Beautiful Losers Quotes

“America, for once in its brief and not always glorious history, must try to learn that its own experience is peculiar in world history, that it has been unusually fortunate in coming to maturity in an epoch of untypical peace and prosperity, and that it cannot continue to judge the world by the norm of its own mythology.”
― Samuel T. Francis, Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism

“Martin Luther King’s legacy, as its keepers know, is profoundly at odds with the historic American order, and that is why they can have no rest until the symbols of that order are pulled up root and branch. To say that Dr. King are the cause he really represented are now part of the official American creed, indeed the defining and dominant symbol of that creed – which is what both houses of the United States Congress said in 1983 and what President Ronald Reagan signed into law shortly afterward – is the inauguration of a new order and the things they symbolized can retain neither meaning nor respect, in which they are as mute and dark as the gods of Babylon and Tyre and from whose cold ashes will rise a new god, leveling their rough places, straightening their crookedness, and exalting every valley until the whole earth is flattened beneath his feet and perceives the glory of the new lord.”
― Samuel T. Francis, Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism

“The truth is that, for all their talk about social “roots,” conservative intellectuals in the postwar era were often rootless men themselves, and the philosophical mystifications in which they enveloped themselves were frequently the only garments that fit them.”
― Samuel T. Francis, Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism

“In the 20th century, egalitarianism has been used principally as the political formula or ideological rationalization by which one, emerging elite has sought to displace from political, economic, and culture power another elite, and in not only rationalizing but also disguising the dominance of the new elite….

Egalitarianism played a central role in the progressivist ideological challenge, and the main form it assumed in the early 20th century was that of “environmentalism” – not in the contemporary sense of concern for ecology but in the sense that human beings are perceived as the products of their social and historical environment rather than of their innate mental and physical natures. Indeed, the ideological function of progressivism is de-legitimizing bourgeois society was accomplished by its identification of the society itself as the “environment” to be altered through social management.”
― Samuel T. Francis, Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism