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a doctorate in British history from the University of North Carolina, and his work is often peppered with ostentatious historical references.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?”