Blood and Politics (51 page)

“From Boston to Berkeley,”
The New York Times
reported, “people searched for ways to vent their anger and astonishment” after the jury announced its decision.
²⁴
Even President George H. W. Bush felt compelled to say, “Yesterday’s verdict in the Los Angeles police case left us all with a deep sense of personal frustration and anguish,” and the Democratic Party presidential nominee-to-be, Governor Bill Clinton, took a half step further. There is a feeling, he said, that “the system is broke and unresponsive and unfair.”
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A dozen major cities soon experienced
violence or the threat of violence. But the epicenter was Los Angeles’s South Central district. Businesses were looted and burned, unwitting passersby attacked, and gunfire rang out in every direction. When police finally restored order after three intense days of conflict, businesses and homes were ruined, at least eight thousand people were arrested, and at least fifty deaths counted.

Into the ensuing political maelstrom stepped the intrepid Pat Buchanan, blustering across California and shooting from his lip. In Northern California he argued that the riots were caused by “the politics of appeasement.”
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At a stop in Whittier he blamed illegal immigrants.
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And at still another stop, he blamed Los Angeles’s Democratic mayor, Tom Bradley, for “giving moral sanction to the mob.”
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In addition to the sound bites in California, he gave a fuller exposition to the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s graduating class at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. “While we conservatives and traditionalists were fighting the Cold War against communism,” he said, “we were losing the cultural war for the soul of America. And we can see our defeat in the smoking ruins of Los Angeles.”
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To this budding generation of religious fundamentalists, Buchanan reduced the economic, political, and social problems of Los Angeles to a simple moral equation: on one side stood “Christian truths” and “Western Civilization”; on the other side were the “barbarians” of an “adversary culture.” He posed George Washington against Robert Mapplethorpe, Easter against Earth Day, and Custer National Battlefield against the descendants of Crazy Horse. Of all the things he lamented just days after the riots had ended, the Republican candidate did not include Rodney King’s fractured skull or the failure of justice in Simi Valley. Instead, he rued the removal of Confederate statues “because Dixie’s cause was not [considered] moral.” According to the presidential candidate, the true legacy of the Confederacy—“family, faith, friends and country”—had fallen victim to the vicissitudes of this culture war. Buchanan’s constant harkening to the past rendered his white nationalism fundamentally backward-looking. He wasn’t a revolutionary like William Pierce, who sought an Aryan superman in the future. Nor did Buchanan then explicitly find Western Civilization in the genetic code of those Europeans who created it, as did Willis Carto’s pseudonymous E. L. Anderson, Ph.D.

In fact, when Buchanan first announced his run, the issues that had most animated his candidacy were those particular to disappointed conservatives: President Bush had reneged on his “read my lips” no new taxes pledge and signed civil rights legislation that he had earlier promised to veto. In addition, Buchanan sought conservative votes as the
most uncompromising opponent of abortion rights and as a staunch defender of the so-called Christian right. When he projected a renewed isolationism, he couched it in terms that would have pleased Robert Taft prior to World War Two. With the Cold War’s conclusion, he reasoned, the imperative to contain the Soviet Union had ended. He called for pulling back from multilateral institutions such as NATO and the International Monetary Fund, ending all foreign aid, and withdrawing American troops stationed in Europe and Japan.
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And from New Hampshire to California, Buchanan had complemented this America first–style foreign policy with a correlate economic nationalism and nativism. He promoted tariff protections as a way to stem transnational capital flows and endorsed immigration barriers to restrict the movement of labor.

After a consideration of his ideological predispositions, one must still question why voters pulled Buchanan’s lever: Was it because he promised to keep factory jobs in the United States and stop Mexicans at the Rio Grande, or because he would outlaw abortions at safe hospitals, or because he invoked a culture war to explain the Los Angeles riots? As will become evident, white nationalists believed the Buchanan candidacy had helped birth a new moment for their politics. At the same time, exit polling in Colorado, Georgia, and Maryland showed that more than three-quarters of Buchanan’s voters supported him mainly to “send a message” of opposition to the sitting president, George H. W. Bush, rather than to affirm votes for Buchanan’s nationalism. As further proof of this anybody but Bush thesis, commentators offered as evidence the South Dakota primary, where Buchanan was not on the ballot. There 31 percent voted for “uncommitted,” rather than Bush, just a few points less than Buchanan received in his best states.
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As Ross Perot was to demonstrate, dissatisfaction with both the Republican and Democratic parties was running high in 1992, and Pat Buchanan obviously tapped the votes of Republicans unhappy with their party.

If Buchanan’s three million votes were, in fact, little more than a protest vote, they would have been remarkable nevertheless. Consider that just as the primaries had begun, William Buckley had argued in
National Review
—the conservative periodical of record—that Pat Buchanan “could not be defended from the charge of anti-Semitism.” Nevertheless, just two months later,
National Review
urged a “tactical vote for the challenger in New Hampshire.”
³²
While the association with anti-Semitism hung around Buchanan’s neck throughout the primaries, it did not seem to matter to the three million Americans who voted for him. Instead, commentators were rankled more by the candidate’s support for protective tariffs than by any supposed animosity toward Jews.

Differences over the meaning of the Buchanan vote continued rattling
around inside the Republican Party for another eight years. Adversaries from within the conservative movement argued that his campaign was less about winning the presidency of the United States than about gaining the upper hand among movement intellectuals.
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But Buchanan’s innermost circles did not believe that his candidacy was simply a bid for ideological hegemony or protest votes. Instead, they believed something totally new was in process.

