In Cosmic Connections, the philosopher Charles Taylor notes that the egalitarian ethic of modernity is more demanding than premodern ethical systems that were based on a vision of “hierarchical complementarity.” Those systems viewed society as an ungainly pyramid where some lives mattered more than others, which often meant, in practice, that we were free to disregard the needs of those who mattered less. By emphasizing the equal dignity and worth of all human life, the ethics of modernity imposes serious demands on us as individuals and as a society. Indeed, these demands are so serious that we haven’t yet developed social arrangements that adequately live up to them. Rather than aspire to a society worthy of these ethical standards, many on the right have proposed that we abandon or at least lower them. We need, they say, to accommodate the society we already have—or better yet, the vision of a society we used to have, where old hierarchies went unquestioned.  

Few writers have argued against modern egalitarianism and for a lowering of ethical standards with more flourish than Samuel Francis (1947–2005). Little known outside radical right circles, he remains a giant within them. The back of Francis’ posthumous opus Leviathan and Its Enemies (2016) bears enthusiastic recommendations from Pat Buchanan and Paul Gottfried, who refers to him as an “intellectual giant” possessed of “a brave heart to pursue and tell the truth” about how racism is a made-up concept. Jared Taylor, editor of the white-supremacist publication American Renaissance, describes Francis as “his generation’s most incisive theorist” on race. In A World After Liberalism, Matthew Rose describes Francis as a key “philosopher of the radical right” whose reputation has “undergone an extraordinary reversal since his death. Journalists on the left and right, in search of the elusive short code of Trumpism, have looked to his books and essays as its possible origin.”

One of the Socratic fallacies that still permeates our culture is the idea that those who defend unjust ideas must be stupid or ignorant. We assume that the axioms of justice must be clear to anyone who has reasoned about them sufficiently; it follows that anyone who endorses injustice as enthusiastically as Samuel Francis did must be incapable of such reasoning. Alas, intellectual history bears sad witness to the fact that many defenders of the worst injustices were neither stupid nor ignorant. Francis, for example, was an undeniably erudite man, and he made an original contribution to radical-right theory. The major themes of his thought are dispossession and resentment. Even more than most other right-wing thinkers, Francis was fixated on the many ways the unworthy had taken something that rightly belonged to people like him. 

Francis was born in 1947 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was a proud southerner. His grandparents’ homes had been built by slaves, and Francis himself never came to terms with the South’s defeat in the Civil War. By all accounts a good student, Francis received a doctorate in British history from the University of North Carolina, and his work is often peppered with ostentatious historical references. Not one for the constraints of academia, he became a columnist for the Washington Times and appeared to be on his way to a conventionally successful career as a mainstream conservative pundit. That all changed in 1995, when Francis was fired for writing a column complaining about the “pseudo-Christian poison of equality” reflected in the nation’s official expressions of shame over slavery. Francis was not quite willing to go full Calhoun and defend the antebellum system; still, he lamented that the “New Testament passages about slaves obeying their masters” were treated as  “irrelevant today, but they happen to occur in the same places that enjoin other social responsibilities—such as children obeying their parents, wives respecting their husbands, and citizens obeying the law. If some passages are irrelevant, why should anyone pay attention to the others, and if you shouldn’t, why not sign up with the feminists, the children’s rights crusaders and—dare I suggest it—the Bolsheviks?” 

This was too much for mainstream conservatives, and Rose notes that Francis was “condemned, purged and marginalized in late life.” With the abrupt end of his career as a respectable pundit, Francis was largely free to express himself more candidly, and for the last ten years of his life he wrote openly in support of white nationalism. Leviathan and Its Enemies, written in the 1990s, was published in 2016 as a contribution to the growing genre of right-wing Gramscianism pioneered by Alain de Benoist.  

For Francis, “middle Americans” have been dispossessed of their country and their wealth by a combination of racial and ethnic minorities allied with a totalitarian managerial elite. In more technical works like Leviathan and Its Enemies, this dispossession is framed in class terms. Francis was deeply influenced by Marxists like Gramsci, but he argued that the United States had not been governed by a ruling class of “bourgeois” plutocrats and capitalists for a long time. What he called a “managerial revolution” had resulted in the “displacement of the bourgeois and entrepreneurial elite as the nationally dominant minority in American political, economic and cultural life by new groups trained in highly specialized technical and administrative skills.” This managerial elite had established a soft form of “despotism” that, while not as overt as the “hard” form that appeared in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, was no less damaging in its way. Nearly every social pathology could be left at its doorstep:

The results of managerial social destruction and routinization are evident in the brutalization of contemporary social life—the increase of violent crime, divorce and desertion, illegitimacy, abortion, child and spouse abuse, mental derangement, suicide, sexual deviance, the use of drugs and stimulants, and social irrationalism and destabilization.

