Second Thoughts on Samuel Francis

Reading the "Message from MARs" in Context

I wrote a piece over at The Bulwark questioning - and apophatically contributing to - the growing popular rediscovery of Sam Francis. If you’re interested, you can read the piece linked below, and come back here for further context and addenda.

PUT IT THIS WAY: Samuel T. Francis has been thoroughly rediscovered.

Once upon a time, Sam Francis had been a leading voice of the hard right—what used to be called the “paleoconservatives.” By the time he died twenty years ago, he had slipped into relative obscurity. But now? Growing interest over the last decade, combined with the Trumpian shift in American politics, has brought this right-winger’s name back into the national political conversation.

The paleoconservatives were the embattled and often embittered second generation of traditionalists within the conservative intellectual movement. They emerged in the late 1970s and early ’80s as a conscious group in direct opposition to “neoconservatives.” (The term “paleoconservative,” in currency as early as 1980, obviously riffs on neocon.) The paleos resented the neos for several reasons. Intellectually, they did not consider the neocons, who were often Cold War liberals who moved to the right in the late 1960s or in the ’70s, to be truly conservative. The paleocons thought, rather, that the neocons were still liberals, just disgruntled ones, and that their basic assumptions remained left-wing, not right-wing. Second, the paleos resented the neocons’ capacity to dominate right-leaning venues and patronage networks. While the well-connected and well-credentialed neocons appeared to live large in multiple Washington think tanks, the paleos had a harder time funding their own think tank up in Illinois, or winning professorships or federal appointments.

In the public mind, the most salient fact about the paleoconservatives was that they were, on the whole, more drawn to racialist thinking than were mainstream conservatives. For several paleocons, this became a decisive factor in their careers. That was certainly the case for Francis. For all his trenchant writing—the American Society of Newspaper Editors twice, in 1989 and 1990, gave him an award for his Washington Times editorial writing—his increasingly open racism led to a slow-motion expulsion from the conservative mainline. In 1995, the Times cashiered Francis for saying whites ought to “reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites” at a conference hosted by white supremacist magazine American Renaissance.¹

Francis denied being a white nationalist. In the immediate aftermath he said, “I believe there are racial differences, there are natural differences between the races. I don’t believe that one race is better than another. There’s reasonably solid evidence for IQ differences, personality and behavior differences. I understand those things have been taken to justify segregation and white supremacy. That is not my intent.”

But his later efforts directly involved raising the political consciousness of whites as a bloc. He argued this was because a consciously white political movement was the only realistic basis for his preferred political outcomes, since, he thought, nonwhites in America were essentially clients of a liberal elite. He continued to make this case at racist venues like American Renaissance where he was celebrated as a victim of liberal censorship. Even if we take at face value Francis’s denials of being a white nationalist himself—and I don’t think we have to—he was objectively pro–white nationalist. By the time he died on February 15, 2005 at the age of 57, Francis was cofounding the white supremacist National Policy Institute.

Since 2016, however, a cottage industry has been busily recovering Francis’s thinking. From the center right, Matthew Rose in First Things; from the left, Peter Kolozi and John Ganz; from the center, Damon Linker. Youthful hard rightists plumb Francis for insight. (Michael Brendan Dougherty, now of National Review, beat everyone to the punch by highlighting Francis in 2007.)

At his height, Francis’s allies were impressed by him. The “paleolibertarian” Murray Rothbard wrote of him in 1994 that “Sam Francis is our Pareto, our Gramsci, and we must not allow him to be suppressed,” breathlessly adding: “Francis can be the Tom Paine, the Patrick Henry of the next American Revolution that will at last redeem the glorious promise of the first.” Paleocon Paul Gottfried called Francis the “contemporary on the American Right who shaped my thinking most decisively.” The magazine Chronicles, where Francis was contributing editor, said that in his anthology, Beautiful Losers, he staked “his claim as one of the most important conservative thinkers of our time.”

Read the whole thing.

Timothy Stanley described Francis as a “fearsome toad.” The black and white filter I have used adds mid-century dignity to a grainy screencap that was short on definition, but long on Francis’s ruddy complexion.

