Counter-Currents
Sam T. Francis by Phil Eiger Newmann, 2021
1,185 words
The late Sam Francis may finally get his due. Several mainstream conservative writers now interact with the paleoconservative’s work and admit his influence. Ever since Donald Trump first captured the public’s imagination in 2015, political observers have looked to Francis to explain the populist moment.
It could be said that Francis has now been rehabilitated in respectable discourse, but this has come at a cost. Those who positively cite Francis eschew or outright condemn his racial views. The “respectable” Francis is now just a theorist of class warfare and the managerial state. His very obvious support for white identity is ignored in favor of imagining he was the prophet of the conservative, multicultural working class.
The latest example of this comes from Matthew Schmitz at The American Conservative. Schmitz has long delved into ideas from the Dissident Right. In 2017, he wrote a rebuke of the Alt Right’s alleged anti-Christianity in an article entitled, “Christianity is for Cucks.” He has written similar articles since then. But while he will signal against the supposed extremism of the Dissident Right, he’s still influenced by us.
Schmitz positively cited Sam Francis this week to challenge claims that the “insurgent new right” has a shaky basis of support. Schmitz does not see identitarians as the new Right; he sees it in “integralism” and other respectable forms of post-liberalism. While he admits that many of these strains are too different to be united under one clear ideology, he claims they all fall under the label of new Right because they all “stress consolidation over dispersion, force over persuasion, communal belonging — national or religious — over individual autonomy.”
Critics have said the new Right is at odds with the actual Trump-supporting base. These critics claim the base is much more libertarian than integralists imagine. They also insist that Trump supporters are more motivated by “owning the libs” than by appeals to the common good.
Schmitz claims Francis thoroughly disproves these arguments:
[The new right] has a deep and abiding base of popular support in what Sam Francis called the “post-bourgeois proletariat,” people who live in, but are not fully part of, our managerial regime. Their outlook — described by Francis as “working-class anti-liberalism” — chimes with new right themes.
Post-bourgeois proletarians hate political correctness, not because they are principled defenders of free speech but because they resent the managerial class that creates and enforces the current speech codes. They resent the HR manager’s faith. They do not reject all pieties. . . .
Post-bourgeois proletarians prefer shows of force to subtle forms of manipulation. They are Jacksonians on foreign policy and law-and-order voters on crime. They probably do not read the Bible or consult the Catechism, but they honor flag, faith, and family.
Francis described the beliefs of the post-bourgeois proletariat in ways that will seem familiar to any follower of abstruse debates over postliberalism, integralism, and the like. They show “little attraction to bourgeois conservatism and its emphasis on laissez-faire economics, the rights of property, [and] the minimal state.
Schmitz goes on to see this anti-liberal proletariat as the nucleus for the new right’s seizure of power. The conservative writer dismisses the traditional middle class of small businessmen and property owners as too small and incapable of resistance against the managerial order. Only the proletariat, eager for the new Right’s message, can. “Opponents of managerialism must give voice to working-class anti-liberalism, mobilizing their base of support, or they will be no more effective than Don Quixote,” he argues.
Schmitz concludes by saying that all this proves that the new right’s ideas carry weight with a broad constituency:
Theories like integralism and post-liberalism may at times take on fantastical form, but they track the movements of real bodies. Like shadows in a film noir, they are distillations and exaggerations, expressing in stark terms truths that otherwise go unseen.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s White Identity Politics here.
At first glance, identitarians would probably not be troubled by this analysis. They would feel that they are part of the new Right against Conservative Inc. A lot of our people see the working class — albeit with an emphasis on the white working class — as the best bet for social change. Identitiarians also wouldn’t have an issue with Schmitz’s description of this class and their characteristics.
The issue comes with what Schmitz implies that this class would gravitate towards. The writer takes bits of the Trumpist moment and Francis’ thinking to conclude that it all leads to a multicultural working class fighting for integralism. This is only hinted at in this American Conservative article, but is fleshed out in Schmitz’s other writings. In 2018, he wrote:
Progressives now stand with global capital, as the Pride Parade so clearly shows. Christians in turn should stand with the working class, which is more religious, more diverse, and more patriotic than the managerial elite. Only by reducing inequality and restraining corporations can Christians avoid being buried. (Emphasis added)
In 2020, he entertained the idea of “post-liberals” supporting Kanye West’s presidency because it would help to build a “multiracial, working-class, patriotic conservative party.”
