Conservative fusion was always both an ideological synthesis and a political coalition.
Conservative fusion was always both an ideological synthesis and a political coalition.
F usionism is a core part of the story of National Review and the modern American conservative movement. But there really always were two fusionisms, not one. To understand the heritage of our ideas, it is vital to understand what was fused, and why.
When fusionism is discussed today, especially by its critics, the focus is typically on fusionism as an ideological project. That project, often identified with William F. Buckley Jr. and Reaganism, was largely the intellectual handiwork of Frank Meyer and M. Stanton Evans. For a flavor of the debate at the time, read Meyer and L. Brent Bozell Jr. in these pages 60 years ago debating the relative merits of fusionism as opposed to Bozell’s case for the primacy of virtue over liberty as the central organizing principle of conservatism.
To briefly summarize a much larger debate, Meyer’s idea of fusionism asserted, in the terms Evans used in the 1960 Sharon Statement, “that liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom,” and “that when government ventures beyond [its] rightful functions, it accumulates power, which tends to diminish order and liberty.” As Ramesh Ponnuru described Meyer’s broader aim:
His project was to get libertarians and traditionalists to unite as more than allies of convenience. Each group was right about something: Virtue is the chief end of man, but freedom his chief political end. Each group was wrong only insofar as it denied the truth the other emphasized. Libertarians erred by exalting an individualism without moral foundations, traditionalists by attempting to coerce virtue.
In short: Meyer wanted conservatives of varying stripes and factions to see one another not merely as uneasy coalition partners, but as common adherents to a single, coherent creed. His success in this was not complete, but the endeavor was nonetheless remarkably effective for over half a century.
The fusionist focus on personal liberty, and its inextricable connection to economic liberty, could be married to traditional conservative values such as virtue and order as a seamless whole by the distinction — going all the way back in Christian and Western thought to St. Augustine and to “render unto Caesar” — between the worldly state and the eternal soul, and between the public and private spheres. The end goal of politics, in this telling, was to secure private liberty both because it benefits the earthly lives of humanity and because a greater sphere for private liberty allows more room for free conscience and for the voluntary cultural institutions that promote virtue better than the government can. A government big enough to crowd out free markets was not only a threat to civil liberties and a free press; the size of government was also a social issue, because a government that big could also crowd out families, private churches, religious schools, and the rest of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons.”
Meyer, because he did not give himself over wholly to libertarianism, was careful to caution that making liberty the proper end of political life was not the same thing as making liberty the only proper goal of life itself:
In the political sphere the conservative consensus presently emerging in the United States regards freedom as an end; but, although it is an end at the political level, it is a means — as is the whole political structure — to the higher ends of the human person. Without reference to those ends, it is meaningless. . . .
The American conservative today, therefore, although he owes much to the libertarian stream in Western thought — its deep concern with freedom, its analysis of the political structure in terms of freedom, its understanding of the vital importance of the free-market economy for a free modern society — cannot accept the fundamental philosophical position, sometimes rationalist, sometimes utilitarian, which is the historical foundation of pure libertarianism. . . .
The contemporary American conservative . . . found[s] his outlook upon that earlier synthesis of belief in transcendent value and in human freedom which the Founders of the Republic embodied in their lives and actions, discursively expressed in their writings and their debates, and bequeathed to us in the body politic they constituted.
Meyer’s claim to recover the ideals of the American Founders was part and parcel of the broader project of intellectual archaeology in the conservative movement during National Review’s first decade: less the promulgation of new ideas than an effort to revive, explain, and synthesize old ones. In this, he had proud antecedents: Abraham Lincoln and the early Republicans, while they were in part a self-conscious “fusion” of political convenience, likewise pledged themselves to a set of common principles — free soil, free labor, free men — that combined the Lockean classical liberalism they attributed to the American Founding with a Victorian-era Christian emphasis on human dignity and virtue and a devotion to the self-improving prospects of free markets.
