Why Bill Buckley’s Ideas Still Matter

For a long time, conservatives had a pat story about their political inheritance. The Right was formless, fractured, a collection of irritable mental gestures — and then William F. Buckley Jr. founded this journal, bringing the various respectable strands of conservatism together and discarding the others. The resulting synthesis came to be known as “fusionism,” which combined elements of classical liberalism and classical conservatism or, in another common formulation, of traditionalism and libertarianism.

 “What gradually happened was a felt acknowledgment that the two strains were not mutually exclusive,” Buckley wrote here in 1995. The libertarian-minded conservatives came to appreciate that the liberty they prized required a cultural infrastructure that in turn required tending. The traditionalist-minded conservatives came to regard overweening and centralized government, especially when married to progressive ideology, as the principal threat to the civilization they cherished. Each came to regard the other as useful allies. And so “little fusionists would be born and baptized from coast to coast.”

With Frank Meyer as its theorist, William Rusher and James Burnham its strategists, and Buckley its impresario, public face, and coalition builder, fusionism would move from triumph to triumph: taking over the Republican Party, then winning the White House, then changing American government. Its political leaders were first Barry Goldwater, then Ronald Reagan, then Newt Gingrich. It grew ever more dominant inside the Republican Party.

Until, that is, the last decade. In taking over the Republican Party, Donald Trump shattered the old Buckleyite consensus. He has neglected its themes — he rarely speaks of limited government or the Constitution — and rejected some of its associated policies. And a subset of his biggest fans reject fusionism as impotent, counterproductive, and, worst, passé. (These fans are to be distinguished from those who celebrate him as a combative and canny advocate of goals that previous Republicans only mouthed.)

Where fusionism’s previous enemies on the right chiefly complained about its social conservatism, its Trump-era foes reject its support for free markets, or at least reject the vehemence of that support. Trump’s victories have encouraged them in their political project, not unreasonably. Some speak of fusionism, and occasionally even Buckley himself, as part of the ash heap of history.

And yet.

The major accomplishments of the first Trump administration fit comfortably in the Buckley/Reagan tradition. The tax reform he signed, largely written by then–Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and like-minded colleagues, cut tax rates for individuals and corporations. Alongside then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, he stocked the federal judiciary with conservatives. His appointees, working with those of previous Republican appointees such as Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, have applied the law to scale back race-based affirmative action, expand religious liberty, and allow restrictions on abortion.

The Trump administration, to the applause of conservatives, also exercised much more regulatory restraint than its predecessors. A less heralded but notable success for economic conservatives was a negative one: Trump was the second president since the U.S. enacted a minimum wage not to have it rise during his time in office. (The third would be Joe Biden.)

Trump has given signal after signal that his pending administration will continue to pursue such pro-market policies. During the campaign, he repeatedly promised to make the tax cuts he signed last time permanent and to couple them with new tax cuts for corporations and for various categories of workers. The second-term initiative that has aroused the most popular excitement is Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s crypto-libertarian campaign to slash government waste and defang the administrative state. Trump’s nominees for key regulatory positions, such as the chairmanships of the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, seem to have more modest conceptions of their role than their Biden-appointee counterparts.

Social conservatives, meanwhile, can look forward to the reversal of Biden administration policies such as those that push educational institutions to class student athletes by their “gender identity” rather than their chromosomal sex. Taxpayer funding of elective abortion, which Biden supported, will presumably now be off the table. To the extent the federal government influences civic education, there will be more emphasis on American ideals and less on American oppression.

The fusionist synthesis is even stronger in the red states than it is in national politics. School choice is perhaps the paradigmatic fusionist policy: It takes its modern inspiration from the libertarian economist Milton Friedman, it aims to break up a government monopoly, and it gives parents more say over the upbringing of their children, including their religious upbringing. The last few years have been the best ever for this cause: The American Federation for Children reports that in the last two years, 24 states have expanded school choice programs.

Economic and social conservatism are making other strides in state politics. Nearly every state with a Republican legislature and governor has reduced its tax rates and flattened its tax code. Since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, a dozen states have banned nearly all abortions. Four more states have banned it after six weeks, and two more states have bans that are tied up in court. Nineteen states have prohibited puberty-blocking drugs. Fusionism, in short, remains alive and well in practical politics. Indeed, one can reasonably say that it is having its heyday right now.

It is true, on the other hand, that some Trump policies had an ambiguous relationship to fusionism. The Reaganite consensus was broadly in favor of free trade but always had some give in it. Goldwater voted against the Kennedy round of tariff reductions without compromising his reputation as a conservative; Reagan and George W. Bush engaged in some protectionism to protect sensitive industries; and conservatives spent much of the 1970s and 1980s arguing for tighter controls on exports to communist countries. Even Mitt Romney, in 2012, campaigned on tariffs in retaliation against Chinese currency manipulation. Fusionist conservatives have also been split on immigration, with this magazine firmly in the restrictionist camp since the early 1990s.

These partial departures from past Republican orthodoxy were also only partial successes — if that. A casual glance at the relevant data, as well as rigorous economic studies, found that Trump’s tariffs neither reduced the trade deficit nor revived manufacturing employment (which were his principal stated rationales for them); nor did they impel the Chinese government to make serious reforms. The costs to the U.S. economy, while not disastrous, outweighed the benefits. Trump’s first term brought about no lasting improvements in immigration policy even on restrictionist terms: no wall was built, employers faced no more serious sanctions for hiring illegal immigrants, asylum law remained unchanged. The public largely rejected his inhumane experiment with large-scale family separation as an enforcement strategy.

If we have a largely inaccurate understanding of fusionism’s fall, it is in part because we have come to have a misleading picture of its rise and reign. From reading some of the analyses, you would think that in the decades prior to Trump, Republicans had been eager to downsize entitlement programs. This is far from true, as reflected in Buckley’s comment in that same 1995 NR article that Social Security had become “more untouchable than Christian dogma.” Bush’s effort to reform the program in 2005, and Paul Ryan’s to reform Medicare in 2011–12, were brief departures from the Republican norm. Trump’s disavowal of any interest in reform was a return to that norm — albeit in the much worse fiscal and demographic context that those earlier Republicans had tried to head off.

The point generalizes: The state of conservatism in 2012 was unusually libertarian and unusually fixated on the perspective of entrepreneurs, for reasons having to do with conservatives’ reaction to the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies; and a lot of populist criticisms of conservatism before Trump are really critiques of the conservatism that immediately preceded his rise rather than of the previous decades of it. Elaborations of how the actual past of conservatism differed from current caricatures could fill volumes — and, in the better histories, already have. Suffice it, here, to say that the idea of a conservatism attuned to blue-collar Americans would not have shocked Ronald Reagan or, for that matter, anyone involved in Buckley’s 1965 mayoral run.

Or note that opposition to affirmative action isn’t something that earlier generations of conservatives had neglected out of fear of being called racist or from lack of interest in cultural issues: It was a cause taken up by such mainstream conservatives as Henry Hyde and Bob Dole — and some of the most powerful early critiques of it came from the neoconservatives who have in recent years been misremembered as interested in nothing other than maximizing GDP and the spread of democracy.

In the context of the larger story of conservatism in America, the Trump phenomenon looks in part like a course correction: He brought the Republican Party back to a less doctrinaire and more politically prudent economics, and closer to the concerns and views of the median voter, after a period in which it had drifted away from both. This achievement is something that neither his most fervent supporters nor his critics have wanted to recognize, intent as they have been on seeing something novel and glorious or novel and monstrous in his politics.

To say that pre-Trump conservatism had to change is not, of course, to say that all the changes have been for the better. Nor does it mean that all of 2012 conservatism should be abandoned — which, as I’ve tried to show, it has not been. (Dare I say that we should seek to fuse the best of pre-Trump and Trump-era conservatism?) Conservatives should welcome debates over what our trade policy toward China should be and whether the federal government should change its policies to enhance U.S. manufacturing capacity. One sign that such debates fit well within the mainstream conservative tradition is that a recent statement of “national conservative” principles had among its signatories a former president of the American Enterprise Institute and a former editor (and current contributing editor) of this journal.

To throw out our basic skepticism of government or our orientation toward free exchange — or, worse, to give up on the U.S. Constitution as irrecoverable or defective, as the most febrile factions of the Right toy with doing — would, however, be a catastrophic mistake. For it is still the case, even after decades of alleged free-market extremism, that many areas of American life need freer markets and less government involvement. The higher-education cartel benefits from massive subsidies and regulatory support; pruning back that support and clearing other pathways to good jobs should be part of any agenda to improve opportunity for the young people our system serves poorly. Housing regulation, especially in the bluest areas of the country, have placed homes out of reach for many young families and suppressed the number of construction jobs available. One of the politicians who have noticed this last point, by the way, is Vice President–elect JD Vance.

The hardiness of fusionism may owe to something that Frank Meyer emphasized: that the concept was not his invention but a deduction from the national experience. Conservatism’s founding story about itself, which starts the action in the 1950s, can obscure that point. That’s one reason Matthew Continetti is wise to begin his recent history, The Right, in the 1920s, which allows him to quote Calvin Coolidge’s observation, on the 150th anniversary of the document, that “about the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. . . . No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.” He was grounding individual liberty and limited government in eternal moral truths or, rather, explaining that the Founders had already done so. Brent Bozell and M. Stanton Evans were not the first Americans to be preoccupied with questions of freedom and virtue.

I don’t mean to suggest that all is well in rightworld, or that I think it is. Some of what’s wrong comes up in the essays that follow this one. But I am not especially worried about the future of fusionism. At no point in the last seven decades would most conservatives have described themselves as fusionists or been familiar with the term. As a practical matter, though, conservatives were engaged in a fusionist project. They still are. Fusionism is embattled but not vanquished, much like the nation and the civilization it sprang from and means to serve.