Sam Francis' Unlikely Comeback: How Conservative Realism Took Over The World | Danube Politics

Things ain’t what they used to be in Conservatism. 

By the 1990s, after a decade of Reagan and Thatcher, Conservatives had established an ideology which felt permanent. 

Markets, individualism, seriousness on questions of debt and security. 

Then came Blair, Clinton, and through that door, a whole new oppositional force, call it the Third Way. Call it The End of History, the Deep State. This new order re-made us. And with that, Conservatism became a mere servant of broader historical forces. 

It was only in 2016 that it found its voice again, with the emergence of Donald Trump. 

Trump was the strange, improbable conclusion to a twenty year struggle for the soul of Conservatism. 

Though he might not have known it. 

In the 1990s, in America, a war was underway, between the Paleoconservatives and the Neo-Conservatives. 

The Paleocons were led by men like Sam Francis and Pat Buchanan. They saw the apparatus of state as having been captured by a managerial class. This class spanned both conservatives and liberals — and took as its fiefs, the underclass, the immigrant class. Those dependent on the largesse of the state, and those who needed its protection. 

Outside of this welcome embrace was what the columnist Sam Francis called the People From Mars - MAR - the Middle American Radicals. Another term from another time might be Pouijadistes. The workers, solo entrepreneurs, backbone of the petit bourgeoisie.  Small towns and traditional communities. Somewheres, in a later coinage. These were the people who they were fighting for. 

Opposing them were the Neocons. The children of Reagan and Thatcher, who believed in that individualised, marketised kind of conservatism. Relaxed about immigration. And social mores. 

In the 90s, the Neocons won. Until they didn’t. 

One man who has the scars on his back of that initial conflict is John O’Sullivan.

From 1988 till 1997, John was editor of the National Review, William Buckley’s organ of reliable, grown up neo-conservatism. 

Today, John himself has shifted somewhat. He is after all, President of the Danube Institute. John personally remembers Sam Francis and Pat Buchanan as worthy adversaries. 

Alongside him, is a Young Turk of the coming age. Markus Johansson Martis.

Markus is Swedish, a lawyer by training, a Danube Institute Visiting Fellow by day, an advisor to the Sweden Democrats, and a columnist at the Dutch magazine Nieuwe Rechts. 

Lately, Markus has published a paper for us, Conservative Realism, which binds together the threads between two figures who together predicted the jump between 1996 and 2026. James Burnham and Sam Francis. 

He argues that Conservatism needs to refine the Burkean bargain — that we shouldn’t simply conserve that which is not itself conservative. Just as the modern city of Rotterdam should not be conserved - because it was rebuilt after the war, with no regard to the city plans that had survived centuries. 

He calls this Conservative Realism. 

John, of course, is the father of O’Sullivan’s Law: organisations that are not explicitly right coded will, in time, end up left-coded. 

Today, we want to ask: how real is our conservatism? And do we need Conservative Realism? If the fight is between conservatives and left-captured institutions, how can we undo the damage, without chopping off the Conservatism that we stand on?