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. Sam Francis was a great thinker, who has been flushed down the memory hole by the Conservative Inc.. Even the neo-reactionaries of the Dark Enlightenment seem to have forgotten about him, if they ever heard of him. It is a pity, he was truly a brilliant thinker on the Right.

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 self-serving way, but that’s to be expected. The ruling class hate 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. There has to be a reason that does not indicate failure on their part.

Our rulers are just as afraid of reality as the rest of us. The managerial class has developed a number of coping strategies to explain away anything the suggests their position is anything other than legitimate. 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 Left 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 crushed by the establishment crooks that attached to it. 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 Left 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 beat a very well-financed establishment guy. Enterprising pols with similar skill should 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.