The post-bourgeois proletariat envisioned in the Francis article is not the white working class. It’s the diverse working class.
This completely misunderstands Sam Francis. Francis was pretty clear about the identity of this working class: It’s a white proletariat. He did not envision Mexican fruit-pickers, black McDonald’s workers, and white welders all joining forces to take on the white managerial elite. Race is inseparable from Francis’ thinking.
Here is what Francis said about the dispossessed revolutionary class in 1994:
As long as whites continue to avoid and deny their own racial identity, at a time when almost every other racial and ethnic category is rediscovering and asserting its own, whites will have no chance to resist their dispossession and their eventual possible physical destruction. Before we can seriously discuss any concrete proposals for preserving our culture and its biological and demographic foundations, we have to address and correct the problem we inflict on ourselves, our own lack of a racial consciousness and the absence of a common will to act in accordance with it.
A post-bourgeois proletariat without any sense of racial consciousness is doomed to failure. This is at the core of Francis’s thinking.
That’s not to say that it’s bad that mainstream conservatives aren’t positively citing a bowdlerized Francis. It’s actually a good thing. More attention to Francis means more people will find his less “respectable” essays and see the world in a whole new way. It will certainly lead to some readers turning to the Dissident Right. The more people who read Francis, the better.
But Francis’ ideology cannot be separated from the racial element — nor can National Populism itself. Donald Trump was vulgar, brash, and racially insensitive when he ran for President in 2016. Nothing in his agenda or style related to Catholic integralism, outside of a greater willingness to use state power and support for some entitlement programs. His agenda was animated more by white backlash than class war.
This is an inconvenient truth for the “new right,” but it’s one they can’t deny. They just need to read more Sam Francis to understand what truly makes Middle American radicals tick.
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.
- First, donor comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Second, donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Non-donors will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days.
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:
Paywall Gift Subscriptions
If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:
- your payment
- the recipient’s name
- the recipient’s email address
- your name
- your email address
To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.
14 comments
It’s hard to believe that they’d try to water down the message of Sam Francis. Still, at least the real thing isn’t too difficult to find.
Samuel Francis could as well have been talking about Rod Dreher’s American Conservative when he denounced ‘the harmless persuasion.’ Every criticism that Francis leveled at the neoconservatives applies, only more. They are inoffensive—so much so that Dreher’s good friend Ross Douthat is allowed to write for The New York Times. They are treated as edgy, but legitimate, intellectuals by the system media in an age when even the average GOP voter is an enemy of the state. Everything they say and write is carefully calculated to be dissident enough to be interesting in our bland and monotonous totalitarian media, but not so dissident as to imperil their relationship with that media. Unlike Conservatism Inc., which was so cognitively lacking that it promoted Jonah Goldberg as a thinker, the Dreherites have built an alternative to white nationalism that is at least as intellectually serious as most white nationalist sites. Although they have no virtually no popular support at all (while implicit white nationalism is now the practical ideology of the American right), they are the first movement to emerge from the Trump Era demise of Conservatism Inc. that can provide an intellectually, instead of merely politically, serious rightwing alternative to white nationalism, and The New York Times knows it and loves them for it.
There is no risk of Dreherism politically challenging either the system or white nationalism. Everywhere in the West religion is rapidly fading, most of all as a political force, especially among the youth. No where is this more clear than in the enthusiasm Donald Trump, the most openly irreligious man to run for president in living memory, received from Evangelicals. The danger of Dreherism is that it is a safe ‘out’ for rightwing intellectuals. Instead of facing either outright demonisation or the constant risk of doxxing for engaging with white nationalism, one can play with Thomas Aquinas, Augustine of Hippo and Christopher Lasch and get rave reviews in The New York Times. Conservatism Inc. hamstrung the right by gatekeeping rightwing intelligentsia from anyone intellectually serious enough to challenge the left’s principles. Dreherism threatens the same, but with the opposite approach; instead of purging the intellectually serious out of political expediency, it offers them a sanctioned ghetto where there is no risk of anything politically dangerous ever escaping to contaminate the masses with ‘hateful’ thoughts. Instead of attacking the system we actually have to live under, the Dreherites critique a classical liberalism that hasn’t been the ruling ideology anywhere in America since at least the Civil Rights Act was passed from a medieval perspective that would have been antiquarian in Victorian Britain.
