Shots Fired: Sam Francis on America's Culture War

Shots Fired: Sam Francis on America's Culture War by Samuel Francis, Peter B. Gemma, ed., (Vienna, Virginia: FGF Books, 2006), 361 pages with index

Review by Ryan Setliff

Samuel Francis—Culture Warrior for the West

The late Samuel Francis gained renown for his trenchant pen, as one of the most provocative paleoconservative writers of his generation. He possessed the trenchant pen of H.L. Mencken and the political predilection Patrick J. Buchanan. In fact, Buchanan has written the introduction to the book. Always caring more about the truth than political correctness, Samuel Francis stuck to his guns, and lost his journalist job with the Washington Times over his politically-incorrect positions on immigration and racial issues in the United States. Francis was the bête noire to the establishment. He kindled the ire of neocon stooges and limousine liberals. His friend, Thomas Fleming, editor of Chronicles, remarked, “In so many ways he was the opposite of most conservatives. He rarely talked a good game, but he always played one.” Paul Gottfried proclaimed, “Francis was not a conventional movement conservative. He was too smart, too honest, and, as these essays indicate, too ready to state social truths that the media had worked strenuously to conceal.” A vociferous pundit, Francis has condemned “immediate gratification, indulgence, and consumption,” while making a clarion call for a “thunderous defense of moral and decent traditionalism.” This powerful anthology of writings, edited by Peter Gemma, represents some of Francis’ most intrepid writing.

Francis was the de facto spokesperson of the fifth column of the American conservative movement. Always the principled populist, he assailed “the stupid party” (i.e., the Republican Party) for betraying the conservative movement, and losing the tug-of-war with the Radical Left, by co-opting its rhetoric and ideology in losing battle, in which it only jockeyed to gain the upper hand in power plays against them. Describing his ideology, Francis wrote: “What paleoconservatism tries to tell Americans is that the dominant forces in their society are no longer committed to conserving the traditions, institutions, and values that created and formed it, and, therefore, that those who are really conservative in any serious sense and wish to live under those traditions, institutions, and values need to oppose the dominant forces and form new ones.” In fact, Francis considered himself “a ‘Buchananite’ conservative,” relating his fealty to the political principles of Patrick J. Buchanan. He posited that support for a Buchanan presidency is part of deep rooted expression of social transformation known as the ‘Middle American Revolution.’ This concept was developed by the late Donald Warren, whose book The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation (University of Notre Dame Press, 1976,) which analyzed the underlying social and political forces that coalesce in an on-going Middle American Revolution. Deeply populist, suspicious of establishment elites, these middle-income, often blue-collar, white voters see themselves as a dispossessed majority. Their traditions are beleaguered by an establishment that bombards them with alien values, alongside economic and social policies completely averse to their interests. Francis gave voice to Middle America, and he sounded the alarms as the fearless village crier. An ardent critic of the conservative movement that doesn’t move, he pointed out how the Grand Old Party has betrayed vital conservative principles at every turn. In 2004, he dared to ask, “Is the American conservative movement as totally bankrupt as it appears to be?”

For the last four years, conservatives have whimpered and whined about insufficient conservative principles of George W. Bush, and properly so. What they don’t want to remember, of course, is that they’re the ones who picked Mr. Bush in the first place—and at the expense of alternatives who tried to them he was no conservative.

Francis would echo the themes of Buchanan predicating a ‘civil war’ for the soul of the Republican Party.

Always the culture warrior, Francis dared to challenge the managerial regime’s egalitarian ideological nostrums of Affirmative Action, Multiculturalism, and social engineering. Francis made a radical reaffirmation of Western traditionalism in the face of a multicultural onslaught of alien values. His writings were full of bombast and flare. His tongue-in-cheek indictment of the television series Star Trek was quite telling: “[It] represents what the cultural elite thinks America and the world should and would be like if only the Philistines would get out of the way and let the Federation spend their money as the elite wants, and the enduring popularity of the series suggests that no small number of viewers at least unconsciously share this vision or have absorbed its premises. That, of course, is what comes of surrendering the production and even the meaning of ‘popular culture’ to the elite.” As the USS Enterprise was meeting its Affirmative Action quotas of Klingons, Francis turned his space-ray-taser-gun against the neoconservatives. Francis lamented: “Contemporary conservatism,” whether officially partisan to the Republican Party or not, “has specialized in surrendering and abandoning the premises of an authentic ‘Right’ and granted the granting the premises of the Left. This is essentially what ‘neo-conservatism’ is—the application of the values and assumptions of the Left for (more or less) rightish positions and policies, at least positions and policies generally to the right of the self-described ‘Left’ supports.

Francis also criticizes the neutered mind of the average conservative in his time, as they considered conservative reading to be pouring over “investigative journalism that raked over the sex lives of important Democrats,” instead of reading the classics from Marcus Cicero to Edmund Burke to Russell Kirk.

