20-20 Foresight 

Roger Berkowitz

Seth Cotler points us to a book review written in 1983 by Samuel T. Francis that makes clear how much of the politics of populism and racism we are experiencing today was already visible to those with eyes to see it. The review of a book by Kevin Philips argues that the frustrations with America’s obsolete constitutional and political system will bring about a racially charged right-wing revolution in the United States. 

The result will be the emergence of a right-wing radicalism that will bear little resemblance to ‘Old Right’ conservatism of either traditionalist or libertarian orientations, to ‘neo-conservatism’ or even to much of the current ‘New Right’ movements. Philips goes so far as to suggest that the United States in the 1980s will resemble the Weimar Republic of the 1930s, and that racial, ethnic, regional, and sectarian identities will play an overt and important role in our politics. The Reagan Administration will not answer or satisfy these frustrations, since the President and his advisers have misunderstood the election of 1980 as a demand for Coolidge Era free market and pro-business Republicanism and not as a vocalization of new forces and values. Philips therefore sees the post-Reagan American right as a potentially serious movement that will abandon many of the haute-bourgeois and constitutionalist themes of conventional conservatism and espouse a more populist, radical, authoritarian, nationalist, and even racialist politics.”