The Enduring Relevance of Fusionism

W ho wants to be a fusionist? National Review editor Frank S. Meyer’s famous template for conservatism has always been saddled with an unwieldy name, inviting confusion with both nuclear physics and culinary innovation. It is said that the name was coined not by Meyer himself but by his critical interlocutor and one-time NR colleague L. Brent Bozell Jr., who likely meant to imply that Meyer’s brainchild was less than it appeared to be: not an elegant synthesis, like the Scholasticism the more traditionalist Bozell favored, but an awkward middle-school science project. In this view, freedom and virtue can, perhaps, be forced together with rubber cement, but the result will be unsightly and not terribly useful.

Many have come to see fusionism this way in recent years, as populists demand a politics less accommodating of the fusionist coalition’s libertarian faction, or speculate that fusionism’s heyday has simply passed. Of course, fusionism has also had numerous defenders over the decades. But when proponents recommend it as a potentially promising template for conservative renewal today, skeptics snicker, in the way that one might laugh at a middle-aged man’s plea to get the old band back together.

The skeptics offer a seemingly endless list of reasons why a renewed fusionism cannot work. The libertarians already betrayed the social conservatives, selling out on same-sex marriage and other key culture-war issues. And the social conservatives fell prey to authoritarian hucksters, becoming caricatures of their more-principled predecessors. And the Left has captured all the institutions, swarmed the corridors of power, and left us so thoroughly beleaguered that nothing will now suffice but an unrestrained, take-no-prisoners resistance. And — this is the most important reason of all — Donald Trump became president, which simply changed everything. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a nostalgic Reaganite drone, desperately trying to reanimate the old-time religion.

I like old-time religion. But fusionism’s enduring relevance really has nothing to do with nostalgia, or pious reverence for the pre-Trump old guard. It’s simply a matter of good sense that the conservative movement should be built on something more than populist rage. Like many people, perhaps, I have spent the past several weeks thumbing back through histories and classic works of the American Right, and this is the point that keeps recurring. The populists were very wrong indeed to reject Frank Meyer’s old paradigm. Reading Meyer’s own summary of fusionism, his ideas seem to rise from the modern political landscape with a relevance that is obvious and even jarring:

Before the challenge of modern collectivism, hostile alike to transcendent truth and to individual freedom, traditionalist and libertarian have found common cause and tend more and more to work together on the practical political level. But further, the common source in the ethos of Western civilization from which flow both the traditionalist and the libertarian currents, has made possible a continuing discussion which is creating the fusion that is contemporary American conservatism. That fused position recognizes at one and the same time the transcendent goal of human existence and the primacy of the freedom of the person in the political order. Indeed, it maintains that the only possible ultimate vindication of the freedom of the individual person rests upon a belief in his overriding value as a person, a value based upon transcendent considerations. And it maintains that the duty of men is to seek virtue; but it insists that men cannot in actuality do so unless they are free from the constraint of the physical coercion of an unlimited state. For the simulacrum of virtuous acts brought about by the coercion of superior power, is not virtue, the meaning of which resides in the free choice of good over evil.

A popular theory nowadays holds that fusionism was successful in the mid 20th century only because the libertarians and traditionalists had a common enemy in the Soviet Union. It’s true enough that the literal existence of a godless, totalitarian empire was helpful for clarifying the dimensions and stakes of the fusionist project, and undoubtedly many things have changed over the past six decades: the USSR collapsed, we lost the War on Drugs, there was a housing crash and then a global pandemic, and young people started sexting instead of fornicating. We elected our first black president and our first reality-TV-star president. It’s a new day. And yet, freedom and virtue are still absolutely central to the Right’s most cherished causes. The Republican coalition is in disarray in large part because so many of our present factions refuse to see this.

Consider the issues that animate the Right just now. There is immense concern over the preservation of free speech, freedom of religion, and the freedom of assembly. In the angst over social media and the woke university, we can glimpse deep fears that an unholy alliance between the state and cheerfully cooperative progressive institutions might smother conservatives’ freedom of expression. Meanwhile, Covid-era restrictions gave us an unsettling glimpse of how ready some politicians were to seize quasi-despotic control over churches, small businesses, and schools, and how reluctant many were to let it go once they’d seized it. With an enormous national debt and increasingly unsustainable entitlement-spending commitments, the nation’s fiscal situation looks like a textbook illustration of problems anticipated by Friedrich Hayek. All of these, broadly speaking, are “freedom issues,” and they line up remarkably well with the concerns that the conservative movement championed for decades. We have not escaped the road to serfdom. Some things may change, but Americans have always wanted to be free.

