Many observers have noted how the idea system known as TRUMP owes its inspiration to the late Chronicles columnist and contributing editor Samuel Francis. In his seminal 1991 essay, “Beautiful Losers,” that political prophet wrote: 

Abandoning the illusion that it represents an establishment to be ‘conserved,’ a new American right must recognize that its values and goals lie outside and against the establishment and that its natural allies are not in Manhattan, New Haven, and Washington but in the increasingly alienated and threatened strata of Middle America.

Francis believed Middle Americans should focus on issues of crime, educational collapse, and “the erosion of their economic status and the calculated subversion of their social, cultural, and national identity by forces that serve the interest of the elite above them and the underclass below them.” The main focus of this movement “should be the reclamation of cultural power, the patient elaboration of an alternative culture within but against the regime.”

I was the publisher of Chronicles from 1986 to 1997. Among my adventures in those years was the need to counter a calculated attack by neoconservatives on the magazine in early 1989, involving the then still incendiary charges of anti-Semitism, nativism, and isolationism. On the one hand, those were painful and difficult months for me, as the dispute spread onto the front pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Chicago Tribune. Many donors fled the melee. On the other hand, and more broadly, my tenure at Chronicles—most certainly including the Paleo War of 1989-91—was actually an exhilarating experience, as we broke free from the iron ideological fist of Movement Conservatism.

This included attention to family disintegration, the subject of deepest interest to me. Cold War America of the 1945 to 1965 era had been marked by a marriage boom and a baby boom, and the health of the nation’s family system seemed secure. “Nuclear families” (what a nice Cold War term!) built on companionate marriages and resting in the suburbs would be the social and cultural bedrock of the American imperium.

Alas, this domestic order began to unravel in fairly brisk fashion during the late 1960s. As resurgent feminists, sexual revolutionaries, and cultural Marxists swept through American institutions, they met almost no opposition. A few “pro-family” organizations emerged in the mid-1970s. However, they tended to focus either on family psychology or on an anemic biblicism. They did nothing to halt or even slow America’s social and moral deterioration. Fresh thinking about the nature of the family, the true identity and goals of its foes, and an agenda to reclaim the cultural high ground on this issue were needed.

Chronicles, along with its sister publication at the Rockford Institute, The Family in America, moved into this intellectual void. In the late 1980s, for example, Chronicles Editor Thomas Fleming and I were both working on our first postdoctoral dissertation books. His The Politics of Human Nature and my Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis were published by Transaction Books in 1988. During those years, we began to employ the phrase “natural family” as an alternative to “nuclear family” or “traditional family.” The new term embraced the rich heritage of Natural Law, the indirect inclusion of ancestors, extended family, and posterity in its provenance, and even an appeal to true science.

Indeed, I recall that Tom introduced me at this time to a remarkable 1981 essay that appeared in the definitive journal Science. “The Origin of Man,” by paleoanthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy, used a meta-analysis of hundreds of research reports to show that “the unique sexual and reproductive behavior of man”—not growth of the brain—“may be the sine qua non of human origins.” Lovejoy identified these behaviors as “intensified parenting and social relationships [homes], monogamous pair bonding [marriage], [and] specialized sexual-reproductive behavior [dads and moms].” Translated into New Speak: to be “human” is to be heteronormative, conjugal, and procreative! Needless to say, cultural leftists have been furious over the implications.

Real consequences did follow from this collaboration. In 1995, I visited Moscow State University at the invitation of its sociology faculty. We agreed to co-convene a World Congress of Families (WCF) premised on the “natural family” model, and the old city of Prague hosted 700 participants at the event in the spring of 1997. The WCF grew into a series of 15 major congresses and over 40 regional events around the globe. Here’s how our opponents reacted:

• “From the U.S. to Italy to Brazil, far-right movements have put the ‘natural family’ … at the center of their populist politics. The political vision nurtured by this WCF network … is now frighteningly mainstream.” (from The Face magazine)

• “The ‘natural family’ discourse contributes to the hard-sounding authoritarian populist discourse by providing moral arguments as well as a tone of love and intimacy…. It is obvious that the WCF through its transnational network construction is a significant player in global politics.” (from the journal Social Politics)

• “Regressive legislation tends to follow where the WCF treads. The group spreads its concept of the ‘natural family’: a heterosexual married couple with biological children.” (the ultimate compliment, from The Southern Poverty Law Center)

My Chronicles years also introduced me to the work of G. K. Chesterton and his advocacy for a distributist polity, resting on family-scale farms and enterprises and political and cultural localism. Chronicles was founded in 1977; the inestimable Chesterton Review two years earlier. By the mid-1980s, the two periodicals had become companions and allies in the culture wars. Fr. Ian Boyd, a Basilian priest in Canada, edited the Review and became a faithful friend of (and occasional advertiser in) Chronicles.

In that capacity, he guided me out of an intellectual cul-de-sac. While I had written extensively on socialist and communist attacks on the natural family, I was still confused about the relationship of capitalism to family life. Fr. Boyd pointed me to the slim Chesterton volume The Superstition of Divorce. In a chapter titled “The Story of the Family,” Chesterton cited “the coercive spirit of the state” as a danger to the home, yet added: “An even more rigid and ruthless external power is that of industrial employment…. An even more ferocious enemy of the family is the factory.” He continued: “if it be true that Socialism attacks the family in theory, it is far more certain that Capitalism attacks it in practice.” By intent, capitalism destroyed home economies and sought to pull men, women, and children alike into factory bondage.

So I came to perceive the lies behind “democratic capitalism,” a favored neoconservative phrase. As the scales fell from my eyes, I joined other emerging Middle American populists in a mounting distrust of, and disgust toward, Wall Street, finance capitalism, and the elite-managed globalist economy.

During Chronicles’ war with the neoconservatives, I discovered the “good” libertarians. As the conflict became public news, a letter arrived from the prominent anarcho-libertarian Murray Rothbard, offering full support to the magazine. Along with his colleagues—including Lew Rockwell, David Gordon, and Jeffrey Tucker—Murray joined a series of conversations seeking to build an alliance between paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians that might usher in a true “new right.” From them, I learned how to distinguish “libertarians” from “libertines” and to appreciate the creativity and flexibility found in solid libertarian theory.

Offering a specific “family” example, Murray and I discovered to our mutual delight that—in independent breaks with Movement Conservatism—we both had opposed the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and the “flat tax” philosophy behind it. As he wrote to me, the effort to “close the [tax] loopholes” and to distribute the tax burden “fairly” were “egalitarian and Jacobinical.” He continued: 

Such people … would regard your proposal of a tax credit per child … as illegitimate ‘social engineering.’ In my view, however, it is neither illegitimate nor social engineering to allow people to keep more of their hard earned money … Tax credits are also far superior to the Chicago School voucher schemes, since child care or education or whatever are taken out of the tax system, instead of being loaded into it. 

I close speaking as an old man of sorts (age 75 and counting) who prefers to forget most (but not quite all) of the troubles in my past and focus instead on the positive: those Chronicles years were good ones!