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Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism
The 1992 presidential election campaign showed just how deep were the divisions within the Republican party. In Beautiful Losers , Samuel Francis argues that the victory of the Democratic party marks not only the end of the Reagan-Bush era, but the failure of the American conservatism.
256 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1994
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October 28, 2023
This is less a review than a collection of observations and favorite bits from this collection of essays from the late conservative edgelord Samuel Francis, lately the beneficiary of renewed attention courtesy of the Alt- and New “new right” (NRx). After all, everything old is new again eventually, Right? Published in 1993, the essays in BL span 1981-1991 and provide an interesting perspective viewed from the ideological crisis of 2023.
From the Introduction – Prescience:
Pg. 16-17: “In place of a national interest-based foreign policy, what both major parties now endorse is a universalist and millenarian globalism that acknowledges the role of the UN as an international arbiter and prepares the nation and the world for evolution into the transnational order of a borderless and bureaucratically managed “global economy.” I would add organizations such as the WEF to this.
Pg. 17-18: “Today, almost the whole of American society encourages dependence and passivity – in the economy, through the continuing absorption of independent farms and businesses by multinational corporations, through ever more minute regulation by the state and through the dragooning of mass work forces in office and factory and mass consumption through advertising and public relations; in the culture, through the regimented and centralized manufacture and manipulation of thought, taste, opinion, and emotion itself by the mass media and educational organizations; and in the state, through its management of more and more dimensions of private and social existence under the color of “therapy” that does not cure, “voluntary service” that is really mandatory, and periodic “wars,” against poverty, illiteracy, drugs, or other fashionable monsters, that no one ever wins.” Sam died in 2005…
From Henry Clay and the Statecraft of Circumstance:
The essay on Henry Clay perfectly describes our present circumstances – moral disagreements that no economic compromise can satiate, and that increasingly beg the question “Why union?” To be sure, I do think there are answers to it that didn’t exist in the 1850s, though I doubt our ability to employ them. I enjoyed this essay on a man with whom I wasn’t previously familiar.
From Message from MARS (1982):
MARs stands for “Middle American Radicals” and this essay exactly describes the pre-Palin, pre-Trump voter – today this essay would be called “Message from MAGA,” so little have things changed. Recognizable in this is the ideas and explanations of American “right wing” populism described and promoted by men from Rush to Yarvin to Shapiro. In fact, if they didn’t all read this essay (arguable Francis’ most famous) in their formative days, I’d be surprised. This essay deserves a WIDE reading. Francis prescribes Presidential power as the only tool left able to break the managerial elite (the administrative or “deep” state).
From Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution:
Pg. 100: Francis quotes Whittaker Chambers: “The New Deal was a genuine revolution… not simply a reform from within existing traditions, but a basic change in the social, and, above all, the power relationships within the nation. was not a revolution by violence. It was a revolution of bookkeeping and lawmaking… the power of politics had replaced the power of business. This is the basic power shift of all the revolutions of our time. This shift WAS the revolution.”
From The Evil That Men Don’t Do:
Pg. 142-44 Francis magisterially compares Marxism and Liberalism, I include it here:
“Between approximately 1930 and 1950 the United States experienced a social and political revolution in which one elite was largely displaced from power by another. The new elite, entrenching itself in the management of large corporations and unions, the federal bureaucracy, and the centers of culture, education, and communication, articulated an ideology that expressed its interests and defended its dominance under the label of liberalism. Although liberalism formally defines itself in opposition to communism, in fact it retains and incorporates some of the basic premises of Marxist doctrine – in particular, the idea that human beings are the products of their social environment and that by rationalistic management of the environment it is possible to perfect or ameliorate significantly the human condition an indeed man himself. The environmentalist and ultimately utopian premises of liberalism are the justification for the expansion of state and bureaucracy, the regulation of the economy, the redistribution of wealth, and the imposition of progressive education and egalitarian experiments on traditional institutions and communities by liberal agencies and policies. In foreign affairs, the premises of liberalism hold out the prospect of an “end to war” through the transcendence of nationalism and international rivalry and the evolution or conscious design of a cosmopolitan world order in which war, empire, sovereignty, and significant national and cultural differentiations among peoples have disappeared. It so happens that the ideology of liberalism, for all its contempt for “special interests,” coincides very conveniently with the political, economic, and professional interests of the bureaucrats, social engineers, managers, and intellectuals who believe in it and who are most zealous in pressing for its agenda. Without liberalism or some such formula under another name, these groups cannot easily explain or justify the power, prestige, and rewards that they hold. By the late 1940s, due to the crises and power vacuums created by the Great Depression, 2 world wars, and the advance of technical knowledge and skill, this complex of special interests and its ideology had secured an essentially dominant, though not exclusive, influence in the strategic power centers of American society. In a word, the rising liberal elite had become a liberal establishment.