Complementing this covert social revolution by managerial elites was an even more covert ideological revolution involving egalitarianism and other leftist doctrines. Superficially, liberalism has several characteristics. One is an “essentially optimistic view of human nature and the human condition.” This aligns with the view that human beings can “make and remake” their world. Combined with this is a commitment to “environmentalism”—the belief that human beings are largely the product of their environment, which can therefore be altered to improve them. In its mature form, liberalism rejected even the “bourgeois ethic” for a “moral and cultural relativism that implied a rejection of all standards by which moral, social, political, and economic behavior could be evaluated and which allowed for the development of a hedonistic ethic.” This hedonistic ethic required rejecting “national class, racial, and regional identities on which the bourgeois order relied” in favor of a radical cosmopolitan egalitarianism centered on a “universal brotherhood” stripped of hierarchical distinctions. In Essential Writings on Race (2007) Francis reiterates the point in less restrained language, stressing that his ideological enemies are “Marxism, liberalism, globalism, egalitarianism, and indeed much of the conservatism now espoused by people such as Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, Bill Bennett, and William Buckley, as well as a good part of Christianity, especially in its ‘Social Gospel’ forms…. Behind all of these ideologies and slogans lies the pervasive venom of universalism, the vision of mankind with a capital M, which now often extends to include ‘animal rights’ so as not to offend our brothers of field and stream.”

Francis was openly contemptuous of liberal philosophy, which may explain why he often seemed to lack even a basic familiarity with its seminal thinkers. But part of his indifference to this intellectual tradition lies in his right-Gramscian way of understanding the function of political ideas. For the most part, Francis was indifferent to the moral and logical substance of philosophical claims. Instead, much like vulgar Marxism, he exclusively emphasized their function in a system of power. Liberal ideology serves as the “rationalization of the power and interests of the managerial elites in the states in which these ideologies prevail.” This point is emphasized even more forcefully in the essay “Equality as a Political Weapon.” There he rebukes conservatives who waste time with critiques of the “formal doctrine of equality.” This doctrine was “unimportant because no one, save perhaps Pol Pot and Ben Wattenberg, really believes in it, and no one, least of all those who profess it most loudly, is seriously motivated by it.” Its real power was as a “social and ideological force…a political weapon to be unsheathed whenever it is useful for cutting down barriers, human or institutional, to the power of those groups that wear it on their belts.” 

Francis represents a distinctly right-wing hermeneutics of suspicion. In his telling, the left is not seriously motivated by a desire for equality any more than the right is committed to freedom. Any intelligent leftist understands that what they really crave is power, and that, to win it, they must dispossess the ruling groups that already have it. Ideology plays a role in justifying this power grab, but its moral substance shouldn’t be taken seriously by anyone sincerely interested in politics.

George Orwell once wrote of James Burnham that his fascination was always with power rather than what power was for, whether as a Marxist or later as a man of the right. The same is true of Francis. The real goal of any political activity is always to obtain and enjoy power. Anyone who pretends to regard power as anything less than the final telos—anyone who treats it as only the means to some other end—is either a fool or a liar. This is a hollow, brutal vision of political life. Francis’s protests boil down to imagining that he, or people like him, were once in charge and that they should be again. Francis resents the left because it stands in the way of this. Resentment at having been dispossessed—and the desire to repossess—is what animates thin spirits like Francis. Justice, and every other pseudo-political value, is entirely beside the point. 

Leviathan and Its Enemies is largely written in a ponderous technical style. It concludes with an expression of hope that a “post-bourgeois” ideology might emerge among “Middle American Radicals” (MARs). Unlike the manipulative ruling elites, these MAR types would be committed to, among other things, “solidarism and attachment to group identities, authoritarianism, with low tolerance of deviation and the subordination of the individual to the group, [and] a disposition to use force as a means of responding to challenges and problems.” A new regime would reject “mythologies of cosmopolitan dispersion and hedonistic indulgence” by reaffirming the nation state as a meaningful object of loyalty and cultural identity. Francis makes it clear that this will mean rejecting the idea that the right should be conservative, since there is little worth conserving in the liberal state. In Beautiful Losers (1994), he calls for the “new American right” to “abandon the illusion that it represents an establishment to be ‘conserved’” since “its values and goals lie outside and against the establishment and…its natural allies are not in Manhattan, Yale, and Washington but in the increasingly alienated and threatened strata of Middle America.” 

This portentous and somewhat ambiguous language of Leviathan and Its Enemies is largely dropped in Francis’s later essays, where he freely acknowledges that by MARs, he really means white people. In Essential Writings on Race, Francis calls for an “explicit revival of white racial consciousness” that will inspire white people to take back control of their country. This will require rejecting the ideology of racial equality propagated by liberal universalists, which can only ever result in social decay. Once the MARs seize control, a new kind of society will be built based on “post-bourgeois” values. Discussing the “Aryan concept of Cosmic Order,” Francis gives us a clue as to the “natural and healthy” kinds of society a rejuvenated and American “Aryan instinct” could create:

Whites exhibit ‘an abiding sense of reciprocity, a conviction that others have rights that must be respected,’ but the modern expression[s] of this trait in such institutions as democracy, free speech, and the rule of law are grotesquely distorted or exaggerated versions of the original and natural impulses. The ‘sense of reciprocity’ as well as the rule of law are no doubt reflections of the Aryan concept of Cosmic Order, a view of the universe that holds that both nature and man behave according to universal, perpetual laws or regular patterns and in which rights and duties are in balance. But the concept of Cosmic Order did not imply an egalitarian or homogeneous social order in which everyone is equal and there are no distinctions between groups, classes, sexes, races, and nations. Indeed, early Aryan society was hierarchical, organic, and aristocratic; the natural form of Aryan government was an aristocratic republic in which distinct classes and social groups participated and expressed their views and interests freely, and a high level of political participation was necessary for such dynamic and restless populations of independent, armed free men as the early Aryans.

