Trump's Art of the Book; Rethinking Sam Francis; Class Dealignment?; Another Visit from the Bond Squad
Reading, Watching 04.15.25
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In this month’s issue of The Nation magazine, I review Trump’s first three books: The Art of the Deal (1987), The Art of Survival (1990), and The Art of the Comeback (1997). I find Trump became much worse—more paranoid, more delusional, more aggressive—after the early 1990s real estate crash and recession, an episode he somewhat hyperbolically called a “Depression.” Conveniently enough, this happens to align nicely with the thesis of When the Clock Broke: that the crisis of the early 1990s revealed the America to come.
And if you’ve been waiting for When the Clock Broke to come out in paperback, it’s almost here: May 27th in the U.S. and June 12th in the U.K. Both editions include a new postscript that tries to bring the book somewhat more up to date. Here’s the British cover.
For a view that dissents from one of the central contentions in that book, historian Joshua Tait has a piece out last week in the Bulwark entitled “He’s a Key Thinker of the Radical Right, But Is He All That? Where the rediscovery of Sam Francis goes wrong.” Tait’s an extremely scrupulous scholar with a detailed knowledge of the conservative movement. I always read him with great interest, but I obviously can’t assent to his revision here: I still think a close reading of Francis is essential to understand what the right has become. Tait’s concerned is that we are making too big of a deal out of him:
The reevaluation of Francis makes me uncomfortable, and not necessarily only for the obvious political reasons. Part of my discomfort is uncertainty about how original a thinker Francis was exactly—and a sense that granting Francis too much acclaim is to bestow upon him and his ideas more credit than they deserve. When does a shocked rediscovery become celebration?
Tait finds a lot of Sam Francis’s ideas to be fairly conventional fare when you put him in the context of his New Right milieu: a lot of people were saying the same things. Okay, but that’s sort of the whole point: the movement organically generated and abetted Francis’s fascist outlook, did not see it as intrinsically alien, or forcefully reject it until much later. Tait admits that contemporary right-wing thinkers are taking ideas from Francis. Well, that’s sort of reason enough to study him.
I also think Tait misses a couple of crucial things. He writes, “In retrospect, one quirk is how conventional Francis was on foreign policy. When he wrote “Message from MARs” in 1981, he was a more conventional anti-Communist hawk. By the time the essay was anthologized in post-Cold War 1993, he had moved toward isolationism, and closer to modern Trumpism.” This doesn’t ring true. Already in “Message from MARs,” he is distinguishing his foreign policy concept from mere anti-Communism in a way that’s quite revealing if you look at Trump-Vance nationalism. Here’s what Francis writes:
The foreign policy of the New Right, then, reflecting the interests and values of its MAR-Sunbelt-neo-entrepreneurial base, is likely to endorse a new nationalism that insists on the military and economic pre-eminence of the United States, on international activism (and even expansionism) in world affairs, on at least some measure of protection for domestic producers, and on far more resistance to Third World arrogance, aggression, and barbarianism. The controversy over the Trilateral Commission, whatever its merits, reflects this conflict over foreign policy between the social forces of the dominant elite and those of the New Right. The Commission is essentially the forum of the elite and its multinational components; as such it has become a symbol of the resentments of MARs and the forces of the Sunbelt. Moreover, the nationalism of the New Right will probably replace the anti-Communism of the Old Right as a focus of foreign policy. While the Soviet Union, Cuba, and their allies remain the principal threat to the United States and our predominance, New Right elements are likely to focus on the threat itself rather than on the ideological origins of the threat. The distinction between the nationalist focus of the New Right and the anti-Communist orientation of the Old became clear in the opposition to the Panama Canal Treaty. While Old Right anti-Communists sought to protray the late Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos Herrera as a Marxist, this was a far less effective tactic than Ronald Reagan's New Right, nationalist slogan on the Canal — "We built it, we paid for it, and it's ours."