Sam Francis: The Strategist of Resentment Politics

In his 2024 book When the Clock Broke, political writer John Ganz examines some of the more controversial and influential figures who shaped American politics in the 1990s. From the bombastic talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh to the insurgent presidential candidate Ross Perot, Ganz traces how these figures emerged from unlikely beginnings and helped unravel the political consensus that had defined the post–Cold War Era. Each, in their own way, destabilized the assumptions of American liberal democracy and opened space for the darker, more fractious politics we now recognize as our own.

Among these figures, none looms larger for our present moment than Sam Francis. Nearly unknown in his own time and largely forgotten today, his ideas continue to shape American politics in ways few could have anticipated. Unlike Limbaugh, who thrived on mass media spectacle, or Perot, who sought to reinvent politics through technocratic populism, Francis operated as an intellectual provocateur, seemingly welcoming the collapse of the current order. Where many post-Reagan conservatives still clung to old pieties about tradition, markets, or constitutional restraint, Francis stripped away those pretenses and presented a bare-knuckled vision of politics as cultural and class warfare. For him, resentment was not a pathology to be overcome but a resource to be cultivated. His was an unapologetic philosophy of hierarchy and exclusion, forged in the ruins of a consensus that no longer seemed viable.

Long before populism reshaped the Republican Party, Francis saw how the language of grievance could be weaponized to mobilize a new kind of right-wing coalition. His story is less about the survival of old conservatism than about the birth of something sharper and more antagonistic: a politics built on division itself. Ganz situates Francis as the most important, and in many ways, the most frightening, voice to emerge from the ruins of early 1990s conservatism. Where others were unsettled by the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis regarded it as confirmation that the real enemy had always been internal. The struggle, he argued, was no longer against Soviet communism but against a managerial elite that presided over an empire of multiculturalism, bureaucracy, and social engineering. His contempt for the “globalist” elite, combined with his vision of a mass revolt defined by ethnic identity, foreshadowed the populist radicalism that would later fuel the MAGA movement.

From Conservative Bureaucrat to Radical Outsider

Sam Francis’s biography does not suggest the makings of a revolutionary. He came from middle-class origins, earned a PhD in political theory, and worked within conservative institutions like the Washington Times and the Heritage Foundation. At Heritage, then the flagship think tank of the ascendant New Right, Francis worked on counterterrorism and contributed to Mandate for Leadership—the policy blueprint that helped shape the incoming Reagan administration. His section on the “Intelligence Community” recommended expanding domestic surveillance and targeting elements of the American left, including progressive PACs and think tanks. Francis’s early policy work thus placed him squarely within the engine room of conservative power, crafting proposals that reached from the Reagan White House to congressional committees. His move to serve as foreign policy adviser to Senator John East, another intellectual-turned-politician, further embedded him in the institutional world of the right, where he witnessed firsthand the nexus of ideas, policy, and political theater.

Yet even within this sphere, Francis displayed an impatience with moderation and a penchant for hostility. He had little interest in careful coalition-building or incremental reform. His writing teemed with the fury of someone convinced that the entire system was rotten. This was the paradox of Francis’s career: a man who helped write the mainstream conservative playbook of the early 1980s would, by the 1990s, reject that very establishment as compromised and corrupt. Ganz emphasizes this unique position within the conservative ecosystem. Unlike Pat Buchanan, who remained tethered to electoral politics, or Newt Gingrich, who played within congressional gamesmanship, Francis increasingly refused to dilute his ideas for mass consumption. He wrote with the tone of an insider turned prophet, someone who had seen the machinery of conservative power up close and declared it hopelessly broken. The effect was both alienating and liberating.

His break with conventional conservatism sharpened in 1993, as Bill Clinton assumed the presidency and the Republican Party struggled to define its post–Cold War identity. Francis argued that the party itself was part of the problem. To him, the GOP had been captured by corporate elites and technocrats who sought cheap labor and cultural prestige rather than defending what he called “Middle American” interests.

MARs: Re-Imagining the Silent Majority

The concept that most defines Francis’s intellectual legacy is “Middle American Radicalism,” or MARs. Borrowing from sociologist Donald Warren, Francis reshaped the term into his own political weapon. Middle Americans, he argued, were neither the poorest nor the wealthiest, but the strata in between. These were white, downwardly pressured Americans who felt increasingly alienated from both elites above and the marginalized groups below. They were small business owners, skilled workers, suburban families, and the backbone of a nation that no longer seemed to value them.

This concept was not an entirely new discovery within conservative politics. During his 1968 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon identified and christened these voters as the “Silent Majority.” In the 2008 book Nixonland, Rick Perlstein describes how Nixon appealed to the “forgotten Americans” who worked, paid taxes, and obeyed the rules, but felt disdained by liberal elites and endangered by protesters, minorities, and the poor. Nixon gave them a voice, not by promising transformation, but by telling them that their resentments were legitimate.

Francis recognized that this same population could be mobilized not just as a voting bloc, but as the foundation of a new radical politics. Unlike Nixon, who used the Silent Majority to stabilize his rule, Francis wanted to weaponize their grievances. They had been betrayed, he argued, by liberal elites who promoted multiculturalism and immigration, and by conservative leaders who sold them out in pursuit of free trade and corporate profits. Only by channeling their anger could a new populist right emerge.