The environmentalist premises of liberalism, its social engineering methods, and its utopian or meliorist implications are not fundamentally distinct from those of communism, and indeed the 2 ideologies share common roots in the pleasant fantasies of the Enlightenment as well as in what Whittaker Chambers called “man’s 2nd oldest faith,” the promise of which “was whispered in the 1st days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ ” Given the common premises and roots shared by members of the new elite and by Communists, it is not terribly surprising that they could work together in administrations and institutions committed to the premises. Nor is it surprising that liberal often failed to recognize the Communists among them or, when their presence was pointed out, that they often failed to see them or the significance of their presence or even to express very much concern about it. Finally, it is not surprising either that some who began as liberals found themselves frustrated by the compromises and slow pace of conventional politics and, faced with the emergencies of global war and economic chaos, were ineluctably drawn toward and into support for the more muscular tactics of Lenin and Stalin. Liberal ideology and the expectations it creates in the minds of those who believe it do not conduce to caution, nor do they discourage the mental habit of dividing the world into the simple dichotomies of the Manichean under the labels of “progressive” and “reactionary.”
Incredibly, Francis predicted the tearing down of the statues of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln to appease the forces of radical egalitarianism, anti-Westernism & Marxism.
From As We Go Marching:
“Like the man who believes milk comes from supermarkets rather than from the careful cultivation of cows, liberals and democrats believe that freedom comes from the procedures themselves, and they ignore or take for granted the underlying and largely invisible social and cultural substratum that allows procedural liberalism and democracy to flourish.”
Many of the essays in BL attack wretched neoconservatism as exactly what it has always been – liberalism with an aggressive foreign policy, but with a set of brakes to keep the rate of progressive change to a manageable level. To quote Curtis Yarvin: "Cthulu may swim slowly, but he always swims left." Blech.
In Equality as a Political Weapon (1991), Francis ably details how egalitarianism is actually a weapon that has always been used by one elite to replace another and as a tool to gain and wield power.
From the final pages of Beautiful Losers, Francis lays out the path forward for the American Right, and it speaks directly to our situation in 2023, which has become far more dire in the intervening years:
“Abandoning the illusion that it represents an establishment to be “conserved,” a new American Right must recognize that its values and goals lie outside and against the establishment and that its natural allies are not in Manhattan, Yale, and Washington but in the increasingly alienated and threatened strata of Middle America. The strategy of the Right should be to enhance the polarization of Middle Americans from the incumbent regime, not to build coalitions with the regime’s defenders and beneficiaries. Moreover, since “Middle America” consists of workers, farmers, suburbanites and other non- or postbourgeois groups, as well as small businessmen… the… salient concerns of postbourgeois Middle Americans that a new Right can express are those of crime, educational collapse, the erosion of their economic status, and the calculated subversion of their social, cultural, and national identity by forces that serve the interests of the elite above them AND the underclass below them, but at the expense of the middle class. A new Right, positioning itself in opposition to the elite and the elite’s underclass ally, can assert its leadership of alienated Middle Americans and mobilize them in radical opposition to the regime.
A new, radical Middle American Right need not abandon political efforts, but, consistent with its recognition that it is laying siege to a hostile establishment, it ought to realize that political action in a cultural power vacuum will be largely futile. The main focus of a Middle American Right should be the reclamation of cultural power, the patient elaboration of an alternative culture within but against the regime – within the belly of the beast but indigestible by it… A Middle American Right should begin working in and with schools, churches, clubs, women’s groups, youth organizations, civic and professional associations, local government, the military and police forces, and even in the much-dreaded labor unions to create a radicalized Middle American consciousness that can perceive the ways in which exploitation of the middle classes is institutionalized and understand how it can be resisted. Only when this kind of infrastructure of cultural hegemony is developed can a Middle American Right seek meaningful political power without coalitions with the Left and bargaining with the regime.”
I feel it is already too late.
From the Introduction – Prescience:
Pg. 16-17: “In place of a national interest-based foreign policy, what both major parties now endorse is a universalist and millenarian globalism that acknowledges the role of the UN as an international arbiter and prepares the nation and the world for evolution into the transnational order of a borderless and bureaucratically managed “global economy.” I would add organizations such as the WEF to this.
Pg. 17-18: “Today, almost the whole of American society encourages dependence and passivity – in the economy, through the continuing absorption of independent farms and businesses by multinational corporations, through ever more minute regulation by the state and through the dragooning of mass work forces in office and factory and mass consumption through advertising and public relations; in the culture, through the regimented and centralized manufacture and manipulation of thought, taste, opinion, and emotion itself by the mass media and educational organizations; and in the state, through its management of more and more dimensions of private and social existence under the color of “therapy” that does not cure, “voluntary service” that is really mandatory, and periodic “wars,” against poverty, illiteracy, drugs, or other fashionable monsters, that no one ever wins.” Sam died in 2005…
From Henry Clay and the Statecraft of Circumstance:
The essay on Henry Clay perfectly describes our present circumstances – moral disagreements that no economic compromise can satiate, and that increasingly beg the question “Why union?” To be sure, I do think there are answers to it that didn’t exist in the 1850s, though I doubt our ability to employ them. I enjoyed this essay on a man with whom I wasn’t previously familiar.
From Message from MARS (1982):
MARs stands for “Middle American Radicals” and this essay exactly describes the pre-Palin, pre-Trump voter – today this essay would be called “Message from MAGA,” so little have things changed. Recognizable in this is the ideas and explanations of American “right wing” populism described and promoted by men from Rush to Yarvin to Shapiro. In fact, if they didn’t all read this essay (arguable Francis’ most famous) in their formative days, I’d be surprised. This essay deserves a WIDE reading. Francis prescribes Presidential power as the only tool left able to break the managerial elite (the administrative or “deep” state).
From Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution:
Pg. 100: Francis quotes Whittaker Chambers: “The New Deal was a genuine revolution… not simply a reform from within existing traditions, but a basic change in the social, and, above all, the power relationships within the nation. was not a revolution by violence. It was a revolution of bookkeeping and lawmaking… the power of politics had replaced the power of business. This is the basic power shift of all the revolutions of our time. This shift WAS the revolution.”
From The Evil That Men Don’t Do:
Pg. 142-44 Francis magisterially compares Marxism and Liberalism, I include it here:
“Between approximately 1930 and 1950 the United States experienced a social and political revolution in which one elite was largely displaced from power by another. The new elite, entrenching itself in the management of large corporations and unions, the federal bureaucracy, and the centers of culture, education, and communication, articulated an ideology that expressed its interests and defended its dominance under the label of liberalism. Although liberalism formally defines itself in opposition to communism, in fact it retains and incorporates some of the basic premises of Marxist doctrine – in particular, the idea that human beings are the products of their social environment and that by rationalistic management of the environment it is possible to perfect or ameliorate significantly the human condition an indeed man himself. The environmentalist and ultimately utopian premises of liberalism are the justification for the expansion of state and bureaucracy, the regulation of the economy, the redistribution of wealth, and the imposition of progressive education and egalitarian experiments on traditional institutions and communities by liberal agencies and policies. In foreign affairs, the premises of liberalism hold out the prospect of an “end to war” through the transcendence of nationalism and international rivalry and the evolution or conscious design of a cosmopolitan world order in which war, empire, sovereignty, and significant national and cultural differentiations among peoples have disappeared. It so happens that the ideology of liberalism, for all its contempt for “special interests,” coincides very conveniently with the political, economic, and professional interests of the bureaucrats, social engineers, managers, and intellectuals who believe in it and who are most zealous in pressing for its agenda. Without liberalism or some such formula under another name, these groups cannot easily explain or justify the power, prestige, and rewards that they hold. By the late 1940s, due to the crises and power vacuums created by the Great Depression, 2 world wars, and the advance of technical knowledge and skill, this complex of special interests and its ideology had secured an essentially dominant, though not exclusive, influence in the strategic power centers of American society. In a word, the rising liberal elite had become a liberal establishment.
