Nationalism Versus Populism:

How the Sam Francis-Kevin Phillips debate prefigured the battle between American nationalists and Populist Inc.

Carl Schmitt: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”

Kevin Phillips: “The whole secret of politics - knowing who hates who.”

Prelude:

Much has been made of the ongoing, so-called “civil war” between National-Populists and Neoconservatives within the Republican Party after Donald Trump was chased into the political wilderness following the controversial 2020 election and the riot at the Capitol on January 6th. Yet the idea that this represents a genuine split in the party is largely an illusion created by the left-liberal press, who like to imagine they have more friends within the party than they do. In truth, the outgoing National-Populist president still dominates the Republican party when the voters are polled¹, and it is a foregone conclusion that he will run again in 2024, win the nomination, and go on to recapture the second term he feels was stolen from him².

(Some of the overly online Right-Wing commentariat - in a quest to be “more catholic than the Pope” no doubt - have suggested that Trump is losing his mojo given his heterodox advocacy for the COVID-19 vaccine and uncharacteristic belligerence towards Russia following the invasion of the Ukraine. Polls dispute this claim, as by force of personality or out of gratitude for his past achievements, it appears that Republican voters still overwhelmingly favour the former President when he is put up against media darlings such as Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, or even populist up-and-comers like Ron DeSantis.)³

More significant, in my view, is the divide within National-Populism which has yet to bubble up into the mainstream. I speak of a subtle split between those who identify exclusively as nationalists, concerned about the sovereignty of the American nation-state and the survival of the traditional American ethnic stock of European descent, and the representatives of capital-P Populism, who pine for a multiracial working class revolt against liberal and capitalist elites.

Some critics correctly observe that nationalism with an ethnic subtext is at the core of the Trumpist revolt, and that a populist style that draws distinctions between “elites” and “the people” is merely an affectation put on to further nationalist goals⁴. This point is correct, but it neglects the emergence of Populism as an ideology seperate from nationalism, allegedly devoted to the redistribution of political power from the elites. Those who associate with “post-liberal”, populist politics remain civic nationalists, yet put concerns over national sovereignty and “The Great Replacement” on the back burner.

These post-liberal Populists - derisively called “Populist Inc” by their opponents - seek to sanitise Trump’s dog-whistling 2016 campaign with appeals to the working Hispanic man, or the Asian woman in New York victimised by crime⁵. They count as their idols Christopher Lasch and Huey Long, rather than George Wallace and “pitchfork” Pat Buchanan⁶ - “the white man’s Jesse Jackson”⁷. By contrast, the Nationalists - who often operate with an ethnic or racial consciousness - inherit the legacy of reactionary paleo-conservatism, transmitted in a garbled form through the meme-making that elected Donald Trump in 2016, the remnants of the pre-Charlottesville Alt-Right, and the shenanigans of the Groyper/America First movements.

Recently, the populist congressional candidate for Washington’s 3rd district, the Steve Bannon-backed and Trump-endorsed Joe Kent, drew the ire of nationalist groypers for denouncing the paleo-conservative provocateur Nick Fuentes⁸. A statement explaining the disavowal contained the phrase “inclusive populism”, which quickly became a meme for nationalists - repeated to mock the pandering tone they despise in politicians. In contrast to the inclusive⁹ Populist Inc, the Nationalists put forward an exclusive political platform, with an emphasis on Christian morality and catering to the grievances of White Americans under attack. Like Christ in the temple, they clearly delineate between their friends and their enemies, taking aim at many groups within the idealised mass of “people” alienated from the ruling class and pandered to by the populists.

Now, electioneering generally encourages pandering and discourages the dispensing of hard truths, but the Populist appeal to unwilling voters strays dangerously close to rewarding enemies and punishing friends.¹⁰ Following Carl Schmitt’s logic, this is an utterly self-defeating style of politics. The most glaringly foolish example of this in recent memory was the emphasis on black outreach in Donald Trump’s reelection campaign.

