Francis seemed to want to return to something like the pre-1929 era. So did the Reaganites, but not in the same way and it seems Francis may feel he was duped. But let's be clear. Reagan had been a Democrat and supported the New Deal. He said he didn't leave his party, it left him.
Reagan was never a man of the Right in the pre-1929 sense. What Reaganites wanted was to restore as much of the pre-1929 *economic* system as possible given that the world has changed since 1929. They were not going to restore Jim Crow, use the power of the state to force women back into the home (as the Taliban have done), imprison or chemically castrate gay men. Those ships had sailed.
But what they did succeed in doing is restoring the high levels of economic inequality of the pre-1929 world. They destroyed the Labor movement. And most importantly they have utterly destroyed the pragmatic Left and the New Dealers who drove them from power for fifty years after 1929.
Most white nationalists don't aim to restore Jim crow. Most white nationalist influenced conservatives don't want apartheid either. They simply want the right to discriminate on a private basis.
A private right to discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity is not viable if one is the only one doing so. They need a societal approval of such discrimination as acceptable and that is functionally Jim Crow.
Why do you suppose Jim Crow laws were established some 30+ years after the end of the Civil War? In the aftermath of the war, when slavery had been a recent reality, it wasn't needed, private discrimination was widespread. But once a new generation of whites who had never known a slave society had grown up it was necessary for laws to be passed to ensure that this practice not fade away. And today, two generations after their end, you have an entire post-Jim Crow population, in which a racist needs to watch his step. And they don't like it.
While racism is still prevalent in America, the only racists with any considerable power today are the well intentioned egalitarian men and women in the Democratic party obsessed with trying to atone for the sins of white Americans. I can understand the desire to make America a majority-minority country, I cannot understand the need to enact South African and Zimbabwean style policies in America.
You are conflating two different practices, private discrimination (the right to refuse service for whatever reason) and official discrimination (Jim Crow). Most white nationalists, especially Sam Francis, don't have any desire to restore any sort of Jim Crow because it does not serve any purpose in modern America. If anything, we have a reverse discrimination against whites (and some groups of East Asians) in the form of affirmative action and civil rights legislation.
Moreover, your first claim is wrong. People discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity every single day. The only difference is that property owners, particularly white property owners are prohibited from doing so. That being said, Indian immigrants engage in nepotism, Black children bully white children, and white people. It does not require "societal approval", it only requires a respect for property rights. Something which is increasingly verboten because liberals like yourself believe equality (especially black-white equality) is more important than distasteful choices.
Very interesting discussion, and I think you nail it that Francis is an *observer of trends* more than anything else.
As someone looking in at the American Right from the outside, I would go as far as to say that Francis is observing a phenomenon that has been a *stronger* influence on *historic GOP campaigning* and a *weaker* influence on *current substantive policy* than the intellectual Right tends to think.
In some ways, the Republican Party for a long time has been Sam Francis in the streets and Paul Ryan in the sheets. Nixon's Southern Strategy involved a lot of posturing against crime and riots, and when Reagan talked about states' rights in Philadelphia, MS and railed against strapping young bucks, he was sending a message about who counts as Middle America and who doesn't. So the precursors of Trump/Francis-style rhetoric have been a fixture of GOP campaigns for a long time. And for all the talk of the populist Trump sweeping aside the old plutocratic policy orthodoxy of the GOP, Trump's major legislative initiatives were ... an attempted social program rollback and an upper-class tax cut. If that's not economic policy for the elite, what is? After all, Francis' vision of rolling back the New Deal state is a fundamentally pro-elite goal.
Of course, it's easy for me as a liberal to say that the "attention to material-economic interests" that Middle America needs includes social insurance and the rich paying their share. To put it mildly, people should and do disagree on what policies support prosperity. But *Middle America itself* considers these things to be in its own material-economic interest. Trump's ACA repeal and tax cut bills were hideously unpopular, with ACA repeal polling <20% and the tax cuts not much better. So my impression is that the substantive policy content of Trumpism is pretty thin. Trump takes populist-nationalist appeals that have long existed on the Right in some form and turns them up to 11. But he does so basically in the service of an orthodox GOP fiscal agenda. The offer when it comes to the things Middle America considers to be in its own material-economic interest is essentially nothing.
