The essay was titled “Principalities & Powers,” and Limbaugh hailed it as the Trumpist manifesto that no one, including the candidate, had been able to formulate. It described a voting base, misunderstood and exploited for decades, that more resembled a “proletariat” than a propertied middle class. “Nationalism and populism,” as Limbaugh put it, not free-market orthodoxy, represented the Republican party’s best way forward. Yet the essay, despite anticipating the presidential inauguration exactly one year later, had not been written by an observer of the 2016 primary season. It had been published in 1996, and its author was not available for interview, because he had been dead for more than a decade.
When he died in 2005, Samuel Francis was nobody’s idea of the most prescient observer of American politics. He had arrived in Washington twenty-eight years earlier, one of many young conservative thinkers and activists drawn to the capital by the election of Ronald Reagan. But he had been constantly and irritatingly out of step: arguing against free trade in the heyday of globalism, defending entitlements in an era of tax cuts, protesting foreign wars in the face of bipartisan agreement, and questioning Christian influence at the apogee of the religious right. His career began promisingly, with early positions at the Heritage Foundation and on Capitol Hill, followed by years as a columnist at the Washington Times. But Francis could not conceal his growing contempt for a movement that he believed failed to understand, let alone challenge, the institutional power of American liberalism. He considered First Things and its founder among the organs of the collaborationist American right.
Francis was a pathologist of American conservatism, a movement he considered terminally ill even during its years of seeming health. As Republicans won five of seven presidential elections and took control of Congress for the first time in four decades, Francis saw a movement being assimilated slowly into the structures of power it professed to reject. His contrarianism won him admirers on the paleoconservative right, who read his essays in small-circulation journals and applauded his attacks on globalism and his defenses of those he called, without irony, “real Americans.” But he won almost no access to major conservative outlets, where his views were denounced, with varying degrees of accuracy, as racist, chauvinist, and unpatriotic. Francis spent his last decade as an editor of far-right newsletters, having been fired by the Washington Times in 1995 for defending the morality of slavery. At the end of his life, his defenders included Patrick Buchanan, whose presidential campaigns he advised, and Jared Taylor, a white nationalist who eulogized Francis as the “premier philosopher of white racial consciousness.”