Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
Michael Pugliese wrote:
> http://www.right-now.org/latest.htm
> RN31, Apr - June 2001 | close window
>
> Beyond the Beltway - the real American Right
>
> Derek Turner interviews Samuel Francis, the US political analyst Pat
> Buchanan once called "the Clausewitz of the Right"
>
> You have said that "The first thing to be said about the presidential
> election of 2000 is that George W Bush and the Stupid Party lost miserably".
> What do you mean by this?
>
> In the literal sense, of course, they won, but it has to be remembered that
> they did lose the popular vote and, had it not been for the presence of
> Ralph Nader's Green Party on the ballot, the Republicans would have lost
> decisively to Gore. Let’s leave aside the pettifoggery about who really won
> Florida, if anyone really won Florida.
>
> But in the larger sense, I meant that the "new Republicanism" on which Bush
> campaigned - the "compassionate conservatism", the "Big Tent Republicanism",
> what I call the "Rainbow Republicanism" - that was so evident in the racial
> pandering in the GOP convention and throughout the campaign - all failed.
> Bush didn’t win the election because of it or because blacks and Hispanics
> and women flocked to his banner (blacks and Hispanics flocked overwhelmingly
> to Gore’s banner); he won because the conservative rank and file of the
> party supported him, the white, Christian, middle class, culturally
> conservative iceberg on which all the Titanics of liberalism, Republican or
> Democrat, eventually crash. They supported Bush despite his running after
> strange gods, but just barely. If the Republicans keep ignoring or betraying
> them, they'll stay home or go somewhere else.
>
> Bush himself won; it was his strategy and the liberal worldview on which it
> is based that lost miserably.
>
> What is wrong with the US conservative movement? Are the Republicans
> unsalvageable?
> I believe the Republican Party is generally unsalvageable today. Because
> Bush did win legally, he and his supporters are now in a position to say
> that the old Reaganite, Southern Strategy, Willie Horton approach is what
> hurt Republicans and it’s the kinder, gentler approach of "compassionate
> conservatism" that won. As I’ve just indicated, that’s not true, but it
> takes some time and effort to argue that. It’s not obvious to casual
> observers.
>
> As a matter of fact, the Republican Left has been making exactly the same
> argument for generations - ever since the New Deal - that the Right has no
> following and is just a small bunch of ideologues. The truth is that except
> for the war hero Eisenhower, no liberal Republican has ever been able to win
> the presidency. Only by running to the Right -- as Nixon, Reagan, and Bush
> Senior in 1988 did - can Republicans win. What is remarkable today is that
> Republican conservatives have now begun to buy into the Republican Left’s
> argument.
>
> As for the conservative movement, in the 1980s the movement was invaded by
> "neo-conservatives" whose metamorphosis into genuine conservatives was
> incomplete, insincere, or both. The neo-cons brought some talents to the
> movement, but they insisted on having everything their own way. They
> succeeded in forcing out or silencing some of the best Old Right thinkers
> and then watering down the militant counter-revolutionary thrust of post-War
> American conservatism so that it would be more palatable to New Deal
> liberals who were afraid of the Soviet Union but were frightened by
> so-called "McCarthyism", concerned about Israel, opposed to anti-white
> racism, and didn’t like homosexuals, extreme feminists and criminals. Having
> destroyed Old Right conservatism, the neo-cons today are amazed to see that
> the GOP is not neo-conservative but really believes in nothing while
> purporting to believe in everything. G K Chesterton once said something to
> the effect that when you cease to believe in God, it is not the case that
> you then believe in nothing; it is the case that you then believe in
> everything. Having ceased to believe in serious conservatism, the GOP and
> many conservatives are now willing to believe that everything is
> conservative - Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, globalist foreign
> policy, continuous war, presidential supremacy, the welfare state, etc.
>
> To what do you attribute the ignominious collapse of the Buchanan campaign?