For Francis, the advent of neocon ideology and its concepts of the ‘credal nation,’ the ‘first universal nation,’ and ‘global democracy’ was far more insidious than their activist foreign policy. These lofty ideological nostrums threatened to supplant “the actual institutional structure of the West—in class and order, clan and family, community and nation, blood and soil—without which the faith, heroism, and the mind of the West cannot be sustained…”

In his 2000 op-ed, “Equality as a Political Weapon,” Francis dared to open the twenty-first century with an intellectual broadside against egalitarian ideology. The late Mel Bradford recognized:

Let us have no foolishness indeed. Equality as a moral or political imperative, pursued as an end in itself — Equality, with the capital “E” — is the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle. Contrary to most Liberals, new and old, it is nothing less than sophistry to distinguish between equality of opportunity (equal starts in the “race of life”) and equality of condition (equal results). For only those who are equal can take equal advantage of a given circumstance. And there is no man equal to any other, except perhaps in the special, and politically untranslatable, understanding of the Deity. Not intellectually or physically or economically or even morally. Not equal! Such is, of course, the genuinely self-evident proposition. Its truth finds a verification in our bones and is demonstrated in the unselfconscious acts of our everyday lives: vital proof, regardless of our private political persuasion. Incidental equality, engendered by the pursuit of our other objectives, is, to be sure, another matter. Inside the general history of the West (and especially within the American experience) it can be credited with a number of healthy consequences: strength in the bonds of community, assent to the authority of honorable regimes, faith in the justice of the gods.

Francis would concur. Such rhetoric is anathema to the establishment today. But it reveals exactly why the logical outgrowth of radical egalitarianism is egregious social experimentation not unlike George Orwell’s Animal Farm. As the pun goes, “All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.” It wouldn’t be much of a surprise if such words were hewn in stone at the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission in Washington, D.C. Francis himself dissects the roots of egalitarian ideology, tracing it back to the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century.

Francis doesn’t find it incongruous that corporate culture is conducive to leveling experiments, “which require a nationally homogenized market of consumers that can be manipulated into buying their products and which find abhorrent and dysfunctional the persistence of local variations in their markets caused by smaller, localized competitors or class, ethnic, and regional diversities of taste and demand. Only if such variations and diversities are broken up,” he laments, “and homogenized by the inculcation of universal consumption, immediate gratification through credit, and upward social and economic mobility and a uniform range of wants can large corporate enterprises operate on a national (and now a global) scale.” Francis eschewed the consumerist culture, and the baneful dream of neoconservatives to see the countryside plowed over with strip malls, concrete and asphalt in the name of their God—‘Progress.’

Francis was no stranger to controversy. Like Mel Bradford, the former nominee for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Francis cuts President Abraham Lincoln down to size, dismissing him as “the classic case of the Peter Principle—a man promoted beyond his level of competence.” As he wrote in Chronicles, Lincoln was “an ill-prepared man who has a strong claim to being the most incompetent President in American history.” He credits Lincoln with setting us on the perilous road toward leviathan, by overthrowing the Old Republic—with its strong emphasis on localism, concurrent majorities and consensus—in favor of a obtuse managerial regime dominated by the American Presidency.

Francis’ zeal for the truth compelled him to challenge the Sanctuary movement, which provided safe havens for illegal immigrants and engaged in legal and labor rights advocacy for legions of aliens. Francis challenged the indifference of states and localities to ferreting out illegal immigrants, particularly in the American Southwest. He recognized that Groups such as the radical far-left National Lawyers Guild (NLJ) have used their growing muscle to serve the open borders agenda. The NLJ was declared by the U.S. House of Representatives in 1950, as “the foremost legal bulwark of the Communist Party.” The CIA and FBI had previously declared this group to nothing more than a pro-communist, Soviet-sponsored front group.

It is no big secret, if you dig through Marxist-Leninist literature that the Reds believed that West can be vanquished and weakened through immigration. They see the growth of a transnational immigrant proletariat in industrialized nations as a key to foment and further the cause of communist revolution. That was the clandestine goal behind their supporting the open borders agenda in the West and the U.S. Such groups as MALDEF, NLJ, and the ACLU, under the banner of "immigrant rights" have pushed for access to costly taxpayer-funded social services for illegal aliens and resident aliens while actively pushing for more legal hamstrings on local, state and federal law enforcement in their efforts to curb the illegal alien problem and enforce the laws on the books.

In the twenty-first century, after Francis’ passing, the United States is swamped by red tape and frivolous litigation by this entrenched class of socially-radical trial lawyers who seek to obstruct immigration enforcement and reform efforts at every turn. Today, Congress even appropriates money for these constituencies for illegal immigrant rights. Such is the folly of American politics today—as it is inundated with cultural Marxism.