The only time I saw Sam Francis face-to-face — in the
Washington Times cafeteria sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s — I
thought he was a crank, but it’s clear now that he was at that moment
becoming one of the most prescient writers of the past 50 years. There’s
very little Donald Trump has done or said that Francis didn’t champion a
quarter century ago.
In a series of essays for
conservative magazines like Chronicles, Francis hammered home three key
insights. The first was that globalization was screwing Middle America.
The Cold War had just ended, capitalism seemed triumphant and the
Clinton years seemed to be an era of broad prosperity.
But Francis
stressed that the service economy was ruining small farms and taking
jobs from the working class.
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