Though Trump was carried over the top in 2016 by white voters receptive to his identitarian appeals¹¹, the team running his re-election tried to broaden the ethnic base of the traditional Republican coalition. There was a prayer at the Republican National Convention for Jacob Blake¹², an African American felon crippled by Wisconsin policemen, who shot him as he tried to reach into the SUV of a girlfriend he would later plead guilty to abusing, armed with a knife.¹³

Emphasis was placed on now-President Biden’s history of supporting severe criminal justice measures¹⁴ - all while Trump paradoxically portrayed himself as the “tough on crime” candidate¹⁵ in the wake of nationwide race riots that would result in the deaths of at least 19 and billions of dollars in property damage¹⁶. All of this effort netted Trump “8 percent of the Black vote,” come election day, “about a 2 percentage-point gain on his 2016 numbers.”¹⁷

Even the ur-Populist, Kevin Phillips, who himself harboured dreams of something approaching a multiracial coalition, observed in 1968 that:

“All the talk about Republicans making inroads into the Negro vote is persiflage… From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that.”¹⁸ ¹⁹

As seen from Trump’s over-performance with Hispanics in 2020, the Latino community is where new votes, that will hold Texas and redeem Arizona, may be found. As Barry Goldwater once said about Southern whites, who now make up the base of the GOP in a Theseus’ Ship transition, one must “go hunting where the ducks are.”

In general the Republican messaging on race demonstrates the toxicity of a Mass-Democratic system for intellectuality. It incentivises pandering and rewards the inauthentic lingo of the focus groups. Enfranchised groups can never be critiqued directly, blame for their woes is attributed to the other side, or some foreign group(illegal immigrants, other countries). Encapsulating this is the Republican message for African-Americans - which combines an almost insulting rejection of their agency with a pointlessly abstract proposition: "In contrast to what you perceive, the white system you feel oppressed by is not the issue. Your culture has problems - forced on you by DEMOCRATS."

In stark contrast to the Donald Trump of 2016, who waged a politically incorrect insurgency against Republican insiders, the post-liberal populists speak in this way.

“There is also a new cadre of people that are coming around, that are even seeking to co-opt the message that we're talking about. They're a little bit more faithful to the substance of what I'm describing {meaning nationalism, compared to the old guard neoconservatives}, some people like Josh Hawley and some others. They use words like ‘industrial policy’ - that's one of their antidotes to the problems going on in the country.”²⁰

Twitter accounts like the “Populist🇺🇦Pundit” (@PunditPopulist) satirise the wonky and inauthentic focus on “industrial policy” and the hokey multiracialism of the new wave of Populists - many of whom were vehemently opposed to Trump in 2016.²¹ ²²

The most damning accusation against the new wave of intellectual populists, ranging from Sohrab Ahmari’s Compact Magazine to Saurabh Sharma’s American Moment, is that they take up valuable political resources - perhaps deliberately - as a means of sabotaging the nationalist revolution that was Trump 2016.

“Like {Liz} Cheney and like Adam Kinzinger, {establishment Republicans} do not stand a chance against the juggernaut that is America First and Donald Trump. But if those people disguise themselves as America First, with the same stuff, it is going to suck out all the money and all the energy and the attention and the momentum right out of the room and direct it right back into the same establishment that got us in this place in the first place”²³

Some nationalists have even accused the Populists of being a reincarnation of the Neoconservative phenomenon - those old liberals who defected to the GOP following the 1960s, who brought out the worst in Ronald Reagan²⁴ before subverting his agenda.

Some of Populist Inc’s more lofty proposals about overcoming the traditional conservative aversion to federal power, remind one of how the Neocons once sounded, and the elitist milieu they emerged from.

(From paleo-conservative Samuel T. Francis’ review of a book by Irving Kristol - godfather of neoconservatism:)

“According to Mr. Kristol, “A conservative welfare state - what once was called a "‘social insurance’ state - is perfectly consistent with the neoconservative perspective”… If Old Right conservatism was, in Clinton Rossiter’s phrase, a “thankless persuasion,” neoconservatism is simply a harmless one, and there is no reason for the Establishment Left to drive the neoconservatives into academic and journalistic exile as it succeeded in doing to the Old Right. The neoconservatives may, in fact, be seen as the right wing of the New Class that they criticise so much, engaged in an effort to moderate its collectivist and utopian dynamic with a strong dose of bourgeois liberalism.”²⁵

This smacks of Adrian Vermeule’s vision.