While Buckley valued Meyer’s contributions, however, his own project (like Lincoln’s) was not ideological fusion but political fusion: gathering together the many and quarrelsome strains of American conservatives into a single movement that could act together cooperatively (if never quite collectively) as if they had common interests, and because they had common foes. As Edmund Burke put it, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Buckley saw that conservatives could not continue to fall in that fashion, as they had often done over the quarter century before 1955.
Neal Freeman, who was there with Buckley, Meyer, Evans, and Bozell in those early days, describes Buckley’s view in a wonderful piece interviewing himself for the American Spectator:
He saw the socialists of all parties, as Friedrich Hayek put it, as pushing America toward the edge of the economic cliff. He saw the communists advancing on all fronts, from the ideological to the geostrategic. He witnessed the collapse of conservative resistance. Buckley was a patriot, and he did what needed to be done. . . .
Somebody had to draw a line in the sand. There was no call for philosophical nuance. Today, we seem to have room, at least in the fundraising space, for an infinite number of prefixed conservatisms — neos, nationals, paleos, revivalists, integralists, and the rest. . . .
Buckley knew that, by Madisonian design, coalitions win and factions lose. He understood that, to join his coalition, every faction — every prefixed conservative — must believe that he had more to gain as part of a winning coalition than he stood to lose by sacrificing a measure of independence. Buckley’s conservatism was almost always procedural, rarely doctrinal.
The whole thing is well worth reading on the virtue of being “coalition conservatives” with a high tolerance for difference of opinion. Freeman’s nostalgia for a conservative movement that was staffed by self-funded amateurs and part-timers carries with it some real wisdom about the dangers of the Right’s institutions becoming ends unto themselves, raising money to pay their own salaries and promoting not-from-my-shop-ism rather than working to strengthen the alliances between elite and grassroots conservatives of all kinds and causes.
But we should not want to return to Freeman’s “Rickenbacker Dispensation,” by which he means that the movement was staffed solely by people with family wealth or second jobs. Like them or not, the much-derided institutions of “Conservatism, Inc.” — whether Reaganite or Trumpy, old-fashioned or “New Right,” Neocon or SoCon — are precisely why the movement is able to accomplish so many things that were only dreamt of in the early years. I know from my own experience that my writing is much more prolific, more productive, and more widely read as a full-time writer than it was in the two decades that I was doing this as a side job while in the private practice of law. My time as a lawyer is helpful — it gave me professional training and a grounding in the world outside of conservative institutions — but I could not do the things I do today if I still needed another job to support my family. That is doubly true for the movement’s legal and political activists.
The end of Roe v. Wade was able to happen only because so many corners of the movement pulled in the same direction for so long. I was recently at an event hosted by the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of several entities on the right that litigates for religious liberty and pro-life, pro-family causes. The group has been as effective as it is at advancing those causes (especially in court) in part because it takes seriously the “alliance” part of the job description. Its head, Michael Farris, likes to note that ADF alone employs more than 20 times as many full-time lawyers as worked in that entire space when he started in the early 1980s, yet it continues to treat peer institutions as partners, not rivals. The reason the Federalist Society, too, has been so successful is that it kept the doors open to so many debates within and among conservatives and libertarians, practitioners, academics, and judges. As Michael Brendan Dougherty recently put it, “We must recognize that neither the Right’s Jack Kemps nor its Pat Buchanans can do it alone; they need each other to succeed.”
The philosophical fusion that Meyer and his successors forged is still vital to what National Review does. It remains crucial to how conservatives should think about the principles of our movement and how we call ourselves and our allies to fidelity to those principles — even as the Meyer–Bozell debate is still with us. But our principles are a compass, not a straitjacket. Buckley’s example remains every bit as important in holding together a coalition in the post-Trump world that will sooner or later arrive, in which what we agree to do together will be more important than where we stood on the many and particular controversies of the 2015–21 period. We should not become dug into ancient battle lines like Tokugawa Japan, where for 250 years everyone’s social status depended on where they fought at a single battle in 1600. Our work, like Buckley’s, aspires to something broader than a constellation of unpitied sacrifices in a contemptible struggle.