Make America Reconsider! – Share Pat’s Columns …
By Tom Piatak at Chronicles Publication
Sam championed all three presidential campaigns of a conservative Christian, Pat Buchanan, who found philosophical resistance to liberalism in his Christian beliefs, and who wrote for years in a magazine largely written by other conservative Christians.
2 years ago, Matthew Rose composed a prolonged post about Sam Francis in First Things (“The Outsider,” October 2019) that I responded to in these pages (“A Giant Besieged by Pygmies,” December 2019 Chronicles). I had actually hoped that Rose would consider the details I provided and use it to paint a more accurate photo of Francis. Rather, Rose turned that article into a chapter in his brand-new book, A World After Liberalism: Thinkers of the Radical Right, which strengthens his old errors about Francis with brand-new ones. The time has pertained to point out Rose’s mistakes when again.
The only concession Rose appears to have made to those of us who objected to his earlier piece is to change his statement that Francis’s “released works showed no feeling for literature, art, music, philosophy, or theology” to “little feeling” for these disciplines. Nevertheless, as I pointed out 2 years back, “Far from being indifferent to art, Sam produced it himself– if literary criticism counts as art– as revealed by his essays on the movie The Godfather (1972) and the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, which I count as two of the finest studies of movie and literature Chronicles has actually published in its long and renowned history.” Rose mentions neither essay in his book, but I will share two responses to those pieces.
One, from a liberal buddy, a former history professor and legal representative, who had actually never ever heard of the author. After reading the essay on The Godfather and Sam’s populist apologia “From Home to Country,” he concluded Francis was a genius and requested more of his work. In National Evaluation, John Derbyshire responded likewise to the Lovecraft essay. “Francis’s review is simply dazzling,” he composed. “I just fulfilled Sam Francis as soon as … Now I wish I had made a much better effort to get familiarized.” I am confident no reasonable reader could come to Rose’s conclusions about Francis’s supposed tastelessness and cultural boorishness. Before Rose presumed to prejudge Francis, he must have read either of those two dazzling essays.
Rose then provides Sam’s concept of the Middle American Transformation as a mindful response to “‘the colored world transformation’ that both Spengler and [Costs] Clinton had actually glimpsed.” He writes that Francis:
never pretended, not even for a moment, that his was a matter of ethical right or justice. It referred power conference power. ‘The problem,’ as he candidly put it, is ‘who in the trashed vessel of the American Republic, is to be master?’
One is led to believe by Rose that the struggle for control in the “wrecked vessel of the American Republic” is in between whites and nonwhites. In reality, the Francis essay he estimates, “Not Really a Republic” (August 1991 Chronicles), casts the struggle as one in between “those Middle Americans who were the nucleus of the American Republic … and who now discover themselves victims of the new imperium” and “the elite that now prevails.” It is Rose who boils this to a racial struggle, not Francis.
Furthermore, Francis would deny that this struggle has nothing to do with ethical right or justice. Certainly, Francis’s works opposing antiwhite discrimination and the outsourcing of American tasks– consisting of, naturally, those held by black and Hispanic Americans– included interest higher perfects. Does Rose consider Francis’s opposition to affirmative action and globalization as racist or atavistic? It would appear so, by this logic.
Rose also disparages Sam’s criticism of the Religious Right of the ’90s, the leaders of which ended up selecting Bob Dole over Pat Buchanan, who had long been a stalwart champ of social conservatism. In 1994, Francis composed an essay criticizing this iteration of the Religious Right, calling it “the religious wrong” and asserting that many of its fans, although genuine in their religions, ran politically under a “incorrect awareness.”
… Read more at Chronicles Publication
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