Vermeule is a recent convert to Catholicism (that’s what’s trendy these days), possessed by a convert’s zeal. In 2006 he was writing apologias for the Bush regime, such as “How War Can Bring Peace.²⁶” Fast-forward a little to see “the one-time clerk to Justice Scalia {deprecating} originalism and the plain meaning of words”²⁷ in a quest to make American statism Catholic and “based”.

““Common-good constitutionalism,” he explains, “will favour a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy,” which will be empowered to impose a particular social and moral code upon Americans. Troublesome concepts like personal liberty and individual rights are brushed aside.”²⁸

In jurisprudential discussions, many self-labelled populists compose wonky legal doctrines that often work against the folk-libertarian²⁹ beliefs and interests of their own voters. “We find in {Vermeule} no judicial philosophy besides perhaps “administrative might makes right.”³⁰

In “Beyond Originalism”, Adrian Vermeule explains “the common-good principle that no constitutional right to refuse vaccination exists.” He goes on to argue that “constitutional law {should} define in broad terms the authority of the state to protect the public’s health and well-being, protecting the weak from pandemics and scourges of many kinds—biological, social, and economic—even when doing so requires overriding the selfish claims of individuals to private “rights.” Thus the state will enjoy authority to curb the social and economic pretensions of the urban-gentry liberals who so often place their own satisfactions (financial and sexual) and the good of their class or social milieu above the common good.”³¹

Ironic in hindsight, given that since that article’s release, it has turned out that conservatives are the ones overwhelmingly rejecting the COVID vaccine³², often on religious grounds³³. In a reversal of the article’s premise, it is the trendy “urban-gentry liberals” who argue most vehemently for vaccine mandates, in the interest of the “common good”. Vaccine mandates empower the managerial state and the scientific jargon they draw on for legitimacy. The performance that these post-liberal, populist inc poseurs stage proves to be a simple shell game once you figure out their formula. They focus their critique of their one-time neoconservative comrades on denouncing their pro-corporate, laissez-faire policies³⁴, while pushing for policies that will empower a bureaucracy which hates the ostensible allies of Populist Inc - the right-wing lumpenproletariat.

Resembling the Straussian neoconservatives of the late 1980s, who blamed left-wing student radicalism on the German rightists Nietzsche and Heidegger³⁵, erroneously mischaracterised as “nihilists”, these post-liberals make a caricature of liberalism that no longer exists their scapegoat. Like Bloom, they see moral relativism where there is none. Like the post-liberals, the progressives are acting in accordance with a profound and totalising moral vision. As the highly respected Daily Caller alum Scott Greer puts it:

“The assessment that moral relativism is responsible for the malaise plaguing Western society completely misunderstands the Left. The modern Left is animated by an intense sense of moral righteousness, not by a laissez-faire attitude toward different lifestyles. Christian bakers who refuse to make cakes for same-sex couples are bigots. Conservative students who want to host an antifeminist speaker are shut down and harassed. For there to be a “do-it-yourself morality,” a level of respect must be afforded to different viewpoints and ways of life. That’s not the case in America today.

Along with the lack of respect for those who don’t kowtow to progressive orthodoxy, there is the underlying desire to have everyone share the same beliefs. We all must acknowledge the bravery of Caitlyn Jenner’s sex transition. We all must think Black Lives Matter has a point. We all must think our country depends on mass immigration to survive. This is not moral relativism; it’s postmodern Puritanism. Just like the colonial Calvinists who settled Massachusetts, social justice warriors (SJWs) are dogmatic, self-righteous, and intolerant of different views. They demand conformity, and they love witch hunts. They even have their own form of original sin: being born white, which requires constant atonement. The SJWs just aren’t that concerned with churchgoing and modest dress, as their Puritan forebears were.

