A long time ago a man named Samuel T. Francis was writing for various conservative publications about Middle American Radicals. The essay in which he laid out his ideas can be found here. I don’t use Google Books much so you may have to navigate around a bit to get to the top of the essay. Sam Francis was a great thinker who has been flushed down the memory hole by the Conventional Right. Even the neo-reactionaries of the Dark Enlightenment seem to have forgotten about him, if they ever heard of him.

It is a pity.

If Sam were alive today he would be chuckling at the results of last night’s election in Virginia. Official Washington is busy interpreting the results in a way that pleases them. That’s to be expected. Inside the halls of power, the managers and technocrats hate you. They hate everything about you. Middle America has been their enemy for so long they no longer recall why. They simply know their guy was thrown out of office by the voters in favor of a guy who sounds like Pat Buchanan with a PhD. There has to be a reason that does not indicate failure on their part.

They will tell themselves all sorts of stories rather than face the truth. The reason is they cannot face the truth. The managerial class exists solely to usurp the power and authority of Middle America and the tradition values they rely upon. To accommodate those ideas means denying their right to rule over all of us. By the weekend, they will be out blaming this on racists who oppose  immigration and Tea Party bogeymen. Some of the posts in this thread give a clue as to how the Cult will respond. We also see some hints of how suicidal libertarians will react.

There’s no escaping the fact that immigration and its impact on the middle-class was the key issue. The middle-class in America, by that I mean outside the coastal hipster enclaves, has endured a long hard slog since the crash. It was not exactly good times in the Bush years. The assault on decency and basic civilization that we see from the Obama administration is looking like the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The middle is now ready to throw off their technocratic managers, regardless of party.

What we see in this race is that an articulate and intelligent candidate picked up on the issues that have been out there for over a decade now. The Tea Party tapped into some of it, but it was unmanned by the establishment crooks that attached to it. As soon as I saw Dick Army involved, I knew it was doomed. It was also plagued by the problem all insurgent movements face. It attracted fringe nuts and weirdos. Too many of them carried the Tea Party banner to prominence, thus making it easy for the Cult to disparage the movement.

The issues remain. Middle class people don’t want to see the nation flooded with South American peasants. They don’t want their jobs sent to Pakistan because Mark Zuckerburg needs a new Ferrari. They don’t want to turn on their TV and see men dressed as girls openly talking about sodomy. What ever their reservations, they don’t want to see their old church bulldozed to make way for an abortion mill. Middle America is not ready to march off to the camps as the managerial class hopes.

Brat is a normal guy who tapped into these issues and won over the establishments top guy. Enterprising pols with similar skill will take note. Democrats may be cheering, but there’s an element in their own ranks that shares the same values as the voters who tossed out Cantor. It is why Hillary Clinton plans to run in 2016 as a populist. That’s the source of the “dead broke” comments the other day. She’s working on her shtick. They may be vulgarians, but the Clintons are not stupid.

It is too soon to know what this means, but it is always good to have a reason to reminisce about the great Sam Francis.