Fair warning: Francis was a controversial figure and not without his critics on matters beyond politics — but a framework this accurate and this predictive deserves serious engagement regardless of its author’s other liabilities.
There’s a book most of the people running Washington, the universities, and the corporate boardrooms would prefer you never read. It was written in 1995 by a political analyst named Samuel T. Francis, suppressed in his lifetime, and only published after his death. It’s called Leviathan and Its Enemies — and it explains, with cold precision, exactly what has been done to this country and to the people who built it.
Francis wasn’t a pundit. He was a scholar, and he did something scholars almost never do: he told the truth about power. Not the polite truth, not the approved truth, but the structural truth — the truth about who runs America, how they took control, and why every movement that has tried to take it back has so far failed.
His argument is this: beginning in the early twentieth century, a new ruling class quietly displaced the old America of small businesses, local communities, family farms, and self-governing citizens. This class didn’t seize power through revolution. It did something more insidious. It built — and then captured — the massive institutions of modern life: the federal bureaucracy, the corporate HR departments, the universities, the media, the nonprofit foundations, the regulatory agencies. Francis called them the managerial elite, and he showed that what unites them isn’t party affiliation — it’s their shared interest in keeping those institutions large, powerful, and beyond the reach of ordinary Americans.
Here’s what makes Francis essential reading right now: he understood that this class rules not primarily through force but through ideology. The language of diversity, equity, inclusion, expert consensus, and settled science — all of it serves a function. It’s not primarily about what it claims to be about. It’s about delegitimizing anyone who challenges the institutions these managers control. Call someone a bigot, a conspiracy theorist, or an anti-science extremist, and you don’t have to answer their actual argument. The ideology is a weapon, and it has been wielded with extraordinary effectiveness against exactly the kinds of Americans who voted for Donald Trump and who are now fighting for medical freedom under the MAHA banner.
Given his book was written in 1995, Francis witnessed the populist third party run for president of Texas billionaire Ross Perot and served as an advisor to presidential candidate Pat Buchannan during which time he no doubt saw the first glimmers of a movement like the one we’re living through. He called it the post-bourgeois resistance: working people, forgotten communities, the men and women who build things and fix things and raise families, who had been systematically stripped of political representation, cultural dignity, and economic security by a ruling class that viewed them with contempt. He said that movement would eventually find a voice. It did.
But he also issued a warning that every MAGA and MAHA activist needs to hear. The managerial class doesn’t need to defeat its opponents at the ballot box. It just needs to outlast them, co-opt them, and absorb their energy back into the system. It has done this before. It knows how. Winning an election is not the same as breaking the machine.
The essay that follows distills Francis’s major arguments from a five-hundred-page masterwork into a form that can be read in a single sitting. It is not light reading — Francis demands something from his reader — but it is worth every page. Because you cannot fight what you don’t understand. And what Francis understood, more clearly than almost anyone else of his generation, is that the fight we are in is not about left versus right, Democrat versus Republican, or even freedom versus socialism.
It is about who controls the institutions that control everything else.
Read it. Share it. And ask yourself: what would it actually take to win?
Click here to be taken to the essay.
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