Changes to our moral culture are not a result of a growth of relativism. They result from a rival value system challenging the old dignity culture of America’s past. If you are a victim, you are now a hero thanks to our society’s transvaluation of values.”

And so leftism is not the morality of the amoral barbarian masters but the morality of the scheming slaves.”³⁶

Vermeule, Ahmari and others like Patrick Deneen misunderstand modern liberalism because they assume it has not changed since its 19th century incarnation³⁷. Modern liberals may be, in some instances, selfish lotharios who violate the national interest for their individual benefit, but they are above all animated by a vision of the moral good - setting them apart from the politically “value-neutral” liberals of old.

Both Populist Inc and the progressives advocate for a stronger state to enforce their moral vision. Given the self-evident liberal bias of the federal bureaucracy, structurally and in terms of personnel, I am sure the vaccine-obsessed progressives will find using said bureaucracy to mandate vaccines child’s play. At the very least, they will find it to be an easier task compared to Vermeule’s attempt at deploying the managerial apparatus to force Papistry onto the right-wing’s protestants who vote for his populist friends. Alternatively, a post-liberal administration would jack up Third World immigration - but only from based Catholic countries, in an attempt to manifest “the Empire of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and ultimately the world government required by natural law.”³⁸ This is a policy that will unite MAGA populists and “all right-thinking persons concerned that current American immigration policy is racist and classist,”³⁹ you see. Good luck selling that to non-college-educated evangelicals who are suspicious of Mexican migrants, and stand petrified at the prospect of what Vermeule’s fellow Catholic Pat Buchanan labelled: “a cushioned seat {for American elites} at the head table of {the} New World Order.”⁴⁰

In short, beating up on an extinct form of liberalism is about as useful as the rantings of fear-mongering, baby-boomer radio hosts, detailing the impending communist takeover of the U.S.A, brought about by the secret muslim socialist Barack Hussein Obama - and about as intellectual too.

These ideas are not threatening. If they were, they would not be aired in the pages of The Atlantic. Even Obama is reading Patrick Deneen⁴¹! But I don’t imagine him picking up Steve Sailer anytime soon. So far the statist suggestions and wonky style of Populist Inc, like old-style neoconservatism, amount to a form of controlled opposition, embodying the critical theorist Paul Piccone’s concept of “Artificial Negativity”.

As one blog puts it:

“Artificial negativity is an extension of Marcuse’s one-dimensionality thesis. For Marcuse, capitalism was capable of quickly reversing opposed movements and concepts and absorbing them into itself – the commodification of rebellion is one example – Che Guevera on every T-shirt. The Telos innovation concurs with this thesis, yet adds that the rationality of the system is only checked by external elements of the system… thus preventing its further reproduction. Faced with a crisis, the crisis that Piccone terms the ‘crisis of one dimensionality’ it is necessary for the state-capital to generate internal opposition to check its bureaucratic excesses. It therefore creates a negativity, an opposition, which is purely artificial in character internally. Artificial negativity poses little real threat to the unfolding of the system and can be easily captured in the representative structures of state-capital concerned with rights and legal representation and the politics of recognition. For example, the debate regarding civil rights for minority communities moved from the genuine assertion of the political restructuring on the streets, to legal cases that were fully within the standard disputations of state managed courts regarding rights, their extension and conflict. Acts of civil disobedience might seem oppositional, but they are merely rituals whereby the state-capital realises its overreach and re-calibrates itself to be more innovative and efficient. Piccone’s move here is partially borrowed from the workerist critiques of Italian Marxism whereby labour conflicts drive innovation in production. Thus, artificial negativity for Telos characterises almost all protest movements since the 1960s: be it the civil rights movements of black liberation and thereafter, the new left, the anti-war movement, claims protecting human rights, colonial opposition or even anti-globalisation. While supposedly opposing the system, all such movements are in fact ensuring the system’s continued domination.”⁴²

Why does Populist Inc exist, then? Simply put, it is profitable to frame your right wing goals in left wing language. The articles written about you are more flattering when said precautions are taken⁴³. But given that language always shapes the content of a concept⁴⁴, these thinkers are drawn down a path that leads to left wing, anti-nationalist proposals too. Child tax credits for African Americans that did not vote for you!⁴⁵ Mass immigration, but only from brown catholic countries! Catholic “Common-Good” jurisprudence for vaccine mandates!

