The return of Sam Francis: MARs rising?

I’m not the only person to have had thoughts about the late Samuel Francis’s theory of “MARs” (Middle American Radicals) in recent days. (See my comment here and also Walter Russell Mead’s comment quoted at VFR yesterday which clearly has MARs-like implications.) At the website Stuff Black People Don’t Like, which is a response to the very nasty anti-white website Stuff White People Don’t Like, the blogger speaks at length about how the current massive resistance to Obama Socialism represents the MARS rising that Francis predicted and hoped to see. However, the anonymous blogger gets one aspect of the story crucially wrong, as I discuss in my bracketed replies.

The blogger writes:

MARs is the designated acronym of Middle American Radicals popularized by Sam Francis, an intellectual who in death will gain a larger following than during his award-winning career:

Middle American Radicals (MARs) are essentially middle-income, white, often ethnic voters who see themselves as an exploited and dispossessed group, excluded from meaningful political participation, threatened by the tax and trade policies of the government, victimized by its tolerance of crime, immigration and social deviance, and ignored or ridiculed by the major cultural institutions of the media and education.

Francis believed that MARs would attack during the Clinton Administration, but the anger of these white people crystallized into the election of George W. Bush and eventually became dormant in the Red States of America.

Black people and disingenuous white liberals look with incredulous eyes toward the Red States as they view these states with suspension and fear. During the 2008 election, Mein Obama had this to say about the MARs who inhabit Red States:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

MARs that inhabit America may not come from the Red Planet, but to Black people, Red States are much worse. They have given birth to people who question Barack Obama’s right to be president through the Birther Movement; white people who still long for Pre-Obama America; and the Tea Party Tax Day protests that have even seeped into Blue States.

The Henry Louis Gates incident showed that the MARs attack Sam Francis believed would take place in the 1990s was projected a decade early and Black people understand exactly what set off the negative reactions to the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: his race. [LA replies: I totally disagree. By saying this, the blogger gives support to the vicious Maureen Dowds of the world who say that opposition to Obama’s policies is fueled by white racism. White Americans would have been fine with a nonwhite president had he not turned out to be an insanely irresponsible, bald-faced-lying, anti-white, anti-American, radical leftist who openly seeks to ruin this country.]

MARs might not admit it yet, but the reason they are attacking from Red States is because they believe an alien to Pre-Obama America is now leading them and their beloved nation into ruin. [LA replies: That’s putting it better. It is not Obama’s race that drives the opposition, but the realization that he is indeed an alien to and hostile to America.]

MARs used to have FOX News Channel to contain their anger, but even that channel is no longer enough to hold off the attack.

The debate about Universal Healthcare has set-off a massive amount of protests from white people, who will pay the tax burden of that proposed system where everyone will insured:

Those whites that you see at the health care meetings, that was really Ronald Reagan’s America,” said John Kenneth White, a presidential scholar at the Catholic University of America and author of the newly published “Barack Obama’s America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family and Religion Ended the Reagan Era.

Reagan’s California exists today only on the commemorative license plate. That California that elected him governor twice and president twice is no more,” White said. He believes some of the anger behind the health care debate is from “a sense that power has shifted in the country, and the country they thought they knew doesn’t exist anymore.

Names like Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones and even Barack Obama fuel the fire that threatens to turn into a conflagaration of MARs anger throughout America:

Van Jones said: “The American way, manufactuered by these white folks in office. By these rich men here to mock us. The United States is a stolen land led by right-wing, war hungry, oil thirsty. And when it’s all said and done they still can’t clean their own place because they got people of color playing servant to do that sh*t for them… The true terrorists are made in the US, in this police state…”

Disingenuous white liberals find the MARs Attacking threat to be a burden and worthy of condescension:

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers—these are “either” the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president—too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters’ signs—too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don’t understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can’t understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

However, Black people know better. They sense in these movements that arise from Red States an omninous warning to THE AGE OF OBAMA and understand that the economic meltdown of the country and the desire to further tax white people to pay for the 40 million uninsured—and largely Black—is finally opening a few eyes.

The fact that Mein Obama has appointed people of his race to public office that hold views that would make George Wallace blush is finally driving MARs to attack. [LA replies: That’s right. It’s not that they’re black, it’s that they are vicious America haters like Van Jones.]

Even Mein Obama speaking to school children has been met with historic animosity from MARs attackers:

But the public resentment toward Barack Obama that has been bubbling under the surface has finally boiled over.

The purely racist actions by local and national school systems is a sign of tumultuous times ahead for Obama and his administration. According to online reports, local school principals have ordered teachers not to show a planned Obama address to schoolchildren on Tuesday, Sept. 8.

Stuff Black People Don’t Like includes MARs Attacking, for the road to THE AGE OF OBAMA was once paved with the same gold as the yellow brick road, but now, white people are beginning to see the man behind the curtain:

One black congressman, Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), was quoted last week alleging that opposition to Obama’s healthcare policies was “a bias, a prejudice, an emotional feeling.”

Some Americans have not gotten over the fact that Obama is president of the United States. They go to sleep wondering, ‘How did this happen?’ ” Rangel said, according to the New York Post.

MARs Attacking is an idea that Sam Francis believed would come at some point, and it is precisely this idea that Black people do not like for we are seeing a Red State invasion unfold before our eyes. And this time, what the radio is broadcasting is not Halloween prank.

And remember, it all started with Sarah Palin.

[end of entry at Stuff Black People Don’t Like]

September 15

JJM writes:

It may not be your cup of tea, humor-wise, but it’s quite wrong to describe “Stuff White People Like” as a “very nasty anti-white” site. The entire purpose of the site is to mock the anti-white self-loathing of modern white liberals. It has nothing to do with “whiteness” (or Westerness) in general.

That’s the whole reason the site is even called what it is: the author is making a teasing point that much of the post-modern liberal popular culture is still overwhelmingly white-dominated and lead; an observation that makes white liberals inherently uncomfortable. White liberals have tried to transcend race; “Stuff White People Like” is saying “no, you’re still white, and you’re still defined by your whiteness.”

I personally think the popularity of this site is a fascinating phenomenon, and it’s hard not to read its popularity as evidence of the rising sense of deep-down disillusionment young people like myself feel towards cultural liberalism. It may still be in the early stages of popular consciousness, and still be a poorly articulated message, but I think “Stuff White People Like” is tapping into something deeper than you might appreciate.

LA replies:

I’ve only read the site once, and maybe I misunderstood it or misremembered it, but the whole thing seemed like the same joke repeated over and over, in which white people are objectified into cliches, and while I saw the humorous elements, after a while it started to feel rather unpleasant.

Jake Jacobsen writes:

The site SBPDL is satirical much like the SWPL site so I think he’s being facetious in his comments. He often presumes to speak for the Black community and I think that’s what he is doing in the bits you cracked on him about.

LA writes:

I have to clarify that the “tea-party” movement has only some elements of a MARs movement, not all. It is responding to economic threats, statist threats. But it’s not responding to national and cultural threats. Conservatives have never organized on this level. There is a galaxy of conservative and grassroots organizations in this country addressing a myriad of issues. There has never been a single conservative organization whether in Washington or at the grass-roots devoted to opposing multiculturalism and the de-Europeanization of America. As long as the tea-party movement is only on size of government and taxes, and not culture, it’s not a real MARs movement as Sam Francis would have understood it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 14, 2009 02:54 PM | Send