Not to go on and on about this but here is a little more about Samuel Francis... I looked in the index of "Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort" by Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons. (I haven't read the book yet...)
At the beginning of the Reagan administration, there was an attempt to revive the old tradition of congressional witchhunting. Strom Thurmond was named head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversaw the work of a newly formed Senate Subcommitee on Security and Terrorism (SST). SST was chaired by Senator Jeremiah Denton. A notable SST staff member was Samuel Francis, who, after authoring the security section of the Heritage Foundation's Reagan transition study, became legislative assistant for national security to SST member Senator John P. East.
Francis denounced critics of SST as "far-left, revolutionary or pro-terrorist." Early targets of the subcommittee included alternative media such as Mother Jones magazine and the Pacifica Radio Network. However, its hearings on the "Red Menace" flopped.
During the 1980s, Francis wrote a column for the Washington Times (owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's network).
Berlet and Lyons note, "..With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, he shifted from an interventionist foreign policy stance to isolationism and a growing emphasis on promoting White culture as the cornerstone of U.S. national sovereignty. He was forced out of his job at the Washington Times after a 1994 speech at an American Renaissance conference in which he declared,
"'We as whites under assault need to...reassert our identity and our solidarity and we need to 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.'
"In the 1990s, Francis maintained a syndicated column in the paleocon Rockford Institute's Chronicles, served as co-chairman of the American Immigration Control Foundation and as a board member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, and was a contributor to the John Birch Society magazine, New American. Leonard Zeskind comments, 'Francis still eschews any overt expression of antisemitism and conspiracies are not his style. His white nationalism may thus prove to be more potent than the Aryan variety.'"
Dave Anderson
Re: Sam Francis. Sara Diamond in her book "Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States" mentions Francis on p. 272 as a leading figure of the "self-identified 'paleoconservatives,' who opposed U.S. military intervention abroad and welfare statism at home, who also championed the Christian Right's moral causes and the racist Right's concerns about illegal immigration and cultural nationalism."
Diamond says, "For paleoconservative thinkers, David Duke's 1991 near win was a watershed event. Samuel Francis, an editor for the paleoconservatives' Chronicles magazine, called it a 'turning point in American history.'"
Diamond quotes Francis:
"Democrats and liberals have spent the last year whining that Duke represents the logical culmination of the conservative resurgence of Ronald Reagan, and conservatives, for the most part, have spent an equal amount of time denying it. The Democrats and liberals are, for once, dead right, though as usual they miss the point. Reagan conservatism, in its innermost meaning, had little to do with supply-side economics and spreading democracy. It had to do with the awakening of a people who face political, cultural, and economic dispossession who are slowly beginning to glimpse the fact of dispossession and what dispossession will mean for them and their descendants.
"There was a subtext to what Mr. Duke explicitly and formally said in his speeches and his campaign literature, and the subtext, communicated by the continued depiction of Mr. Duke in Nazi uniform and Klan hood by his enemies, is that the historic core of American civilization is under attack. Quotas, affirmative action, race norming, civil rights legislation, multiculturalism in schools and universities, welfare, busing, and unrestricted immigration from Third World countries are all symbols of that attack and of the racial, cultural, and political dispossession they promise to inflict upon the white post-bourgeois middle classes."
Francis argues that if the Right is to remain the dominant political force into the 21st century, it would have make "cultural nationalism" the "center of public concern and public policy."
I somewhat doubt that he is correct. I think the rightwing is experiencing a serious case of intellectual bankruptcy (whether you are dealing with Bush's "compassionate conservatism," the Christian right, the paleoconservatives, the "patriots" and their militias...). Am I deluding myself? If the left was more coherent and unified, we could offer a real alternative...Ideas really matter.
Dave Anderson
Ralph Suter wrote:
In a message dated 6/19/01 7:33:16 AM Pacific Daylight Time, debsian at pacbell.net writes:
<< 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. >>
Is this the core of this guy's conservatism? This plus his later remark (see below) about "anthropological optism" strongly suggests that he's more a
racist than a conventional conservative, many of whom of course are racists but most of whom at least say they aren't. Francis doesn't seem to care. Is anthropological optimism a frequent subject of discussion by conservatives like Francis? Is "anthropological pessimist" now what racist right wing conservative intellectuals prefer to call themselves? It does at least sound less offensive than racist.