Nationalists pillory Populist Inc for their inoffensive style, as befits an ideology developed in the politically correct beltway, designed not to be too offensive to the liberals running YouTube or the New York Times⁴⁶, indeed modified to appease their sensibilities (hence the emphasis on religiously grounded anti-racism⁴⁷).

As the provocateur Fuentes put quite memorably in his second speech at his proprietary America First Political Action Conference⁴⁸:

“I'm sorry but when I see Black Lives Matter destroying the city, I want to say certain things… And you know somehow industrial policy or multi-racial working-class populism just doesn't do the trick. Just doesn't suffice. Frankly, they are GAY [Applause] and we are based. When I see what's going on in the country, I don't want to listen to some of these five-hour podcasts about policy-making. I want to get in front of somebody and say: it's ‘America first, Bitch.’”

Fuentes continues:

“It is those things that differentiate us from them. When I see Donald Trump go on the timeline on Twitter, and he goes off… When I see him get on the podium, and just start saying things like “Ted Cruz's dad killed JFK”… It reminds us that he is a real human being… It shows us that he's not one of them, more than anything, because these people that are grown in a petri dish, in a laboratory in the Heritage Foundation - they would never say something like that. They would never give the speech that I'm giving. They would never tweet the things Trump has tweeted, and that is because they have been groomed for power by the same establishment that we're fighting against.”

He ends with a restatement of nationalist positions and priorities:

“The main issues that America First must solve, and seeks to solve are issues of sovereignty. Fundamentally the crisis of our time is a crisis of control over our country.”

Rather than summarising this dispute any longer, I feel that this divide can be illustrated with an analysis of two exemplary National-Populists in conversation. Representing the Populist side, is the illustrious Republican campaign strategist turned historian Kevin Phillips. Representing nationalism is the paleo-conservative polemicist and political theorist Samuel T. Francis.

Article Abstract:

In my view, the textual conversation between Sam Francis and Kevin Phillips anticipates this cleft between nationalists and populists. On a theoretical level, it raises important questions that a fusionist alliance between nationalists and populists must reckon with. Are American-Right wingers fighting class enemies, or racial/cultural ones? The rest of the article will explore that central question, in analysing four reviews written by the paleo-conservative Sam Francis of the populist Kevin Phillips’ work. The nationalist reaction to the populist critique of neoconservative Reaganism is illustrative of the differences between both positions, obscured by their alliance against neoconservatives in the Trump and post-Trump eras.

This textual conversation is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the shadowy intellectual war waged by Populists and Nationalists against each other. Eagle-eyed readers would do well to familiarise themselves with the historical and constitutional debates between Southern reactionary Mel Bradford(or Willmoore Kendall) and his interlocutor Harry Jaffa, the intellectual godfather of the National-Populist Claremont institute, and a West-Coast Straussian who enshrined Equality as a principle of American Conservatism.⁴⁹ Though Southern traditionalists have largely been evicted from the political scene, such conflicts shed light on subtle doctrinal divisions within the American Right. One must also take note of Harry Jaffa’s impressive support for the nomination of Mel Bradford - his “principal intellectual antagonist” - to the position of NEH⁵⁰ chairman of the Reagan administration. Tragically, this nomination, which could have empowered paleo-conservatives and Southern regionalists with federal funding, was foiled by Bradford’s neoconservative foes, who elevated the forgettable mediocrity Bill Bennett to that position⁵¹, and called upon the inventor of liberal Reconstruction historiography, Eric Foner⁵², to attack Bradford. This drama signalled the beginning of the purge of the paleo-conservatives, a process which would continue until the “unpatriotic conservatives”⁵³ were at last expelled over their opposition to Iraq War, if not their support of Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaigns beforehand.