>
> Buchanan and his sister, who ran his campaign, made a number of serious
> tactical blunders. They made Lenora Fulani, a black Marxist, co-chairman of
> the campaign, which allowed Pat’s critics on the neo-con Right to ridicule
> him for claiming to be a "true conservative". The campaign emphasized trade
> and foreign policy issues at a time when neither went anywhere with the
> voters. And they chose a black female running mate (although she was at
> least a strong conservative) with some embarrassing baggage and no standing
> whatsoever. But Pat’s main problem was that conservatives had become so sick
> of Clinton and so scared of Gore that they insisted on voting for a
> Republican who had a chance of winning, regardless of whether he was really
> a conservative at all. This is because, as I have written in several places
> over the last few years, the American Right has become obsessed by Clinton,
> at the expense of substantive issues. The Right could have been redefining
> foreign policy after the Cold War, reforming immigration policy, dealing
> with a number of practical issues in a serious and radically conservative
> way that could have won them a new image and new voters. Instead, all they
> yammered about was Whitewater, Vince Foster, Monica Lewinsky, etc, etc.
> Nothing reveals the intellectual poverty of the American Right today more
> than this tendency towards obsessiveness over Clinton at the expense of
> serious issues.
>
> Are there any genuine conservatives in the new administration? What do you
> think of John Ashcroft?
>
> I’m sure there must be some real conservatives there, but I really can’t
> tell you who they are or what they might do. Dick Cheney is pretty
> conservative; I was sorry to see him trying to backtrack on his excellent
> voting record in Congress when he was named as Bush’s running mate. I would
> expect Cheney to provide some serious conservative instincts in the
> administration, but I doubt if he’ll have much pull against the spinmeisters
> and the political hacks.
>
> Ashcroft is a decent but rather dim fellow. He had a real chance during his
> nomination to challenge the kind of demagoguery about the sympathetic views
> of the Confederacy he had expressed, and he could have blasted political
> correctness and the black radical domination of political expression
> soundly. Unfortunately, he took the easy path of recanting and wallowing. I
> really don’t expect much from him in the future for real conservative
> politics.
>
> One of the principal problems with the organized conservative movement today
> is that it has based itself in Washington – "inside the Beltway" - and has
> come to be part of the political system it was supposed to challenge. The
> think tanks, periodicals, consultants, media stars, journalists, PR experts,
> etc form a managerial elite of their own, closely wedded to the larger
> Leftwing elites inside the state and appendages. The conservative wing can
> be part of this larger elite only if it refrains from saying and doing
> radical things that would threaten the larger system. Hence, the
> conservative wing has in effect become part of the system, has been co-opted
> by it.
>
> What has happened to the "Reagan Republicans" and the so-called "Middle
> American Radicals" (MARs)?
>
> The MARs - who provided the backbone of the Wallace, Reagan, Perot, and
> Buchanan movements - may still be there, but changes in the economy have
> undermined the manufacturing sector that was their economic base and changes
> in the culture, due mainly to immigration, and the emergence of non-white
> racial consciousness, have challenged their cultural role. Buchanan was
> never willing to appeal to them as radically as Wallace did, but it may
> still be possible to mobilize them in a radical conservative movement. Time
> will tell.
>
> Is Southern secession feasible and/or desirable?
>
> I have managed to anger a great many of my Southern friends by arguing that
> it is neither possible nor desirable. It is not possible because the
> Southern national identity is just not there today (it may not even have
> been there in 1861). It is not desirable because it draws an artificial
> regional line among the middle-class whites who should be working together
> and not trying to define each other as enemies as ‘Yankees’ and ‘Rednecks’.
> We - whites in general - are today faced with an immense threat from
> non-whites that is demographic, political, and cultural, and if we don’t
> learn how to work together in the next decade, the white world will vanish
> within a generation or so.
>
> Who are the most useful and important people on the modern US Right?
>
> I believe the Council of Conservative Citizens, as well as a handful of new
> publications, groups, and websites, are slowly building an alternative right
> that is sharply different from the Beltway Right around Bush. The Council is
> today mainly regional in its focus, mainly a Southern group, but it has
> chapters all over the country and is the only real membership group on the
> right in this country. Groups like the Christian Coalition and the John
> Birch Society, though still in existence, are virtually moribund. The
> Council is an activist organisation whose members agitate in defence of
> Southern traditions and symbols like the Confederate flag, against
> immigration, and similar grassroots issues.