The environmentalist premises of liberalism, its social engineering methods, and its utopian or meliorist implications are not fundamentally distinct from those of communism, and indeed the 2 ideologies share common roots in the pleasant fantasies of the Enlightenment as well as in what Whittaker Chambers called “man’s 2nd oldest faith,” the promise of which “was whispered in the 1st days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ ” Given the common premises and roots shared by members of the new elite and by Communists, it is not terribly surprising that they could work together in administrations and institutions committed to the premises. Nor is it surprising that liberal often failed to recognize the Communists among them or, when their presence was pointed out, that they often failed to see them or the significance of their presence or even to express very much concern about it. Finally, it is not surprising either that some who began as liberals found themselves frustrated by the compromises and slow pace of conventional politics and, faced with the emergencies of global war and economic chaos, were ineluctably drawn toward and into support for the more muscular tactics of Lenin and Stalin. Liberal ideology and the expectations it creates in the minds of those who believe it do not conduce to caution, nor do they discourage the mental habit of dividing the world into the simple dichotomies of the Manichean under the labels of “progressive” and “reactionary.”
Incredibly, Francis predicted the tearing down of the statues of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln to appease the forces of radical egalitarianism, anti-Westernism & Marxism.
From As We Go Marching:
“Like the man who believes milk comes from supermarkets rather than from the careful cultivation of cows, liberals and democrats believe that freedom comes from the procedures themselves, and they ignore or take for granted the underlying and largely invisible social and cultural substratum that allows procedural liberalism and democracy to flourish.”
Many of the essays in BL attack wretched neoconservatism as exactly what it has always been – liberalism with an aggressive foreign policy, but with a set of brakes to keep the rate of progressive change to a manageable level. To quote Curtis Yarvin: "Cthulu may swim slowly, but he always swims left." Blech.
In Equality as a Political Weapon (1991), Francis ably details how egalitarianism is actually a weapon that has always been used by one elite to replace another and as a tool to gain and wield power.
From the final pages of Beautiful Losers, Francis lays out the path forward for the American Right, and it speaks directly to our situation in 2023, which has become far more dire in the intervening years:
“Abandoning the illusion that it represents an establishment to be “conserved,” a new American Right must recognize that its values and goals lie outside and against the establishment and that its natural allies are not in Manhattan, Yale, and Washington but in the increasingly alienated and threatened strata of Middle America. The strategy of the Right should be to enhance the polarization of Middle Americans from the incumbent regime, not to build coalitions with the regime’s defenders and beneficiaries. Moreover, since “Middle America” consists of workers, farmers, suburbanites and other non- or postbourgeois groups, as well as small businessmen… the… salient concerns of postbourgeois Middle Americans that a new Right can express are those of crime, educational collapse, the erosion of their economic status, and the calculated subversion of their social, cultural, and national identity by forces that serve the interests of the elite above them AND the underclass below them, but at the expense of the middle class. A new Right, positioning itself in opposition to the elite and the elite’s underclass ally, can assert its leadership of alienated Middle Americans and mobilize them in radical opposition to the regime.
A new, radical Middle American Right need not abandon political efforts, but, consistent with its recognition that it is laying siege to a hostile establishment, it ought to realize that political action in a cultural power vacuum will be largely futile. The main focus of a Middle American Right should be the reclamation of cultural power, the patient elaboration of an alternative culture within but against the regime – within the belly of the beast but indigestible by it… A Middle American Right should begin working in and with schools, churches, clubs, women’s groups, youth organizations, civic and professional associations, local government, the military and police forces, and even in the much-dreaded labor unions to create a radicalized Middle American consciousness that can perceive the ways in which exploitation of the middle classes is institutionalized and understand how it can be resisted. Only when this kind of infrastructure of cultural hegemony is developed can a Middle American Right seek meaningful political power without coalitions with the Left and bargaining with the regime.”