Now, that's not to discount the appeal of Trumpism, which is a formidable electoral force. Its cultural appeals are popular in and of themselves and useful for pivoting away from the fiscal agenda. But it's important not to overstate Trump-induced changes to GOP fiscal policy here, because "tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for everyone else" is one of his few electoral vulnerabilities.
A good and very interesting article by Mr. Linker overall, in trying to assess the legacy of Sam Francis, really the most systematic and influential paleoconservative thinker overall, on not just paleoconservatism but the alt-Right and Donald Trump. Not an easy job. All sorts of clarifications are necessary, and especially for someone whose serious interest in Francis is quite recent, Damon does very well IMO.
One thing always difficult in writing on the alt-right is distinguishing the variations among the different personalities. groups, and groupings of the alt-Right. This is not after all a particularly homogeneous movement. Frequently their only identifying factor as "alt-Right" is inability to get along with either the mainstream right or the political mainstream. Not unexpectedly, they don't as a rule in my experience get along particularly well with each other.
I'd just like to touch briefly on one aspect of paleoconservatism Linker passes over but for this note, foreign policy.
"Paleoconservatism blended hard-edged social/religious conservatism with.....opposition to an internationalist foreign policy."
This became Buchanan's and later MAGA/Trumpists trademark, but this was due more to the influence of another alt-Right group, the anti-war libertarians. Francis himself was quite critical if not hostile to things like Murray Rothbard's celebration of the fall of Vietnam, or other leftists popular with the anti-war libertarians like Noam Chomsky.
Buchanan's own anti-intervention stance let's not forget seems to have started with blowback from his transparently antisemitic "amen corner" criticism of the first Iraq War, and his efforts, somewhat successful, to rehabilitate himself as a principled anti-interventionist as opposed to just an antisemitic fascist. Not the first rightist to try so, nor the last.
Once the left gave up on proletarian revolution and placed its hopes in identitarian revolution, it forgot about the importance of class. Today, as nonwhite lower and middle class voters move right, the left is losing out. Social class can be an identity too and appears to be more powerful than race or ethnicity. We will have to wait and see if that is true in the long term.
I met Sam Francis a couple times and read his column in the Washington Times before he was fired for his populist views, and after this on the internet
I think you exaggerate his influence on Trump or even on Breitbart, but I think he’s been proven wrong
His central thesis was the demographic changes from immigration doomed the GOP and the conservative movement
But what we see is that many Hispanics and other immigrants groups are moving to the right even with the drawbacks of Trump.
"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.”"
Behold the counter-elites! In Peter Turchin's book "End Times," he talks about periods of disintegration wherein the over-production of elites causes counter-elites to form (see Russ Vought, Jonathan Mitchell, Roger Severino) These guys are eager to trade one bureaucracy for another as long as they're directing the traffic. But this isn't about values religious or otherwise. This is about thwarted ambition finding a home in Trumpism.
Before there was Sam Francis there was the John Birch Society. Despite his intellectual bona fides he really was just a garden variety racist and reactionary. The JBS created the space for people like Francis and Buchanan. Although the JBS remains a discreet organization it has released its poisons into the mainstream of the Republican Party. In a real sense the objectives of the JBS have been realized and made potent.
The political right was too focused on ideas and not on power. No more. Whatever ideas that can be marketed in order to gain power are useful. Fixed principles only represent an obstacle to power.
It isn't just a coincidence that Fred Koch, father of the Koch Brothers, was an early member and financial supporter of the JBS.
The confluence of business, religion and reactionary/libertarian politics is everywhere today. From the National Prayer Breakfast to the Speaker of the House of Representatives to the Governors and legislatures of Florida, Texas and other Republican controlled states.
Sam Francis wasn't prophetic--- he was diligently preparing the path for all of this.
Francis seemed to want to return to something like the pre-1929 era. So did the Reaganites, but not in the same way and it seems Francis may feel he was duped. But let's be clear. Reagan had been a Democrat and supported the New Deal. He said he didn't leave his party, it left him.