But there is one thing that Rod Dreher and his friends at the American Conservative deserve nothing but praise for. While the altright was worrying about how to influence the Trump adminstration, a task that proved impossible anyhow, and inviting legal trouble on itself with rallies, the Dreherites stayed totally aloof of the entire thing and focused on their intellectual pursuits. White nationalists have focused far too much on partisan politics and not enough on asserting their own philosophy—and not because we are not capable. Ernst Haeckel, Savitri Devi, William Luther Pierce and many of the historical authors published by this website all espoused nationalism not just as a policy position, but as a worldview. The altright (especially after 2016) put partisan politics first, even though everything that it achieved was metapolitical instead of government policy. As inoffensive and ineffectual as Dreherism is, it has been far better at asserting its own worldview than we have, and our failures in this area mean that plenty of highly intelligent, ideologically-inclined whites that might otherwise have become white nationalists are going to take the ‘out’ of Catholic Integralism.
Good point about TAC having almost no popular support. I used to look at their twitter feed and the few responses they would get would be dissident right types telling them how they are wrong.
Sam Francis would be pleased at the collapse of Conservative Inc. and the rise of the dissident right. He would also expose Dreher and the harmless buffoons at TAC.
Ernst Haeckel, Savitri Devi, William Luther Pierce… are some very colorful figures who’s intellectual output can simply not provide a basis for a serious political movement. Beautiful wackos to entertain beautiful losers. Fitting how this article is about Sam Francis.
The only successful rightwing, nationalist political movement in the West so far, the one that it took World War to stop, was following the same philosophy that they espoused. Watch Ewiger Wald if you doubt that.
Everything else has failed, and without any need for such dramatic measures to stop it. Franco’s regime? Peacefully deposed by the king that Franco himself restored upon his death. The Estado Novo? Its own military decided that it liked Marxism more. The Greek Junta? It was overthrown after the State Department decided that it had outlived its usefulness. I suppose that you could point to Orbán in Hungary, but his government seems to me more like a rearguard action than a revolutionary movement to turn the tide.
I am not making the ‘they’re just going to call you a nazi anyway’ argument, which is juvenile. There is no need to shackle ourselves with the baggage of WWII. We can restate the same basic philosophy, which Hitler in no way originated, without tying ourselves down. E. O. Wilson was not far off, and I doubt that he even realised it.
I see no other way forward. Rearguard actions and conservatism, no matter how hardline, are not going to cut it. We need a total, revolutionary new charge in worldview, as dramatic as the one that took us from Christianity down the path to Drag Queen Story Hour if we are to survive. This was already happening at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Darwinism and other scientific discoveries were calling into question the atheistic, anthropocentric egalitarianism of the French Revolution. Hitler was but the first to make it the basis of his government, he had not come up with any of it. After WWII came a great reaction; the Cult of Reason’s own Bourbon Restoration. With World War II faded from memory, advances in genetics challenging egalitarianism far more than anything had in the Twentieth Century and the internet breaking the system media’s information quarantine, we get a second chance at an ideological paradigm shift. If we fail, if we cannot enact a total charge in worldview, our entire race will be destroyed.
I think you’re working within too broad categories. E.O. Wilson is as far as anyone can get from Hitler while still acknowledging biology and staying in our sphere. Frank Salter put it more bluntly, and I think a nationalistic polity that lets scientific truth inform its policies is all we need. This, again, is very much distant from Savitri Devi esoterica, and however she might have envisioned a perfect state to be.
I have to disagree. William Luther Pierce was estatic when he read of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology in Time magazine. He wrote in his celebratory article on it, Sociobiology: The Truth at Last that ‘National Socialism may properly be thought of as applied sociobiology extended into the political realm.’
It is possible that Pierce misunderstood Hitler and thereby I have a second-hand misunderstanding of Hitler. Perhaps I am projecting too much of my own beliefs onto the Third Reich. I’ve read Rosenberg but never Mein Kampf, because I assume that it is more about the here-and-now of Weimar Germany and contemporary politics than anything that is of interest to us in the 2020s. Rosenberg praises Darwin on the first page of the first chapter of his book (or at least the first page of the first chapter of my translated copy) though, so I think that my understanding is not too far off the mark.
