bill mckay on bluesky likened the termination of usaid to "one massive Aktion T4 on the poorest people in the world," a structural genocide via austerity of the global south (exemplary of the neoliberal>>neofascist evolution), a neonazi redux of mike davis's late victorian holocausts
ive likened the maga quest for nationalist autarky to white flight from the cosmopolitan marketplace, a hostile exit in protest against the global desegregation of decolonization, a refusal to do business with and share the same worldspace as african and asian nations who can now leverage their weight as trade partners and possess their own rising educated professional classes
the whole project is shot through with profound racial and gender anxieties, seeing the codependencies created by free trade, however vastly mutually beneficial, as basically emasculation and miscegenation
I like "white flight from the cosmopolitan marketplace" a lot.
I've always found the US-Vietnam relationship in the 90s forward kind of sweet, which makes the war even more tragic. "Let's set this ideology business aside and make some money together". It's sad to see trade scuttled because (as you say) they see this impulse as cucked.
Elad Nehorai wrote a Substack post framing the termination of USAID in a similar way as Bill McKay. He contrasted Elon Musk's obsession with natality with his disdain for the lives of (non white) children which were saved through USAID, and came to the conclusion that killing non white people was part of the design in shutting USAID, not an unfortunate side effect.
He took this as a starting point to state he'd erred in first thinking of Musk as a white nationalist, like many MAGAs, when Musk was more of a white globalist, trying to push white supremacy worldwide.
Musk's been critical of tariffs and favors free trade (...between the US and Europe, some white coding of free trade I suppose), I guess it's a reminder that pushing free trade and some kind of internationalism doesn't necesarly mean one is an humanist, at all.
This is beautifully written and accurate except I think neoliberalism link is a bit of stretch, unless you’re perceiving it as an inevitable backlash. For all its faults neoliberalism was and is an embrace of the global marketplace.
Trump's individual agenda is an additional factor. As Sen. Chris Murphy recently opined, tariffs provide him leverage with governments and corporations: everybody has to seek favors from him.
Illuminating. Perhaps it's not apropos but since it is apparent that it's Rothbard and Francis' America now what immediately comes to mind is Roth's identification of the "indigenous American berserk" and D.H. Lawrence' description of that essential trait of the white American psyche as "...hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.”.
David Brooks in a recent Atlantic piece describes an epiphany about American conservatives and American conservatism attached to his recognition that there were intellectual conservatives wedded to Burke and traditional currents of Conservative thought and then there were the "conservatives" who just wanted to "make the libs cry". He never thought the latter would become ascendant. He dismissed them. I don't know that is a distinction that was as clear-cut as he believed.
It surprised me a bit given the Francis', Rothbards and Buchanans that kept popping up but I'm getting the idea most movements never really seem to understand their essential nature until it's too late.
This reminds me of my parents, who are both Canadian conservatives (one a business-friendly "red Tory" and the other an anglophile Burkean type). I think it has been genuinely painful for them to see that even if their particular conservatisms wielded a lot of power during their lifetime, it no longer puts "butts in the seats", and maybe never did.
Taking apart the whole idea that there used to be "good" intellectual Burkean conservatives who are different than the bad conservatives we have today is pretty much the whole point of Corey Robin's "The Conservative Mind". One thing he does is he actually read Burke, which basically no one does, and finds he's a lot more like the "bad" supposedly non-Burkean conservatives
It wasn't my intention to label all conservatives as the latter. But it does seem to me that to the extent that once Conservatism writ large becomes an ideological project it betrays itself. Arendt noted of European Conservatism that it is a "polemic"; that seems generally true to me. And once it arrives there the temptation is always to "make the libs cry".
Re tension between the libertarian & populist wings: I think you can tell a lot about a libertarian by how they talk about migration. Immigration restrictions are (often ugly, expensive, and surveillance-heavy) state action, and once they start backfilling justifications for them it's a big red flag you're not dealing with a principled defender of individual rights and they're swimming in paleo waters. It won’t be too surprising that on the relevant wikipedia page, the anti-section is dominated by Rothbard and his students (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_perspectives_on_immigration#Libertarian_proponents_of_free_immigration).
