Samuel Francis

Latest by Samuel Francis in Chronicles

• Blog

  March 7, 2019

  Crime Story: The Godfather as Political Metaphor

  Probably not since Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind has a popular novel influenced Americans as deeply as Mario Puzo's The Godfather. Appearing in 1969, the book remains, according to the inflated come-on of its publisher's blurb, "the all-time best-selling novel in publishing history."

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• Blog

  November 14, 2018

  Define "Imperialism"

  Lewis Namier liked to tell the story of an English schoolboy who was asked to define "imperialism" on an examination paper. "Imperialism," the budding proconsul wrote, "is learning how to get along with one's social inferiors."

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• Blog

  August 2, 2018

  Ditching the Cadaver

  If anything might have transformed the presidential election of 2004 from a dull ritual of mass democracy into an interesting and perhaps even meaningful act of civic decision, it would have been the presence of Patrick J. Buchanan, whose wit and sharp conservative intelligence enlivened the elections of 1992, 1996, and 2000.

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• Blog

  July 25, 2018

  The Vanishing Anglo-Saxon Minority

  For almost exactly 30 years, Kevin P. Phillips has been cranking out some of the most interesting and provocative works of political analysis written since World War II.

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• Blog

  March 22, 2018

  Corruption and Contempt

  The late Sam Francis dissects two attempts at modernizing Machiavelli and considers whether dictatorship is the answer to corruption.

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• Blog

  March 12, 2018

  The Managerial Mob

  Twenty years ago, Samuel Francis looked at the link between the mob and the managerial revolution.

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• Blog

  February 21, 2018

  Winning the Culture War

  The first thing we have to learn about fighting and winning a cultural war is that we are not fighting to "conserve" something; we are fighting to overthrow something.

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• Blog

  January 24, 2018

  Where the Buck Really Stops

  Sovereignty, by definition, concerns the issue of who is to be master in a society, whether it has to do either with internal autonomy or with its external independence.

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• Blog

  November 13, 2017

  Nationalism, True and False

  Ruling classes exercise power through combinations of coercion and manipulation—what Machiavelli called force and fraud, or the habits of the lion and the fox that he recommended to princes who wish to stay in power.

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• Blog

  November 2, 2017

  Burnham Agonistes

  Most adult conservatives as well as many educated people know that James Burnham was an anticommunist author and columnist for William F. Buckley’s National Review; a number of others will be aware that Burnham’s name seems to flap through the corridors of early 20th-century American intellectual history, though they may not be able to explain just who he was or what he did.

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• Blog

  May 15, 2017

  The Price of Empire Globalism and Its Consequences

  I know it will strike many people as odd to call the current foreign policy of the United States a form of "empire building" or "imperialism," and of course none of our leaders would ever call it that.

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• Principalities & Powers

  March 2005

  Perfect for This Moment

  The hero of the hour, if not the messiah of the New Age, is Barack Obama, a gentleman whose name might lead you to suspect him of being an Afghan terrorist or the most recent American puppet candidate for the presidency of Iraq but who, in fact, is merely the freshman senator from the state of Illinois and very possibly the next vice president (and future president) of the United States.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  March 2005

  Foreign Policy "Revolutionary"?

  If President Bush achieved nothing else in his Inaugural Address, he at least provided fodder for media pundits to chew on for a solid week or more.

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• Round Table Discussion

  February 2005

  Paleos in Context

  The significance of Chilton Williamson’s new book, The Conservative Bookshelf, is that it is the first general account of the conservative tradition to place what is now called paleoconservatism in the context of that tradition.

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• Principalities & Powers

  February 2005

  Toward a Hard Right

  What is the meaning of the election of 2004 for the American Hard Right? The question, of course, presupposes that there is such a thing as a “Hard Right” distinct from the Mossad’s Station Pentagon, or the “moral values” evangelicals, or the Girly Boys’ Jamboree.

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• Principalities & Powers

  January 2005

  You Say You Want a Revolution

  With a none-too-whopping lunch of 51 percent of the popular vote packed into their bellies, the nation’s “conservatives” quibbled and preached to one another about the true meaning of the 2004 presidential election even before the 51 percent had made it all the way down their political esophagus.

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• Reviews

  December 2004

  The Left-Hand Path

  Last May, the New Republic carried an informative article about how contemporary exponents of Cabala, a school of Jewish mysticism dating from the Middle Ages (if not earlier), have shaped the minds (such as they are) of such celebrities as Mick Jagger, Britney Spears, Demi Moore, and Madonna.

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• Reviews

  November 2004

  Ditching the Cadaver

  If anything might have transformed the presidential election of 2004 from a dull ritual of mass democracy into an interesting and perhaps even meaningful act of civic decision, it would have been the presence of Patrick J. Buchanan, whose wit and sharp conservative intelligence enlivened the elections of 1992, 1996, and 2000.

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• Principalities & Powers

  October 2004

  The Enemy of the Nation

  Not long before the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev was still in power and I was an editorial writer at the Washington Times, a bunch of Soviet “journalists” came to lunch at the newspaper.

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• American Proscenium

  October 2004

  Smearpolitik

  After several weeks of fulminating about John Kerry’s war record and the medals he presumably awarded himself, at least some veterans of the Stupid Party eventually got down to the real point about the man who wants to replace George W. Bush in the White House.

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