Reagan was never a man of the Right in the pre-1929 sense. What Reaganites wanted was to restore as much of the pre-1929 *economic* system as possible given that the world has changed since 1929. They were not going to restore Jim Crow, use the power of the state to force women back into the home (as the Taliban have done), imprison or chemically castrate gay men. Those ships had sailed.
But what they did succeed in doing is restoring the high levels of economic inequality of the pre-1929 world. They destroyed the Labor movement. And most importantly they have utterly destroyed the pragmatic Left and the New Dealers who drove them from power for fifty years after 1929.
Most white nationalists don't aim to restore Jim crow. Most white nationalist influenced conservatives don't want apartheid either. They simply want the right to discriminate on a private basis.
A private right to discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity is not viable if one is the only one doing so. They need a societal approval of such discrimination as acceptable and that is functionally Jim Crow.
Why do you suppose Jim Crow laws were established some 30+ years after the end of the Civil War? In the aftermath of the war, when slavery had been a recent reality, it wasn't needed, private discrimination was widespread. But once a new generation of whites who had never known a slave society had grown up it was necessary for laws to be passed to ensure that this practice not fade away. And today, two generations after their end, you have an entire post-Jim Crow population, in which a racist needs to watch his step. And they don't like it.
While racism is still prevalent in America, the only racists with any considerable power today are the well intentioned egalitarian men and women in the Democratic party obsessed with trying to atone for the sins of white Americans. I can understand the desire to make America a majority-minority country, I cannot understand the need to enact South African and Zimbabwean style policies in America.
You are conflating two different practices, private discrimination (the right to refuse service for whatever reason) and official discrimination (Jim Crow). Most white nationalists, especially Sam Francis, don't have any desire to restore any sort of Jim Crow because it does not serve any purpose in modern America. If anything, we have a reverse discrimination against whites (and some groups of East Asians) in the form of affirmative action and civil rights legislation.
Moreover, your first claim is wrong. People discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity every single day. The only difference is that property owners, particularly white property owners are prohibited from doing so. That being said, Indian immigrants engage in nepotism, Black children bully white children, and white people. It does not require "societal approval", it only requires a respect for property rights. Something which is increasingly verboten because liberals like yourself believe equality (especially black-white equality) is more important than distasteful choices.
This piece gives Sam Francis far too much credit as a "visionary." He wasn't really all that prescient or insightful, or even an original thinker.
The dispensation (and constituency) Francis foresaw was envisioned and assembled decades earlier (with frightening success) by Father Coughlin!
Very interesting discussion, and I think you nail it that Francis is an *observer of trends* more than anything else.
As someone looking in at the American Right from the outside, I would go as far as to say that Francis is observing a phenomenon that has been a *stronger* influence on *historic GOP campaigning* and a *weaker* influence on *current substantive policy* than the intellectual Right tends to think.
In some ways, the Republican Party for a long time has been Sam Francis in the streets and Paul Ryan in the sheets. Nixon's Southern Strategy involved a lot of posturing against crime and riots, and when Reagan talked about states' rights in Philadelphia, MS and railed against strapping young bucks, he was sending a message about who counts as Middle America and who doesn't. So the precursors of Trump/Francis-style rhetoric have been a fixture of GOP campaigns for a long time. And for all the talk of the populist Trump sweeping aside the old plutocratic policy orthodoxy of the GOP, Trump's major legislative initiatives were ... an attempted social program rollback and an upper-class tax cut. If that's not economic policy for the elite, what is? After all, Francis' vision of rolling back the New Deal state is a fundamentally pro-elite goal.
Of course, it's easy for me as a liberal to say that the "attention to material-economic interests" that Middle America needs includes social insurance and the rich paying their share. To put it mildly, people should and do disagree on what policies support prosperity. But *Middle America itself* considers these things to be in its own material-economic interest. Trump's ACA repeal and tax cut bills were hideously unpopular, with ACA repeal polling <20% and the tax cuts not much better. So my impression is that the substantive policy content of Trumpism is pretty thin. Trump takes populist-nationalist appeals that have long existed on the Right in some form and turns them up to 11. But he does so basically in the service of an orthodox GOP fiscal agenda. The offer when it comes to the things Middle America considers to be in its own material-economic interest is essentially nothing.
