One reflection of the political and social crisis in the country is the on-going battle of over myths of national origin and purpose. We can see this taking place now in the furious reaction to “Critical Race Theory,” now resulting in book banning and censorship. We can also see it in the intense anger and controversy generated by the 1619 Project, which displaced what George Carey and Wilmoore Kendall one of the “basic symbols” of the American tradition: the 1620 Mayflower Compact, with another founding before the founding. We can see it in the birth of strange millenarian fantasies like QAnon, which is now drawing on the boomer fantasia of a Kennedy restoration. And we can see it in the rather plaintive calls by some liberals for a restored progressive form of patriotism, like in Ben Rhodes’s recent Atlantic essay. While conflicts over the nature of the country are not in any way new, they seem to have reached a fevered intensity in the last few years. What people seem to be looking for, to quote Antonio Gramsci, is a “Sorelian myth—i.e. a political ideology expressed neither in the form of cold utopia nor as learned theorizing, but rather by a creation of a concrete phantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organize its collective will.”
The Right is perhaps a little more self-aware than the Left about attempting to formulate such a myth. Writing in the American Conservative this week, Matthew Schmitz invokes Sam Francis as a guide to the contemporary American Right. Arguing against my friend Sam Adler-Bell’s New Republic piece, he proposes that a new crop radical right intellectuals has a genuine and organic constituency in the historic core of the conservative movement:
It has a deep and abiding base of popular support in what Sam Francis called the “post-bourgeois proletariat,” people who live in, but are not fully part of, our managerial regime. Their outlook—described by Francis as “working-class anti-liberalism”—chimes with new right themes.
Post-bourgeois proletarians hate political correctness, not because they are principled defenders of free speech but because they resent the managerial class that creates and Like all classes, this one has characteristic habits and beliefs. A regime that reflects its preferences will enforce definite orthodoxies. (Centrist commentators who present “right-wing political correctness,” as a threat equal and opposite to “left-wing political correctness” understand this perfectly.) Post-bourgeois proletarians prefer shows of force to subtle forms of manipulation. They are Jacksonians on foreign policy and law-and-order voters on crime. They probably do not read the Bible or consult the Catechism, but they honor flag, faith, and family.
Francis described the beliefs of the post-bourgeois proletariat in ways that will seem familiar to any follower of abstruse debates over postliberalism, integralism, and the like. They show “little attraction to bourgeois conservatism and its emphasis on laissez-faire economics, the rights of property, [and] the minimal state.” These ideas supported and were supported by a bourgeois order that the rise of large organizations—the so-called managerial revolution—has displaced.
Let’s set aside just how “post-bourgeois” or “proletarian” this class really is, or if it even constitutes a class, I happen to think Schmitz is right in a certain way: Sam Francis is really the clearest and most-honest guide to the present disposition of the Right. This is why he’s a major figure in the book I’m writing. Francis was the most brilliant of the “paleocons,” the hard right faction of the right intelligentsia whose ideas in the 80s and 90s pre-figured Trumpian politics. Here’s Francis writing in 1992:
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, and who also are starting to think about reversing the processes and powers responsible for their dispossession.