I don't want either flavour running my country, but the non-paleo-types (neoliberal libertarians?) occasionally have insights worth listening to or are working from a cognizable moral framework (whether consequentialism or liberal rights). As you've said many times, though, those are decidedly not the libertarian antecedents to trump, which really helps square the populist/libertarian circle on trade: state action is not problematic insofar as it’s directed at foreigners.
I'm genuinely not smart enough or well read enough to really prove this but I've long suspected that the whole "libertarian" tradition (at least in the US) was basically some kind of marketing/rebranding effort to promote what are essentially just paleocon ideas and is not some genuinely different intellectual/political tradition. If you look into it at you see that the supposed values of "small government" and "personal freedom" are at best applied totally inconsistently and everything boils down to typical right wing ideology.
idk how productive it is to get bogged down into a definition game. If "libertarian" necessarily includes strong, deontological rights against any state action whatsoever, then sure, it's dominated by kooks and sickos. But it's often used to mean "laissez-faire on social & economic issues". That isn't my politics but isn't viscerally repulsive. And those people are a lot more likely to make valuable policy contributions than Conservatives, imo (e.g., a ton of criminal defence lawyers in that space; worthwhile criticisms of regulatory regimes in e.g. housing/insurance/pharmaceuticals).
Right, so the nationalist ideology doesn't view the *state's* concern only with universalist values as limiting itself to some common denominator without necessarily encroaching on groups of citizens to assemble and choose their own, more restrictive particular values, but as actively hostile to any expression of a volk.
While I can see how such a conflict between universal and particular values may arise in, say, Saudi Arabia, I wonder what actual (not hypothetical) conflict they would claim to exist in America. After all, those very same "globalist", universalist values could also be cast as particular European, Enlightenment values that arose in a particular place and a particular time just as "naturally" as any other local, particular value. But those aren't the values these guys wish to preserve, are they?
I once emailed Chomsky to ask him to tell me more about how his views on trade differed from Buchanan. He didn’t really answer my question except to say “very different” but I assume his answer would be that he wanted organizations like the ILO to have a stronger role in the trading regime. Whereas for Buchanan et all the tariffs are a unilateral solution with potent symbolism as well. Pettis suggested a tax on cross border investment flows which I doubt would have the same resonance with the base.
Kind of bizarre to consider that at exactly the moment Francis was lamenting deracinated national identity (1991-1992), 18 entirely new nation-states were created out of whole cloth, 14 from the dissolution of the USSR, 4 from the civil war in Yugoslavia. I think in many ways guys like Francis experienced "winning" the Cold War as a loss for US hegemony.
I'm recalling the Trans-Pacific Partnership of 2016 and the objections from both left- (Bernie) and right-(Buchanan) populists to it in this context. The last gasp of official globalism. In retrospect it seems inept in its ambition, as many of its goals (probably isolating China as a part of the "Pacific Pivot") could have been achieved without such a comprehensive supranational framework.
The treaty framework which mobilized the opposition allegedly would have created arbitration forums to litigate labor disputes formerly governed by national law and courts. That was seen as a corporate-controlled dispute resolution system which would drive labor standards to the lowest denominator in the TPP countries. It was a frequent subject of discussion on Democracy Now! Many of the things Francis said were echoed in the opposition to TPP from the left.
Hillary Clinton was "for it before she was against it," in her campaign, and maybe the suspicion she wasn't really against it was a factor in her loss.
What gets me here--and elsewhere in arguments about the underlying, evil logics of Trumpian behavior--is the absolute dissonance between things like you argue here (immediately sensible synergy adding more bricks to the foundation that is Francis and Rothbard, which I buy) vs. Trump's own godawful incoherence as he blathers on about, say, tariffs. I have largely given up on trying to mind-read Trump. But public statements by his cabinet are often just as inane. Is the theory of the case here that Francis-Rothbardism seeped into, permeated the populist right that became Trumpism, so we need not look for an extant Rasputin whispering in Trump's ear because it's in their drinking water? That they latch onto certain policies for the resonance, and that resonance exists because of the music played by Francis-Rothbard back in the day? I guess my trouble is that I absolutely buy the right-wing analysis you give, the argument from the intellectuals, but then I see little sign of intellectuals in this administration. This all works toward an American fascism, drawing on the strains you note, but is it more, well, emergent system or intelligent design?
