Obscure Pat Buchanan Adviser in 1996 Predicted Wild Donald Trump Campaign of 2016

Via Andrea Tantaros, see Michael Brendan Dougherty, at the Week, "How an obscure adviser to Pat Buchanan predicted the wild Trump campaign in 1996":

[S]ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or diminish our national interests and national sovereignty, a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes, the better… [Samuel Francis in Chronicles]

Imagine giving this advice to a Republican presidential candidate: What if you stopped calling yourself a conservative and instead just promised to make America great again?

What if you dropped all this leftover 19th-century piety about the free market and promised to fight the elites who were selling out American jobs? What if you just stopped talking about reforming Medicare and Social Security and instead said that the elites were failing to deliver better health care at a reasonable price? What if, instead of vainly talking about restoring the place of religion in society — something that appeals only to a narrow slice of Middle America — you simply promised to restore the Middle American core — the economic and cultural losers of globalization — to their rightful place in America? What if you said you would restore them as the chief clients of the American state under your watch, being mindful of their interests when regulating the economy or negotiating trade deals?

That's pretty much the advice that columnist Samuel Francis gave to Pat Buchanan in a 1996 essay, "From Household to Nation," in Chronicles magazine. Samuel Francis was a paleo-conservative intellectual who died in 2005. Earlier in his career he helped Senator East of North Carolina oppose the Martin Luther King holiday. He wrote a white paper recommending the Reagan White House use its law enforcement powers to break up and harass left-wing groups. He was an intellectual disciple of James Burnham's political realism, and Francis' political analysis always had a residue of Burnham's Marxist sociology about it. He argued that the political right needed to stop playing defense — the globalist left won the political and cultural war a long time ago — and should instead adopt the insurgent strategy of communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci. Francis eventually turned into a something resembling an all-out white nationalist, penning his most racist material under a pen name. Buchanan didn't take Francis' advice in 1996, not entirely. But 20 years later, "From Household to Nation," reads like a political manifesto from which the Trump campaign springs...

Keep reading.

That's exactly right.

Recall, as I wrote last night when the National Review hit piece went live:

Folks like Trump because they believe he'll fight for their values. They don't care if he can articulate them perfectly well. He's hits the bullseye when he stands up for the working-class downtrodden, to say nothing of the Great White Nationalists. Yep, I said it. You can't understand his success unless you see Trump's rise as a revolt against the politically correct, pro-diversity establishmentarians of both parties. Trump's especially got the GOPe running scared.

All of this is reminding me of the late Samuel Huntington's path-breaking book, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity.

At the time (Huntington's book came out in 2004), Who Are We sounded the tocsin but was decidedly a voice in the wilderness. If Huntington were around today, he'd be cheering on Donald Trump and saying to the downtrodden Middle American Proletariat, "what took you so long?"