Paleos Ascendant?

The Takeover at the Heritage Foundation

This morning, The Washington Post reported that Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts toasted Chronicles magazine and its editor-in-chief
Paul Gottfried at a recent dinner. That hardly sounds like news in this day and age, but it’s a notable indicator of the ideological direction that D.C.’s conservative institutions are taking.

Roberts, of course, was the guy who defended Tucker Carlson for having Nick Fuentes. Gottfried coined the terms “paleoconservatism” and “alternative right,” and was the erstwhile mentor to white nationalist Richard Spencer. Chronicles is the premier outlet of paleo thought, and it once published Samuel T. Francis, the John the Baptist of MAGA.

Roberts is returning the favor: Chronicles stood up for him during the Tucker imbroglio. Now Roberts wants to help Chronicles “expand its reach.”

In a blog post published this morning, Paul Gottfried has taken exception to the Post’s coverage, particularly its statement that Francis once praised KKK wizard and neo-Nazi leader David Duke. According to Gottfried, I’m one of a group of writers who have “smeared” Francis by giving the impression that his endorsement of Duke’s politics was full-throated. He points to qualifications and criticisms in Francis’s work about Duke. Unfortunately for Gottfried, some of the “countervailing evidence” he cites is also quite damning.

For instance, Gottfried seems to think this passage from Francis’s 1991 Chronicles column “Bad Moon on the Rise” is exculpatory:

Of course, by itself, Mr. Duke’s ability to gain votes does not constitute a revolution, nor does the candidate himself seem to promise much as a serious leader of one. He simply carries too much baggage, and there are persistent rumors about irregularities in his personal life, which, if true, point to serious character flaws and threaten an eventual political embarrassment. Whatever his plans for the future, Mr. Duke and his supporters shouldn’t count on holding high elective office. He can at most be a gadfly, and perhaps the best thing for him to do now would be to institutionalize the movement he has started in a nationwide organization that could exert cultural and indirect political power and radicalize Middle American consciousness still further.

I don’t think encouraging David Duke to “institutionalize the movement he started” is exactly a repudiation. Perhaps Gottfried should get his prescription checked.

Francis’s criticisms of Duke were limited to his political viability as a representative of a coming populist wave, not to his beliefs. The evidence for Francis’s racial politics is nearly endless. And in regard to Duke, Francis seemed to buy his project to clean up white supremacy for a mass audience. After Duke visited the Washington Times offices, Francis wrote a column entitled “Respectable Racism?”

After his visit to the Senate, he dropped in at The Washington Times to explain himself to reporters and editors. The interview he gave suggests that he has not only managed to separate himself from Klan-like racism but also formulated a message new to American politics, a message that might be called “respectable racism.” While Mr. Duke now calls himself a “conservative Republican,” it became clear in the course of his remarks that he espouses a belief in the importance of race that most conservatives would shun.

Then Francis points out that Duke’s racial message may be more effective than a standard conservative one:

It’s interesting that Mr. Helms, despite a close contest with a black opponent, avoided racial issues like affirmative action in his campaign until last week. That may be why his campaign was floundering while Mr. Duke’s flourished. Conventional conservative themes such as Mr. Helms emphasized in most of his campaign may not attract voters anymore the way Mr. Duke’s new racial appeal does.

Francis did not always limit his praise to purveyors of respectability politics either, but was intrigued by what violent extremism heralded, as well. Look at his Chronicles column from 1985, “The End of Bourgeois Conservatism?” which he dedicated to analyzing the political meaning of the rise of neo-Nazi terrorist groups like The Silent Brotherhood, which had murdered Jewish radio host Alan Berg a year earlier:

It is because they are postbourgeois and antibourgeois, because they have so little attraction to the prosaic ambitions of bourgeois civilization and so much scorn for the baubles of the managerial regime, that the new militants or their successors may be able to achieve what no other force on the American right has ever been able to do, to formulate a myth of the right around which it would be possible to mobilize a massive popular challenge to the myth of the left that has animated Western politics for the last two centuries and which has now even insinuated itself into contemporary conservatism. "Myths," wrote Georges Sorel, "are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act. .. . A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of their convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalysable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions." The frightening significance of the perpetrators of recent right-wing violence does not therefore consist in their "descriptions of things," but in their "determination to act," in the irrefutable power of their convictions, and in the possibility that they may be able to conjure up that most formidable of all specters in the nightmares of establishments, a revolution from the right, a rejection of both bourgeois comforts as well as of managerial humanism and social engineering, and an affirmation of our national identity and its destiny.

Again, the examples are nearly endless. There’s the inconvenient fact that Francis was ultimately fired from The Washington Times in 1995 for appearing at the conference of a white nationalist magazine, American Renaissance, and saying, “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 civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people." This was after Francis was already on thin ice at the Times for a column that criticized the Southern Baptist Convention for apologizing for slavery. In that column, he wrote, theologically speaking, “neither ‘slavery‘ nor ‘racism‘ as an institution is a sin.”

What has happened in the centuries since the Enlightenment is the permeation of the pseudo-Christian poison of equality into the tissues of the West, to the point that the mainstream churches now spend more time preaching against apartheid and colonialism than they do against real sins such as pinching secretaries and pilfering from the office coffee pool. The Southern Baptists, because they were fortunate enough to flourish in a region where the false sun of the Enlightenment never shone, succeeded in escaping this grim fate, at least until last week.

This column is helpfully included in a collection published by American Renaissance entitled “Essential Writings on Race: Samuel Francis.”

I could go on and on and on. There’s also all the anecdotal evidence. Like Francis calling himself a “fascist” to a young Michael Lind. Or, as Adrianne Black told me, dining at the home of KKK chieftain and Stormfront founder. Don Black. You get the point.