The Auron MacIntyre Show - Samuel Francis on How Nationalism Killed the Republic ｜ 3⧸28⧸25

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:31.800 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.700 I am Oren McIntyre.

00:00:36.300 One of the people who I draw from frequently when we discuss political theory is a writer

00:00:42.600 named Samuel Francis.

00:00:44.340 And he wrote a very interesting piece back in 1992 about the battle between nationalism

00:00:50.860 and republicanism.

00:00:52.960 Now, most of us think of Republicans as the nationalists.

00:00:56.720 They're people who would prefer the American nation to a global understanding, a globalist

00:01:02.420 network of governance.

00:01:04.040 They're the people who tend to focus on national identity and support that.

00:01:07.980 But Samuel Francis's question was, did this push towards nationalism actually destroy the

00:01:14.720 classic understanding of republicanism?

00:01:17.360 Because republican isn't just a slogan, it's not just a party, it's not just a mascot.

00:01:24.560 Republicanism is a specific form of government.

00:01:27.400 Oftentimes people like to say, no, we're not a democracy, we're a republic.

00:01:31.380 And that was true at one point about America, but they rarely think about what the difference

00:01:37.120 between a republican and democracy would be and why a republic would be preferable.

00:01:42.520 What actually makes up a republic?

00:01:44.380 And can we become a unified nation?

00:01:46.920 Can we have a unified national identity while maintaining the things that are required to

00:01:51.720 create republican conditions?

00:01:54.040 That's what Sam Francis addressed in this piece back in 1992, but I think it is still

00:01:59.900 extremely relevant.

00:02:01.400 So I want to dive into that today.

00:02:03.480 But before we do, let's hear from today's sponsor.

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00:03:08.880 All right, so we're diving into this essay from Samuel Francis.

00:03:13.680 Now, I have read many essays on this channel, and most of the time I do a lot of stopping

00:03:19.500 to break down and explain what's going on, and I'll still do that here, but I will probably

00:03:25.100 read more than I normally do.

00:03:28.960 I will probably take fewer times to break in because I feel like Samuel Francis is a very

00:03:35.520 clear writer.

00:03:36.600 He is very good at using language that I think is approachable, and so a lot of it is self-explanatory.

00:03:42.980 It's also a longer piece, and I want to be able to finish it because I really think it's

00:03:46.620 very good.

00:03:47.600 Even though this is over 30 years old, it's still asking a lot of questions that we are

00:03:54.560 exploring to this day.

00:03:56.200 My friend ended up turning me on to this essay, and even though I've read a lot of Sam Francis,

00:04:05.080 I had never seen this one, but it still managed to kind of dovetail along with many of the

00:04:10.040 thoughts that I have been having.

00:04:12.060 So thank you, Nate Hockland, for bringing this essay to my attention, but it's just amazing

00:04:17.120 that we had someone like Francis who was able to see the problems, the undercurrents in American

00:04:25.220 society this far out.

00:04:27.200 This could have been written yesterday, and it would be just as relevant as it is today,

00:04:32.940 but Francis was largely excluded from the conservative movement, and so we had this level of insight

00:04:39.720 and this level of political theory available to us for a very long time, but it sat in places

00:04:45.000 like Chronicles, which is an excellent magazine.

00:04:47.220 It's run by Paul Godfrey today.

00:04:48.980 They're doing the Lord's work of bringing paleoconservatism. 1.00

00:04:51.900 They maintained it in the darkness, and they're bringing it back in this moment, so of course

00:04:57.460 this essay is here, and kudos to them for continuing this great work, but it's not a magazine that

00:05:02.640 has a lot of reach, and so the fact that this is the only place that you could really find

00:05:07.000 the wisdom of someone like Sam Francis, again, amazing work by Chronicles, but the fact that

00:05:12.560 this was not widely read and widely understood by many people on the right really just tells you

00:05:18.280 how desperate people were to silence a category of thought that I think would have been far

00:05:25.520 more useful to the right in the long run, but that said, let's go ahead and dive into the

00:05:31.600 essay here, and I'll stop when I feel it's appropriate to go ahead and add or to clarify

00:05:37.220 when I think that's useful.

00:05:39.340 So Francis says,

00:05:40.100 In the course of American history, nationalism and republicanism have usually been enemies,

00:05:45.400 not allies.

00:05:46.680 From the days of Alexander Hamilton, nationalism has meant unification of the country under

00:05:55.140 a centralized government.

00:05:57.240 The supremacy of the executive over the legislative branch, the reduction of states' rights and

00:06:02.940 local sectional parochialism, governmental regulation of the economy and engineering of

00:06:10.140 social institutions, and an activist foreign policy, expansionist, imperialist, or globalist

00:06:16.940 that costs much money and requires at least occasional wars.

00:06:22.140 So right off the bat, we can see that this version of nationalism, as Sam Francis is describing

00:06:28.620 it, sounds a whole lot more like the type of government we have today, something that

00:06:33.280 wants to erase regional differences, wants to centralize the entirety of the nation under

00:06:39.560 the same government, wants to erase the ability of different regions to live as they wish.

00:06:45.600 It needs an expansionist, imperialist, globalist type of foreign policy that demands a lot of

00:06:53.400 money and a lot of military activity to keep it going.

00:06:56.860 Nationalism and its proponents have historically been anglophiles, emulating the mercantilist

00:07:03.800 dynastic state that flourished in Great Britain from the 18th century, and for all of their

00:07:09.180 claims of overcoming sectionalism and private interests, they have been identified with the

00:07:14.400 northeastern part of the United States and its institutions, New England, New York City,

00:07:20.300 the Ivy League, big banks, big business, Wall Street, and Washington.

00:07:24.680 So he's talking about this clash that has existed from the beginning of the country.

00:07:28.820 If you've watched this channel, you know, when we get to American history that we have

00:07:32.080 addressed this, many people will talk about the vision of the founders, what the founders

00:07:36.520 intended.

00:07:37.320 And there are overlapping values in the founders.

00:07:40.620 But the idea that the founders were one unified body that had one unified vision is just

00:07:47.120 factually incorrect.

00:07:48.080 The biggest battle was between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, the people like Hamilton

00:07:54.180 who wanted to centralize power, create more of an imperial mercantile government in the

00:07:59.760 United States, as where Jefferson and many of his ilk would have preferred to have an agrarian

00:08:08.180 understanding of American identity.

00:08:10.260 Every American owns his own farm, defends his own home, kind of raises his own food.

00:08:15.500 It's the self-sustained, you know, kind of isolated existence, not isolated, the wrong

00:08:21.600 word, but existence that does not rely on a bunch of other national institutions.

00:08:28.480 That's the way that Jefferson understood it.

00:08:30.660 And so we've seen that the Hamiltonian understanding has won out in the long run, right?

00:08:35.440 But it represented a very distinct interest in American life.