Meanwhile, the culture wars continue to rage. For conservatives, the language has shifted a little but major themes remain fundamentally unchanged. The emphasis on personal responsibility has dimmed a bit since the Reagan years, and communitarian themes are more prominent today. Conservatives remain animated, though, by the belief that nature and tradition organically combine to lay the foundation for a civilized society. At our best, we are not reactionaries, but reflective preservationists. For decades now, American conservatives have worried that the moral core of Western civilization is eroding, and may be in real danger of disintegrating altogether. Sadly, that concern probably will not diminish anytime soon. Transgenderism presently represents the most lurid front in the Left’s assault on nature, but there will be more. Recent revelations about Canada’s chilling embrace of euthanasia have shown us one possible dystopian future. As technology advances, new forms of transhumanism will come up for debate, and young people will struggle to establish responsible life patterns. The pro-life movement still has many battles left to fight as well. These are “virtue issues,” and they are as relevant as ever. Our young people today have a palpable craving for moral authority that conservatives need to satisfy.

Fusionism raises some difficult philosophical puzzles. That has always been true. Freedom and virtue complement each other in significant ways, but there are also deep tensions between them, and protecting both in an incredibly diverse, complex society of more than 300 million citizens requires a difficult balancing act. Some measure of liberty is necessary for individuals to attain moral maturity; freedom also facilitates the virtuous person’s efforts to realize noble goals. In this sense, freedom and virtue are mutually supportive, and indeed must coexist if we hope to have a thriving civil society. But it is equally true that liberty must be ordered, lest it devolve into mere license. License engenders vice in the morally immature, and addiction, sloth, and unrestrained indulgence can become their own forms of slavery, not only for the vicious person but also for his victims and dependents. Freedom and virtue may both be good things, but there is nothing simple about establishing the conditions in which they both can flourish.

There is no need to sugar-coat that reality. Fusionism has always been under-defined, more a political project than a political theory as such, even though it reliably draws conservatives into discussions of political theory. In a room full of conservatives, merely uttering the words “ordered liberty” is often enough to spark vociferous debate, and that’s as it should be. Dynamic tension is a key part of this alliance, and indeed of the entire American political tradition. The Founders fiercely debated liberty and license, paternalism and virtue, and the competing demands of personal integrity and pluralism, just as we do today. In important ways, these debates have defined Americans as a people. We are the offspring of Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and John Locke, but our nation has also had a robust strain of Aristotelianism from its earliest years, embodied especially in communities of faith. If these elements can be neatly reconciled, the human race has yet to uncover the secret, but in the interim it may be enough just to leave all the pieces on the table.

What really undermines fusionism is not philosophical incoherence, but rather a lack of humility. The competing factions of the coalition can offer a valuable corrective to, and a moderating influence on, each other, but people do not always like to be corrected and moderated. Thus, the so-called New Right has gained considerable cachet from sweeping critiques of capitalism that used to be the province of leftists. This has led to some glaring errors, and effectively prevented the New Right from generating any sort of realistic platform or agenda. Markets are not sacred, of course, and it is certainly permissible to discuss the costs of market-driven economic change. But there are also excellent reasons to think that the nation, and conservatives especially, will regret it if we allow the state to metastasize without serious resistance. We cannot defend freedom simply by shouting indignantly whenever campus administrators or social-media moderators make decisions that displease us. We have to explain and apply the principles that underpin our indignation, too.

Of course, myopia is not a problem exclusive to the New Right. As social conservatives become more and more countercultural, some small-government libertarians have started fantasizing about the socially liberal, fiscally conservative paradise that many of them have always seen as the ideal. That dream inevitably grows in appeal as the religious “nones” continue to rise, and as the pro-life movement struggles to find its footing in the post-Roe world. But jettisoning religious traditionalists would be a bad mistake. Though they may be a minority in American society today, no other group is rooted in the same way in a rich and nuanced tradition, which supplies historical perspective and philosophical ballast as well as long experience channeling moral precepts into fights for worthy causes and, ultimately, political victories. It is fair to say that traditionalists are still reeling from some hard knocks in the culture wars. They need to recover their balance. If they cannot, though, then it is hard to imagine any robust form of ordered liberty thriving in America. Without their traditionalist allies, libertarians will always be a small, idiosyncratic minority.

Which brings us back to fusionism’s continued relevance.

Fusionists have always held that freedom and virtue were both essential-but-fragile goods that could easily be lost, unless committed defenders took pains to articulate their value and defend them. Does that sound like an idea whose day has passed? In a world where both goods are as imperiled as ever, I’d say not.

Fusionists have always held that liberty and virtue were both essential to human thriving, such that neither could be neatly subsumed by the other. Is that establishment pabulum? It sounds entirely reasonable to me.

Fusionists have always held that libertarians and religious conservatives had much to offer one another, in the seminar room as well as on the campaign trail. Is that “rotting-flesh Reaganism?” If it is, then I’ll sit back and eagerly await the zombie apocalypse.