THE CHIEF CAUSE of Francis’s rediscovery is that his writing appears to have anticipated in startling detail Donald Trump and Trumpism. I vividly remember reading in the autumn of 2016 his 1981 essay, “Message from MARs: The Social Politics of the New Right” and thinking, “My God, this anticipated all of it.” I was obviously not alone.
What seems to set Francis apart from the earlier generation of conservative intellectuals was his materialism—grounding politics in the hard structures of politics—and his related belief that ideas and rhetoric are not enough. Power matters. In “Message from MARs,” Francis’s central move was to find a sociopolitical base for the emergent “New Right,” an activist-oriented right-wing movement organized around social issues. The New Rightists were often the younger or second-generation members of the conservative intellectual movement who, based in Washington, D.C. or its Virginia suburbs, aimed to turn their ideas into real political action, usually funded by small donors reached by direct-mail appeals.
Aggrieved or worried middle Americans were the financial drivers of the New Right, and Francis saw in them a greater possibility. In his hands, they became “Middle American Radicals” (MARs): high-school educated, white ethnic (or Baptist and Mormon), “skilled and semi-skilled blue-collar workers” aged in their thirties through sixties, who wanted change. Their defining feature was the attitude that, politically speaking, “The rich give in to the demands of the poor, and the middle income people have to pay the bill.” The MARs are the angry middle class, resentful of the poor, envious of the rich, and after theirs.
Francis saw opportunity in the MARs. If the New Right harnessed their power, it could effect a revolution in the ruling elite, replacing the left-liberal rulers and their administrative arm with a right-wing elite that would dismantle the “managerial power structure.”
Francis’s most unique contribution was probably to think transgressively—from a conservative perspective—about how to achieve New Right goals. With the backing of the MARs, the New Right, Francis argued, should “find a radical, anti-establishment approach better adapted to the achievement of its goals.” It could be more protectionist, and use the state to benefit the interests of the MARs directly. It would be staunchly nationalist in foreign policy. It would make greater use of the presidency than conservative theory traditionally allowed:
only the Presidency—as Nixon and Agnew showed—has the viability and resources to cut through the intractable establishment of bureaucracy and media to reach the MAR social base directly. Only the Presidency is capable of dismantling or restructuring the bureaucratic managerial apparatus that now strangles the latent dynamism of the MAR-Sunbelt social forces.