Politics

The Sam Francis I Knew

The late conservative thinker, who died 20 years ago Saturday, has transcended the pariah status imposed on him during his life.

Seeing that the 20th anniversary of the passing of Samuel T. Francis transpired on February 15, this may be the proper time to recall this gifted thinker of the American right. Francis wrote provocative books, but unfortunately, they didn’t attract prestigious presses, the one exception being University of Missouri Press, which brought out Francis’s acidic collection of essays Beautiful Losers in 1993. Most of his other books were published by obscure or vanity presses, and his posthumously printed anthology of sociological studies, Leviathan and its Enemies, only saw light in 2016 thanks to a far-right publishing house. No leading conservative press, to my knowledge, offered to publish these learned studies in book form. (Although I too as a writer suffered excommunication by so-called conservative publishers, leading academic presses have always taken my work.)  

Francis was a brilliant, witty columnist appearing in both The Washington Times and Chronicles magazine. As is well known, he lost his post as a prize-winning commentator at the Times in 1995 because of a long-remembered professional faux pas. Francis chastised the Southern Baptist Convention for having offered a collective apology for its members’ onetime practice of slavery. By then, however, Francis had taken many other bold positions against what he interpreted as the leftward course of American politics and culture. His remarks about slavery and the Southern Baptist Convention were seen as further proof of his unwillingness to take polite stands on delicate issues. 

Although a Southerner from Chattanooga, Tennessee, this longtime acquaintance never expressed sympathy for the Lost Cause, which he saw as a failed uprising led by an overly confident planter class (to which his own family belonged). His focus was on his own age—the danger he saw in the politics of misplaced guilt and the inability of socially rooted Americans to throw off the rule of the managerial class and the ideology by which it manipulated its subjects. 

Francis’s favorite conservative thinker was James Burnham, on whom he wrote a monograph and whose study of the managerial revolution was his constant reference work. Francis never held it against Burnham that he wrote his classic while still under Marxist influence, because for Francis such an identity may have helped Burnham understand the aspect of class struggle inherent in what the right was now required to do. A true right, as opposed to a bought conservative movement, according to Francis, would unite with the social group which he, in the manner of sociologist Donald Warren, called “middle Americans.” The right’s natural allies were the predominantly white working class, which was found mostly outside the large cities. It was this group that carried traditional values, and whose members felt growing resentment at how managerial elites were destroying their way of life and trampling on their sense of the sacred. 

Much of Francis’s critique of urban modernity and manipulative bureaucrats can be found in more mainstream critics like Christopher Lasch. But, unlike more commercially acceptable commentators, Francis laced his writing with sarcasm and invective, and he left no doubt that he was coming from the right. In his last years, before being snatched away by an aneurysm at the age of 57, he addressed white nationalist audiences, although most of what he said to these listeners was aimed at the failings of white people whom he thought were being suckered by what had become the multicultural left. That Sam framed his argument in racial terms was short-sighted and sometimes offensive, but the underlying assumption about where the U.S. and other Western countries were headed was right on.   

If there was anything about his native South that Sam valued, it was not its upper-class gentility but its populist tradition. He once joked with me that, while watching the movie adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s award-winning novel All the King’s Men, he discovered that Willie Stark—the Louisiana populist figure based on Huey Long—was someone to his liking. But as we knew, Sam was anything but the self-described populist “hick” played by Broderick Crawford in the movie. He was a widely read scholar, who wrote knowledgeably on Burnham, Machiavelli, C. Wright Mill, and Antonio Gramsci; he produced a doctoral dissertation on the Earl of Clarendon as a chronicler of the English Civil War. He was also proud of his Huguenot ancestry and would tell us that his middle name “Todd” marked his descent from Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of Abraham Lincoln. 

Arguably, even if Sam had never spoken about race, he would have been utterly unacceptable to the conservative establishment of his time. He baited the neoconservatives, who were then the movement’s vital center ideologically and financially. He also refused to pay homage to “private enterprise” and might have been mistaken for one of the leftist sociologists he wrote about when he went after global corporate capitalists. The shibboleths that he encountered on the Wall Street Journal editorial page were always anathema to him. He was an anti-liberal interventionist, a relentless critic of social reforms undertaken by the managerial state, and a populist rather than global democrat.

Although he would never live to experience this success, his ideas would eventually generate excitement among the younger generation on the right. As much as Francis was ostracized and abhorred by Boomer conservatives and Reaganauts, he would come to be revered by a later independent right. If he continues to be blacklisted by the establishment he scorned, his name turns up endlessly on social media and among right-wing intelligentsia in their 20s and 30s. Commentaries on how Donald Trump’s electoral victory was owing to the adoption of Sam Francis’ strategy have become a pervasive media theme. Meanwhile, woke leftist authors like John Ganz have become obsessive about seeing the shadow of Sam Francis everywhere on a transformed right. A certain inevitability may be attached to Francis’s continued relevance. In my autobiographical Encounters, I dwell on his high ranking even among the great conservative figures of the second half of the last century. That Fox News groupies and conservative movement careerists choose to ignore him may be taken as high praise. However slowly, things are moving in his direction.

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