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View Full Version : This latest populist revolt is not the rise of the Right, but of the MARs




bobbyw24
03-15-2010, 05:06 AM
No Life on MARs

This latest populist revolt is not the rise of the Right.

The social class on which [Will Herberg] and I both once pinned our hope of national regeneration, those whom we jokingly referred to as ‘the Archie Bunkers,’ has gone the way of the dinosaur. It has been replaced by a multitude of vastly more radicalized versions of Meathead, Archie’s fashionably liberal son-in-law who by now could be an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal.

—Paul E. Gottfried, Encounters

The Tea Party movement seems to put the lie to Professor Gottfried’s despair. At the movement’s February convention, the Archie Bunkers were out in force: politically unsophisticated working- and middle-class Americans asserting themselves against the Meatheads of fashionable liberalism, into whose hands the levers of power had passed barely a year before.

As Herberg and Gottfried pinned their hopes on those Archie Bunkers, so Sam Francis, a few years later, saw the possibility of national regeneration in the conservative surge that had helped elect Ronald Reagan. Examining the base of citizens from which that surge drew its strength, Francis borrowed a tag from sociologist Donald Warren, calling them “Middle American Radicals.” These insurrectionists, Francis said in his 1982 essay “Message from MARs,” had grasped the essential power conflict in postwar American society. That conflict is not between rich and poor, as both Old Left and Old Right had supposed, but between, on the one hand, an alliance of meritocratic elites with underclass government clients, and on the other, those whose work and enterprise feeds both components of that alliance. Our political contest is not top vs. bottom, but top-and-bottom-united vs. middle.

In a different essay 16 years later, by way of pooh-poohing secessionist talk, Francis gave his clearest statement of this dichotomy:

Today, the main political line of division in the United States is not between the regions of North and South (insofar as such regions can still be said to exist) but between elite and nonelite. As I have tried to make plain ... for the last 15 years, the elite, based in Washington, New York, and a few large metropolises, allies with the underclass against Middle Americans, who pay the taxes, do the work, fight the wars, suffer the crime, and endure their own political and cultura1 dispossession at the hands of the elite and its underclass vanguard.

Francis’s thought shows an interesting development. “Message from MARs” is written in the rather abstract diction of Machiavelli and James Burnham. A ruling class had established itself with aid from underclass allies to whom it had given promises of provision and protection. This ruling class had become careless and decadent. A rising group sought to replace it. Middle American radicals could be that rising group, said Francis: “The MARs form a sociopolitical force now coalescing into a class and perhaps into a new elite that will replace the managerial elite.”

By 1998, Francis’s reports from the class-war front were darker, more urgent, and more tribal. The overclass-underclass alliance, he said, had seized on a new strategy for strengthening itself: the importation of massive underclass reinforcements via unrestricted immigration of poor, unskilled Third Worlders from regions of low civilizational achievement—people bound to end up on the elites’ clientage rolls in perpetuity.


Continue:

http://amconmag.com/article/2010/apr/01/00009/

Agorism
03-15-2010, 05:08 AM
Sounds like a populist movement to me.

rprprs
03-15-2010, 05:51 AM
Wow.
One of the most insightful articles I have ever read.
And one of the most depressing. :(

fj45lvr
03-15-2010, 05:52 AM
sounds like the script from a play....

johngr
03-15-2010, 07:00 AM
I suspect from anyone who invokes Archie Bunker, a direct analogy to Step 'n Fetchit, except to deconstruct the charicature/stereotype, a Europhobic racial agenda.

AuH20
03-15-2010, 08:13 AM
The MARS are too incompetent and emotionally immature to pull anything of this size and scope.