I guess what I wonder about is how this works. Vance appeared weak in the Signal chat leak, with Miller the voice of Trump, but that could be because of the topic or Vance's relative capital at the time. But prominent figures in Trump's orbit are subject to the vicissitudes of his daily annoyances, so their stock rises and falls, I'd imagine, so even if Vance is a key "intellectual," there have to be some days he's on the outs and some days he's in good graces.
I know and believe the argument that all the staffers are groypers, but they're twits, not masterminds.
It's just that the Francis-Rothbard brain trust origin story is very convincing (hat-tip). Is that where we poisoned the water supply, and these 9th-rate inbred intellects in the administration (cabinet and staff) have just imbibed it so long that it's their instinct? Because we know the ideologies contradict, the interests served clash, and it's not like we're seeing finesse on display in trying to paper over the conflicts.
Is it just that when folks get in a room together, some version of the Francis + Rothbard overlapping circles gets consensus based on gut reaction of what will sell to the Francis-Rothbardian base, sometimes one side pitching more successfully to Trump's ego, sometimes the other doing so, and that's what passes for compromise among the factions in this Admin?
I'd bet more heavily on all the preëxisting elements that gave us Rothbard and Francis being heavily in the water Trump drank. I don't recall if it were here or elsewhere that I speculated that Fred regularly regaled the family at supper about (among other things directly relating to his rental policies) against 'Rosenfeldʼs Screw Deal', how if the tariffs were higher he wouldn't have to pay income tax, and the foreign fake-American agitators against '100% Americanism".
…as well as describing how everyone else was continually trying to cheat him so that meant that any other description of human relations were a ruse, or at best a schoolmarmy, civilised, fiction only a loser could believe….
(On the other hand, just as paranoids create enemies, given how they act who _wouldn't_ at least consider giving Fred or Donald a kick if they could….)
(My father ran a very small business, and I did grow-up to descriptions of much wealthier people than he trying to get out of paying bills…but he also mentioned good customers and suppliers—perhaps because he never atrempted to cheat anyone, he didn't need to believe that such were the universal way of the world.)
I don't know much le Maistre and that I do know is largely via Isaiah Berlin, but the particularism reminds me of le Maistre's saying that he had never met a 'man', only a Frenchman &c.:
…which, I'll admit, I remember mostly for amusement's sake when I hear a reactionary bigot talk about defending 'Europe' or 'the white race'. 'Piker, you have _nothing_ on old J.l.M.….'
The U.S. was the first Enlightenment nation; it can never please all of its inhabitants, and all things induce their opposites anyway, so why _shouldn't_ anti-Enlightenment fervour contnually bubble under? Maybe the Enlightenment is in our veins but as for our lymphatic system….
Though I think Haidt misses the mark often—though that may be my biases showing as he seems to be more and more plainly conservative—I can't help but think of his positing a 'Purity/Disgust' pillar for conservatism: trade is contact, and contact can convey uncleanliness.
There is also a masculinist element in play: a Real Man doesn't need anyone else. Need is weakness, which like many of the best lies has a grain of truth in it but ignores the weakness that can result from the monomaniacal pursuit of independence.
The globalism the business puppets disliked was *a* form of it: commercial competition as viewed by people who believed for them to succeed, someone must lose.
But there was a bigger form, one they supported which was of course our tendency to work covertly to ensure that the world would remain safe for capitalism and, obviously, safe from socialism. Western commercial interests were at risk so overthrows in Guatemala, Chile and Iran. Socialism had be kept out of Europe so elections were regularly subverted, famously so in Italy for decades. And those are just the examples popping quickly into my aged head. There are of course many other instances.
