In a time of challenges from the left and great debate on the right, conservatives should embrace freedom as our theme.
In a time of challenges from the left and great debate on the right, conservatives should embrace freedom as our theme.
M ore than a decade ago, in the aftermath of the Great Recession and its dramatic electoral consequences, former Clinton campaign fundraiser Nancy Jacobson and former GOP congressman Tom Davis started a group called No Labels. Over the years, other prominent Republicans and Democrats attached themselves to it, such as current co-chairs Joe Lieberman and Larry Hogan. Because I’ve been spending an increasing share of my own professional time fostering constructive engagement across political differences, much of the rhetoric of No Labels is appealing to me. Our current moment “demands American leaders and citizens alike declare their freedom from the anger and divisiveness that are ruining our politics and most importantly, our country,” the organization states. Agreed.
Nevertheless, I reject the very concept of “no labels.” Without affixing names to political ideas, and to the movements that champion them, meaningful conversation about politics becomes impossible. This observation applies to ideological divides between the Left (broadly construed) and the Right (ditto). It also applies to debates within these sprawling political coalitions, like the one currently raging between those who call themselves National Conservatives and those who do not.
I’ve spent most of my career founding, leading, or writing for right-of-center organizations. Some were explicitly named conservative, others libertarian or classical liberal. All of them embraced freedom as a core value. And nearly all embodied that distinctively American blend of the politics of liberty and the politics of virtue that came to be called fusionism — though rarely by those who espoused it.
Political actors don’t always get to coin their own labels. For example, during the Exclusion Crisis of the late 1670s, those who opposed the future royal succession of James, the Catholic Duke of York, lived primarily in small towns and rural areas. Thus they were originally known as the Country Party in opposition to the Court Party of Stuart defenders. These labels were too boring to stick, though. Partisans of James started calling their opponents whiggamores, slang for Scottish cattlemen and roughly equivalent to “rednecks.” Just as American rednecks adopted that insult as a badge of honor, so did 17th-century Whigs come to embrace their new name with pride — and, in turn, helped to name their adversaries by mocking them as Tories, slang for dispossessed Irish Catholics who’d turned to robbery and brigandage.
Maybe it’s just the Scotch-Irish in me, but I’ve always felt a comparable urge to affix derogatory names to my adversaries. It feels deeply satisfying. It is, however, no way to win an argument, or the future. So, I’m learning to resist the temptation.
When it comes to the thinkers and activists who comprise the national-conservative movement, then, I call them by the name they chose for themselves rather than the ones I might prefer. Perhaps they will reciprocate by no longer calling the rest of us “neoconservatives,” “cuckservatives,” “Zombie Reaganites,” and the like. But even if they don’t, I’ll keep calling them National Conservatives. And regardless of what they do, we conservatives who disagree with their assumptions, views, and political program need a good way to describe ourselves.
Fusionism isn’t it. That term was never it. As explained by M. Stanton Evans, one of the founding evangelists of post-war American conservatism, the term fusionist “assumes the point at issue — that liberty and virtue are incompatible and can be brought together only by some tour de force that links them arbitrarily together.” On the contrary, he argued, the two are “hemispheres that form a whole, thematically and in the development of our institutions.” Another preacher of this gospel of American conservatism — call him the John Wesley to Evans’s George Whitefield — was National Review’s own Frank Meyer. Unlike Evans, Meyer did sometimes employ the term “fusion” early on but came to reject its implications. Meyer argued that the integration of virtue and freedom in modern conservatism was an “instinctive consensus,” not a strange, bicolored alloy forged in some intellectual’s furnace. “Denial of the claims of virtue leads not to conservatism but to spiritual aridity and social anarchy,” he wrote, while “denial of the claims of freedom leads not to conservatism but to authoritarianism and theocracy.”
If not fusionism, then what is the best name for a 21st-century movement that champions limited government, market economics, free trade, the rule of law, and the critical social institutions of family, faith, community, and enterprise that sustain a free and virtuous society? There is no shortage of possibilities. As has been long understood, what sets American conservatism apart from that of other lands is what we seek to conserve: The Founders’ radical idea that classical-republican virtues can and should coexist with what we now think of as classical liberalism. What worries many of us about National Conservatives is their manifest illiberalism, some of which is explicitly conceded to be “post-liberal.” So, does that make us Classically Liberal Conservatives? LibCons? Nah, that can’t be it.
In my own work, I’ve argued that describing American conservatism as fusionism imported the wrong metaphor from science. To make a long story short, there are three kinds of chemical bonds: ionic, metallic, and covalent. In the first, one or more electrons leave one orbit to enter another, producing positively and negatively charged ions. Both chemistry and your mother have something important to say about the resulting bond, however. Opposites do attract. But such a bond tends to be brittle under stress (the same ceramic cup you can’t tear apart with your bare hands will shatter if dropped on a hard floor). In metallic bonds, by contrast, electrons leave their orbits altogether to form a negatively charged “cloud” flowing around multiple nuclei. Metals can be strong and supple, yes, but only communists, fascists, and other cranks think human psyches can be so easily dissembled and reassembled into an undifferentiated mass.