00:08:40.620 It favored big towns in the Northeast, big cities that were dependent on manufacturing

00:08:45.780 and trade.

00:08:46.940 And it tended to take advantage of farmers, agrarian, the South, those that were not in

00:08:53.940 this kind of clique that would have benefited from these actions.

00:08:57.840 So he's just hitting on something that has been there since the beginning of the country.

00:09:02.700 All right, so the national state and the nationalists defended and constructed was born with the

00:09:15.780 ratification of the U.S. Constitution, reached adolescence in the victory of the North in the

00:09:21.860 Civil War, and grew to a corpulent adulthood in the 20th century managerial state of Woodrow

00:09:28.400 Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.

00:09:34.000 So he's hitting on those key points.

00:09:36.840 Again, if you go back to the episode where I was with the good old boys and we talked

00:09:40.380 about the five republics of the United States, he's talking about those critical moments in

00:09:45.500 which the government changed radically.

00:09:47.440 The Civil War, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, these critical moments where

00:09:54.320 they seem to have changed the way the Constitution works without technically altering the words of

00:10:01.500 the Constitution.

00:10:03.160 The principal opponents of nationalism in American history have been Republicans, and it is one of 0.65

00:10:09.700 the ironies of our history that the political party that claims the Republican name has been the

00:10:15.800 chief vehicle since the Civil War of anti-Republican nationalism.

00:10:20.100 The Anti-Federalists were opposed to the ratification of the Constitution, were men immersed in the 0.93

00:10:27.920 political theory of classical Republicanism, a school of thought that originated in modern

00:10:33.440 times with Machiavelli.

00:10:35.400 A lot of people don't know this.

00:10:36.880 They'll just read the prints.

00:10:37.940 They think that Machiavelli was a monarchist, but that is not the case.

00:10:41.740 He actually was a big supporter of Republicanism, which you will find out if you read Discourses

00:10:47.440 on Livy, found expression in the 17th century British resistance to the powers of the monarchy

00:10:53.760 and in the 18th century influenced by both radical Tories and radical Whigs.

00:10:59.560 Deeply suspicious of centralized power of any kind and of the corruption it bred, the Anti-Federalists

00:11:06.440 opposed the ratification, demanded a Bill of Rights to limit federal power, and insisted on a strict

00:11:12.360 reading of the constitutional text as the basic law defending the states against the federal government

00:11:17.720 and the Congress against the presidency, and were generally content with the limitation on wealth

00:11:24.060 and national power that a small, restricted state imposed, in preference to what they condemned

00:11:29.620 as luxury and empire that national consolidation and interventionist foreign policy would encourage.

00:11:36.900 So from the beginning here, he is noting something that, again, I think a lot of people, a lot

00:11:42.340 even conservatives would be very hesitant to admit, which is that this limited small government,

00:11:49.500 this government that is free from the centralization of powers and the mass institutions that now

00:11:56.080 run our society is intrinsically going to be a smaller government and going to be a less wealthy

00:12:03.040 government, and they recognized the sacrifices that they would be making by maintaining that type of government.

00:12:10.860 No, you wouldn't be the most wealthy and militarily powerful government in the world if you maintained

00:12:15.840 yourself as a republic, but that was okay because the republican form of government was superior.

00:12:22.140 So they understood that there was a trade-off, a cost, a limitation that republican government placed

00:12:27.660 on the formation of nations, and that ultimately, if you want to maintain that type of government,

00:12:33.920 you have to be willing to accept the limitations of the form. If you want to go beyond that,

00:12:39.520 you might be moving towards the luxurious empire, but you must live as an empire. You must recognize

00:12:46.140 that you are an empire. You must recognize that you are giving up a republican lifestyle to embrace

00:12:53.480 that expansion, and he points out here that they were aware of this trade-off. This is not something

00:12:59.420 that we have suddenly discovered so many hundreds of years later. It's there, again, at the founding,

00:13:05.400 if we will look at the wisdom that many founders put forward, and instead of just going out and just

00:13:11.400 reading the schoolhouse rock version of American history. The anti-federalist rights professor

00:13:17.900 Ralph Ketchum in his introduction to a popular edition of his writings looked into the classical

00:13:23.780 idealization of the small pastoral republic, which were virtuous, self-reliant citizens,

00:13:30.340 managed their own affairs, and shunned the power and glory of empire. To them, the victory of the

00:13:35.420 American Revolution meant not so much the big chance to become a wealthy world power, but rather the

00:13:40.720 opportunity to achieve a genuinely republican polity. Far from the greed, lust for power, and tyranny

00:13:47.380 that generally characterized human society. So again, they recognized a trade-off early on. It's not

00:13:54.600 just, oh, well, we become a republican form of government, and therefore we get to have all of these

00:14:00.760 things as well. They recognized that there were limitations to what was being set up, and that might be

00:14:06.800 preferable because the cost of empire might be too high. Though the anti-federalists lost their ideas

00:14:14.860 far more than those of Edmund Burke and Adam Smith have informed the long American tradition of

00:14:20.660 resistance to the leviathan state of the nationalists, appearing in the thought and lips of

00:14:27.040 John Randolph, John C. Calhoun, and the leaders of the Confederacy, the populists of the late 19th

00:14:34.400 century, and the southern agrarians of the early 20th century, in the old right conservatism of the era

00:14:40.300 between Charles Lindbergh and Jesse Helms. In the 18th century, when the debate between the two sides

00:14:46.200 of the American political coin still sparkled, it was possible for the American people and their

00:14:50.760 leaders to choose republicanism and to institutionalize its ideals. Perhaps it was possible to do so as late

00:14:57.960 as the early 20th century, before the managerial state began to crystallize. Today, it is no longer

00:15:04.620 possible. The national state has long since triumphed, and with it wedded to it like a Siamese sibling

00:15:13.160 is multinational corporations, giant labor unions, universities, and foundations. All of the titanic

00:15:20.620 labyrinth of modern bureaucratic organizations in both the public and increasingly the illusory

00:15:26.600 private sectors have won as well. To establish republicanism in anything like its classical form

00:15:34.520 would involve a massive rejection, a massive rejection and dismantlement of the main features

00:15:41.480 of the 20th century, the physical and social technologies by which modern centralized bureaucratically

00:15:48.220 managed mass organizations operate. And while they continued, and while the continued existence and

00:15:55.640 dominance of such features are not inevitable in any Hegelian sense, no one can save a few romantic

00:16:02.580 reactionaries seriously contemplates doing away with them. Not only do technology and its

00:16:12.420 organizational applications entice us with luxury, what we today complacently call a high standard of

00:16:19.100 living, but also they offer to those who understand how to manipulate them a degree of power unknown to the

00:16:26.280 most imperious despots of the past. So he's saying here is that basically, we have moved beyond the

00:16:34.540 possibility of this form of government. Maybe we could have chosen it at some point. But once we

00:16:41.700 institutionalize the managerial state, once we created the total state, the mass bureaucratic state,

00:16:49.380 we created a set of powers and privileges so compelling that it is very difficult to imagine

00:16:57.200 most people giving them up. And more importantly, it is very unlikely that our leaders will give them

00:17:03.060 up because it allows our leaders to manipulate us at a massive scale that has just never been seen before.

00:17:10.760 The elites that manage modern mass organizations and master the technical skills that allow these

00:17:17.260 organizations to function cannot permit the decentralization and autonomy that characterize

00:17:23.900 republican civil culture simply because their own power would vanish. And these elites are logged or

00:17:31.340 lodged not only in the state, but also in the dominant organizations of the economy and culture so that our

00:17:38.240 incomes and our very thoughts, values, tastes, and emotions are conditioned and manipulated by them

00:17:45.880 and their apologists. Short of a new dark age, or perhaps it would be a golden age, in which knowledge

00:17:52.520 of scientific and organizational technology is lost, there is no prospect of reversing the trend towards

00:17:58.440 mass organization and its absorption of local and decentralized institutions. And here we see that

00:18:06.920 Francis is addressing a similar question to Alexander Dugan, the one Alexander Dugan asked today,

00:18:14.400 in the metaphysics of the washing machine. Is the creation of these technologies an indication that

00:18:22.120 there's an inevitable pull towards this situation? Can we deny ourselves these technologies? Could our

00:18:29.460 ruling elites deny themselves the control that these technologies bring? For Francis, the answer is no.

00:18:35.620 He's very deterministic in this sense. He says, look, we have embraced this technology,

00:18:40.960 and we would have to abandon all of it in order to return to a level of individual reliance that

00:18:47.800 characterizes Republican government. Remember, the key to Republican government for Machiavelli and for

00:18:54.920 pretty much every thinker was the idea of self-sufficiency of the people. The people were ready

00:19:02.120 to defend themselves with their own arms. They were ready to feed themselves with their own farms.

00:19:06.500 They were ready to make determinations on their government based on their own action as citizens.

00:19:12.560 He says that is impossible in the current world with our current technology and the different ways

00:19:17.660 in which we are now bound to the institutions that create power for our ruling elite. Back to the essay

00:19:24.680 here. Moreover, as most students of classical Republicanism understand, the distinctive principle of

00:19:30.920 its theory is its concept of virtue, a quality that consists less in moralistic purity than in

00:19:37.460 personal and social independence. Owning and operating his own farm or shop, usually producing

00:19:44.240 his own food and clothing, governing his own family and his own community, and defending himself with

00:19:49.780 his own arms in company with his own relatives and neighbors, the citizen of the classical republic

00:19:56.200 neither needed nor wanted a leviathan state to fight wars across the globe on behalf of democracy,

00:20:03.380 nor to pretend to protect him and his home. Again, just could have been written yesterday.

00:20:10.460 Sounds like it could have been written yesterday. Nor did he need or want a job in someone else's

00:20:15.920 company or a pension plan or a health benefits or paid vacation or five hour or five hour workdays.

00:20:23.260 He did not want to shop in vast shopping malls where nothing is worth buying and nothing bought

00:20:28.700 will last a year. It did not occur to him to enroll himself or his children in therapy courses or in

00:20:34.840 sensitivity and human relations clinics in order to find out how to get along with his neighbors.

00:20:41.180 And he sought no edification or instruction from the mass media to entertain him continuously or

00:20:47.740 indoctrinate him with the current cliches and slogans of public discussion or trick him into

00:20:53.180 buying even more junk from which he had no use and no desire. If the citizens succumbed to such

00:20:59.660 temptations, then he had become a dependent on someone who, or he became dependent on someone or

00:21:06.660 something other than himself and his extension and his extensions in family and community. Men who

00:21:12.760 become dependent on others cannot govern themselves and they cannot govern themselves. If they cannot govern

00:21:17.920 themselves, they cannot keep a Republic. This is the bug man, right? This, this is the bug man. This

00:21:24.640 is Nietzsche's bug. Uh, this, this is Nietzsche's last man, the guy who has traded all agency, all will,

00:21:30.880 all self-determination for comforts just to be left alone, to not be bothered, to, to have plenty,

00:21:37.760 but to not have to worry about existential conflicts, to not have to go out and earn a living that this is

00:21:44.300 what he's talking about. He says the, the person who is a Republican in, in the classical sense is

00:21:51.080 looking to do it all themselves to rely on those local or community, uh, ties, but not looking for

00:21:57.220 the state to step, step in. They would not expect state organizations to take care of them. If they

00:22:02.000 needed organizations, they would make them themselves. And so this is his, uh, real point is that we have

00:22:08.500 lost the virtue necessary. Not only have we lost the virtue necessary, the very institutions,

00:22:13.560 the very mechanisms of power we have created specifically rob us of that virtue. They

00:22:19.660 encourage us not to, uh, create the level of virtue to cultivate the level of virtue necessary

00:22:25.540 to operate as a Republican government today. Virtually everyone in the United States is habituated to a

00:22:32.080 style of living that is wrapped up in dependency on mass organizations of one kind or another

00:22:38.080 supermarkets, supermarkets, hospitals, insurance companies, uh, the, uh, bureaucratized police,

00:22:43.640 local government, the mass media, the factories, the office buildings, where we work, the apartment

00:22:49.300 complexes and suburban communities where we live and the massive remote and mysterious national state

00:22:55.400 that, uh, supervises almost every detail of our lives. Most Americans cannot even imagine a life

00:23:02.180 without such dependencies and would not want to live without them. If they could imagine it,

00:23:07.560 the classical Republicans were right. Having, having become dependent on others for our livelihood, 0.97

00:23:13.380 our, uh, our protection, our entertainment, and even our thoughts and tastes, we are corrupted.

00:23:19.920 We neither want Republic. Uh, we neither want a Republic nor could we keep it. If we had one,

00:23:25.520 we do not deserve to have one. And like the barbarians conquered and enslaved by the Greeks and the 1.00

00:23:31.400 Romans, we are suited only for servitude. He says very basically here, we have abandoned the

00:23:37.100 virtue that made us capable of operating a Republic. So if you even offered people a Republic at this

00:23:45.000 point, they would not take it. So conservatives running around and saying we're a Republic,

00:23:49.160 not a democracy would not be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to actually make that

00:23:54.380 statement true. To return us to actual Republican virtue.

00:23:59.920 When I found out my friend got a great deal on a designer dress from winners, I started wondering,

00:24:05.520 is every fabulous item I see from winners? Like that woman over there with the Italian leather handbag. 1.00

00:24:11.440 Is that from winners? Ooh, or that beautiful silk skirt. Did she pay full price? Or those suede sneakers? 0.98

00:24:17.840 Or that luggage? Or that trench? Those jeans? That jacket? Those heels? Is anyone paying full price

00:24:24.400 for anything? Stop wondering, start winning. Winners find fabulous for less.

00:24:31.580 Back to the essay here. He says classical Republicanism then is defunct as a serious

00:24:36.640 political alternative to the present regime. But this does not mean that Americans should either

00:24:41.540 embrace the old Hamiltonian nationalism or merely squat passively in their kennels waiting for the

00:24:48.040 next whistle from their masters. Even though virtually no one today subscribes or adheres to

00:24:53.440 the classical Republican ideal of virtue and independence, even though most Americans are too

00:24:58.420 corrupt in Republican terms to support a Republic, there remains a large number of Americans, perhaps a

00:25:05.020 majority whose material interests and most deeply held culture codes as endangered by the national and

00:25:13.400 increasingly supranational managerial regime. These middle Americans, largely white and middle class,

00:25:20.560 derive their income from their dependence on the mass structures of the managerial economy.

00:25:25.620 And because many of them have long since lost their habits of self-reliance,

00:25:29.620 they are dependent on the services of the government, at least indirectly, and the dominant culture.

00:25:35.860 Yet despite their dependence, the regime does little for them and much to them. They find that

00:25:42.480 their jobs are insecure. Their savings stripped of value. Their neighborhoods and schools and homes

00:25:48.600 unsafe. Their elected leaders indifferent and often crooked. Their moral beliefs and religious

00:25:53.920 professions and local codes under perpetual attack, even from their own government.

00:25:59.040 Their children taught to despise what they believe. Their very identity and heritage as people

00:26:04.820 threatened in their future, political, economic, cultural, racial, national, and personal uncertain.

00:26:12.180 They find that no matter which party or candidate they support, no matter what the candidates and,

00:26:20.240 sorry, no matter what the candidates and parties promise, nothing substantially changes except for the

00:26:26.920 worse. Although they do the labor that sustains the managerial system, pay the taxes that support it,

00:26:33.300 fight the wars its leaders devise, raise the families, and try to pass on the beliefs and habits that

00:26:38.780 enable the regime and the country to exist and survive, they receive from the regime or what they receive

00:26:44.940 from the regime is never commiserate with what they give. So he says here, basically, look,

00:26:50.280 the Republican form is dead. We can't go back. We have gone too far, both technologically and

00:26:56.920 unfortunately, we have devolved morally and in self-discipline and virtue. We could not put it

00:27:04.500 back together if we wanted to. That said, there is a block of middle Americans who are treated like

00:27:11.640 garbage, right? They fight the wars, they pay the taxes, they deliver the food, the gas, 0.97

00:27:16.460 they make sure it gets grown, they defend the country, they enforce the law, but they're treated 0.99

00:27:21.640 like crap all the time. Again, he wrote this 30 years ago, more than 30 years ago, but it could 0.96

00:27:28.140 have been written yesterday. It says all of the things that we are experiencing right now. And so he

00:27:34.300 says, even though that form of Republicanism is dead, there is still a constituency that was the core of

00:27:41.160 that Republican identity. And even though that constituency has become more dependent on a larger

00:27:48.280 nationalist state than was ever intended by many of the founders, ultimately, that is still a group

00:27:55.220 of people that needs to be spoken for. So if we can't speak for them through the Republican ideal,

00:28:02.860 how do we serve their interests? What is the way in which we actually address it? He says,

00:28:07.460 it's not just the Hamiltonian nationalism, but there is a version of nationalism that might allow us to

00:28:14.240 work for these people. He says, uh, they are the Americans sneered out as the Bubba voters. You 0.83

00:28:21.520 might call them deplorables today, mocked as Archie bunkers and denounced as racist, sexist, anti-Semites, 0.99

00:28:28.800 xenophobes, homophobes, and hate criminals who don't, who haunt the dark corners of the land, 0.97

00:28:34.060 the dark side of America, even as their own energy sacrifice and commitment make possible 0.93

00:28:40.160 the regime and the elite that despise them, exploit them and dispossess them. They are at once the real

00:28:48.140 victims of the regime and the core or nucleus of American civilization, the real America, the American

00:28:55.260 nation. Again, spot on 30 years ago, hits this on the head that the regime is the biggest enemy of middle

00:29:05.620 America, not some foreign power endangering us though. You obviously have to defend against that, but the,

00:29:12.040 the regime itself is at war with middle, middle America. He saw this coming 30 years ago. It's still accurate 1.00

00:29:19.500 throughout this century. Middle Americans have gradually acquired a collective consciousness,

00:29:25.260 an awareness of who they are, what this position is in the regime that, that exploits them in

00:29:31.680 economically prosperous periods. The radicalism of the consciousness is largely dormant, but in the

00:29:37.880 depression and the infiltration, uh, inflationary crunch of the 1970s, the recessions of the early

00:29:44.640 1980s and the early 1990s, material insecurity has served as a trigger for heightened consciousness,

00:29:51.760 a radicalization, a sharper self perception of their plight, neither liberalism and the ideologies

00:29:59.160 of the left nor mainstream conservatism and entrepreneurial version of classic republicanism

00:30:05.620 adequately expresses their plight or their interests and values or offers much of a solution. So he says

00:30:13.340 both the conservatives and the Democrats have no answer for what is ailing middle America

00:30:18.960 continuing with the essay here, the left offers nothing but economic redistribution predicated on

00:30:28.440 egalitarianism and universalist dogmas. And in practice, this means that lib, that liberal left

00:30:34.540 policies reflect the interests of non-white underclass and the intelligentsia that, that designs the, 0.75

00:30:41.780 the formulas and policies of the left. Hence, the left is incapable of defining the specific interests

00:30:48.860 and concrete cultural forms of middle, middle America. The right, though it defends in theory,

00:30:54.940 middle American cultural norms and institutions offers a vision of decentralism, decentralism,

00:31:02.400 strict constitutionalism, economic individualism, and minimal, and a minimal state that fails to speak to

00:31:08.640 the middle American material interests and the challenges that they typically encounter. What

00:31:13.740 middle Americans need in a political formula and a public myth that synthesizes the attention to

00:31:20.320 material economic interests offered by the left with a defense of concrete cultural and national

00:31:25.700 identity offered by the right. The division of the American political spectrum into the categories of

00:31:31.360 right and left makes the political expression of such a formula virtually impossible.

00:31:35.920 So he says that the classic Republican formula has ignored all the things that the left has done

00:31:44.220 basically to Americans, the huge change that has occurred in America during this time. And so the,

00:31:50.540 the, the model it's offering to middle Americans doesn't actually address their problems in an ideal

00:31:56.000 world. It would, but it is not addressing any of the new challenges that have arisen. And therefore it is not

00:32:03.100 speaking to the things that are necessary for middle America to survive. And so he says, what we need

00:32:09.880 is a new type of populism that is going to pay attention to the economic concerns of middle America

00:32:15.580 while still protecting their actual culture and identity. And this by the way, is what we're seeing

00:32:22.700 from Donald Trump. Not perfectly to be clear. However, what we see here is why Donald Trump stands out,

00:32:29.580 right? Cause he broke this mold, right? Cause he broke this mold, that kind of a classic conservative

00:32:33.500 economic laissez faire. We, we only free trade, but we got to go to war all the time for some reason

00:32:40.340 like he, but also we say, we're going to protect all these American values and all this American

00:32:46.140 culture, but we encourage all these corporations that actually destroy American culture to ship all the

00:32:52.860 jobs overseas. Like he recognizes this contradiction and says, we need a politician that will marry

00:32:59.320 these two things together. Now, of course, Donald Trump is only doing what Pat Buchanan tried to

00:33:04.460 do, right? So it's not like Donald Trump invented the wheel here. However, he is predicting that what

00:33:08.960 we needed was a Pat Buchanan ask candidate. And that's what Trump is, right? Trump is the reemergence

00:33:15.880 of this paleo conservative understanding that says, we are going to look at the actual conditions

00:33:21.680 of middle America. And we're going to speak to the conditions of middle America while protecting 0.68

00:33:27.800 their culture and their national identity. We're not going to be the left who says, we'll give you

00:33:32.600 all this free stuff, but we're going to destroy everything you believe in. And we're not going

00:33:36.360 to be the right and say, well, just, I guess we don't care. Corporations can ship all your jobs

00:33:41.140 overseas. We don't care about the destruction of family formation or any of these things.

00:33:45.940 But in theory, we'll defend your Christian values. Like he says, we need a real defense of the actual 0.76

00:33:52.480 material interests of the middle class that is married onto a defense of their identity and their

00:33:57.320 Christian values. Back to the essay here. The appropriate formula for the expression of

00:34:03.060 middle American material interests and cultural values is nationalism. The managerial state and its

00:34:09.560 and its linked economic and cultural structures have succeeded in breaking down the regional

00:34:14.620 variations, local and sexual autonomy, the institution and institutional stability and independence

00:34:21.600 of middle Americans. And the regime now lurches happily towards a globalization that seeks to

00:34:27.260 integrate all Americans and all other people as well into a planetary political, economic,

00:34:33.000 demographic, and culture order in which national identity will eventually disappear entirely.

00:34:39.140 Again, 30 years ago, he wrote this in 1992, uh, the homogenization of subnational social and

00:34:47.480 religion and regional differences throughout political, uh, through political centralization,

00:34:52.680 urbanization and, uh, and mobility, mass communication and mass consumption and production means that the

00:34:59.600 older decentralized identities of particular social classes, sections, communities, and religious and

00:35:06.780 ethnic groups no longer effectively mobilize Americans for political action. Identities such as 1.00

00:35:13.500 Southerners or Midwesterners or Catholic or Protestant or Anglo-Saxon old stock or European ethnic,

00:35:19.980 small businessman or assembly line worker, no longer seem to offer sufficient bonds of common interest for

00:35:26.840 serious political cooperation for any goal beyond immediate special interests. The emerging identity

00:35:33.720 of a middle America, however, appears to convey sufficient meaning to serve as the foundation of a

00:35:40.220 politically and socially important force in a nationalism that is politically and culturally based on

00:35:47.220 middle Americans expresses their material interests and affirms their cultural norms as the dominant

00:35:53.980 public myth of American civilization is today. The only possible vehicle for effective resistance to the

00:36:00.780 managerial globalism and national and cultural extinction it threatens. So he says, look, all these

00:36:07.160 smaller identities that used to allow for Republicanism that are allowed for this regional autonomy,

00:36:14.020 this regional rule, this self identity and independence. Unfortunately, sadly, those have been broken down. No matter how

00:36:23.140 we feel about it, and I feel very bad about it, they have lost their pool, they have weakened. And so even though he

00:36:30.400 says nationalism in its original form destroyed many of these identities, it is now the only meta identity left that

00:36:39.380 can bind people together against the ultimate meta identity, which is globalism. So while we think of

00:36:45.620 nationalism as this positive force against globalism, and it is, the reason we have globalism is nationalism

00:36:52.340 dissolved all of the intermediate institutions and intermediate identities before we got to nationalism,

00:36:57.860 and then continued beyond the nation to go to the globe. The ability to rally around the nation is the last

00:37:06.440 remaining binding agent for these different lost identities. Now, I hope, ultimately, he's wrong,

00:37:13.640 that these identities can be rediscovered, that this breakdown of kind of the particular can be

00:37:21.720 reversed. But until then, working as a populist nationalist is the best way to create this scenario,

00:37:30.760 right? It's the best way to actually organize these people who otherwise would not be ready for

00:37:35.480 collective action. Moreover, only nationalism seems capable of organizing offensively on a

00:37:41.960 collective scale. One reason for the failure of classical republicanism and similar decentralist

00:37:47.240 movements was that they were capable of only defensive maneuvering and were never able to become,

00:37:53.480 or rather to overcome, divisions of particular and divergent interests and identities sufficiently to

00:38:01.480 organize an effective offensive strategy aimed at dominance rather than merely survival and liberty.

00:38:09.240 So basically, he says, these old identities allowed for this republican virtue and this individualism and

00:38:14.120 this particularism, but it also made it difficult to organize. And so the nationalism allows for a larger

00:38:21.800 scale of organization. Even though it may break down all these smaller identities, it might be the only thing

00:38:27.960 defensible. Again, to point to Alexander Dugan's work, he believes that civilizational blocks are the only thing that

00:38:34.200 battle against globalism. So for Dugan, even the nation is not sufficient. Nationalism is not sufficient. You really need

00:38:41.480 empires, you really need civilizational blocks in order to counter globalism. Again, you can judge whether or not you think

00:38:48.440 that's right or wrong, but they're both observing the same phenomenon, the breakdown of these individual

00:38:54.280 identities and the necessity of some meta and identity that is bigger than the region or the republic, but is

00:39:03.320 smaller than the globe. That's really what we're trying to settle on is what is the smaller operational

00:39:09.720 identity? Can we operate on a regional scale, a national scale, a civilizational scale, or a global scale?

00:39:18.440 Which one can we retreat to or organize around to actually push back against what is happening

00:39:23.880 right now? The defensive strategy mounted by the Confederacy during the Civil War was one of the

00:39:29.880 main reasons for its military defeat, and similar defensiveness has crippled conservative tactics

00:39:36.120 as well. Activate, man, does that still speak true? Again, 30 years later. Activated only by immediate

00:39:43.160 threats to local or private interests, conservative forces have organized mainly around

00:39:48.280 striking personalities and single issue like tax revolts, religious and social issues of largely

00:39:54.840 sectarian concern and anti-busing and educational movements, anti-communism, deregulation term limits.

00:40:02.840 They tend to disband or wither when their favorite personality is elected or the threats of their

00:40:09.000 immediate interests and pet causes seem to be pushed back. Again, just a perfect description of our current

00:40:17.160 problem, right? Like if that does not describe the problem of conservatism to AT, I cannot tell you

00:40:23.720 what. Like that is an amazing distillation of the problem that conservatives have faced for a very

00:40:31.720 long time. That they are unable to stay focused, that they organize around a regional or particular issue

00:40:38.680 concern, but they can never continue to bring the pressure that the minute that a charismatic figure

00:40:44.920 blows through town, they rally around them, push for a while, maybe win a few things, but overall are not

00:40:51.080 able to maintain the momentum and coherency of their movement. Again, written 30 years ago, could have been

00:40:56.360 written yesterday. Nationalism, though its historically proven capacity to mobilize passions of mass solidarity and

00:41:04.040 sacrifice and its aggressive invocation of collective identity offers a practical instrument for

00:41:10.600 overcoming the burden of purely defensive conservatism and aspiring to endure to enduring political

00:41:17.560 power. Sorry, culture, cultural and political power. The old Hamiltonian, sorry, the old nationalism of

00:41:25.160 the Hamiltonian tradition will not suffice for this purpose. However, it was explicit. It was the explicit

00:41:31.720 mission of Hamiltonian nationalism to obliterate what Hamilton's best and, sorry, what Hamilton's best

00:41:40.440 and most recent biographer, Forrest MacDonald, called the inertia of a social order whose pervasive

00:41:46.520 attributes were provincialism and lassitude. The means by which Hamilton determined to accomplish

00:41:54.920 the revolutionary change was money, wealth, economic growth, aided and supported by the national

00:42:01.320 state to transform the established order. Professor MacDonald writes, to make society fluid and open to

00:42:07.880 merit, to make industry both rewarding and necessary, all that needed to be done was to monetize the whole,

00:42:15.000 to rig the rules of the game so that money would become the universal measure of all of the value of

00:42:21.240 things. For money is obvious, is oblivious to class, status, color, and inherited social position. 0.86

00:42:29.160 Money is the ultimate neutral, impersonal arbiter. Infused into its oligarchical agrarian social order,

00:42:36.520 money could be the leaven, the fermenting yeast that would stimulate growth and change,

00:42:42.680 prosperity, and national strength. So basically he says here, money dissolves everything. The liquidity

00:42:50.440 of capital dissolves all these identities. And so by embracing a more mercantile existence,

00:42:58.680 by making money the main thing to decide where you should be, where you should stand,

00:43:03.000 you dissolve all these natural hierarchies, and instead we end up with our current situation.

00:43:12.680 But by making money the universal measure of the value of things, the defining principle of the

00:43:17.720 national identity and joining it to the centralized power, Hamilton ultimately defeated his own purposes.

00:43:24.200 In the first place, because his nationalism set itself against existing social institutions and

00:43:30.600 habits, it was necessarily alienated from and adversarial towards the norms by which most Americans

00:43:37.480 live. And its alienation was persisted for two centuries to inform the cultural style and attitudes

00:43:43.880 of the dominant elites of the managerial system toward the rest of the country. So he says,

00:43:48.920 from the beginning, this form of government governance, this way to organize the economy and the culture

00:43:55.400 necessarily set the ruling elite against the core identity and beliefs of the people. Secondly, because

00:44:03.160 his nationalism was based on the abstraction of money, it was unable to win the support of any but economically

00:44:09.800 ambitious Americans and unable to express or sustain a genuinely national or even a genuine social bond.

00:44:17.240 Hence, Hamilton's nationalism, rational, calculated, pragmatic, degenerated into a mask for individual

00:44:24.600 factional and sexual acquisitions. It was not and could not be an authentic nationalism that controlled

00:44:31.880 and disciplined the parts within the whole, but only a pseudo-nationalism that allowed the parts to seize

00:44:37.800 control of the whole and define the whole in terms of parts and their interests. In another of Hamilton's

00:44:43.720 biographers, John C. Miller writes, the failure of Hamilton's nationalism probably stemmed from the

00:44:50.040 fact that he associated the national government with no great moral issue capable of capturing the

00:44:55.720 popular imagination. He seems to stand only on the natural right of great fishes to eat up the ones,

00:45:02.360 the little ones whenever they can catch them. So basically, by basing the entire ethos of the

00:45:09.000 republic on money, you basically dissolved all the things that made republicanism possible. And if you

00:45:15.320 had had a nationalism that unified people over a shared idea, a shared notion of who they were,

00:45:22.120 then that might have been okay. You might have still fused people together in a more lasting way.

00:45:27.640 But because it was really this open and empty commercialism that was the vehicle by which you

00:45:34.360 attempted to unify the state, which you really just ended up doing was dissolving all the more

00:45:39.000 organic bonds that might have really held people together. Again, 30 years ago. American nationalism

00:45:46.200 after Hamilton, especially through Abraham Lincoln, sought to rectify this flaw by defining the ideal

00:45:52.760 of the national unity in terms of more accurately masking it with a great moral issue. Manifest destiny

00:46:00.280 was one such issue, and it quickly became a mask for territorial expansion, surviving in Wilsonian

00:46:07.160 internationalism and messianic anti-communism of the Cold War liberalism and the global democratization

00:46:16.680 or democratism and the new world order of post-Cold War neoconservatism. Equality has another

00:46:24.440 has another such issue, and it is too served as a mask for acquisitive individualism. Harry Jaffa,

00:46:33.080 those who don't know, Harry Jaffa is kind of the favorite philosopher of the Claremont Institute.

00:46:40.280 Harry Jaffa is in a sense correct that the principle of equality as he perceives it is the declaration

00:46:46.520 in the Declaration of Independence and in Lincoln's thought is the ground of the recognition of the human

00:46:53.480 deficiencies which arise naturally, but in civil society when human industry and acquisitiveness

00:46:59.240 are emancipated. Though he is wrong in claiming that equality is far from enfranchising any leveling

00:47:06.280 action of government, the very process of which human acquisitiveness is emancipated involves the

00:47:13.080 obliteration of the state of social barriers to acquisitiveness. And so it did in the attack on

00:47:22.680 property and federalism that Lincoln unleashed in the Civil War. Basically, to allow for this level

00:47:29.240 of acquisition, you must break down the social barriers. You must get rid of those natural 0.95

00:47:33.960 hierarchies. You must get rid of those historical prejudices and understandings of how things should

00:47:40.760 be put together. Hence, Emmy Bradford is also, and more importantly, correct when he writes that the

00:47:47.160 depredations and corruptions of the Gilded Age and the area of great barbecue, the original

00:47:55.480 vulture capitalism began either under Lincoln's direction or with his sponsorship, and that Lincoln's

00:48:01.560 administration laid the cornerstone of the great alteration of the posture of the federal government

00:48:07.880 towards the sponsorship of business. It was indeed the cornerstone of the modern corporate state on which

00:48:13.640 the twin towers of managerial capitalism and managerial government are grounded. The great moral issues

00:48:20.200 that the old nationalism eventually selected, therefore, were little more than fantastic and

00:48:25.560 easily penetrated costumes in which older human passions of greed and lust for power sallied forth to 0.87

00:48:32.840 their orgy. Precisely because the old nationalism assumed an adversarial relationship towards the norms and

00:48:39.160 institutions to which most Americans adhered, it could locate few forces in American society with

00:48:45.640 which it could join, and therefore came to rely almost entirely on centralized state as the only

00:48:51.320 nationalizing instrument available for its mission. Hence, the old nationalism was intimately bound up

00:48:58.440 with abstraction, alienation, and serving of special, uh, serving of special rather than authentically

00:49:05.080 national interests, national interests and the consolidation of state power against its own society. This is so

00:49:10.600 important. Okay, this is so important. The fact that the managerial powers needed to centralize, but could not

00:49:21.640 find any shared identity or ideology to do so meant that they had to build their entire, uh, ideology in

00:49:31.080 in opposition to American identity. That's why, again, this paragraph is just so important.

00:49:38.440 That's why our current government is constructed to hate you. That's why our current regime is designed

00:49:45.560 to destroy you. It needed to from the beginning. You were always, your beliefs, your identity, your way of

00:49:53.480 being was always an obstacle to centralization. And in order to nationalize to, in order to centralize in the way that

00:50:01.800 it wanted, the only way that the power could do this was to become an opponent of American identity, an opponent of the

00:50:09.800 American people. It's not just that the left chose to be anti-American. Okay. It's that that was actually mechanically

00:50:17.640 necessary for the advance of power. And that's not just the left. That's also evident in some areas of

00:50:24.920 the right. When you look at neoconservatism, it has the same problem. It's a different flavor. It's, it's taking

00:50:33.240 different people who hate middle America and forming them together. But there's a reason that all of these

00:50:38.840 projects to centralize power have to hate middle America, have to hate the American identity. They can never

00:50:45.560 align themselves with the value of Americans. And this is why again, very important.

00:50:52.040 What a new middle American nationalism must seek is a redefinition of nationalism away from the terms

00:50:58.120 of the old, since a middle American nationalism, uh, bases itself on the actual interests and norms of a

00:51:04.920 concrete social group. It will not display the same adversarial alienation that affected the pseudo

00:51:12.440 nationalism it seeks to replace, nor will it need to rely on the power of the national state

00:51:18.440 to the same degree or in the same way. Nevertheless, the mission of the new nationalism must not or must

00:51:25.800 be not merely the winning of formal political power through elections and roll call votes, but also the

00:51:31.720 acquisition of subs of substantive social power and the displacement of the incumbent managerial elite

00:51:38.840 of the regime by its own elite drawn from the represent drawn from and representing the middle

00:51:44.600 American social stratum. When we say counter elite, when we talk about the rotation of elites, the

00:51:50.840 circulation of elites, this is what we're talking about right here. No social group becomes an elite

00:51:56.360 unless it makes use of the instruments of force that are at the heart of state. And hence a middle American 0.87

00:52:01.560 nationalism cannot expect to achieve its goals unless it employs the state to, uh, to reward its own, uh,

00:52:09.560 socio political base and exclude its rivals from access to rewards. If this sounds familiar,

00:52:15.560 it's reward your friends and punish your enemies. He says, look, even if we don't like the centralized

00:52:20.440 state, we're going to need control of the centralized state in order to use the power that it has to

00:52:27.880 dismantle aspects. We don't like, we're going to need it. We're going to need to reward our friends and punish our

00:52:33.320 enemies. If we're going to be able to move the needle on this. So any conservative who's over there, twiddling

00:52:38.680 their thumbs saying we can't use power. We can't use power. This is Sam Francis saying, shut up. Okay. Your way does

00:52:45.160 not work. Yours is the failed way that we have been leading conservatives down the entire term time. We have to

00:52:52.040 recognize the need to control, not just government as he points out here, but cultural power and being able to

00:52:57.800 wield that power, being willing to wield that power, both to reward friends and punish enemies.

00:53:03.480 A middle American nationalism must expect to redefine legal rules, political procedures, fiscal 0.70

00:53:10.680 and budgetary mechanisms, and national policy generally in the interest of middle Americans.

00:53:15.400 And it must do so with no illusions about rejecting decentralizing or dismantling the nation state or

00:53:21.400 power it affords. So he says, look, you're going to need to keep most of this intact.

00:53:26.200 You're going to need to organize society for the benefit of middle Americans, and you're going to

00:53:31.240 need to be unapologetic towards it. And you should not be looking to dismantle the power of the state

00:53:37.640 that affords you that control until you've made that transformation, even if, or if you even want

00:53:43.640 to do it at all. Again, maybe we agree or disagree with Francis's conclusion that we have to leave it

00:53:48.360 entirely intact. But surely until we've at least completed the job of orienting our society towards

00:53:54.680 the advantage of these people, it's simply not possible. Middle American interests are dependent 0.84

00:53:59.720 on the nation state through various educational, fiscal, trade, and economic instruments. And a

00:54:05.400 middle American nationalism ought to announce an explicit agenda of consolidating and enhancing these

00:54:11.720 instruments. At the same time, a new nationalism must recognize that many of the organs of the

00:54:17.720 national state exist only to serve the interests of the incumbent and lead and its underclass allies,

00:54:23.720 the arts, humanity, arts and humanities endowments. Most are all of the department of education,

00:54:29.480 labor, commerce, housing, and urban development and health and human services,

00:54:33.240 and the civil rights enforcement agencies in those various departments. It should seek their outright

00:54:38.680 abolition as well of those agencies and departments in the national security bureaucracy that serve

00:54:44.100 globalist and anti-nationalist agenda. Hey, guess what Donald Trump's doing? Donald Trump's getting

00:54:48.980 rid of the Department of Education. Donald Trump is getting rid of the U.S. foreign aid that helps

00:54:54.260 globalist organizations. Now, is he getting rid of all of these? No. Does he need to get rid of all of

00:54:59.300 these? According to Sam Francis, he does. Again, Francis is saying we don't need to dismantle the entire

00:55:04.260 state, but we need to specifically get rid of the branches and departments that are designed to

00:55:08.900 only benefit the elites and the underclass that serves them. Like, those need to go. If the 0.97

00:55:14.820 department does not serve the interests of middle Americans, it needs to go. So Trump is getting a

00:55:19.620 good start on this, but he needs to widen his purview. But power based merely on the state is insufficient

00:55:28.820 for the reconstitution of American society under middle American dominance. State power, indeed,

00:55:35.780 through a prerequisite for the emergence of a new elite is itself a weak support and must be

00:55:43.620 supplemented by cultural dominance. Under the incumbent elite and its regime, characteristic

00:55:49.460 middle American norms of sacrifice for and solidarity with family, community, ethnicity, nation, religion,

00:55:57.380 morals, and their rules of taste and propriety are under continuous attack, subversion,

00:56:05.780 and delegitimization by the cultural and intellectual vanguards of the elites. In place of such norms, the

00:56:12.500 elite offer a ethic of hedonism, immediate gratification, and cosmopolitan or universalist dispersion

00:56:20.100 of concrete identities and loyalties of an ethic that serves the interests of incumbent elites by

00:56:27.220 encouraging a passive homogenized though fragmented culture of continuous consumption,

00:56:32.900 distraction, entertainment, self-indulgence, surrender of social responsibilities to mass

00:56:38.340 organizations, and the erosion of the concrete social identities and intermediary institutions that

00:56:45.700 restrain the centralized manipulative power of both political and corporate structures. By far, the

00:56:57.860 most strategically important effort of an emerging middle American kind of elite would be a long 0.97

00:57:02.900 countermarch through the institutions of the dominant culture. Universities, think tanks, foundations,

00:57:08.740 schools, arts, journalism, organized religion, the professions, labor organizations, corporations, not only to

00:57:16.260 assert the legitimacy of middle American culture and ethnic identity norms and institutions, but also to redefine,

00:57:23.620 or sorry, rather also to define American society in terms of them. Instead of an ethic of inquisitive

00:57:30.660 or acquisitive individualism, immediate and perpetual gratification, distraction, and dispersion, the new

00:57:37.780 nationalism should assert an ethic of solidarity and sacrifice able to discipline and direct national energy

00:57:44.100 and national and reinforce national social and ethnic bonds of identity. The pseudo-nationalist

00:57:50.340 ethic of old nationalism that served only as a mask of the pursuit of special interests will be replaced by the

00:57:58.420 social ethic of an authentic nationalism that can summon and harness the genius of a people certain of its

00:58:05.860 identity and its destiny. The myth of the managerial regime that America is merely a philosophical proposition

00:58:12.580 about the equality of all mankind and therefore includes all of mankind must be replaced with a new 0.99

00:58:18.420 myth of the nation as a historically and culturally unique order that commands loyalty, solidarity, and

00:58:25.300 discipline and excludes those who do not or cannot assimilate to its forms and interests. This is the real 0.99

00:58:31.860 meaning of America first. America must first not only among other nations, but first also among the

00:58:42.580 other individual or class or sexual interests of its people. Unless a middle American nationalism or any

00:58:49.140 other socio-political movement can achieve such cultural hegemony through the formulation of an accepted public

00:58:55.460 myth, its political power and economic resources will remain dependent on the cultural power

00:59:02.180 of its adversaries and eventually will succumb to their manipulation as it takes its cues on goals and

00:59:10.500 tactics from its opponents. I know we're running a little long here, but I want to finish this because

00:59:16.180 it's so good and we've only got a few more paragraphs.

00:59:18.020 If a new middle American nationalism is in some respects a synthesis and a transcendence of the

00:59:28.660 conventional poles of right and left, it is also in another sense the resolution of polar conflicts

00:59:34.180 between the classical republicanism and nationalism around which so much of American political history

00:59:39.620 has swung. Like the nationalist tradition, it concerns itself with the pragmatic defense of national

00:59:44.980 national interest in foreign affairs, military security, and political economy. But unlike old 1.00

00:59:49.940 nationalism, it perceives a national interest beyond the pragmatic dimensions in the preservation of

00:59:56.100 the distinct cultural and ethnic foundations of nationality. Recognize that the pragmatic material

01:00:03.540 and economic conditions may and should defer to the more central norms without much without

01:00:09.780 which pragmatism is merely a meaningless process. So he said there's nothing wrong with being pragmatic,

01:00:14.820 but if you don't recognize who you're being pragmatic for, if you end up sacrificing the nation itself

01:00:20.020 in the name of nationalism, then you didn't really do yourself any favors. The affirmation of national

01:00:25.940 and cultural identity at the core of new nationalist ethic acquires a special importance at a time

01:00:32.500 when massive immigration, a totalitarian and anti-white multicultural fanaticism, concerted economic

01:00:39.540 warfare by foreign competitors by foreign competitors and forces of anti-national political globalism

01:00:45.220 combined to jeopardize the cultural identity, demographic existence, economic autonomy, and national

01:00:50.980 independence and sovereignty of the American nation. Like the republican tradition, the new nationalism is

01:00:56.500 essentially populist in tactics, locating the cultural and moral core of contemporary American society in a

01:01:04.500 stratum that is the main victim of the regime that now prevails in the United States.

01:01:10.020 Like republicanism, also, it is less interested in the abstract pursuit of luxury and empire,

01:01:17.620 and in the defense of the characteristic norms and identity of the people it defines and represents.

01:01:23.300 Like republicanism, it calls people to a duty higher than mere accumulation and aggrandizement to a

01:01:37.380 destiny of knowing who they are and where they came from and what they can be. If they remain able to

01:01:45.460 answer the call, they and their posterity may yet be able to achieve both a virtue and power that neither

01:01:52.820 old republicanism nor old nationalism were able to create.

01:01:58.340 All right, guys, so that is the essay, again, Nationalism Old and New by Sam Francis, printed back

01:02:05.380 in 1992 in Chronicles. Like I said, I wanted to get through it because I just felt like it's so

01:02:11.460 present. It represents so many of the problems that we're looking at today. It contains many things that

01:02:18.100 I came up kind of separately from this essay. But of course, I was already influenced by Sam Francis.

01:02:23.460 So not surprising that some of that was still here. And so I just thought it was well worth going through

01:02:29.460 because very much that this is still the essay of our times and something that we need to consider as we

01:02:36.340 try to figure out what the American first movement is supposed to be.

01:02:39.620 All right, guys. Well, we're going to wrap this up. Doesn't look like we have any questions

01:02:44.100 from the people today. So if it's your first time on this YouTube channel, you need to go ahead and

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01:03:17.620 of merch, including a new shirt, the Brutal American shirt, if you'd like to pick that up.

01:03:22.400 And of course, if you would like to get my book, The Total State, which goes into depth on the thought

01:03:27.240 of Sam Francis and connects it to other thinkers as well, you can pick that up at Barnes & Noble Books

01:03:32.260 a Million, pretty much anywhere books are sold. It's also got an audiobook version if you prefer to listen.

01:03:37.220 All right, guys, thank you everybody for watching. It's a pleasure to talk to you. Have a great

01:03:41.740 weekend. And as always, I will talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - March 28, 2025

Samuel Francis on How Nationalism Killed the Republic ｜ 3⧸28⧸25

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