The anti-globalists John writes about in the post were are beyond cool with that form of globalization.
Were these Francis type populists reading Schmitt or is it just an uncanny convergence? The opposition to liberalism on both counts, economic and especially political/cultural-humanitarian, in service to the state and justified by the particularist, is very Schmittian. Terrible minds think alike I suppose.
I'll agree that the Sam Francis line isn't quite reducible to classic antisemitism, of the Protocols variety. But antisemitism and the Sam Francis line are both reducible to ressentiment. Sam Francis is not dominating inferior wogs; he's fighting a noble underdog Thermopylae [sic] against "global elites."
Totally possible you’ve gone long on this in a prior piece (or more significantly commented on it in your book and I’ve forgotten) but is there a reason you find Francis/Rothbard more representative of this phenomenon than Buchanan?
Is it that they are in the trenches generating these ideas and Buchanan was more of a middleman for smuggling the ideas into the mainstream?
Or are there other reasons that Pat gets substantial guest starring roles, but not leading man status, when he seems to crop up in many of the same contexts as Francis etc?
Buchanan had a long career in my youth as a talking head on ostensibly liberal outlets and it does feel like that dynamic is different than just politician vs. intellectual.
But perhaps by the point Pat was on Maddow he had ceased to have much input into the ideas that John is tracing here 🤷
You absolutely do not neglect him. Sincerely apologize if my comments came across as critical.
Frankly I’m just fascinated by Buchanan as the old, racist dog that was around long enough to catch the car and would enjoy hearing your thoughts on him from a more retrospective, 2025, perspective than from a historical/90s perspective.
bill mckay on bluesky likened the termination of usaid to "one massive Aktion T4 on the poorest people in the world," a structural genocide via austerity of the global south (exemplary of the neoliberal>>neofascist evolution), a neonazi redux of mike davis's late victorian holocausts
ive likened the maga quest for nationalist autarky to white flight from the cosmopolitan marketplace, a hostile exit in protest against the global desegregation of decolonization, a refusal to do business with and share the same worldspace as african and asian nations who can now leverage their weight as trade partners and possess their own rising educated professional classes
the whole project is shot through with profound racial and gender anxieties, seeing the codependencies created by free trade, however vastly mutually beneficial, as basically emasculation and miscegenation
I like "white flight from the cosmopolitan marketplace" a lot.
I've always found the US-Vietnam relationship in the 90s forward kind of sweet, which makes the war even more tragic. "Let's set this ideology business aside and make some money together". It's sad to see trade scuttled because (as you say) they see this impulse as cucked.
Elad Nehorai wrote a Substack post framing the termination of USAID in a similar way as Bill McKay. He contrasted Elon Musk's obsession with natality with his disdain for the lives of (non white) children which were saved through USAID, and came to the conclusion that killing non white people was part of the design in shutting USAID, not an unfortunate side effect.
He took this as a starting point to state he'd erred in first thinking of Musk as a white nationalist, like many MAGAs, when Musk was more of a white globalist, trying to push white supremacy worldwide.
Musk's been critical of tariffs and favors free trade (...between the US and Europe, some white coding of free trade I suppose), I guess it's a reminder that pushing free trade and some kind of internationalism doesn't necesarly mean one is an humanist, at all.
(Found back the post, here it is : https://eladnehorai.substack.com/p/elon-musk-isnt-a-white-nationalist?r=1443i&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true )
This is beautifully written and accurate except I think neoliberalism link is a bit of stretch, unless you’re perceiving it as an inevitable backlash. For all its faults neoliberalism was and is an embrace of the global marketplace.
Trump's individual agenda is an additional factor. As Sen. Chris Murphy recently opined, tariffs provide him leverage with governments and corporations: everybody has to seek favors from him.
Illuminating. Perhaps it's not apropos but since it is apparent that it's Rothbard and Francis' America now what immediately comes to mind is Roth's identification of the "indigenous American berserk" and D.H. Lawrence' description of that essential trait of the white American psyche as "...hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.”.