Ganz shows how radical this move was within the conservative discourse of the time. The Reagan coalition had thrived by papering over divisions between economic libertarians, social conservatives, and Cold Warriors. Francis tore off the mask and demanded a politics explicitly built on conflict. He rejected the universalist rhetoric of the Right, with its appeals to freedom, opportunity, and markets, and replaced it with the language of struggle, identity, and retribution. Middle Americans, in his telling, were no longer the “silent” foundation of a civic order, but embattled victims of a hostile elite who deserved to be overthrown.

This vision was both prescient and poisonous. It was prescient in its anticipation of the collapse of the Reaganite consensus and the surge of populist discontent that would follow. But it was poisonous in the way it infused that discontent with racialized and exclusionary themes, narrowing the possibilities of democratic life rather than expanding them.

A Theory of Betrayal

At the heart of Francis’s politics is a theory of betrayal. He believed that America’s ruling class, the “managerial elite,” had severed its ties to the people it governed. No longer rooted in nation, culture, or tradition, this class pursued abstract ideals of globalization, diversity, and technocracy. Francis borrowed and radicalized James Burnham’s earlier theory of the “managerial revolution.” Where Burnham offered an analytic description, Francis infused it with moral outrage.

That rupture had multiple dimensions. Economically, elites favored open markets and immigration that depressed wages for native workers. Culturally, they embraced multiculturalism and feminism, undermining what Francis regarded as the natural hierarchies of family and ethnicity. Politically, they maintained control through bureaucracy, media, and party structures, excluding Middle Americans from meaningful participation.

What distinguished Francis from mainstream conservatives was his refusal to treat these as separate issues. For him, economics, culture, and politics were all part of a single system of domination. His critique was potent because it spoke to everyday frustrations about jobs, schools, and neighborhoods, while also offering a grand narrative of civilizational decline. Yet it also pushed him into dangerous territory, since the logic of betrayal pointed inexorably toward a politics of exclusion and authoritarianism.

Alienation and Rage

Ganz captures well the affective quality of Francis’s writing. It was not merely analytical but seething. He wrote with the utmost disdain for elites, multiculturalism, and the weakness of his fellow conservatives. This tone was powerful because it gave voice to feelings of humiliation and bitterness that polite conservatism ignored.

But the style was inseparable from the substance. Francis believed that the time for persuasion and coalition-building had passed; what was needed was confrontation. His rhetoric encouraged readers not to imagine compromise but to envision revolt. He spoke of politics in terms of enemies to be defeated rather than opponents to be debated.

Ganz situates this within the broader breakdown of the early 1990s. The Cold War had ended, but instead of peace and stability, Americans faced recession, culture wars, and a sense of drift. For many, the system seemed incapable of delivering meaning or security. Francis’s rage resonated because it transformed this unease into a coherent worldview, one that told Middle Americans they were right to feel betrayed, because they had been.

Exile from the Mainstream

Francis’s radicalism eventually cost him his institutional platform. By the mid-1990s, his increasingly explicit racial commentary, especially his insistence on the incompatibility of multiculturalism with national survival, led to his dismissal from the Washington Times. From then on, he became more of a pariah within respectable conservatism, gravitating toward white nationalist outlets and conferences.

Ganz does not treat this simply as the story of a man self-destructing. Rather, he emphasizes the structural irony: the very alienation that Francis described in his theory also played out in his career. Just as Middle Americans were, in his view, abandoned by elites, Francis himself was cast out by the conservative establishment. He thus lived the role he had scripted, turning his exile into proof of his own correctness.

No longer constrained by the need for mainstream respectability, he spoke more freely, articulating a worldview that later generations of populists and white nationalists would adopt. Though he died in 2005, his ideas lived on, percolating through online forums, paleoconservative circles, and eventually into the rhetoric of Trump-era politics.

The Legacy of Sam Francis

Ganz insists that Francis should not be dismissed as a marginal crank. His concept of Middle American Radicalism foreshadowed the very constituencies that would later power right-wing populism: the disaffected middle, alienated from both parties, eager for leaders who promised revenge against elites. His theory of betrayal anticipated the language of “globalists,” “the deep state,” and “America First.” His disdain for liberal democracy and admiration for authoritarian order prefigured the growing illiberalism of the contemporary right.

Yet Francis’s story is also a cautionary tale. His analysis contained the kernel of truth that many middle Americans felt abandoned by political elites. However, he twisted that truth into a justification for exclusion and resentment. Rather than expanding democracy, he sought to narrow it. Rather than addressing economic insecurity, he redirected it toward cultural scapegoats.

In Ganz’s telling, Francis embodies the danger of intellectuals who diagnose real problems but channel them into destructive solutions. He was both insightful and corrosive, a thinker who saw clearly where American politics was heading but celebrated its ugliest impulses.

A Harbinger of Collapse

Sam Francis emerges from Ganz’s narrative not as a footnote, but as the figure who most fully articulated the coming breakdown in American politics. He anticipated the fracture of the old conservative order and pointed toward a future defined by populist rage. His concept of Middle American Radicalism crystallized the grievances that would later define the politics of Trump and the greater MAGA movement. His disdain for elites and his call for confrontation rather than compromise all resonate uncannily with the crises of the present.

Reading Francis today reveals how fully his vision has taken root. The politics of resentment he championed have become a powerful engine of mobilization and destruction. Alienation and anger now openly corrode democratic institutions and embolden authoritarian impulses. Though once cast out of the conservative mainstream, Francis’s ideas now shape the landscape of the Right, finding their fullest expression in contemporary politics. Ganz presents him not merely as a figure of the past, but as a thinker whose insights have come alive in our own time. He saw, with unsettling clarity, how the clock was breaking. The tragedy is that he chose rupture over repair, and in doing so, hastened the break itself.