History of Donald Trump's rightwing revolt
Timothy Shenk
Tuesday 16 August 2016 01.00 EDT
... The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World was the most unlikely bestseller of 1941. The author, James Burnham, was a philosophy professor at New York University who until the previous year had been one of Leon Trotsky’s most trusted counsellors in the US ... The son of a wealthy railway executive ... the Great Depression radicalised him ... By 1940, Burnham had lost his faith in the revolution of the proletariat ... Marx had been his guiding influence in The Managerial Revolution; now he turned to Machiavelli ... Burnham’s newfound zeal for defending freedom led him, in 1955, to a conservative magazine called National Review ...
... Francis agreed that society had been taken over by managers, but he believed the new ruling class was far more vulnerable than Burnham had realised ... For reasons he never quite explained, he insisted that the cosmopolitan elite threatened the traditional values cherished by most Americans: “morality and religion, family, nation, local community, and at times racial integrity and identity” ... Francis delivered his remarks on racial consciousness at a conference organised by American Renaissance, an obscure journal devoted to promoting white nationalism ... Francis’s employers at the Washington Times ... fired him after his comments were released ... For years he had cultivated a relationship with Pat Buchanan ... Francis urged Buchanan to make another run for the White House in 1996 ... After Buchanan’s defeat and his own exile from mainstream conservatism, Francis devoted himself to what he called “racialpolitik” ...
... Prompted by a magazine article casting Francis as the prophet of Trumpism, Limbaugh read aloud from one of Francis’s post-mortems on the Buchanan campaign ... The white nationalists who rallied to Francis in the last decade of his life .. also see Trump as a vindication of their longtime inspiration ...
In language that Francis would have recognised, the billionaire PayPal co-founder and Silicon Valley guru Peter Thiel declared that America is no longer a democracy – since it has become a country “dominated by very unelected, technocratic agencies” ... In July, following an outpouring of criticism, he cancelled a planned appearance in front of a group that has provided a meeting ground for libertarians and white nationalists, including Francis’s close friend Jared Taylor. But a similar public outcry did not persuade him to drop another speaking engagement earlier that month: a speech on the final night of the Republican national convention, where he had come as a delegate to cast his vote for Donald Trump ...
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/16/secret-history-trumpism-donald-trump
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