David Brooks in a recent Atlantic piece describes an epiphany about American conservatives and American conservatism attached to his recognition that there were intellectual conservatives wedded to Burke and traditional currents of Conservative thought and then there were the "conservatives" who just wanted to "make the libs cry". He never thought the latter would become ascendant. He dismissed them. I don't know that is a distinction that was as clear-cut as he believed.
It surprised me a bit given the Francis', Rothbards and Buchanans that kept popping up but I'm getting the idea most movements never really seem to understand their essential nature until it's too late.
Errant thoughts.
This reminds me of my parents, who are both Canadian conservatives (one a business-friendly "red Tory" and the other an anglophile Burkean type). I think it has been genuinely painful for them to see that even if their particular conservatisms wielded a lot of power during their lifetime, it no longer puts "butts in the seats", and maybe never did.
Taking apart the whole idea that there used to be "good" intellectual Burkean conservatives who are different than the bad conservatives we have today is pretty much the whole point of Corey Robin's "The Conservative Mind". One thing he does is he actually read Burke, which basically no one does, and finds he's a lot more like the "bad" supposedly non-Burkean conservatives
It wasn't my intention to label all conservatives as the latter. But it does seem to me that to the extent that once Conservatism writ large becomes an ideological project it betrays itself. Arendt noted of European Conservatism that it is a "polemic"; that seems generally true to me. And once it arrives there the temptation is always to "make the libs cry".
Re tension between the libertarian & populist wings: I think you can tell a lot about a libertarian by how they talk about migration. Immigration restrictions are (often ugly, expensive, and surveillance-heavy) state action, and once they start backfilling justifications for them it's a big red flag you're not dealing with a principled defender of individual rights and they're swimming in paleo waters. It won’t be too surprising that on the relevant wikipedia page, the anti-section is dominated by Rothbard and his students (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_perspectives_on_immigration#Libertarian_proponents_of_free_immigration).
I don't want either flavour running my country, but the non-paleo-types (neoliberal libertarians?) occasionally have insights worth listening to or are working from a cognizable moral framework (whether consequentialism or liberal rights). As you've said many times, though, those are decidedly not the libertarian antecedents to trump, which really helps square the populist/libertarian circle on trade: state action is not problematic insofar as it’s directed at foreigners.
I'm genuinely not smart enough or well read enough to really prove this but I've long suspected that the whole "libertarian" tradition (at least in the US) was basically some kind of marketing/rebranding effort to promote what are essentially just paleocon ideas and is not some genuinely different intellectual/political tradition. If you look into it at you see that the supposed values of "small government" and "personal freedom" are at best applied totally inconsistently and everything boils down to typical right wing ideology.
idk how productive it is to get bogged down into a definition game. If "libertarian" necessarily includes strong, deontological rights against any state action whatsoever, then sure, it's dominated by kooks and sickos. But it's often used to mean "laissez-faire on social & economic issues". That isn't my politics but isn't viscerally repulsive. And those people are a lot more likely to make valuable policy contributions than Conservatives, imo (e.g., a ton of criminal defence lawyers in that space; worthwhile criticisms of regulatory regimes in e.g. housing/insurance/pharmaceuticals).
Right, so the nationalist ideology doesn't view the *state's* concern only with universalist values as limiting itself to some common denominator without necessarily encroaching on groups of citizens to assemble and choose their own, more restrictive particular values, but as actively hostile to any expression of a volk.
While I can see how such a conflict between universal and particular values may arise in, say, Saudi Arabia, I wonder what actual (not hypothetical) conflict they would claim to exist in America. After all, those very same "globalist", universalist values could also be cast as particular European, Enlightenment values that arose in a particular place and a particular time just as "naturally" as any other local, particular value. But those aren't the values these guys wish to preserve, are they?
I once emailed Chomsky to ask him to tell me more about how his views on trade differed from Buchanan. He didn’t really answer my question except to say “very different” but I assume his answer would be that he wanted organizations like the ILO to have a stronger role in the trading regime. Whereas for Buchanan et all the tariffs are a unilateral solution with potent symbolism as well. Pettis suggested a tax on cross border investment flows which I doubt would have the same resonance with the base.
