Samuel T. Francis and Revolution from the Middle
by Joseph Scotchie
Shotwell Publishing, 201 pages, $24.95

Dead white supremacist. Voice of the racist right. Dangerous apostle of right-wing populism.

Such terms of non-endearment have been applied to the right-wing writer Sam Francis since his untimely death in 2005 at age 57. As the phrases suggest, not only Francis’s death, but also his ideas, were untimely. 

Francis was a progenitor of “paleoconservatism” but moved on from that ideology in the mid-1990s, following a personal crisis and President Bill Clinton’s reelection victory. The more radical alternative he developed in the final decade of his abbreviated life pointed beyond not only neoconservatism, against which the paleocons had asserted America First principles, but also the Trumpian New Right—decades before Donald Trump descended the golden escalator and announced he was running for president.

Relegated to the margins of respectable conservatism, Francis set himself a forbidden task: He became, in the words of one associate, “the premier philosopher of white racial consciousness.” As a result, he was by turns vilified and ignored. Yet many conservatives (and a few liberals) who encounter his works today find the myriad insights contained therein too valuable to disregard.

Samuel T. Francis and Revolution from the Middle, a new book by the journalist Joseph Scotchie, is an intellectual biography, a survey of late-20th-century conservative thought, and, most remarkably, an act of redemption. A few prominent conservatives in the media—most notably, David Brooks of the New York Times—have exhumed the corpus that Francis left behind and presented him as a prophet of post-globalization nationalism, albeit a problematic one. But Scotchie, who had been a friend of “Sam,” aims for a full rehabilitation.

The title alludes to multiple essays by Francis, including “Message from MARs,” first published in 1982. Francis proposed that “Middle American Radicals” could form the social base of a political and cultural revolution. The essay’s quasi-Marxian class analysis and treatment of ideology as epiphenomenal to material interests shows the deep influence on Francis of James Burnham, the Trotskyite-turned-conservative and regular contributor to National Review. (Other influences, mentioned by Scotchie, include the political philosopher Willmoore Kendall, the sociologist Donald E. Warren, and the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci.)

In Francis’s telling, Middle American Radicals are middle-income whites who resent their exploitation by “managerial” elites (a term borrowed from Burnham). Against cosmopolitanism, they affirm their distinctive cultural identities. Against liberal values, they promote traditional morality. Against the forces of corporate capitalism and the welfare-regulatory state, they advance their interests as diligent but struggling workers. A bold, aggressive president who vanquishes their foes can carry forward their revolution.

Francis must have thought that Pat Buchanan—a paleoconservative luminary (and co-founder of this magazine)—was just the man for the job. In 1991, when Buchanan was preparing a run for the Republican nomination, Francis privately urged him to issue a radical appeal to disaffected voters. “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 anymore,” Francis recalled telling him. “Pat listened, but I can’t say he took my advice.”

Opposition to conservatism was a recurrent theme for Francis. Paladins of the Old Right had wielded conservative ideology to defend their stature within the establishment. The Movement conservatives, by contrast, roamed the wilderness outside the walls of power. “The first thing we have to learn about fighting and winning a culture war is that we are not fighting to ‘conserve’ something, we are trying to overthrow something,” thundered Francis at a conference in the early 1990s. Francis despised the left, but, as Scotchie emphasizes, he reserved special disdain for conservatives who seek to ingratiate themselves with progressive elites and insinuate themselves into liberal institutions, diluting their principles—and betraying Middle Americans—in the process.

Francis hadn’t always been a rabid right-winger, at least publicly, and he sported the pedigree of a domesticated political animal. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Johns Hopkins University and a PhD at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Next he worked in Washington, DC as a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation and an aide to Sen. John East (R-NC). 

After the lawmaker died from suicide in 1986, Francis entered the world of journalism—and thrived. For nearly a decade, he was an editorial writer at the Washington Times, where he earned national awards, a wide readership, and a well-deserved reputation as a prose stylist and sharp-tongued polemicist.