In the Bulwark essay, I try and read Francis not as a sui generis figure, but as he was, part of a New Right milieu. A major part of this was situating arguably his most cited essay in context. One of those contexts was the collection of essays it arrived in, The New Right Papers, edited by Robert Whitaker. I had this question about Francis in the back of my mind as I worked on a chapter about the New Right. When I started, I only knew Whitaker as the editor behind this fairly foundational text for reckoning with New Right self-understanding. When I dug around to work out who Whitaker was I found he ran a small New Right outfit with his wife and a friend called the Populist Forum. Whitaker had been a George Wallace supporter, and he especially championed populist politics. Originally from South Carolina, he had studied public choice economics in graduate school at the University of Virginia, although he did not complete his doctorate. Whitaker’s earlier book had involved a history of American populism, and, working with National Review’s William Rusher, they sought to build the populist conservative new majority. Along with his wife and Robert Hoy, another contributor to the book, he ran the Populist Forum, a tiny outfit that “involved themselves in several protest movements, serving as itinerant, bipartisan organizers.” Since personnel is political, Whitaker became a special assistant in the Office of Personnel and Management, telling the New York Times, “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t trying to change something.”

Elsewhere I’ve called him a professional Middle American Radical, which I think sums it up pretty well.

Much of what Francis says in Message to MARs echoed Whitaker, as well as Paul Weyrich (whose name I mispronounced when talking to George Will about him (it’s Wy-Rick)) and the father of them all Kevin Phillips. Whitaker tried to get all these guys into The New Right Papers.

For what it’s worth, here’s what Whitaker envisaged for the “Message from MARs.” I think Whitaker overemphasizes the violence in the MARs worldview. I don’t think it comes through in Warren’s work nearly to the extent that Whitaker glosses it here.

In fact, Whitaker saw the populist New Right in violent terms, or at least reckoning with a highly combustible substance. To quote my draft manuscript

Whitaker claimed a “major function of the New Right” was to keep the revolution “political.” In the same vein, Weyrich told an interviewer the New Right were in a war. “It may not be with bullets,” but it “is a war nevertheless.” One of “ideology,” “ideas” and “our way of life.” They must fight with the same “intensity” and “dedication” as “a shooting war.

The New Right Papers did not remake the right. The book’s publication three years after Whitaker began the project may have meant it missed the moment, so to speak—and his original proposal suggests a more impressive book than he was able to pull off. My editor joked: “thus was it ever.” The New Right’s dismissal of the traditional conservative movement also aroused criticism from potentially friendly corners. In his review for the more mainline conservative Human Events, Bruce Bartlett criticized the authors anthologized in The New Right Papers for abandoning free enterprise and thereby playing into liberal hands. They made the same mistake liberals did in encroaching on freedom. “I suspect that some people in the New Right know and understand this fact full well,” Bartlett wrote. “Rather than causing them concern, they rejoice at the opportunity to use state power to force people to adhere to their moral and social code.”

After Bob Whitaker left the government in 1985, it’s not clear what he did. His web biography says he travelled to Central America and Russia, and retired in the 1990s. It implies he worked in intelligence, but it’s hard to tell because he seemed to lose control of his ability to write and engage with the mainstream. He may have just become a fantasist. His third book—an insane collection of what reads like old internet message board posts—was unpublishable, and Whitaker became an active racist, a pro-white activist, and a popularizer of the concept of “White genocide.” He was briefly the vice presidential candidate for the white nationalist American Freedom Party in 2016. He died the following year.

Like Whitaker, by the 1990s, his Populist Forum colleague Robert Hoy had also become an open white nationalist. He supported David Duke in 1990, and made national news gatecrashing one of Bill Clinton’s Advisory Board on Race sessions at Annandale High School in 1997. At a press conference about the Advisory Board, Hoy appeared alongside Jared Taylor, Thomas Chittum, Michael Hart, and others.

I note all this not to impute Francis’s guilt by association. I think he said and did enough on his own to conclude he was a racist. But it is revealing that the most ardent populists from this group - Francis, Whitaker, Hoy - became anti-immigration to the point of white supremacy.