So, for _how_ many years running did Mr Francis win the award for 'Longest possible way of saying "The Jews! The Jews!"'?
Kind of bizarre to consider that at exactly the moment Francis was lamenting deracinated national identity (1991-1992), 18 entirely new nation-states were created out of whole cloth, 14 from the dissolution of the USSR, 4 from the civil war in Yugoslavia. I think in many ways guys like Francis experienced "winning" the Cold War as a loss for US hegemony.
I'm recalling the Trans-Pacific Partnership of 2016 and the objections from both left- (Bernie) and right-(Buchanan) populists to it in this context. The last gasp of official globalism. In retrospect it seems inept in its ambition, as many of its goals (probably isolating China as a part of the "Pacific Pivot") could have been achieved without such a comprehensive supranational framework.
The treaty framework which mobilized the opposition allegedly would have created arbitration forums to litigate labor disputes formerly governed by national law and courts. That was seen as a corporate-controlled dispute resolution system which would drive labor standards to the lowest denominator in the TPP countries. It was a frequent subject of discussion on Democracy Now! Many of the things Francis said were echoed in the opposition to TPP from the left.
Hillary Clinton was "for it before she was against it," in her campaign, and maybe the suspicion she wasn't really against it was a factor in her loss.
What gets me here--and elsewhere in arguments about the underlying, evil logics of Trumpian behavior--is the absolute dissonance between things like you argue here (immediately sensible synergy adding more bricks to the foundation that is Francis and Rothbard, which I buy) vs. Trump's own godawful incoherence as he blathers on about, say, tariffs. I have largely given up on trying to mind-read Trump. But public statements by his cabinet are often just as inane. Is the theory of the case here that Francis-Rothbardism seeped into, permeated the populist right that became Trumpism, so we need not look for an extant Rasputin whispering in Trump's ear because it's in their drinking water? That they latch onto certain policies for the resonance, and that resonance exists because of the music played by Francis-Rothbard back in the day? I guess my trouble is that I absolutely buy the right-wing analysis you give, the argument from the intellectuals, but then I see little sign of intellectuals in this administration. This all works toward an American fascism, drawing on the strains you note, but is it more, well, emergent system or intelligent design?
Vance is into this shit. The intellectual stuff is more at the staff level.
I guess what I wonder about is how this works. Vance appeared weak in the Signal chat leak, with Miller the voice of Trump, but that could be because of the topic or Vance's relative capital at the time. But prominent figures in Trump's orbit are subject to the vicissitudes of his daily annoyances, so their stock rises and falls, I'd imagine, so even if Vance is a key "intellectual," there have to be some days he's on the outs and some days he's in good graces.
I know and believe the argument that all the staffers are groypers, but they're twits, not masterminds.
It's just that the Francis-Rothbard brain trust origin story is very convincing (hat-tip). Is that where we poisoned the water supply, and these 9th-rate inbred intellects in the administration (cabinet and staff) have just imbibed it so long that it's their instinct? Because we know the ideologies contradict, the interests served clash, and it's not like we're seeing finesse on display in trying to paper over the conflicts.
Is it just that when folks get in a room together, some version of the Francis + Rothbard overlapping circles gets consensus based on gut reaction of what will sell to the Francis-Rothbardian base, sometimes one side pitching more successfully to Trump's ego, sometimes the other doing so, and that's what passes for compromise among the factions in this Admin?
I'd bet more heavily on all the preëxisting elements that gave us Rothbard and Francis being heavily in the water Trump drank. I don't recall if it were here or elsewhere that I speculated that Fred regularly regaled the family at supper about (among other things directly relating to his rental policies) against 'Rosenfeldʼs Screw Deal', how if the tariffs were higher he wouldn't have to pay income tax, and the foreign fake-American agitators against '100% Americanism".