Alas, that would be the last position of prestige that Francis would ever hold. The Times let him go in 1995 after Dinesh D’Souza, a neoconservative journalist, covered an American Renaissance conference that Francis had spoken at one year prior. An immigrant of Indian extraction, D’Souza must have stood out in the audience—American Renaissance is a pro-white outlet founded by Jared Taylor, a self-described “race realist” and “white advocate.”

D’Souza took umbrage at the anti-immigration sentiments expressed by various speakers, and his report, published in the Washington Post, was a snitch job. Taylor had proclaimed “our right, our duty, not to let our country become full of people who are utterly unlike ourselves.” Francis too had delivered a rousing call to action. As quoted by D’Souza, he implored those present 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. . . . The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.

A severance agreement soon was successfully transmitted to Francis, who wrote about his firing (or rather, his coerced “resignation”) in the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles, concluding with a mic-drop kicker that Scotchie quotes:

It’s true I lost my job and my Washington outlet, and that’s a blow, but it’s far from death. In the coming years, the Beltway right may be amazed to discover how little it has to do with the direction in which the country is moving, and I plan to be there when it finds out that no one else is paying much attention to its precious “limits” on what you can and cannot say.

Clearly, one of Francis’s virtues was resilience. Another, less obvious one was personal humility. His dismissal from the Times was a major news story. “Francis, however, stayed out of the limelight,” Scotchie writes. “He called off any demonstrations planned on his behalf and refused media interviews.” Francis was a private man, even reclusive. He did, however, have many friends, including one Louis March, a Capitol Hill staffer whom Francis met in the 1970s. Scotchie includes, in an early chapter, colorful excerpts from March’s eulogy of Francis, such as the following:

One day at our usual after-work haunt, I was a bit down in the mouth. I’d been invited out to California and needed an extra $500 that I didn’t have to make the trip. I had never been to California. Sam spoke up: “I’ll lend you the money. I have the $500, you need it, end of story.” I was amazed. And if you knew what a fastidiously frugal fellow he was, you’d be too!

Generosity, resilience, a certain kind of humility—Francis possessed all these admirable qualities. Prudence, however, was another matter, notwithstanding his apparent frugality. 

To observe that a man lacks prudence is not necessarily to imply that he should acquire it. Did Leonidas act prudently when he led 300 Spartans against thousands of Persian invaders in the Battle of Thermopylae? The good king died in combat, yet in so doing attained immortality, and the Greeks, inspired by his example, won the war the next year. Leonidas displayed courage, tenacity, and self-denying patriotism, to be sure, but not prudence, which would have attenuated those other virtues.

Ditto Francis, who admired the fighting spirit of Western man and aspired to enact it, or at least, an intellectual’s version of it. Summarizing Francis’s view on the subject, Scotchie writes:

Western man accepted a tragic fate. He would not hide from his enemies. Magic would not save him. No deliverance from the gods was forthcoming. He would fight, even when defeat was pre-ordained. Western man would come home with his shield or as a dead man laying upon it. He accepted the dangerous life. He preferred a short life full of heroic deeds to a long one spent in servitude.

Scotchie continues:

Western man, Sam concluded, had a thousands-year-old legacy worth saving—and enhancing. Self-government, inventiveness in arts and sciences, a class structure producing harmony and self-worth, respect for women and animals. However, the defining quality is courage. Sam quoted Davy Crockett: “Be sure you are right, then go ahead.” Western man was willing to fight and die under great odds, knowing that in defeat he planted seeds of victory.

Francis was sure he was right, and he marched ahead, often courageously, but even fellow travelers sometimes doubted the wisdom of the most daring steps he took. Scotchie draws attention to one essay from 1996 in which Francis uses the term “Aryans” when referring to proto-Europeans, even after reflecting on its unfortunate connotations. In the piece—entitled “The Roots of the White Man”—Francis leaned into the term’s racial-biological significance. “Whatever modern scholars may say about the old Aryans being merely a language group and not a race,” Francis wrote, “that does not seem to be the way the old Aryans themselves looked upon the question.”