The best analogy for healthy and sustainable political relationships is covalent bonding, in which atoms arrange themselves in often-complicated patterns so they can share the electrons required to complete their orbits. Alas, this concept also yields no useful label. Covalently Bonded Conservatives? CoBoCon sounds like the name of a nerd convention, or perhaps a shadowy defense contractor out to get Jason Bourne.
Some years ago, NR’s Charlie Cooke suggested the label Conservatarian. The argument was sound, but its end proved to be another kind of unlovely fusion. I rather like the simplicity and vigor of American Conservatives, and would love to call myself an AmeriCon, but I fear that the various iterations of MAGA have rendered such a label too confusing.
The best answer, I think, lies in the titles of the works I quoted earlier: Evans’s 1994 book The Theme Is Freedom and Meyer’s 1962 NR essay “Why Freedom?” Those on the right who remain indebted to and inspired by these arguments — and therefore tend to be skeptical about if not explicitly opposed to the claims and goals of National Conservatives — are best thought of as Freedom Conservatives. We believe, as Meyer wrote, that “the decisive criterion of any political order is the degree to which it establishes conditions of freedom.” That most emphatically does not mean, however, that freedom is all that matters to us, or that we believe all decisions made by free persons are of equal moral worth. Indeed, most FreeCons deny that the political order should be the central arena of human action in the first place. We believe virtue to be far too important, and its inculcation too crucial to individual flourishing and communal survival, to be left in the hands of government.
Keep in mind that, in the Western political tradition, freedom has multiple meanings. The late Rufus Fears, a University of Oklahoma professor and Lord Acton scholar, argued that there are at least three distinct concepts embedded within it: national freedom, political freedom, and individual freedom. The first, freedom from foreign control, is “the most basic concept of freedom,” he wrote. “It is the desire of a nation, ethnic group, or tribe to rule itself.” As for political freedom, it protects the “consent of the governed” and includes a wide range of voting rights and other procedural safeguards — including, at least in the American context, the separation of powers as well as the overlapping sovereignties of federal, state, and local governments. Finally, Fears described individual freedom as “a complex of values” that enable “the freedom to live as you choose as long as you harm no one else.”
Each has classical roots. Herodotus and Thucydides had much to say about what we would call questions of national identity and sovereignty. And in Book 6 of his Politics, Aristotle observed that freedom was “the basis of a democratic state” but defined it in two different ways: as political freedom (“for all to rule and be ruled in turn”) and as individual freedom (“a man should live as he likes.”)
Throughout history, few people have enjoyed all three forms of freedom at the same time. Smaller communities lost their “national” freedom by becoming part of a larger polity but retained some of their local political institutions or even gained some individual freedoms. Some monarchies or aristocracies ensured a large degree of national and individual freedom while giving average citizens no meaningful way to participate in government. And there are, of course, plenty of modern-day countries that feature both free elections and overbearing governments.
Of all the polities that have ever existed, the United States of America has come closest to offering all three forms of freedom simultaneously — to varying degrees over time, of course, and always imperfectly. We Freedom Conservatives venerate this American tradition and aspire to restore and build on it. We certainly do champion the freedom and sovereignty of our nation as well as the right of the people to populate American governments by democratic means, both principles that National Conservatives also champion. But we also champion the freedom of individual Americans to make more decisions for themselves. That means that even for services where government plays a large financial or oversight role, such as education and health care, consumers should enjoy as much freedom as possible to choose among competing providers. And FreeCons defend the freedom of individuals to buy goods and services from overseas rather than from domestic producers if they wish, or to engage in private conduct that even majoritarian governments have no legitimate power to forestall.
Evans was right: The common theme of America’s distinctive conservative consensus is freedom. There are copious references to it, variously defined, in the founding documents of the 18th century and in the rhetoric of subsequent generations of leaders. The same Ronald Reagan who said that “as government expands, liberty contracts” also said that “a nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation” and that “freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.” Other right-leaning leaders, including George W. Bush and Donald Trump, have used similar language at their best moments.
Does maximizing freedom solve all human problems? No! We are conservatives, not utopians. Is it a simple task to strike the proper balance between legislative and executive power, between low taxes and the adequate provision of core public services, between Washington and the states, between the political sovereignty of communities and the personal sovereignty of individuals? No! If free societies were easy to sustain, there’d be more of them.
As American conservatives see it, freedom allows us to pursue virtue. Virtuous behavior, in turn, helps to sustain our freedom. It is a reciprocal relationship. It is, however, far from automatic or guaranteed. Its preservation requires constant vigilance, and ongoing adaptation, and vigorous effort to strengthen the civil institutions that seek to transmit virtue and to ameliorate the consequences of vice.
Our country faces grave threats to our economic well-being, national interest, and social cohesion. To overcome them, the America of the 21st century needs what the America of Abraham Lincoln’s day experienced: a new birth of freedom. And the American Right needs Freedom Conservatives.