…as well as describing how everyone else was continually trying to cheat him so that meant that any other description of human relations were a ruse, or at best a schoolmarmy, civilised, fiction only a loser could believe….
(On the other hand, just as paranoids create enemies, given how they act who _wouldn't_ at least consider giving Fred or Donald a kick if they could….)
(My father ran a very small business, and I did grow-up to descriptions of much wealthier people than he trying to get out of paying bills…but he also mentioned good customers and suppliers—perhaps because he never atrempted to cheat anyone, he didn't need to believe that such were the universal way of the world.)
I don't know much le Maistre and that I do know is largely via Isaiah Berlin, but the particularism reminds me of le Maistre's saying that he had never met a 'man', only a Frenchman &c.:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7781373-now-there-is-no-such-thing-as-man-in-this
…which, I'll admit, I remember mostly for amusement's sake when I hear a reactionary bigot talk about defending 'Europe' or 'the white race'. 'Piker, you have _nothing_ on old J.l.M.….'
The U.S. was the first Enlightenment nation; it can never please all of its inhabitants, and all things induce their opposites anyway, so why _shouldn't_ anti-Enlightenment fervour contnually bubble under? Maybe the Enlightenment is in our veins but as for our lymphatic system….
Though I think Haidt misses the mark often—though that may be my biases showing as he seems to be more and more plainly conservative—I can't help but think of his positing a 'Purity/Disgust' pillar for conservatism: trade is contact, and contact can convey uncleanliness.
There is also a masculinist element in play: a Real Man doesn't need anyone else. Need is weakness, which like many of the best lies has a grain of truth in it but ignores the weakness that can result from the monomaniacal pursuit of independence.
The globalism the business puppets disliked was *a* form of it: commercial competition as viewed by people who believed for them to succeed, someone must lose.
But there was a bigger form, one they supported which was of course our tendency to work covertly to ensure that the world would remain safe for capitalism and, obviously, safe from socialism. Western commercial interests were at risk so overthrows in Guatemala, Chile and Iran. Socialism had be kept out of Europe so elections were regularly subverted, famously so in Italy for decades. And those are just the examples popping quickly into my aged head. There are of course many other instances.
The anti-globalists John writes about in the post were are beyond cool with that form of globalization.
FWIW, of course.
Were these Francis type populists reading Schmitt or is it just an uncanny convergence? The opposition to liberalism on both counts, economic and especially political/cultural-humanitarian, in service to the state and justified by the particularist, is very Schmittian. Terrible minds think alike I suppose.
def knew him
I'll agree that the Sam Francis line isn't quite reducible to classic antisemitism, of the Protocols variety. But antisemitism and the Sam Francis line are both reducible to ressentiment. Sam Francis is not dominating inferior wogs; he's fighting a noble underdog Thermopylae [sic] against "global elites."
Hi John,
Totally possible you’ve gone long on this in a prior piece (or more significantly commented on it in your book and I’ve forgotten) but is there a reason you find Francis/Rothbard more representative of this phenomenon than Buchanan?
Is it that they are in the trenches generating these ideas and Buchanan was more of a middleman for smuggling the ideas into the mainstream?
Or are there other reasons that Pat gets substantial guest starring roles, but not leading man status, when he seems to crop up in many of the same contexts as Francis etc?
Thanks as always for a good post.
Buchanan is the politician, Rothbard and Francis are the intellectuals
I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. Big walls on the outside, right wing libertarianism and hierarchy on the inside.
Yeah, I agree.
Buchanan had a long career in my youth as a talking head on ostensibly liberal outlets and it does feel like that dynamic is different than just politician vs. intellectual.
But perhaps by the point Pat was on Maddow he had ceased to have much input into the ideas that John is tracing here 🤷
I mean, I do not neglect Buchanan's importance
You absolutely do not neglect him. Sincerely apologize if my comments came across as critical.
Frankly I’m just fascinated by Buchanan as the old, racist dog that was around long enough to catch the car and would enjoy hearing your thoughts on him from a more retrospective, 2025, perspective than from a historical/90s perspective.