Scotchie, at times in the book, seems self-conscious about writing a laudatory monograph on a white nationalist. “If this biography is ever reviewed, the identification of Sam Francis as a ‘racist’ will overshadow everything else he thought and wrote about,” he laments. Scotchie notes that Francis “denied being a racist, even though he believed there are differences between races and cultures.” He relays what he takes to be a redeeming observation from Francis’s friend and ally Peter Brimelow, an immigration restrictionist and founder of the website VDARE. Brimelow, Scotchie writes,

pointed out that Sam had purchased a home in Seabrook, which happens to have black-majority residents. Sam, as Brimelow approvingly observed, lived in peace with his longtime black neighbors, none of whom, we can guess, knew that their neighbor—an unassuming middle-aged man, wearing a pullover sweater, hair falling over his forehead, quietly chain-smoking and wise-cracking along—was the most controversial political columnist in America.

That Francis “lived in peace” with black neighbors likely wouldn’t impress many liberals. Francis wouldn’t have minded their continued scorn, and he might even have objected to being defended on grounds of good behavior in multi-racial settings. He didn’t care about impressing liberals—or conservatives—and so perhaps we should judge him according to standards he would recognize as worthy, even if we do not ourselves endorse them. For example, we could try to ascertain whether he succeeded in his racial project.

Francis has been hailed—including, emphatically, by Scotchie—for laying the groundwork for the Trump revolution. “Trump’s 2024 campaign was pure Sam Francis,” Scotchie writes. Commentators less enthralled by Francis have also marveled at his prescience. Michael Brendan Dougherty, for example, wrote a 2016 article whose subheadline depicted the writings of Francis as “the Rosetta Stone for Trumpism.” He focused especially on an essay Francis had published 20 years earlier, “From Household to Nation,” which, Dougherty said, “reads like a political manifesto from which the Trump campaign springs.” 

The judgment is well-founded. Francis clearly anticipated the right-populist wave that Trump rode into the White House. And he elucidated, with academic precision, the social forces that made such an event possible, even likely, if only some post-libertarian, anti-globalist leader emerged to channel them into political triumph. But would that triumph in fact fulfill the dreams of Francis?

Living as we do in the Trump era, I think we can say with some confidence that the answer is “no.” Though Francis has been called a nationalist, he was, more fundamentally, a civilizationist, as his reflections on Western man illustrate. But the America First movement he supported has, in the final analysis, undermined that grander program. The second Trump administration, with its vehemence against cultural liberalism, has weakened alliances with Europe and Canada, even as it has strengthened ties with the Arab Gulf states and other non-Western nations.

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As the MAGA movement has produced a global rupture between America and its civilizational allies, it has also amplified tensions at home between white liberals and white conservatives. Electorally, Trump overcame the backlash of white liberal elites by boosting his support among black and Hispanic men and driving to the polls low-propensity, working-class white voters. Meanwhile, educated white suburbanites have flipped to the Democrats. MAGA conservatives have welcomed this realignment—but unlike Francis, MAGA conservatives are not advocates of white solidarity.

Perhaps Francis, who delighted in offending the sensibilities of white liberals, would also have applauded these developments, but I fail to see how they serve his cause of creating white racial consciousness. What he—and Scotchie—seem to have overlooked is that populist nationalism sits uneasily with the lofty civilizational pride that Francis felt in himself and promoted in his most ruminative writings. Had he lived to witness the movement he foresaw, I suspect Francis would have disavowed it, gravitating toward a more elitist and pan-Europeanist ideology.

Samuel T. Francis and Revolution from the Middle memorializes a brilliant and eccentric figure, a right-wing radical whose perceptiveness on deep political matters even the most milquetoast conservatives cannot deny. In addition to identifying Francis’s intellectual lodestars, Scotchie illuminates his most controversial aims and adeptly tracks the evolution of his ideas. But as Hume once observed about the field of ethics, there is a gulf here between the is and the ought, the analysis of nationalist discontent and the yearning for civilizational revival, and neither Francis nor his biographer seem to have noticed it.