(Kevin Phillips)

The populist Kevin Phillips broke from the Republican Party long before that. Once a strategist for Nixon’s ‘68 campaign, Phillips cut his teeth with his theory of the “Emerging Republican Majority” - the hated source of the so-called “southern strategy”⁵⁴. Contrary to its black legend, the book was not just concerned with manipulating the neuroses of Southern Whites, but represented a grand analysis of the electoral patterns of American history. And winning over Northern Catholics was just as important as winning over Southern Whites⁵⁵. That required manipulation of tribal rivalries more complex than plain negrophobia. As the Southern Christian Leadership Council member Dorothy Tillman declared when she arrived up north:

“Down South you were black or white. You wasn't Irish or Polish or all of this ..."⁵⁶

“To the pure of heart it all sounded spooky and a bit repugnant because it was premised on the alleged hostility of Irishmen, Italians and Poles, whose ethnic traits were conservative, toward Jews, Negroes and affluent Yankees, whom history had made liberal.”⁵⁷

The “young, self-taught ethnologist” became disillusioned with the party under Reagan, rebelling in quite a progressive fashion against the unevenly distributed wealth generated by the Gipper’s administration. It was under Reagan that all of the aspects of the GOP that he hated degenerated into self-parody. His populist streak had been there since the election of Nixon, as evidenced by his comments to the New York Times:

“I wish we could drop into the Potomac all those obsolescent conservatives who are still preoccupied with Alger Hiss and General MacArthur, and who keep trotting out laissez faire economics and other dead horses. They make the Republican party look musty to millions of ignored working class people who are looking for a party that relates to their needs… It’s run by Yankee silk stockings like Josiah Spalding, who send their kids 2,000 miles away to look for poverty in Mississippi but won’t travel one subway stop to help poor whites working for 1,800$ a year. As long as they are in charge, the Republican party won’t do well there. But the upper-crust is leaving us to become Democrats. The Republicans are getting thousands of Irish and Italian working-class switchovers and the Democrats are getting Chub Peabody.”⁵⁸

Sound familiar?

Here is Phillips on liberals:

“Liberalism has turned away from the common people and become institutionalised into an establishment. Its spokespersons are driven around in limousines and supported by rich foundations, the television networks and publishing houses, the knowledge industry, the billion-dollar universities and the urban consulting firms which profiteer from poverty.”⁵⁹

Again, sound familiar?

The books which he authored to vent his frustrations with both parties (especially the Bush-era GOP) were reviewed by Francis, and will be covered in this article.

Phillips left the party, repulsed by the dominance of corporate capitalists, oil barons and religious extremists. The depravity of the Reagan years, in his view, was expanded into a full-blown burlesque by the time the Bushes ascended to the Oval Office, steering the ship of state from the “Arrogant Capital” - Washington D.C. The “American Dynasty” he despised gave way to an “American Theocracy,” the name he used for Bush 43’s increasingly unpopular neoconservative administration that wasted blood and treasure on the Middle East and promoting “radical Christianity”⁶⁰ at home, while the emerging Republican majority Phillips worked to build was broken and replaced by Barack Obama’s “emerging Democratic Majority.”⁶¹ By then a cranky independent, Phillips retreated into predicting a “Crisis of American Capitalism”, and producing a populist history book on the American Revolution⁶².

(Samuel T. Francis)

Though he did let out a rebel yell when riding off to battle against the establishment with Pat Buchanan, Samuel T. Francis remained an associate of the conservative mainstream until he was expelled by Dinesh D’Souza of all people for controversial statements on race. D’Souza wrote about his speech at the “race realist” or “white advocacy” organisation American Renaissance. The offending passage involved Francis entreating whites 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 civilisation 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 civilisation can be successfully transmitted to a different people."⁶³

Such comments resemble the career-ending comments of former Iowa representative Steve King, who claimed that “We {Americans} can't restore our civilisation with somebody else's babies.”