No one could be a greater fan of Frank Salter’s research than I am (I only started reading about race and IQ after reading some of Frank Salter’s writings on ethnic genetic interests sparked an interest in the science of race), but I was never particularly impressed with his political philosophy. It seems like he is running with utilitarianism, and that has never managed to overcome the is-ought problem.
Good comment, and despite its length, I wish you would elaborate a bit more. What is this “Dreherite” ” intellectually, instead of merely politically, serious rightwing alternative to white nationalism”? In what does it consist? Certainly not Catholic Integralism, as Dreher is not Catholic. I only occasionally glance at The American Conservative website (is it any longer possible for a non-subscriber to access the actual magazine archives?). Dreher is no WN, but he’s not bad. Take away the knee-jerk sniveling when faced with liberal sensitivities, and he does denounce many things prowhites hate, too. I’ll read his Live Not By Lies at some point. I think he exaggerates the persecution of Christians in the US (and risibly understates that of whites qua whites). But I like that he recognizes that the Occupationist Regime is real, and deeply hostile to Traditional {white, Christian} America. Of course, many of the writers here, starting with Greg Johnson, are far more insightful than Dreher. But then it always seems to be the case that the best American rightist thinkers are the most marginalized (the irony here is that TAC was founded by paleocons as precisely NOT to be a place for snivelers not wanting to stray too far from “rigththink”; how did wimpy Dreher end up with it?).
The one magazine that is getting better – slowly groping its way closer to, if not WN, at least an overt race and culture realism – is First Things. I was a charter subscriber to TAC, and it has gone way downhill. I’ve been reading FT for a long time and it has gotten better ideologically (the academic quality of the writing remains pretty much the same).
You might be interested, when I went looking to see if I could find Francis’ original essay online to show how well some of his other quotes on neoconservatism described Dreher, I found out that Paul Gottfried had already beaten me to describing Dreherism as ‘the harmless persuasion.’
As for what it is, I would say Christian Traditionalism. I say Catholic Integralism because Dreher was a Catholic for most of his career and converted because of disagreements with the Church leadership, not for theological reasons and because the rest of his camp are all Catholic.
They dislike a lot of the same things as us, because like us they are opposed to the anthropocentric humanism that we live under. But they are coming at it from a different angle. We are coming at it from the Book of Nature, specifically racial biology, while they are coming at it from the Old and New Testaments. (And before I’m accused of anti-Christianity, there are Christians that manage to synthesise both, and Morris van de Camp makes a persuasive case that Gothic Christianity as a whole did. But the Dreherites are not among those Christians.)
I meant to say ‘William de Vere’ not ‘Morris van de Camp.’ Counter-Currents has too many brilliant writers with ‘de’ in their names.
Appreciate the article. But I see a watered down version of Francis being talked about in the mainstream as very positive. More and more people then turn to original sources and get deeper. A watered down version of Steve Sailer, Goad, Counter Currents would be good to have in mainstream outlets. An engine needs to build a certain amount of steam and pressure before it moves.
Call yourself racist/racialist or white preservationist/separatist/supremacist or simply: (best and most uncompromising option) nationalsocialist (in german: Nationalsozialist), because words such as “patriot” or “nationalist” or even “fascist” are also often used by cucks who reject the reality and importance of race.
I mean of course that these cucks use mentioned words to describe themselves.
“An engine needs to build a certain amount of steam and pressure before it moves.”
How many generations of such weak, careful, half-hearted and half-brained “steam” have passed without its doing more than merely spinning our wheels?
Limited hangouts like Dreherism are, have been, and always will be legion. They are all dead ends – and are designed to be such.
Until we understand and act on the fact that the enemy of our race is the jew – not powers and principalities of the air, Turkic Khazarian oligarchical satraps, interdimensional lizard creatures, the broken tax code, our ex-wife, Cartesan epistemology, the absence of fathers in black neighborhoods, people misunderstanding the original Greek of this or that Bible verse, etc. – until, I say, we pull our heads out and see that the world’s foremost problem is the biological jew and his real-world political and legal power, we will remain impotent: spinning our wheels and gobbling drugs until the clock strikes extinction.
Comments are closed.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Edit your comment