I feel it is already too late.
July 31, 2024
Trump’s advisors would do well to read this book. Sure hope Vance has. Sam Francis is a genius who predicted everything and describes what has happened and how. You would do well to read it, too.
September 16, 2023
Much of the content of the essays seems antiquated but the theoretical meat is in the two essays The Other Side of Modernism and Message from MARs. Throughout Francis reiterates the managerial revolution thesis of former Trotskyist turned Cold War conservative and political realist James Burnham that bourgeois free market capitalism was supplanted not by socialism but by the separation of management and ownership of increased corporate and state dominance creating a new credentialed bureaucratic elite responsible for the social engineering aims of modern liberalism. To this Francis advocated a Caesarist populism to short circuit the top-bottom versus middle strategy of the managerial elite and their client base. Francis is somewhat radical yet maintains a sentimental attachment to the old right who were largely intellectual and without a popular base of support while sparring with neoconservatives similarly intellectual but dominated elite institutions, yet advocates in the context of the Cold War an aggressive foreign policy. Overall feels like a dense work despite the seeming short length and essay format but is packed with insights. My favorite essay is The Other Side of Modernism in which Francis sees in thinkers like Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Hume, and Madison a limited view of human nature and politics that advocates a balance of power as opposed to traditionalists who see Dachau and the gulag inevitable in modernity. However the essay on Henry Clay is pessimistic at the prospect of the balancing of interests by legislative means.
March 16, 2025
I wanted to like this more, since Sam Francis was one of the best Rightwing thinkers of the last 30 years. Unfortunately, too much of the book covers political personages and issues that are no longer relevent. Immgration and Globalism, for example aren't even mentioned. In short, too much of the book is dated. It also suffers from the boring "Courtly Gentlemen" style common to much of Conservative writing.
Mr. Francis always hits soft, is always meaured and polite, and always thoughtful. Even when he recounts how the Neo-Cons got the Paleocons (like Sam) fired from jobs, smeared as racists and antisemites, and barred from think tanks and grants, Sam just can't get angry and recounts it "More in sorrow than in anger". It'd would have been nice to get some Righteous anger and invenctive. Or maybe some passion.
That said, there are some gems. He has a whole chapter on the fraudulent George Will, a spirited (for Sam) defense of Joe McCarthy, and an insightful analysis of the Dr King Holiday.
Mr. Francis always hits soft, is always meaured and polite, and always thoughtful. Even when he recounts how the Neo-Cons got the Paleocons (like Sam) fired from jobs, smeared as racists and antisemites, and barred from think tanks and grants, Sam just can't get angry and recounts it "More in sorrow than in anger". It'd would have been nice to get some Righteous anger and invenctive. Or maybe some passion.
That said, there are some gems. He has a whole chapter on the fraudulent George Will, a spirited (for Sam) defense of Joe McCarthy, and an insightful analysis of the Dr King Holiday.
December 20, 2021
One of the best books of Dissident Right thought.
These essays delve deep on how power dynamics work and the way movements mortally wound themselves when they choose to ignore them.
I really enjoyed it and found Francis more prophetic than antiquated.
These essays delve deep on how power dynamics work and the way movements mortally wound themselves when they choose to ignore them.
I really enjoyed it and found Francis more prophetic than antiquated.
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January 27, 2022More useful reading for parsing out the differences between the "neocons" and the "paleocons" and for trying to construct a useful taxonomy of the Right in America. Written from the perspective of someone who would be considered a "paleocon" in the binary distinction above.
December 7, 2021
Paleoconservative firebrand Sam Francis writes a book that is mostly applicable today if you swap some names out.
November 4, 2022
Very insightful observations on the effect of the "managerial elite" on our politics written in elegant, easy-to-read prose.
January 4, 2025
Incredibly instructive history lesson on the Old America and the evil revolution that has been inflicted upon the West in the last century.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews