Samuel Francis on How Nationalism Killed the Republic ｜ 3⧸28⧸25
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 3 minutes
Words per Minute
151.30505
Summary
In 1992, Samuel Francis wrote a piece about the battle between nationalism and republicanism. It's over 30 years later, and it's still relevant to this day. In fact, it could have been written yesterday, but Francis was largely excluded from the conservative movement at the time.
Transcript
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We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
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Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.
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Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.
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One of the people who I draw from frequently when we discuss political theory is a writer
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And he wrote a very interesting piece back in 1992 about the battle between nationalism
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Now, most of us think of Republicans as the nationalists.
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They're people who would prefer the American nation to a global understanding, a globalist
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They're the people who tend to focus on national identity and support that.
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But Samuel Francis's question was, did this push towards nationalism actually destroy the
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Because republican isn't just a slogan, it's not just a party, it's not just a mascot.
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Republicanism is a specific form of government.
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Oftentimes people like to say, no, we're not a democracy, we're a republic.
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And that was true at one point about America, but they rarely think about what the difference
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between a republican and democracy would be and why a republic would be preferable.
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Can we have a unified national identity while maintaining the things that are required to
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That's what Sam Francis addressed in this piece back in 1992, but I think it is still
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But before we do, let's hear from today's sponsor.
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All right, so we're diving into this essay from Samuel Francis.
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Now, I have read many essays on this channel, and most of the time I do a lot of stopping
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to break down and explain what's going on, and I'll still do that here, but I will probably
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I will probably take fewer times to break in because I feel like Samuel Francis is a very
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He is very good at using language that I think is approachable, and so a lot of it is self-explanatory.
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It's also a longer piece, and I want to be able to finish it because I really think it's
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Even though this is over 30 years old, it's still asking a lot of questions that we are
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My friend ended up turning me on to this essay, and even though I've read a lot of Sam Francis,
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I had never seen this one, but it still managed to kind of dovetail along with many of the
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So thank you, Nate Hockland, for bringing this essay to my attention, but it's just amazing
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that we had someone like Francis who was able to see the problems, the undercurrents in American
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This could have been written yesterday, and it would be just as relevant as it is today,
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but Francis was largely excluded from the conservative movement, and so we had this level of insight
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and this level of political theory available to us for a very long time, but it sat in places
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like Chronicles, which is an excellent magazine.
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They're doing the Lord's work of bringing paleoconservatism.
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They maintained it in the darkness, and they're bringing it back in this moment, so of course
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this essay is here, and kudos to them for continuing this great work, but it's not a magazine that
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has a lot of reach, and so the fact that this is the only place that you could really find
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the wisdom of someone like Sam Francis, again, amazing work by Chronicles, but the fact that
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this was not widely read and widely understood by many people on the right really just tells you
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how desperate people were to silence a category of thought that I think would have been far
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more useful to the right in the long run, but that said, let's go ahead and dive into the
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essay here, and I'll stop when I feel it's appropriate to go ahead and add or to clarify
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In the course of American history, nationalism and republicanism have usually been enemies,
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From the days of Alexander Hamilton, nationalism has meant unification of the country under
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The supremacy of the executive over the legislative branch, the reduction of states' rights and
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local sectional parochialism, governmental regulation of the economy and engineering of
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social institutions, and an activist foreign policy, expansionist, imperialist, or globalist
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that costs much money and requires at least occasional wars.
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So right off the bat, we can see that this version of nationalism, as Sam Francis is describing
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it, sounds a whole lot more like the type of government we have today, something that
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wants to erase regional differences, wants to centralize the entirety of the nation under
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the same government, wants to erase the ability of different regions to live as they wish.
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It needs an expansionist, imperialist, globalist type of foreign policy that demands a lot of
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money and a lot of military activity to keep it going.
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Nationalism and its proponents have historically been anglophiles, emulating the mercantilist
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dynastic state that flourished in Great Britain from the 18th century, and for all of their
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claims of overcoming sectionalism and private interests, they have been identified with the
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northeastern part of the United States and its institutions, New England, New York City,
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the Ivy League, big banks, big business, Wall Street, and Washington.
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So he's talking about this clash that has existed from the beginning of the country.
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If you've watched this channel, you know, when we get to American history that we have
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addressed this, many people will talk about the vision of the founders, what the founders
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And there are overlapping values in the founders.
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But the idea that the founders were one unified body that had one unified vision is just
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The biggest battle was between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, the people like Hamilton
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who wanted to centralize power, create more of an imperial mercantile government in the
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United States, as where Jefferson and many of his ilk would have preferred to have an agrarian
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Every American owns his own farm, defends his own home, kind of raises his own food.
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It's the self-sustained, you know, kind of isolated existence, not isolated, the wrong
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word, but existence that does not rely on a bunch of other national institutions.
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And so we've seen that the Hamiltonian understanding has won out in the long run, right?
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But it represented a very distinct interest in American life.
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It favored big towns in the Northeast, big cities that were dependent on manufacturing
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And it tended to take advantage of farmers, agrarian, the South, those that were not in
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this kind of clique that would have benefited from these actions.
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So he's just hitting on something that has been there since the beginning of the country.
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All right, so the national state and the nationalists defended and constructed was born with the
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ratification of the U.S. Constitution, reached adolescence in the victory of the North in the
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Civil War, and grew to a corpulent adulthood in the 20th century managerial state of Woodrow
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Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.
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Again, if you go back to the episode where I was with the good old boys and we talked
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about the five republics of the United States, he's talking about those critical moments in
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The Civil War, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, these critical moments where
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they seem to have changed the way the Constitution works without technically altering the words of
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The principal opponents of nationalism in American history have been Republicans, and it is one of
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the ironies of our history that the political party that claims the Republican name has been the
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chief vehicle since the Civil War of anti-Republican nationalism.
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The Anti-Federalists were opposed to the ratification of the Constitution, were men immersed in the
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political theory of classical Republicanism, a school of thought that originated in modern
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They think that Machiavelli was a monarchist, but that is not the case.
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He actually was a big supporter of Republicanism, which you will find out if you read Discourses
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on Livy, found expression in the 17th century British resistance to the powers of the monarchy
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and in the 18th century influenced by both radical Tories and radical Whigs.
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Deeply suspicious of centralized power of any kind and of the corruption it bred, the Anti-Federalists
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opposed the ratification, demanded a Bill of Rights to limit federal power, and insisted on a strict
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reading of the constitutional text as the basic law defending the states against the federal government
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and the Congress against the presidency, and were generally content with the limitation on wealth
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and national power that a small, restricted state imposed, in preference to what they condemned
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as luxury and empire that national consolidation and interventionist foreign policy would encourage.
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So from the beginning here, he is noting something that, again, I think a lot of people, a lot
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even conservatives would be very hesitant to admit, which is that this limited small government,
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this government that is free from the centralization of powers and the mass institutions that now
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run our society is intrinsically going to be a smaller government and going to be a less wealthy
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government, and they recognized the sacrifices that they would be making by maintaining that type of government.
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No, you wouldn't be the most wealthy and militarily powerful government in the world if you maintained
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yourself as a republic, but that was okay because the republican form of government was superior.
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So they understood that there was a trade-off, a cost, a limitation that republican government placed
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on the formation of nations, and that ultimately, if you want to maintain that type of government,
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you have to be willing to accept the limitations of the form. If you want to go beyond that,
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you might be moving towards the luxurious empire, but you must live as an empire. You must recognize
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that you are an empire. You must recognize that you are giving up a republican lifestyle to embrace
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that expansion, and he points out here that they were aware of this trade-off. This is not something
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that we have suddenly discovered so many hundreds of years later. It's there, again, at the founding,
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if we will look at the wisdom that many founders put forward, and instead of just going out and just
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reading the schoolhouse rock version of American history. The anti-federalist rights professor
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Ralph Ketchum in his introduction to a popular edition of his writings looked into the classical
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idealization of the small pastoral republic, which were virtuous, self-reliant citizens,
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managed their own affairs, and shunned the power and glory of empire. To them, the victory of the
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American Revolution meant not so much the big chance to become a wealthy world power, but rather the
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opportunity to achieve a genuinely republican polity. Far from the greed, lust for power, and tyranny
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that generally characterized human society. So again, they recognized a trade-off early on. It's not
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just, oh, well, we become a republican form of government, and therefore we get to have all of these
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things as well. They recognized that there were limitations to what was being set up, and that might be
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preferable because the cost of empire might be too high. Though the anti-federalists lost their ideas
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far more than those of Edmund Burke and Adam Smith have informed the long American tradition of
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resistance to the leviathan state of the nationalists, appearing in the thought and lips of
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John Randolph, John C. Calhoun, and the leaders of the Confederacy, the populists of the late 19th
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century, and the southern agrarians of the early 20th century, in the old right conservatism of the era
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between Charles Lindbergh and Jesse Helms. In the 18th century, when the debate between the two sides
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of the American political coin still sparkled, it was possible for the American people and their
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leaders to choose republicanism and to institutionalize its ideals. Perhaps it was possible to do so as late
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as the early 20th century, before the managerial state began to crystallize. Today, it is no longer
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possible. The national state has long since triumphed, and with it wedded to it like a Siamese sibling
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is multinational corporations, giant labor unions, universities, and foundations. All of the titanic
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labyrinth of modern bureaucratic organizations in both the public and increasingly the illusory
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private sectors have won as well. To establish republicanism in anything like its classical form
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would involve a massive rejection, a massive rejection and dismantlement of the main features
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of the 20th century, the physical and social technologies by which modern centralized bureaucratically
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managed mass organizations operate. And while they continued, and while the continued existence and
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dominance of such features are not inevitable in any Hegelian sense, no one can save a few romantic
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reactionaries seriously contemplates doing away with them. Not only do technology and its
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organizational applications entice us with luxury, what we today complacently call a high standard of
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living, but also they offer to those who understand how to manipulate them a degree of power unknown to the
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most imperious despots of the past. So he's saying here is that basically, we have moved beyond the
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possibility of this form of government. Maybe we could have chosen it at some point. But once we
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institutionalize the managerial state, once we created the total state, the mass bureaucratic state,
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we created a set of powers and privileges so compelling that it is very difficult to imagine
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most people giving them up. And more importantly, it is very unlikely that our leaders will give them
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up because it allows our leaders to manipulate us at a massive scale that has just never been seen before.
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The elites that manage modern mass organizations and master the technical skills that allow these
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organizations to function cannot permit the decentralization and autonomy that characterize
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republican civil culture simply because their own power would vanish. And these elites are logged or
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lodged not only in the state, but also in the dominant organizations of the economy and culture so that our
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incomes and our very thoughts, values, tastes, and emotions are conditioned and manipulated by them
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and their apologists. Short of a new dark age, or perhaps it would be a golden age, in which knowledge
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of scientific and organizational technology is lost, there is no prospect of reversing the trend towards
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mass organization and its absorption of local and decentralized institutions. And here we see that
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Francis is addressing a similar question to Alexander Dugan, the one Alexander Dugan asked today,
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in the metaphysics of the washing machine. Is the creation of these technologies an indication that
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there's an inevitable pull towards this situation? Can we deny ourselves these technologies? Could our
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ruling elites deny themselves the control that these technologies bring? For Francis, the answer is no.
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He's very deterministic in this sense. He says, look, we have embraced this technology,
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and we would have to abandon all of it in order to return to a level of individual reliance that
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characterizes Republican government. Remember, the key to Republican government for Machiavelli and for
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pretty much every thinker was the idea of self-sufficiency of the people. The people were ready
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to defend themselves with their own arms. They were ready to feed themselves with their own farms.
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They were ready to make determinations on their government based on their own action as citizens.
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He says that is impossible in the current world with our current technology and the different ways
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in which we are now bound to the institutions that create power for our ruling elite. Back to the essay
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here. Moreover, as most students of classical Republicanism understand, the distinctive principle of
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its theory is its concept of virtue, a quality that consists less in moralistic purity than in
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personal and social independence. Owning and operating his own farm or shop, usually producing
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his own food and clothing, governing his own family and his own community, and defending himself with
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his own arms in company with his own relatives and neighbors, the citizen of the classical republic
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neither needed nor wanted a leviathan state to fight wars across the globe on behalf of democracy,
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nor to pretend to protect him and his home. Again, just could have been written yesterday.
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Sounds like it could have been written yesterday. Nor did he need or want a job in someone else's
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company or a pension plan or a health benefits or paid vacation or five hour or five hour workdays.
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He did not want to shop in vast shopping malls where nothing is worth buying and nothing bought
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will last a year. It did not occur to him to enroll himself or his children in therapy courses or in
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sensitivity and human relations clinics in order to find out how to get along with his neighbors.
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And he sought no edification or instruction from the mass media to entertain him continuously or
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indoctrinate him with the current cliches and slogans of public discussion or trick him into
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buying even more junk from which he had no use and no desire. If the citizens succumbed to such
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temptations, then he had become a dependent on someone who, or he became dependent on someone or
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something other than himself and his extension and his extensions in family and community. Men who
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become dependent on others cannot govern themselves and they cannot govern themselves. If they cannot govern
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themselves, they cannot keep a Republic. This is the bug man, right? This, this is the bug man. This
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is Nietzsche's bug. Uh, this, this is Nietzsche's last man, the guy who has traded all agency, all will,
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all self-determination for comforts just to be left alone, to not be bothered, to, to have plenty,
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but to not have to worry about existential conflicts, to not have to go out and earn a living that this is
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what he's talking about. He says the, the person who is a Republican in, in the classical sense is
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looking to do it all themselves to rely on those local or community, uh, ties, but not looking for
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the state to step, step in. They would not expect state organizations to take care of them. If they
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needed organizations, they would make them themselves. And so this is his, uh, real point is that we have
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lost the virtue necessary. Not only have we lost the virtue necessary, the very institutions,
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the very mechanisms of power we have created specifically rob us of that virtue. They
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encourage us not to, uh, create the level of virtue to cultivate the level of virtue necessary
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to operate as a Republican government today. Virtually everyone in the United States is habituated to a
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style of living that is wrapped up in dependency on mass organizations of one kind or another
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supermarkets, supermarkets, hospitals, insurance companies, uh, the, uh, bureaucratized police,
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local government, the mass media, the factories, the office buildings, where we work, the apartment
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complexes and suburban communities where we live and the massive remote and mysterious national state
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that, uh, supervises almost every detail of our lives. Most Americans cannot even imagine a life
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without such dependencies and would not want to live without them. If they could imagine it,
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the classical Republicans were right. Having, having become dependent on others for our livelihood,
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our, uh, our protection, our entertainment, and even our thoughts and tastes, we are corrupted.
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We neither want Republic. Uh, we neither want a Republic nor could we keep it. If we had one,
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we do not deserve to have one. And like the barbarians conquered and enslaved by the Greeks and the
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Romans, we are suited only for servitude. He says very basically here, we have abandoned the
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virtue that made us capable of operating a Republic. So if you even offered people a Republic at this
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point, they would not take it. So conservatives running around and saying we're a Republic,
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not a democracy would not be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to actually make that
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statement true. To return us to actual Republican virtue.
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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.
00:24:11.440
Is that from winners? Ooh, or that beautiful silk skirt. Did she pay full price? Or those suede sneakers?
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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
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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
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increasingly supranational managerial regime. These middle Americans, largely white and middle class,
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derive their income from their dependence on the mass structures of the managerial economy.
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And because many of them have long since lost their habits of self-reliance,
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they are dependent on the services of the government, at least indirectly, and the dominant culture.
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Yet despite their dependence, the regime does little for them and much to them. They find that
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their jobs are insecure. Their savings stripped of value. Their neighborhoods and schools and homes
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unsafe. Their elected leaders indifferent and often crooked. Their moral beliefs and religious
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professions and local codes under perpetual attack, even from their own government.
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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,
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fight the wars its leaders devise, raise the families, and try to pass on the beliefs and habits that
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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,
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the Republican form is dead. We can't go back. We have gone too far, both technologically and
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unfortunately, we have devolved morally and in self-discipline and virtue. We could not put it
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back together if we wanted to. That said, there is a block of middle Americans who are treated like
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garbage, right? They fight the wars, they pay the taxes, they deliver the food, the gas,
00:27:16.460
they make sure it gets grown, they defend the country, they enforce the law, but they're treated
00:27:21.640
like crap all the time. Again, he wrote this 30 years ago, more than 30 years ago, but it could
00:27:28.140
have been written yesterday. It says all of the things that we are experiencing right now. And so he
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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
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nationalist state than was ever intended by many of the founders, ultimately, that is still a group
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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,
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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
00:28:21.520
might call them deplorables today, mocked as Archie bunkers and denounced as racist, sexist, anti-Semites,
00:28:28.800
xenophobes, homophobes, and hate criminals who don't, who haunt the dark corners of the land,
00:28:34.060
the dark side of America, even as their own energy sacrifice and commitment make possible
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
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,
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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01:03:27.240
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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.