Tellingly, Francis left the GOP not over economic policy, but over wars not in the American interest⁶⁴ and the Republican Party’s weakness on immigration - a demographic threat to America to Francis⁶⁵. Such critiques of the establishment GOP were echoed in Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, which was primarily isolationist and immigration restrictionist.

In short, it’s race, stupid.⁶⁶

Perspectives on race stick out as a distinction between Francis and Phillips, and by extension, ideological nationalists and populists. To illustrate this, simply contrast the civic, funny-name-nationalism of “Ahmari” and “Sharma” with the overt racial appeals of men like Francis and Buchanan. Even Kevin Phillips, who would later become quite the supporter of multiracial working-class populism, effectively made his career by observing that the Republican Party could make inroads into the South by appealing to “negrophobe” whites as the Democratic Party under Johnson manoeuvred to cater to “black interests”.

Another distinction between the two men is their respective populism and elitism. Phillips envisioned a broad-based, inclusive, working coalition emerging to overthrow the hated corporate elites. Such an eschatological fantasy has a left-wing colour to it. It calls on the workers of the world to unite! Though it takes stock of the fact that the workers of the world are more socially conservative than their Marxist vanguards would like them to be.⁶⁷

Sam Francis by contrast, under the influence of James Burnham and the Italian school of Elite Theorists⁶⁸, remained a right-wing elitist⁶⁹. He accepted the human need for an elite class as an inviolable fact of organisational history⁷⁰. All Francis wanted was a regime change in a nationalist direction, tailored to the interests and habits of his revolutionary class - the Middle American Radicals who supported Nixon and Wallace, and elected Reagan. Those were the men he envisioned smashing the managerial regime that wrested control of America and the broader West from the old bourgeois capitalists of the 19th century. Middle American Radicals(MARS)⁷¹ were his audience, a constituency more specific than “the people”.

“As a member of the silent majority,” a white father from an affluent suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina, declared in 1970, “I have never asked what anyone in government or this country could do for me, but rather have kept my mouth shut, paid my taxes, and basically asked to be left alone.”⁷²

These were the “northern European ethnics” (particularly Italians) and white Southerners who flipped to Nixon and Wallace from the Democratic party over issues such as racial integration, in particular court-mandated busing. This is a more concrete example of the negrophobia Phillips predicted would drive working class whites into the arms of the GOP.

In the words of sociologist Donald Warren - inventor of the term:

“MARs are a distinct group partly because of their view of government as favouring both the rich and the poor simultaneously. . . . MARs are distinct in the depth of their feeling that the middle class has been seriously neglected. If there is one single summation of the MAR perspective, it is reflected in a statement which was read to respondents: The rich give in to the demands of the poor, and the middle income people have to pay the bill.”⁷³

To Francis the New Right was not a generic rebellion of the people against the elites, but a rebellion of the Middle Classes of America against a managerial system which looted them to pay for the corporate welfare of the liberal rich and the standard welfare of the underclass.

Surveys of the Trump base bear this out. “Many Trump supporters were primarily motivated by the fear of declining group status resulting from demographic change, rather than more conventional pocketbook concerns,” says the “Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.”⁷⁴

In an article explaining “What Many On The Right Still Don’t Understand About “Trump Populism”, Scott Greer reminds us of “a study conducted during the 2016 GOP primaries,” which “found that favourability toward immigration restriction, anti-political correctness, and white identity were the strongest predictors for Trump support. Income and education were at the bottom of factors that predicted Trump support.”⁷⁵

Greer advances to attack the Populist Inc portrayal of Trump supporters as economically aggrieved and nothing else. Such an image does appeal to liberal commentators, the kind who cried reading Hillbilly Elegy, but it does not accurately capture the motivations of the MAGA movement. It is a half-truth designed to humanise Trump supporters to an ideologically hostile audience.

“{Ahmari thinks that} the January 6 protesters were hard-bitten workers outraged over Trump’s inability to eliminate DoorDash. This conflicts with reality.”