Now, that's not to discount the appeal of Trumpism, which is a formidable electoral force. Its cultural appeals are popular in and of themselves and useful for pivoting away from the fiscal agenda. But it's important not to overstate Trump-induced changes to GOP fiscal policy here, because "tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for everyone else" is one of his few electoral vulnerabilities.
A good and very interesting article by Mr. Linker overall, in trying to assess the legacy of Sam Francis, really the most systematic and influential paleoconservative thinker overall, on not just paleoconservatism but the alt-Right and Donald Trump. Not an easy job. All sorts of clarifications are necessary, and especially for someone whose serious interest in Francis is quite recent, Damon does very well IMO.
One thing always difficult in writing on the alt-right is distinguishing the variations among the different personalities. groups, and groupings of the alt-Right. This is not after all a particularly homogeneous movement. Frequently their only identifying factor as "alt-Right" is inability to get along with either the mainstream right or the political mainstream. Not unexpectedly, they don't as a rule in my experience get along particularly well with each other.
I'd just like to touch briefly on one aspect of paleoconservatism Linker passes over but for this note, foreign policy.
"Paleoconservatism blended hard-edged social/religious conservatism with.....opposition to an internationalist foreign policy."
This became Buchanan's and later MAGA/Trumpists trademark, but this was due more to the influence of another alt-Right group, the anti-war libertarians. Francis himself was quite critical if not hostile to things like Murray Rothbard's celebration of the fall of Vietnam, or other leftists popular with the anti-war libertarians like Noam Chomsky.
Buchanan's own anti-intervention stance let's not forget seems to have started with blowback from his transparently antisemitic "amen corner" criticism of the first Iraq War, and his efforts, somewhat successful, to rehabilitate himself as a principled anti-interventionist as opposed to just an antisemitic fascist. Not the first rightist to try so, nor the last.
Once the left gave up on proletarian revolution and placed its hopes in identitarian revolution, it forgot about the importance of class. Today, as nonwhite lower and middle class voters move right, the left is losing out. Social class can be an identity too and appears to be more powerful than race or ethnicity. We will have to wait and see if that is true in the long term.
I met Sam Francis a couple times and read his column in the Washington Times before he was fired for his populist views, and after this on the internet
I think you exaggerate his influence on Trump or even on Breitbart, but I think he’s been proven wrong
His central thesis was the demographic changes from immigration doomed the GOP and the conservative movement
But what we see is that many Hispanics and other immigrants groups are moving to the right even with the drawbacks of Trump.
"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.”"
Behold the counter-elites! In Peter Turchin's book "End Times," he talks about periods of disintegration wherein the over-production of elites causes counter-elites to form (see Russ Vought, Jonathan Mitchell, Roger Severino) These guys are eager to trade one bureaucracy for another as long as they're directing the traffic. But this isn't about values religious or otherwise. This is about thwarted ambition finding a home in Trumpism.
Before there was Sam Francis there was the John Birch Society. Despite his intellectual bona fides he really was just a garden variety racist and reactionary. The JBS created the space for people like Francis and Buchanan. Although the JBS remains a discreet organization it has released its poisons into the mainstream of the Republican Party. In a real sense the objectives of the JBS have been realized and made potent.
The political right was too focused on ideas and not on power. No more. Whatever ideas that can be marketed in order to gain power are useful. Fixed principles only represent an obstacle to power.
It isn't just a coincidence that Fred Koch, father of the Koch Brothers, was an early member and financial supporter of the JBS.
The confluence of business, religion and reactionary/libertarian politics is everywhere today. From the National Prayer Breakfast to the Speaker of the House of Representatives to the Governors and legislatures of Florida, Texas and other Republican controlled states.
Sam Francis wasn't prophetic--- he was diligently preparing the path for all of this.