationalist agendas.”

Populist Visionary

This is a remarkably prescient expression of Trumpist ambitions a quarter century before they captured the imagination of right-wing voters and intellectuals. But I want to close by making clear what I think this tells us about the place of political ideas in the world.

Lots of my Straussian friends tend to place heavy emphasis on the influence political philosophers supposedly exert on the world. Harvey Mansfield’s latest book, for example, is titled Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World. Mansfield is a great scholar and a wise and witty writer. There’s therefore much of value in the book. But its key contention—that we’re living in a world fashioned by a Florentine political theorist who wrote five centuries ago—is, in my view, wholly unconvincing.

Machiavelli didn’t make the world what it is by way of subterranean influence on later generations of writers, with that influence ultimately trickling down to lesser writers, thinkers, and political actors who effectively did Machiavelli’s bidding unbeknownst to themselves. Rather, Machiavelli saw, with great and rare perspicacity, how the world was trending beyond the powers of any writer to shape. He saw the emerging modern world and predicted how it would evolve—what possibilities it opened up, and which it foreclosed, and he gave bold advice about how clever and ambitious individuals could take advantage of those changes in order to thrive and (perhaps) help political communities to flourish within this new, emerging world.

That’s very different than crediting Machiavelli with “creating” our world. The world is what it is. It’s up to us to understand its contours and logic, and then, on that basis, to figure out how to live out our lives within it.

I think reading Sam Francis confirms this. Francis didn’t “create” Trumpism. Trump himself doesn’t read. He has instincts and impulses that ended up aligning with much of what Francis saw decades in the past. That’s a striking coincidental convergence of diabolical talents, not a case of influence.

Like Marcuse before him, Francis saw an emerging material and ideational world of new political possibilities—but unlike Marcuse, who worried it might yield a counter-revolutionary backlash against left-wing goals, Francis hoped a form of right-wing politics more to his liking might thrive in this new dispensation. By the same token, many of the right-leaning writers who have spent the past eight years remaking their careers in light of the Trumpist revolution of 2016 have ended up inadvertently parroting Francis’ ideas from the early 1990s. In most cases, this isn’t because they’ve gone back to mine Francis’ essays for inspiration. It’s because today’s conservative-minded intellectuals now see right in front of their faces and for the very first time trends that Francis noticed and wrote about decades ago.

Francis’ intellectual gift was vision—at the scale of decades. Machiavelli possessed it at the scale of centuries. Most of the rest of us hope (and often fail) to get things right a few weeks or months in the future. That’s a good part of how greatness in political theory should be measured, quite apart from the question of whether any particular thinker’s vision of the collective and individual good life is choiceworthy.

A version of this essay first appeared in Notes From the Middleground, a newsletter from Damon Linker.

Follow The UnPopulist on: X, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky.