Sam Francis and the Paleocons

I'm trying to make sure my posts are germane to this site. As Sam Francis spent much time in NC, I believe this one passes the test.

If we are to more fully understand the Neo-Confederacy, which has been linked to Ron Paul, it is important to look at the Paleoconservative movement, of which the neo-confederates are a part. For the uninitiated, Pat Buchanan most ably represents the paleocons among recent presidential candidates. No one portrays the transition from paleocon to neo-confederate better than the late Samuel Todd Francis, Ph.D.

I found these words by Michael Brendan Dougherty illuminating:

Throughout his years at the (Washington) Times, he made the normal rounds of cocktail parties and conservative gatherings, often standing in the back of the room and cracking wise about whoever was speaking. Although some friends, like Don Devine, vice chairman of the American Conservative Union, with whom Francis often ate dinner at such events, found his prickly personality charming, others felt ill at ease around him. Francis often seemed angry and was prone to feeling slighted. His hard-right politics, cutting barbs, and frequent jeremiads about the deficiencies of the conservative movement along with his appearance -- unkempt, corpulent, and smokey from the Pall Malls he chainsmoked -- made him a repulsive figure to many in the conservative movement. Here was a loser, the "angry white male" bogeyman the Left held up for
derision and scorn in the 1990s.

Complaining that the neocons had entrenched themselves as "the permissible right wing" of liberal political and cultural hegemony, Francis sought out political groups and factions outside the mainstream, including the Council of Conservative Citizens (CoCC), a hard right activist group with roots in the defunct White Citizens Council. New alliances were essential, he wrote, because "movement conservatism" had become the mirror image of what it ostensibly opposed: "For the last 20 years, the establishment right has increasingly cloistered itself in Washington and its suburbs periodically dispatching flying squadrons to raise money from the yokels back home by claiming to be "populists.'"

Ron Paul supporters, at least the reasonable ones, have had reason of late to also become disillusioned. Maybe that is another chronic symptom of ultra-conservative thought. For me, it is a difficult place to spend time: populated with compelling characters sometimes espousing despicable ideas. I suppose they call it the fringe for a reason.

I come away feeling sorry for these tragic thinkers. They do not warrant being mentioned in the same breath with the more well known KKK and neo-Nazi bottom feeders.

From Dr. Sam Francis:

Some Americans, especially the cosmo-conservatives in Manhattan and Washington, may fantasize that globalization will yield another "American Century," with Yankee know-how tossing institutional and ideological candy-bars to fetching senioritas in the Third World. But blue-collar workers in Detroit and construction men in Texas probably have a better grip on the realities of globalization as they watch their own jobs disappear before Asian competition and illegal immigrants. Globalization doesn't mean that America will prevail, but that it will vanish among the electrons and laser beams by which the planet is to be held together, just as Midwestern small businesses and Southern family farms vanished into the financial and industrial grids of the nineteenth century nationalists.

I caution commenters to read the Wikipedia entry on Dr. Francis as well as Dougherty's article. This was a complicated man dealing with an arcane subject.