>
> Peter Brimelow's website, Vdare.com [Editor’s Note: See RN21 for an
> interview with Peter Brimelow, or visit www.vdare.com], and Louis Andrews’
> Stalking the Wild Taboo [Editor’s Note: See page xxx, this issue) are
> probably the most exciting websites on the Right in cyberspace today, and of
> course, Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance remains the most courageous and
> most interesting hard copy publication on the American Right, though it has
> only a racial focus. Middle American News is a good, hard-Right monthly
> newspaper published in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the Council of
> Conservative Citizens publishes a bimonthly newspaper, the Citizens
> Informer, of which I am editor in chief. We are gradually upgrading the CI
> to make it competitive with the best offered by the American Right today. I
> remain persuaded that these are all signs that an increasing number of
> Americans are sick of the establishment Right, the neo-conservative Right,
> Beltway Right, the Rainbow Republicans, and the rest of the merry band. We
> need to work together more and begin making our presence and our power
> better known.
>
> You are an aficianado of such writers as H P Lovecraft and Dennis Wheatley.
> Why?
>
> I read both of them in high school and still occasionally read them.
> Wheatley not so much, since I soon came to regard him as a bad writer of
> banal books, despite their exotic and somewhat lurid themes (he wrote a
> series of cheap novels about Satanism, as you know). Lovecraft was a
> genuinely interesting man, an independent thinker who was on the political
> Right most of his life. I think the supernatural fiction they wrote does
> point to a worldview that rejects the conventional rationalism and
> anthropological optimism of the modern world, and Lovecraft, despite his own
> atheism and materialism, was extremely anti-modernist. The best of Lovecraft
> ’s stories, I have argued and continue to believe, can be read as dramas of
> modernity, in which the consequences of modernism - rationalism, optimism -
> work themselves out symbolically in dreadful and horrifying ways. Lovecraft
> is an example of what I have elsewhere called "counter-modernism", the use
> of modernist ideas and forms to challenge the conventional rationalistic and
> optimistic forms of modernity. James Burnham is a similar figure, and so are
> T S Eliot, Ezra Pound, and a number of others.
>
> Samuel Francis:
> Born Chattanooga, Tennessee, on 29th April 1947
> Education: John Hopkins University (BA, 1969), University of North Carolina
> at Chapel Hill (MA, 1971 and PhD, modern history, 1979)
> Policy analyst, The Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, specializing in
> foreign affairs, terrorism, and intelligence and internal security issues,
> 1977 – 1981
> Legislative assistant for national security affairs to Senator John P East
> (Republican, North Carolina) and worked with the Senate Judiciary Committee’
> s Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, of which Senator East was a
> member, 1981-1986
> Editorial writer, Washington Times, 1986
> Deputy Editorial Page Editor, The Washington Times, 1987-1991
> Acting Editorial Page Editor, The Washington Times, February-May 1991
> Staff columnist, The Washington Times, 1991 to 1995.
> Editor and publisher of The Samuel Francis Letter and Samuel Francis Online
> (www.samfrancis.net) to date
>
> Publications:
> The Soviet Strategy of Terror (1981; revised edition, 1985)
> Power and History: The Political Thought of James Burnham (1984)
> Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism (1993)
> Revolution from the Middle (date?)
> Articles or reviews in a number of newspapers and magazines, including The
> New York Times, USA Today, National Review and Chronicles: A Magazine of
> American Culture
> Member of the Board of Editorial Advisors for Modern Age: A Quarterly Review
> Recipient, Distinguished Writing Award for Editorial Writing of the American
> Society of Newspaper Editors 1989 and 1990
> Finalist, National Journalism Award (Walker Stone Prize) for Editorial
> Writing of the Scripps Howard Foundation in 1989 and 1990