In Francis’s Aryan utopia, “historical population groups” will no longer have to “endure the traumatizing and potentially radicalizing experiences of social destruction, national decomposition and fragmentation, political alienation and cultural dispossession.” He admits that “domination and racial antagonism may therefore result” but explains that these are not “relationships to be desired or advocated” but “the consequence of the natural reality of racial differences.” What would happen to the growing number of nonwhite Americans in Francis’s utopia? He floats several possibilities. He takes seriously the idea of resegregating the whole population; he also considers relocating Americans to “some other territory outside the United States.” But both of these options are ultimately rejected as impractical. Instead, he concludes, white Americans must engage in a “reconquest” of the country. Francis insists that this reconquest would “not involve any restoration of white supremacy in the political and legal sense that obtained under slavery or segregation, and there is no reason why nonwhites who reside in the United States could not enjoy equality of legal rights.” But “Warren Court-era notions of political equality, voting rights, school integration, etc.” would all be on the chopping block. The reconquest of the United States would mean the supremacy of whites in a cultural, if not a legal, sense. It would be unapologetically “Eurocentric.” And there would certainly be no nonsense about social and economic equality. Francis also suggests that a United States governed by and for MARs would have to take measures to increase white birthrates and to decrease the “non-white birthrate” by ending welfare subsidies, mandating the use of contraception by welfare recipients, and generally encouraging its use among other nonwhite Americans. In short, Francis’s project is openly eugenicist. The “genetic” inheritance of whites is to preserve their civilization for themselves and no one else. Left to their own devices, “non-whites may indeed create a different civilization of their own, but it will not be the same as the one we as whites created and live in, and most of us (or even most non-whites today) would not want to live in it.”

What is striking about Francis’s work is that it always assumes that everyone, friend or enemy, is motivated by aspirations as low and banal as his own. He thinks the fatal theoretical contradictions of liberalism reflect the need of elites to remain in power; this is why it is “impossible to describe the ideology of an elite in a logically rigorous way. Most elites simply do not confine themselves to beliefs that are too rigorous and systematic.” One searches in vain for any engagement with the work of Mill, Rawls, Nussbaum, or any other defender of liberalism who has attempted to describe it “in a logically rigorous way.” Such liberals were quite aware of, and often dealt carefully with, the difficulties Francis seems unable to think through. But we’re left to take his word for it that liberals are incapable of offering a cogent defense of their own philosophy. The contradictions he detects in liberal ideology are often just contradictions in his own critique of it. Sometimes he takes liberals to task for a nihilistic relativism that undermines all values, while at other moments he laments liberalism’s exorbitant universalism, which imposed moral burdens on people that they couldn’t reasonably be expected to bear. Liberalism is chaos; no, liberalism is a locked cage—Francis can’t seem to decide.

Francis often claimed that the United States was seeing an uptick in violent crime, anticipating Trump’s warnings about “American carnage.” He attributed this uptick to the unwillingness of liberals and mainstream conservatives to get tough with criminals. In fact, crime rates had been decreasing rapidly throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, the period when Francis was writing. And by the 1990s the United States had the highest rate of imprisonment in the world. In The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, William J. Stuntz argues that crime rates fell not because incarceration rates climbed, but because the population was aging, and most experts agree with him. In other words, Francis was wrong both about the scale of the problem and the solution. His call for harsher criminal justice was of a piece with his complaint that the United States had lost its martial values. The managerial elites were hostile to the “use of protracted or massive force.” This was an amazing thing to say about a country that was directly involved in four wars during Francis’s lifetime (Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the War on Terror), not to mention several smaller military interventions. Perhaps nothing short of another world war could satisfy his yearning for a demonstration of “massive force.”

But it’s pointless to make an inventory of Francis’s bad arguments, because he was not particularly interested in logical consistency or coherence. For him, the point of political argument was not to play fair but to win. He did not claim to be motivated by an angelic desire for the truth, whatever that might mean, but by an undisguised libido dominandi, and he congratulated himself for his lack of pretense. White Americans from the heartland needed to stand up for themselves and not worry too much about treating others the way they wished to be treated. Such moral scruple was “utopian” and therefore decadent. Real Americans might be Christians, but real Christianity, with its Golden Rule, was for chumps. Social reality was irreducibly tribal (i.e., racial), and “equality” was just a pretty word for dispossession. St. Augustine would call it a philosophy for gangsters. 

If all this sounds dismally familiar, it should. Francis’s right-wing radicalism, once considered disreputable by most Republican pundits and politicians, has quickly gone from a backwater to the mainstream. Donald Trump and his gang now practice what Samuel Francis preached.