“What has happened in the Buchanan revolution,” wrote Sam Francis, “is the emergence of a new political identity.”
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Samuel Todd Francis was in a unique position to gauge the campaign’s import. He and Buchanan were fellow columnists, and Francis had long urged his friend to jump into the electoral fray. When Buchanan finally did announce his candidacy, he handed off his nationally syndicated column to his colleague. Both men had once been part of the conservative establishment, privy to the elite at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Now they were part of the opposition, the white nationalist opposition. Comrades called Francis the Clausewitz of the Right. But he was an intellectual rather than a strategist. A more apt sobriquet might have been philosopher-general. His influence did not end or begin with Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaigns, and he was able to explain the intellectual underpinnings of his ideas in a common sense fashion.

Francis’s pen was as sharp as his body was round. A postwar boomer native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, the large, flush-faced Francis graduated from two first-rank institutions, earning a bachelor’s degree at Johns Hopkins University in 1969 and a doctorate in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1979. His dissertation may have focused on the first earl of Clarendon in 1660, but Francis’s interests were very contemporary.

At the Heritage Foundation, the ascendant think tank on the conservative right in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Francis churned out background briefing papers on international terrorism, southern Africa, and issues related to American intelligence agencies. (He recommended that intelligence agencies be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.)
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During that period he also wrote for
Southern Partisan
(the same magazine that Boyd Cathey later edited), as well as for journals managed by Roger Pearson. Pearson, who had left Willis Carto and
Western Destiny
fifteen years before, was then making a splash in D.C. Pearson edited his own journal, for which Francis wrote, as well as briefly serving on the Heritage Foundation’s
Policy Review
board.
³⁶

Francis’s intellectual products were genuine, not crackpot propaganda paperbacks promoting race war. His book
The Soviet Strategy of Terror
was published in 1981. Three years later the University Press of America published his study of James Burnham, who predicted the dominance of a new managerial class over the owner-operators of pre-monopoly capitalism. Francis showed residues of his ideological debt to Burnham, a Marxist turned conservative, for years to come. And as the 1992 election cycle concluded, Francis finished collecting his essays into a book published by the University of Missouri Press,
Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism.
Published at the end of twelve years of Republican presidential rule, the title conveyed Francis’s assessment of the Reagan Revolution.

Francis had also served as a senior aide to North Carolina Senator John East, who sat on the Senate’s subcommittee on terrorism, from 1981 to 1986. (East’s office was then a nesting place for a bevy of future Buchananite intellectuals.) After the wheelchair-bound East committed suicide in 1986, the impeccably credentialed Francis went to work alongside Pat Buchanan, writing editorials and columns for
The Washington Times
, a daily newspaper that had marked itself during the Reagan years as the conservative alternative to
The Washington Post
. (He eventually won two awards from the American Society of Newspaper Editors.) It was Francis’s prodigious intellect that propelled the Buchanan brain trust. And at the vortex of this intellect swirled his conception of Middle American Radicals.

When Francis had written that Buchanan’s Middle American Radicals represented new social forces, he didn’t mean “new” as in “born yesterday.” In fact, he had said much the same thing in 1981. By his account, Middle American Radicals (or MARs) were the social constituency of what was then known as the New Right. At that time, Francis argued that Middle American Radicals had expressed themselves in a string of movements throughout the 1970s: against school busing for racial integration, against the Equal Rights Amendment, against the ceding of the Panama Canal, and finally in electing Ronald Reagan president. MARs were both a social movement and a class: “not simply a middle class and not simply an economic category . . . [but] in the broadest sense a political class.”
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Arguing in much the same way as Marx did about the proletariat, Francis contended that MARs’ will to power, while it was self-motivated, would actually benefit all society. That early essay was two-sided. It burned with personal anger at the Middle American’s “threatened future and . . . insulted past.” And it borrowed extensively
from the dispassionate analysis of the Michigan sociologist Donald Warren, who had first discovered and named this ideologically complex class while studying Governor George Wallace’s presidential campaigns.
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According to Warren, MARsians were radically alienated from institutions that reproduced social consensus, such as the government, trade unions, and churches. But they were neither unambiguously of the traditionally plebeian left nor the aristocratic right. He found this generation at the center of society, rather than at its so-called extremes. Unlike the inhabitants of the conservative right, MARsians were antielite. At the same time, they were vehemently opposed to the aspirations of black people, quite unlike the left. According to Warren, MARsians saw themselves “caught in the middle between those whose wealth gives them access to power and those whose militant organization . . . gains special treatment from the government.”

MARsians were not antigovernment per se (as libertarians are); rather, they were hostile to government because they claimed it didn’t represent their interests as a group or as individuals. MARsians considered themselves dispossessed opponents of the status quo. Dissecting a constituency that opposes itself to those it considers beneath it in social status, while also opposing those it regards as elites, may seem commonplace thirty plus years after Wallace. But at the time Warren’s findings stood many conventional analyses on their head.

One of the most remarkable findings in Warren’s study was buried in the middle of his 1976 book
The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation
. After dissecting his population samples by income, education, and opinion, he asked: “As a social group are MARs more similar to the white majority of society or to more conventional minorities?” That is, did MARsians tend to think of themselves as members of a racially defined subgroup? The answer was yes, and at levels much higher than other whites, with percentages approximating those of black respondents. Thus MARs were not just angry antigovernment militants; they regarded themselves as an oppressed and exploited white subgroup, with a distinct racial consciousness. And if the Wallace vote in 1968 and Duke’s votes in 1990 and 1991 were indicators, there were millions of white people who saw themselves in this mirror.

At the end of the opinion polling, survey questions, number crunching, and peer review by other sociologists, it seemed as if Donald Warren had discovered the “dispossessed majority” at about the same time as Wilmot Robertson. When unburdened by the baggage of anti-Semitism, these MARsians appeared to Francis to be the class basis for a (white) social revolution.