He ends the article with his own, statistically substantiated view:

“Trumpism is ultimately about identity, not economics. Trump supporters simply want their country back. It’s a message that even alleged populists just don’t get.”⁷⁶

Nationalists prioritise the sovereignty of the American nation and the survival of the national ethnicity as the issues with the most significance. They use populism as a style, as a means to an end, if they even believe in the ability for elite classes to be abolished. Francis certainly does not. Populists of the right share the concern for national sovereignty, but their conception of the nation is that of a voluntary, civic, propositional identity. They believe in the abolition of an elite class. Indeed Populism as an ideology and not a style has been described as the redistribution and dispersal of power - an opposition to concentrated power wielded by organised minorities⁷⁷. To an elite theorist like Francis, Burnham or Mosca, such organised minorities are the engines of history, and will always dominate disorganised majorities. Ignoring this fact is the Populist’s delusion⁷⁸. The best that can be hoped for is a circulation of elites.⁷⁹

So the choice goes for the National-Populists. Kevin Phillips or Sam Francis? Class war, or racial consciousness? For the style of populism necessitates a war between the people and the elites, or the American people, however defined, against foreign interlopers. Given what we know of the beliefs of Trump supporters, an inclination towards the latter seems more natural. Especially in a country like America, which has always possessed a more civically integrated working class⁸⁰, identities are more racial, more ethnocultural than they are economic. Nationalism comes naturally to the inegalitarian right-wing personality. Populism for them is a means to the end of elite regime change, and the preservation of an exclusive national identity.

The dissident right can profit immensely from reading both writers.

Phillips has a great grasp of history - and if you are into elections he is your man. As the GOP goes into an electoral winter due to mass migration and demographic change, right wingers must heed the lessons Nixon learnt from populist strategists like Phillips in his wilderness years, in the wilderness years of his whole party - destroyed by FDR. The GOP and the historic American nation it claims to represent, are once more the small kids on the block within an ethnic kaleidoscope of a state.

Francis drew on Phillips heavily, as a prophet of Populism, who described how Burnham’s managerial elite interfaced with what Phillips dubbed the “knowledge industry”:

“Universities, think-tanks, foundations, social and welfare workers, urban planners, and so forth. The New York-Washington media axis became closely linked, in succession, to the liberal integration, anti-poverty, anti-hunger, anti-war, and ecology causes. . . . While the media in Chillicothe or Peoria might be spokesmen for local families, banks, or industries, the New York-and-Washington-based media were emerging as pre-eminent spokesmen for the causes of interest-group liberalism.”⁸¹

Both shared a populist contempt for the “managers and theoreticians who deal in ideas and methods”. Phillips elaborates:

“They approach society from a new vantage point. Their capital is movable, not fixed. . . . Change does not threaten the affluent intelligentsia of the Post-Industrial Society the way it threatened the landowners and industrialists of the New Deal. On the contrary, change is as essential to the knowledge sector as inventory turnover is to a merchant or manufacturer. Change keeps up demand for the product (research, news, theory, and technology). Post-Industrialism, a knowledge elite, and accelerated social change appear to go hand in hand.”⁸²

The distant managers of the west who trade in ideas, Phillips explains, promote “accelerated social change.” Their social liberalism is a function of their social role. Francis characterises it as “a process of continuous and permanent revolution, innovation, and social change that reinforces and enhances the dominance of its elite and challenges the power of non-managerial groups that resist innovation and absorption.”

He finishes with a Pareto-esque analysis of the soft-managerial disposition, as gleaned from their policies and actions.

“This process is consistent with the manipulative personality type and patterns of behaviour that characterise the soft managerial elite.”

Francis in contrast to Phillips is a genuine political theoretician, as well as a biting polemicist with a sharp wit. His philosophy is raw but intriguing:

“By “the Right,” he understood a post-conservative movement of change that required mass mobilisation and the timely arrival of appropriate leaders. The present age, Sam maintained, needed counter-revolutionaries, who would unseat the managerial class and restore what they could of the pre-managerial past. But even this, he thought, might not be possible any longer, and the most that now seemed feasible would be the creation of a less revolutionary form of managerial rule.”⁸³

Without further delay, the review articles in question.