-Ralph Suter
Ralph,
I think you are conflating two different dimensions of this guy's outlook.
Clearly he is a racist, both ideologically and organizationally. The ideology sounds like a throwback to Madison Grant. The Council of Conservative Citizens is a lineal descendent of the White Citizens' Councils that provided the "respectable" above ground face for the campaign of "massive resistance" to civil rights. They advocate against interracial marriage, and, as you can see from the post, for a racialist view of culture.
However, when he refers to "anthropological" optimism and pessimism, I believe he is referring to "anthropology" in its older and philosophical sense -- "the study of human nature" rather than either ethnography or ethnology & the "study of peoples" or "study of societies and cultures" sense that has defined the academic field of "anthropology."
For Francis, anthropology is a religious question I think. Anthropological optimism is the belief that human nature is fundamentally good, perfectable in this world by developing innate human capacities. Enlightenment and post-enlightenment progressivism stressing the role of reason in human progress is the version that particularly seems to perturb him, although arguably a romantic, emotional or intuitively oriented anthropological optimism is also possible.
Conversely, anthropological pessimism is the belief that human nature is fundamentally bad, evil or sinful. Or perhaps, fundamentally incapable of self-perfection. Conservative Christianity tends toward this, although if you poke at it a little you find various conundra -- both the idea of the fall and the idea of redemption from sin seem to imply that ultimate human nature is perfectable and conformable to God's perfection, though by divine rather than human agency. So which is human nature -- humanity in the garden, before the fall, or humanity with fully-fledged capacity for moral choice, afterwards? Likewise some politically conservative Christians have a radical view of God's liberality in dispensing forgiveness. Opposition to such views by hard line pessimists at various points has been a source of intra-Christian conflict and intolerance.
It would appear that Francis takes the dimmer view. He quotes a lot of Catholic thinkers, but from a position that appears to oppose faith to reason, partly via a nostalgia for an imaginary medieval Church. Pat Buchanan is also a conservative Catholic, of course, with his own medievalist fantasies. Francis' anti-modernism is also explicitly anti-rationalism, and perhaps really irrationalism, though I'm not sure if he'd agree to the latter. Catholic thinking can accommodate more benign views of reason, of course. Francis' anthropological pessimism would also be compatible with ultra-Calvinist positions, though his sympathy for Catholic writers would be odd then.
Anyway, the CCC forms a sort of bridge between hard-right and racist-right grassroots that are theologically conventional (i.e., not "Christian Identity"), e.g. the bulk of David Duke voters, and the "respectable" right of Trent Lott et al.
Chris Lowe
He is a widely published columnist in more conservative papers and regions. http://www.townhall.com/columnists/samfrancis/archive.shtml http://www.vdare.com/sam_francis.htm http://www.samfrancis.net/about.html http://www.google.com/search?q=Sam+Francis Started out, from my read an adherent of the ex-Trotskyist, National Review "Rollback" (of communism, instead of "containment") CIA consultant, conservative "realist", James Burnham. Moved into paleo-conservativism, has been in process towards an explicitly racist, culturally ethnocentric., nativist set of positions. See this which deals extensively with Francis, ! http://www.newcomm.org/party/index.htm Our latest special report Party Crashers: White Nationalists and Election 2000 is now available online. Michael Pugliese P.S. I've seen a copy of that first book of his. What a hoot! Red Arrows With Dagger Thrusts From Nicaragua and Cuba On The Warpath Pointed Towards Washington, D.C. And Your Backyard!!! P.P.S. One "good" thing about Francis is, you read him and he says what few others that are "movement conservatives" will say in public. And he is no "dummy" "kwazy as a fox" Knows his enemy i.e. has read neo-conservative liberal and left sources. See the book w/the essay on "Middle American Radicals" (Buchananites), "Beautiful Losers, " two different pb. editions, one a university press, I have, and another right-wing press in a mass market pb. size and price, $6.95, I think. He is ,"The crazy Aunt or Uncle in the Attic," everyone there prefers to pretend does not exist. But, if it didn't who were in all those voting blocs for anti-immigration and anti-affirmative action initiatives?