John Derbyshire, Sam Francis, and the War on Middle Class White Americans

John Derbyshire’s “No Life on MARS” is valuable mainly because he quotes a 1998 essay by Sam Francis as follows:

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. …

The leaders of the alien underclass, as well as those of the older black underclass, invoke race in explicit terms, and they leave no doubt that their main enemy is the white man and his institutions and patterns of belief. … Middle Americans now face [the imperative] of constructing their own autonomous political movement that can take back their nation rather than assisting the new underclass and the globalist ruling class in breaking it up. The time left for us to do so is shorter than it has ever [been] before in our history.

Francis also pointed out that the elites had developed a powerful new weapon against Middle Americans in the form of mass immigration. The result is what we see now: Accelerating White dispossession and the polarization of politics along racial/ethnic lines rather than social class lines.

As usual, Derbyshire fails to mention any role of Jews as a critical part of the anti-White elite and the historic role of Jews in creating an elite that is hostile to the interests of middle class White Americans. (This is unlike Francis who, in a chapter in Race and the American Prospect written shortly before his death, described Jews as “as the cultural vanguard of the managerial class, providing ideological justification of its structure and policies, disseminating its ideological formulas to the mass population, formulating and often implementing specific policies, and providing much of the specialized educational training essential to the transmission and perpetuation of the technocratic skills of the elite.”)  In addition to being vastly overrepresented in all areas of the elite, Jews have allied themselves with the “alien underclass.” The Black-Jewish alliance is over a century old, and now Jewish groups are busy aligning themselves with the myriad ethnic groups that will soon make up the American majority.

Derbyshire is right to be pessimistic about the prospects of White Middle American anger for really changing things. What it really comes down to is the lack of intellectual leadership able to challenge “liberal ruling-class rhetoric about ‘nativism’ and ‘racism.’” “The Tea Partiers will be marginalized by appeals to political correctness, a thing easily done as practically all of them are white.”

This is quite correct, and it points to a reality that Derbyshire underplays. This is fundamentally a low-level race war between middle class Whites and the people who would displace them. It’s not just the alien underclass that is favored by elite opinion. The coalition commanded by the ruling elite includes not just the underclass, but all non-Whites as well as sexual minorities and aggrieved feminists. Moreover, it’s notorious that mainstream “conservative” intellectuals have knuckled under to this rhetoric as well. Hence the furor among respectable conservatives over the establishment of AltRight and the constant harassment and vilification of any murmurings of White identity on the part of activist organizations like the SPLC and the ADL.

This is really what it comes down to, but we certainly can’t blame middle class Whites for the fact that they are not up to challenging the consensus on race. Middle class Whites respect elite opinion and trust the basic institutions of the society. They are strongly patriotic. They are intellectually insecure when it comes to thinking about race, subjected as they are to constant media images of racially conscious Whites as Klansmen, Nazis, psychopaths, and intellectual cretins. And “conservatives” like Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, and O’Reilly keep telling them that the main problem is those nasty Democrats. These media conservatives bend over backwards to show that they have signed on to elite opinion about race. It takes a great deal of intellectual self-confidence and a very thick skin to withstand the onslaught of the intellectual and media elites who occupy all the prestigious positions in society, especially since many of the middle class targets of this onslaught could lose their jobs for asserting a White identity.

Until White identity and interests are legitimized, it’s certainly naïve to suppose that respectable middle class White people are going to start complaining about their displacement in explicitly White terms. But they will not be an effective political force until they do so. Although they will be in the forefront of the looming battle on illegal immigration (and that is certainly all to the good), they will remain silent in the face of the much greater problem of legal non-White immigration. (Glenn Beck on legal immigration: “I’m not a racist. [Illegal immigration] isn’t to be confused with legal immigration.”)

The war against middle class White America is therefore a war that “cannot tell its name” — it can’t be labeled for what it is but must masquerade as a moral crusade for certain abstract concepts like “diversity,” and “tolerance.” The Tea Partiers are left with no alternative but to fight back with their own abstractions, like “limited government” and “individual freedom.” The liberal establishment has nothing to fear from this.

That’s why the White middle class revolution has to be top-down in the sense that it must have an intellectual vanguard that legitimizes White identity and interests among the broad mass of White people. Until then, there will be much rage but no basic change. And this implies that a huge part of our energies must be directed at legitimizing the simple idea that White people, like everyone else, have ethnic interests.