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Samuel Francis and Middle American Radicalism
In the March 1996 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, the late Samuel Francis (1947-2005) published an essay titled “From Household to Nation: The Middle American Populism of Pat Buchanan.” Francis wrote about Buchanan’s then-ongoing campaign for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, framing it within the larger historical context of American conservatism and populism. He noted that the campaign had proved, up to that point, more viable and enduring than many political prognosticators expected. Francis observed:
… the courtiers and professional partisans miss the larger victory the Buchanan campaign is on the eve of winning. If Buchanan loses the nomination, it will be because his time has not yet come, but the social and political forces on which both his campaigns [1992 and 1996] have been based will not disappear, and even if he does lose, he will have won a place in history as an architect of the victory those forces will eventually build.
Francis saw Buchanan and his quixotic campaigns as the vanguard of a larger, emerging sociopolitical movement:
The reason 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.
Francis continued:
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.
Francis was taking note of the emergence of what, in other writings, he referred to as “Middle American radicalism,” borrowing and popularizing a term first coined by the late sociologist Donald Warren (1935-1997).
Are we now, in 2016, witnessing the maturation of this movement that Francis saw emerging two decades ago? That may indeed be the case. Like Pat Buchanan’s 1992 and 1996 campaigns, the Donald Trump campaign of 2016 defies easy categorization along the traditional left-right spectrum. But Trump seems to have struck a nerve that Buchanan either did not or could not. Francis believed that Buchanan himself was too closely wedded to the mainstream conservative movement, a belief borne out by Buchanan’s past association with Richard Nixon and his later (and still ongoing) career as a conservative journalist and commentator. Buchanan was either unable or unwilling to move out from under the conservative umbrella. Toward the end of his essay, Francis related this story from the very early days of Buchanan’s first campaign:
I recall in late 1991, in the aftermath of a wall-to-wall gathering at his home to discuss his coming campaign, I told him privately that he would be better off without all the hangers-on, direct-mail artists, fund-raising whiz kids, marketing and PR czars, and the rest of the crew that today constitutes the backbone of all that remains of the famous “Conservative Movement” and who never fail to show up on the campaign doorstep to guzzle someone else’s liquor and pocket other people’s money. “These people are defunct,” I told him. “You don’t need them, and you’re better off without them. Go to New Hampshire and call yourself a patriot, a nationalist, an America Firster, but don’t even use the word ‘conservative.’ It doesn’t mean anything any more.”
Needless to say, Buchanan did not take Francis’ advice. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, it would appear that Donald Trump has. Interesting times lie ahead.
Published in General
That’s interesting; I wouldn’t have made the connection before. I’m glad you wrote this, because I had forgotten just how good a writer Francis was. I wonder what he would think of Trump and his campaign. On one hand, Trump takes up the themes Francis describes, but on the other, would he think that Trump is the right man to lead this movement? It’s like my father said recently: he can see himself agreeing with some of the things Trump says, but he can’t bring himself to vote for that man. He likens him to Wallace. He also had sympathy for what Wallace was saying in his 1972(?) campaign but thought the man had too much baggage at that point. I’d voted for Buchanan in the 1992 primary, although I wasn’t thinking it through at the same deep intellectual level as Francis. I just thought Buchanan was more conservative than Bush, who’d been wavering on some issues. I actually disagreed with Buchanan on trade but figured a protest vote would give Bush a wake-up call.
I knew Francis a little bit. He and I were both in the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Washington, D.C. in the late 1990’s, and I’d gotten to talk to him a few times there. While I thought his columns had taken a somewhat defeatist turn in his later years, he was a wonderful and thoughtful writer.
I think you are right about Buchanan’s foreshadowing the current Trump populist success. Buchanan’s protectionist, semi isolationist, anti immigrant positions didn’t resonate for him then as part of the Republican party, but after the disasters of Obama and Bush, and in the media driven idea free celebrity culture, they work. There are parallels in Latin America where parties aren’t important but personalities are. But opportunism by itself doesn’t work well and in some cases, like Argentina, locked them into dysfunctional politics, institutionalized populism. Similarly, the European Fascists broke with international socialism, called themselves something new, and rode nationalism to power. But, after making the trains run on time, it was all down hill, they were lucky to have lost the war. Are there statist alternatives, at least ones that embrace freedom and prosperity, for a giant heterogenous nation like the US? Conservatives doubt it. Can we be disengaged in a post cold war world? We know progressivism doesn’t work toward any identifiable benefits except for rent collectors and cronies, but we have no clue what governance by a reality tv personality means. So those who do have some ideas about how to govern this country, and have been looking for them for half a century, and now constitute a large minority of the Republican party, constitutional conservatives, are deeply concerned. We had our chance to break with a progressive century and instead may be getting our own Peron. Tragic but perhaps foreseeable.
Interesting. I recently subscribed to Chronicles but have yet to receive my first issue. Buchanan was one of the folks touting the magazine.
Buchanan, like the John Birchers before him, was rightly chased out of the Republican Party. As Trump will be. Part of the reason I am a Republican (and, apparently, part of the GOPe) is that we are unlike the Democrats in that we do not kiss the ring of nutcases just to court their nutcase followers. We have had our own versions of Reverend Al or Socialist Bernie from time to time. We have always rejected them and chased them out. Good for us! God save the Republic if we ever stop.
Good post, Mike. Lots of food for thought.
What worries me is that the movement seems to have become dissociated from moral values, a terrible development.
One of the things that made Buchanan persuasive back then to the likes of me was that he denounced the moral relativism being pushed by the elite as much as the economic globalism.
Now it seems the heirs of the movement couldn’t care less about moral values. That’s bad.
We are ripe for statism.
Go to New Hampshire and call yourself a patriot, a nationalist, an America Firster, but don’t even use the word ‘conservative.’
The above excerpt is chilling.
Also explains a decent amount of the rise of Bernie Sanders, and the “Occupy Wall Street” types.
A great post with much insight into what is driving the Trump Train. Of course there is a massive gulf between Buchanan and Trump on the understanding of the proper role of government and their grasp of policy. I may have disagreed with Buchanan on many things (his rejection of the modern global economy being one) but the man at least had concrete proposals the back up his rhetoric. It is true that Republicans have failed to explain how their policies and vision will benefit these Middle Americas as the OP calls them, but this does not mean that the policies and vision are wrong – just the presentation. Trump and Buchanan are often wrong on substance, but right in their focus – Republicans would do well to show how their policies are better at addressing these issues than Trumps Reign by Executive Action would be.
Very interesting post Mike. Thank you.
Great find. And the tragedy is that Republicans went for two decades with the Bushes and neocons and all the disasters rather than with Buchanan. Maybe they will get it right and go with Trump.
I was no more an admirer of Buchanan in the 1990s than I am of Trump today. You are right that there are elements of continuity.
Thank you, Mike. Like others, I thought this was thought provoking. I think this section you quoted is important, but it also left me frustrated:
On the latter two issues, pretty much all the Republicans seem to be on the right side of things, albeit to varying degrees and with different emphases. Much the same goes for the first half of the first (“hypertaxation”).
That leaves the globalism thing. It’s important and I agree that shouting “Free Trade is awesome! Look, stuff!” doesn’t get us very far, but I’m sort of wondering what else people are really looking for. Also, the blaming of “elites” for a globalized economy just seems like scapegoating.
As I recall, Buchanan was as much derided and laughed at as Trump has been.
Even back then, upper-class people described those who feared the negative effects of unchecked immigration and globalization as low-class ignorant people. How a person felt about these things was a status indicator.
Yet the “Buy American” movement persisted, and every now and then the mainstream media itself would wonder if things were going according to plan and if all was truly well. I remember a spate of worried articles in the 1990s about how foreigners were buying up America–the big news was that a huge portion of Vermont was being bought by the Chinese. Today there is a concern about the Chicago Stock Exchange being bought by the Chinese. The reporters are saying, “Isn’t anybody going to do something about this?”
I am and have always been in the camp of wanting more restrictive immigration and less globalization.
I wish the other candidates were talking about this as much as Trump is, but I understand why they aren’t. They are afraid of the press.
We just watched this type of national argument play out with the gay marriage movement. It reached the point at which opponents were immediately labeled “homophobes.”
In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of Trump’s support is coming from the anti-gay-marriage movement, people who are really sick and tired of their community life being reshaped without their consent.
I first heard about Francis in this article by Michael Brendan Dougherty. I immediately clicked over and read the entire “From Household to Nation” piece. I encourage those who are head-nodding to the extracted portions of the article to go read the whole thing, and do some more reading about Francis.
Before I push back against Francis’ account of things, I want to first acknowledge some places where we partially agree. I’m using Francis’ words from the same article:
I would call the explosion of this kind federal power the rise of the administrative state, and I do think it requires a certain set of managerial and technical skills to navigate it (and the contemporary economy) and that those skills tend to be inculcated at more elite research institutions, and that these institutions have become insular. I would also agree that the social sorting we see among those who graduate from these institutions is a problem, and that the revolving doors between Washington, large banks, think tanks, and lobbying agencies (as well as bailouts, etc) has further given rise to the sense ordinary Americans have that the game is rigged.
Second point of agreement:
I would not deploy the kind of Marxist language that Francis does here, but I take his point both about what the New Deal did and about the anxieties of working class voters for the last half-century.
Third point of agreement: Francis briefly mentions the etymology of “economics” coming from the Greek meaning household management. Indeed.
For some reason I looked up the Southern Poverty Law Center website the other day.
You may be contacted by the Southern Poverty Law Center: “Rush Limbaugh and the Breitbart News Network … promoting white nationalists? On January 20, Limbaugh read an excerpt from a 1996 essay penned by white nationalist Sam Francis, one of the most influential racist ideologues of the past quarter century. The essay, which Limbaugh claimed to predict the coming of a Donald Trump-type figure in American politics, was first published in Chronicles magazine. Limbaugh and Breitbart News are now playing an identical role pushing Sam Francis’ ideas and the Identitarian movement ideology into the conservative wing of American politics.”
All Rush did was read part of what the article said on the radio, trying to help everyone understand this Trump phenomenon that perplexes most of the population.
…
Southern Poverty Law Center publishes articles such, “No, the Ku Klux Klan Has Never, Ever Been a ‘Leftist’ Organization”.
“Democrats set about frantically rewriting their own ugly history.
Step 1: Switch “Democrat” to “Southerner”;
Step 2: Switch “Southerner” to “conservative Democrat”;
Step 3: Switch “conservative Democrat” to “conservative.”
Contrary to liberal folklore, the Democratic segregationists were not all Southern — and they were certainly not conservative. They were dyed-in-the-wool liberal Democrats on all the litmus-test issues of their day. All but one remained liberal Democrats until the day they died. That’s the only one you’ve ever heard of: Strom Thurmond.” — Ann Coulter
So, where do I disagree?
In the first place, there is a tone throughout Francis’ piece that all of the economic upheaval that what he terms “Middle America” has faced (which I would argue is not truly Middle America) is the result of a set of rigged policy choices by “globalist” interests. He doesn’t seem to recognize the extraordinary impact that technology has had on the economy in the last 60 years–raising barriers to trade without significant domestic costs is much easier in a world without airplanes. In an early age, imposing a tariff on foreign goods might well have hit the upper classes pining for the unique or luxury items the most–it might have been progressive. In our moment, any tariff would disproportionality affect the wallets of “Middle American” consumers, drastically raising prices. Instituting and collecting such a tariff would also require a large expansion of the administrative bureaucracy
In the second place, Francis doesn’t really have a solution to the technocratic mindset his article criticizes. In place of the current “globalized” elite, he basically wants to keep the same apparatus of power in place, just make it work for “Middle Americans”. There is no argument here to restrain or replace the leviathan of New Deal or Great Society programs with a more sensible approach that doesn’t turn all Americans into serfs and proletarians.
In the third place, there are sentences like this one:
Wait, what? Anti-white? ….
Do a little more reading about some of Sam Francis’ positions–several are quite ugly. In thumbnail version: there seems to be an undertone (and not always an undertone) in his work that the problem with multiculturalism isn’t that differences in language and culture are important and must be respected, that one must have a melting pot style immigration policy or actively teach civics…..but rather instead that such differences are tied to something ineradicable like “race”.
Exactly. Trump barely even pretends to address this.
This is hardly a new or original thought, but I’m finding it increasingly clear that being anti-Left — even vehemently so — does not necessarily imply anything close to classical liberalism of any sort.
Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping point also explains much of what is happening in Middle America.
People aren’t anti-taxes. But increase after increase after increase will see the protesters coming out after a while. People aren’t against immigrants. They are against unchecked and always increasing immigration.
I had to understand this when I was trying to get my fellow townspeople to agree to raise their local taxes to improve our schools. A friend said to me at the time, “People don’t like change.”
I did a double take. We all pay taxes all the time. I didn’t think of a tax increase as a “change.” But the more I worked with the townspeople, the better I understood the point my friend had made.
People are highly adaptable to whatever life throws at them. They adapt by adjusting their lives to fit their circumstances. There is an ecology to that adjusted life. Too much change in any part of it–such as a property tax increase–throws them for a loop. Even more so when there is precious little wiggle room in any part of that life they have built through their countless adjustments.
That’s why people are upset about the immigration. And the wall Trump promises represents a backstop to their having to keep changing as the problem keeps worsening.
This is a great post, one of the best I’ve read! Thanks Mike. I’m also enjoying all the thoughtful commentary — pro and con — delivered in a tone respectful of the reader … makes me feel rather blessed that I ever found Ricochet within the chaos of the internet.
No, I don’t think so. Buchanan and Trump are both protectionists. However, neither was/has been able to gain the support of anything close to a majority of Republican voters. Buchanan garnered about a third of the Republican primary voters in 1992 & 1996 in campaigns that were much more ideological than Trump 2016. Meanwhile Trump is also only able to garner about a third of the Republican primary electorate in a campaign devoid of any identifiable ideology except for the Cult of Personality surrounding Donald Trump. The difference is the Republican primary of 2016 featured too many contestants and the Republican primary voters were unable to settle on a candidate (or two) that had the ability to gain majority support within the party in a timely fashion, wasting precious time on such obviously un-serious candidates as Dr Ben Carson.
This actually gives me a little hope that all is not yet lost in the 2016 election.
And BTW, thanks for posting the Francis essay Mike.
This is my biggest problem with Trump. He has no solutions. It’s all, “Trust me.” Even in the areas where he has issued specific plans – Trump himself has little idea what those plans actually are and he contradicts them in his own speeches.
Even on things that seem so central to his campaign such as immigration, he says, “You have to be flexible.”
This reminds me of that speech from Other People’s Money. Trump isn’t the right man to lead the movement; he’s the only man. Since Buchanan, nobody else (of any notable effectiveness) has tried.
I’ve been a long time subscriber to the Wall Street Journal, but I found it offensive when their slogan was, “The Daily Diary of the American Dream.” Stuff is good, but the American Dream is expressed in the preambles to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If you want to be crassly utilitarian, you could say the American Dream involves pursuit of socio-economic status. But “stuff” has never been it, for anyone, even though there have been many libertarians and socialists who try to get people to think it is.
Ever read the Mansion section? Yikes!
I’ve glanced at it, but am much more interested in the parts about government and markets. And lately, I like the weekend Review section. I’m not in the demographic group that WSJ advertisers are interested in.
Might you be confusing “Off Duty” and “Review”?
Thanks for all the comments. I’m out of town right now and am just following along via my iPhone. I’ll respond at length later tonight.
I double checked and this weekend’s section is just called Review. I’ve seen an Off Duty section, too. The one I try not to miss is the one with the book reviews.
On the subject of mansions, even though I’m not in that demographic, it doesn’t bother me that people can afford expensive mansions like that. Good for them, if they can afford it and can enjoy them. I very seldom find that sort of thing interesting, but we all have our interests.
As a social and political problem, inequality of wealth and income bothers me a lot. But the fact that some people live in mansions and some don’t does not get me very interested.
I briefly corresponded with Francis back in 1996. My impression of him was that he was a very intelligent and thoughtful man.
Your dad is right that there are some parallels between Wallace in ’68 and Trump in ’16, but of course the latter does not have the racist/segregationist background of the former. Thus, I think Trump has the potential to expand the base of the GOP and reach out to people that Wallace never could have, whether as a member of the American Independent Party in ’68 or the Democrats in ’72.
I’ve been a subscriber since 1993. I’ve always enjoyed the wide array of opinions and analyses that the magazine’s contributors bring to the table.