On Beautiful Losers: on Samuel Francis' American First. Burnhamism and the art of governing from the right

Even in the most bookish of Humanities formal education generates a kind of funnel or light-cone in which students encounter a very narrow range of authors and ideas. This is an inevitable effect of the finite structure of curricula, the march of time (which consigns most authors to oblivion), and the operation of what we might call ‘soft’ power in academic disciplines that reflect not just their own internal prestige hierarchy, fashions, and economic opportunities, but also wider structural interests and aspirations.

A collection of essays by Isaiah Berlin was gifted to me at my college graduation by Norman Barnett in 1993. Norman was an American businessman and exquisite storyteller, and despite his very short height a true lady’s man. He had charmed my mom in the 1970s in Amsterdam and had become a lifelong friend to her, and me. And while respectful of ideas, Norman had not read Berlin before he bought the book on the recommendation of a bookseller on the Upper East Side.

I never met Berlin, but his essays are great feats of storytelling because he is capable of making ideas and authors come alive in a great drama of political history. I liked reading Herzen and (much less so) Herder, when I eventually did so, but they did not spark as much joy as discovering them through Berlin, who kept me company in my early 20s (in my road trips). The truth is, to repeat, Berlin’s stories about those that the academic light cone makes invisible are much more enjoyable to read and more nourishing for reflection on political life than his often quite earnest source material (or his own “Two Concepts of Liberty”).

Because Berlin ended up at the center of much soft power (even of the imperial kind), and because Berlin was such an arresting persona, his own works have resisted historical oblivion thus far. But it’s pretty clear that his work will not endure as canonical political theory or philosophy in competition with not just Rawls or Hayek (the high tides of liberalism), but also not with Arendt or Foucault as representatives of European thought in its decline. I don’t say that with pleasure because — regular readers need no reminding — my own skeptical liberalism is much indebted to his agonistic and tragic kind, but I don’t see the ascending intellectual and social tribes — subaltern or not — having much use for Berlin, alas.

I only started reading James Burnham (1905 –1987) less than five years ago because of my regular teaching of Orwell’s 1984, the nudging of Alex Aragona (a Canadian podcaster who I describe as ‘Prairie libertarian’), and Matthew Rose's A World After Liberalism, which is a useful primer to what we might call ‘post-liberalism.’ I didn’t encounter Burnham in my studies because of the funnel effect I described above. This despite the fact that he was rather famous in his own day, and some of his books incredibly widely read.

Through a fluke of political history, James Burnham will, however, become ever more significant because of the way the American political parties have effectively sorted themselves and will keep each other balanced in the Electoral College (and because America is our empire and these are an effective duopoly). The contemporary Republican party is not bookish and its coalition is held together by a cult of an individual who is not especially theoretically curious. But the sociological character of this coalition can be understood if one reads Samuel Francis (1947 – 2005), and Burnham is for Francis the intellectual touchstone through which he interprets American political history and his own times.

The previous paragraph is not designed to tar or malign Burnham. In his best works, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (1941) and The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943), Burnham has a fully worked out theory of political life that is a clear alternative to liberalism (left and right) without falling prey to totalitarian fantasies or the backward-looking pieties of Burkean conservatism. And this theoretical core will remain salient as long as people will search for democratic alternatives to liberalism. (To predict facilly: Burnham will be ignored in China and become big in India.)

I had heard about Francis through a Damon Linker Substack, “Trumpism's Prophet: On Samuel Francis’ diabolical vision.” (April 19, 2024) Linker’s essay is now behind a paywall. Linker himself links to an astute (November 2016) column, “How an obscure adviser to Pat Buchanan predicted the wild Trump campaign in 1996: This should be the Rosetta Stone for Trumpism,” in the The Week, by Michael Brendan Dougherty “about Francis as a herald of the right-wing populism that seized control of the GOP in 2016 and went on to win the White House.” Dougherty’s essay usefully connects the dots between Pat Buchanan’s campaigns and Trump’s, and crucially explains Francis’ role in the background. As Dougherty puts it, “20 years later, [Francis’s essay,] "From Household to Nation," reads like a political manifesto from which the Trump campaign springs.”

The first thing you learn from Wikipedia about Samuel Francis is that he is a white supremacist.+ But “From Household to Nation,” lacks a focus on race. The key idea in it is that “The post-Wold War II middle class was in reality an affluent proletariat, economically dependent on the federal government through labor codes, housing loans, educational programs, defense contracts, and health and unemployment benefits.” Francis argues that by the 1980s neither political party really caters to this class interest. And by drawing on Burnham and Lasch, Pat Buchanan is creating the outlines of a new enduring political program that can do so. If Fanon can turn the urban lumpenproletariat into an engine of history, then Francis can do the same for the affluent proletariat of the American hinterland.

I decided to order Francis’ (1993) collection Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism. This is well curated. And most of these essays could be taught in a class without risk of cancelation (unless the Wikipedia statement is sufficient grounds). By which I mean that it is not focused on white Supremacism.*

In his Substack essay, Linker recommends two essays, “Beautiful Losers” from 1991 and “Nationalism, Old and New,” (which is not in the collection). These are indeed two useful primers to situate Francis’ self-understanding of his place in the ideological battles of his own age (on the political Right) and the long durée of American political life, and, more importantly, the true meaning of ‘American First’ as a national program on behalf of that affluent proletariat.

But the best essay is probably the one on “Henry Clay and the Statecraft of Circumstance.” This (1991) essay basically uses Clay’s political life as a vehicle to illustrate Burnham’s ideas in the service of demolishing the Burkean views then fashionable among ‘fusionist’ conservatives. And what’s crucial about Francis’ argument is that in it he cannot rely on the claim (as he does elsewhere) that Burke has become irrelevant after the successful managerial/technocratic revolution of the early twentieth century. On Francis’ view, in our mass society, the language of ‘virtue’ and the small platoons cannot lay claim to a true social force that might be a governing order.

The point of “Henry Clay and the Statecraft of Circumstance” is to show that even in the era of the true American republic, Burke could not provide a successful governing philosophy. Francis’ general theory of politics is Burnham’s: to put it abstractly, all great societies can be decomposed in a battle for power among great social tribes (or classes/forces) and coalitions that compose them and among them. These great forces are the vehicle of a successful minority to govern the whole. And this minority, in turn, will legitimize its rule through a particular civil religion (or a creed/myth). Of course, this battle is partially shaped by institutions and by the particulars of technology/economy, as well as international relations (etc.). Burnham’s debt to Marx and both to Machiavelli is straightforward. Like them, Burnham rejects moralism in political analysis.

In Francis’ hands, Clay is ineffective in his political aims not because he doesn’t understand the great social forces of his age that have turned America not just into competing geographic/sectorial interests, but also into civilizations at odds with each other. Clay’s whole program of compromise can be understood as an attempt to mediate among them. But rather on Francis’ account, Clay fails because he believes in Burkean national harmony and, more subtly, in the self-equilibrium tendencies of political life.

To put it like that understates Francis’ analysis of Clay because Clay is shown to realize that the Federal government is required to be an impartial ‘judge and arbitrator” (Beautiful Losers, p. 45) among the competing social forces — this idea has a useful afterlife in twentieth century neoliberalism — and that his “economic nationalism,” in turn, needs the threat of a common enemy as a species of self-justification. But because for nineteenth century Americans there was no credible foreign enemy, "the appeal to a common threat as a principle of national reconciliation was not effective and indeed was capable of having the opposite effect, of promoting sectional conflict.” (p. 50.)

In 1991 this is rather prescient. America is then about to lose the Soviet Union as a credible, existential enemy. Neo-conservatism ends up self-undermining its grip on power by exaggerating all the new threats, and by promoting a misguided foreign policy in light of them. If it didn’t involve needless destruction, this would have been especially farcical because the rise of neo-conservatism was itself a product of the failures of liberal millenarianism in the debacles in Vietnam.

That is to say, on Francis’ account Clay mistakenly relied on myths that were verifiably false. Francis puts his point as follows,

Clay’s conservatism, in other words, presumed too much. It took for granted a community of values and interests that defined the United States in the early nineteenth century, and therefore there is, despite its sophisticated and worldly appeal, a naivete and a parochialism within it. (p. 47, emphasis added.)

The naivety is constituted by taking the sources of stability in the political status quo for granted. The key underlying moral (and this is basically Burnham’s position) is articulated as follows:

Yet the flaw of Clay’s statecraft of circumstance was not his alone. The Madisonian model of checks and balances, formalized in the Constitution and enshrined in the claims of political liberalism, offers no brake by which the perpetual motion of sectional and social conflict can be controlled and reconciled, and neither Clay nor any of his contemporaries can be blamed too much for failing to find or create such a brake. The United States, from its origins as a political society, recognized no such restraint, and it stepped forth into history in the delusion that none is necessary, that balance and compromise through the mutual gratification of economic interests are as natural and stabilizing in society and politics as in the celestial mechanics of the Newtonian universe the Framers inhabited.

In the absence of some common myth—religious, ethical, ideological. national, or racial—that could serve as a framework by which individual and sectional appetites could be governed, and relying solely on a supposititious balance of selfish but enlightened interests, the Republic sooner or later was destined to suffer either dissolution from the centrifugal conflicts those interests engendered or centripetal domination by one or another of the strongest of them. During Clay’s lifetime, a balance did indeed endure that permitted the efflorescence of an American civilization and republican liberty through the mutual contributions and antagonisms of different sections, subcultures, classes, and economies. But that balance was an accident of history, not a law of nature. (p. 58)

As Francis hints at in this essay (without mention of Henry Jaffa), Lincon did succeed in generating such a common myth (about which some other time more).

On Francis’ account, then, part of the historic mission of the intellectuals of the American political Right is the development of a framework — in opposition to the existing liberal one that benefits a global, managerial class — that can unite a coalition centered on the needs and aspirations of that affluent proletariat and that facilitates the art of governing. It has, thus far, failed in that mission despite tactical wins on the coattails of Trump, presumably because it has grown addicted to funding by Silicon Valley billionaires.

But those of us who dwell on the edges of empire, we can already discern that in most places this alternative framework will itself have transnational commonalities in virtue of its common enemy. And because of the ordinary functioning of the academic light cone, Burnhamism still operates in the shadows despite feeling the tailwinds of good political fortune.

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+Somehow this is not said about Burnham, although Burnham’s 1964 bestseller Suicide of the West defends ethno-national cultural superiority.

*Even the diatribe against King Day, “The cult of Dr. King,” is actually rather respectful toward King the man, even as it fulminates against “militant egalitarian universalism” (p. 159) and putting “Dr. King into the [American] Pantheon.” (p. 158) In fact, Francis’ real ire (often quite funny) is directed against the tendency among his fellow travelers on the right — and we might hasten to add American liberalism — to downplay the true nature of Dr. King’s vision which, if acted on, would lead to “the radical reconstruction of American society” (p. 159) and to assimilate Dr. King into a more banal set of sermons. My Marxist friends would probably agree.