The sudden revival of interest in James Buchanan (1905-1987), an almost totally forgotten political thinker, may be called one of the most intriguing aspects of the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The Trotskyist-turned hardcore anti-communist forged an idiosyncratic future vision of human society which apparently synchronized with popular sentiments of “middle America” in our age. Several figures mediated his return into the political public sphere. Among them is Samuel Francis (1947-2005), an obscure conservative thinker who passed away more than ten years ago, and who also returned to the political narrative in America along with Burnham.

Burnham, born in 1907 to a prosperous Chicago railway executive, studied English and philosophy at Princeton and Oxford. While teaching philosophy at New York University, he joined the Trotskyist movement in the early 1930s and soon became a central flgure, along with Sydney Hook and Max Shachtman. His Trotskyist odyssey started much earlier and therefore lasted longer than the earliest neo-conservatives such as Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer. By finding his views on Stalinist Russia incongruent with those of the mainstream Trotskyists and Trotsky himself when Stalin signed a pact with Hitler then invaded Poland, he broke ranks with them and the movement in 1940.

Soon thereafter, he authored two important ideological books, in 1941 and 1943

respectively. The Managerial Revolution and The Machiauellians seem completely relevant to the Trump age. In the former, Burnham described his future vision in which he rejected the Marxist idea of the final transition by class struggle from capitalism to socialism. He considered that it would not be proletariats but “managers” who would take control of the means of production. The technocrat-ruled world that he envisioned would be divided into three “super-states” looks like the world we live in today. The latter book, on neo-Machiavellians in the early twentieth century, investigates an inevitable dichotomized society of the ruling elites and the ruled and how to defend freedom in such a society.

Burnham, who died in 1987, had disappeared from people’s memory by the early 2000s, though he turned out a dozen books while editing a flagship conservative magazine as a conspicuously active right-wing public intellectual. Samuel Francis succeeded Burnham in his peculiar brand of conservatism, tainted by Marxism and neo-Machiavellianism, yet he was marginalized into oblivion by mainstream conservatives after his death in 2005.

However, the Trump campaign triggered a debate over the relevance of Francis’ political thought and Burnham’s peculiar vision of the world we live in. It began among conservatives, as they found in the Trump campaign a replay of Pat Buchanan’s bid for the Republican nomination for the presidency in the 1990s advised by Francis, with the “America First” slogan and outlandish policy proposals. The debate eventually involved the main traditional media outlets both on the right and left. It is certain that this whole process of resurrection of the dead, forgotten thinkers happened in reaction to grievances of the people in contemporary America.