Will today’s conservatives look to the fusionist founding father for how to fill the theory vacuum?
Will today’s conservatives look to the fusionist founding father for how to fill the theory vacuum?
W hither conservatism?
This question, even more so than who Republicans will nominate for president, animates discussions among intelligent conservatives who look to 2028. With personality rather than principle primarily captivating the rank-and-file right over the last decade, intellectuals jockey to fill not a power vacuum but a theory vacuum.
“We’re coming a little bit out of a period where fusionism, the sort of freedom conservative, has been kind of out of fashion,” Paul Mueller of the American Institute for Economic Research told The Hill last week from the Freedom Conservatism conference. “I think it’s going to come back into fashion.”
First, this imagined future must grapple with the actual past.
Last year, I wrote The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, a biography of the fusionist founding father. Posthumously, Meyer became the personification of an idea. To the extent that conservatives remembered him, Frank Meyer meant fusionism. That seemed not merely a simplification but a slur against history. The communist-turned-conservative lived not as an idea but as a human being, and a profoundly interesting one.
Meyer called for the violent overthrow of Ramsay MacDonald in Great Britain during the 1930s as he engaged in a clandestine romantic relationship with the prime minister’s youngest daughter. Prior to his predictable deportation, the head of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s student bureau became a cause célèbre who attracted support from future prime minister Clement Attlee, philosopher Bertrand Russell, and Passage to India and Howard’s End novelist E. M. Forster. His charisma enraptured the anonymous before they became famous: Novelist James A. Michener begged for his friendship, Indian statesman Krishna Menon rigged a London School of Economics student government election for his benefit, New Republic publisher Michael Straight marched around London chanting “Free Frank Meyer,” a pre–National Review William Rusher referred to him as “the Master,” and essayist Joan Didion credited him with publishing her first freelance work.
But his big idea managed to overshadow his big personality.
Fusionism, ironically, is national conservatism — the outlook often pitted against it in 2026. It recognizes that conservatives preserve the special traditions of the places from which they hail. Maybe an Italian conservative might conserve Catholicism and an English conservative might conserve the monarchy. What sticks out in the American tradition as most worth conserving? The answer to Meyer was clear: the American founding. And what stuck out about the American founding? One of Meyer’s most accomplished intellectual heirs, M. Stanton Evans, put the answer on the cover of an important 1994 book, The Theme Is Freedom.
Freedom rested on centuries of Western civilization; strip away that heritage, and watch liberty collapse. Virtue, impossible under coercion, required choice. The traditionalists and libertarians, in other words, needed one another.
Like Meyer himself, fusionism experienced a colorful history. And like Meyer’s colorful life, the history of fusionism remained obscured for many decades.
Its origins lie not at a conservative conference but in the Communist Party.
In 1943, after he washed out of the army and as he recuperated from training injuries sustained therein, Meyer implored American Communist Party head Earl Browder for “a conscious effort pervading all our work to make our Party constitution real when it speaks of our theory as the fusing of the ideas of the American leaders with the ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin.”
In 1943, as a Stalinist, Meyer writes the peculiar word “fusing,” a variant of the word with which he became synonymous, to describe the attachment of a political theory with the American founding.
Meyer understood that the 1930s popular-front party that proclaimed “Communism Is Twentieth Century Americanism” exerted more influence and attracted more of his fellow countrymen than the iteration that more overtly appeared as a satellite support group for Russian Communists. He wanted the party to revert to that red-white-and-blue communism.
He further wrote, again using a variant of “fusion,” to Browder:
A people’s America and a socialist America must be presented all the time — not simply in an occasional article or on the 4th of July — as a natural, integral outgrowth of our whole past history, and presented in terms of our tradition. And this will only come about when our leaders from top to bottom are as familiar with the struggles of Jefferson and Jackson and Lincoln, and what we have inherited from those struggles, as they are with 1848, 1902, 1917, and fuse these understandings into one tool.
The five-page letter at once disrupted the Communist Party and provided the provenance for an idea that transformed American conservatism.
Within months, the Communist Party became the Communist Political Association; Meyer, who had run the Chicago Workers’ School, now taught at New York’s Jefferson School; and “The Star-Spangled Banner” replaced “The Internationale” to start meetings. Moscow, upon understanding their wartime ally as a peacetime enemy, essentially ordered a Russification of the Americanized party shortly after Franklin Roosevelt’s death. The party defenestrated Browder. His acolyte, Frank Meyer, voluntarily walked out the door by 1945’s end.
As a fanatic, Stalinist Frank Meyer imagined that Marxism could mesh with the American founding. In repose as a former communist but not yet a conservative, Meyer grasped that Marxism clashed with the American tradition.
So, then, what idea did fuse with the American founding?
The question animated Meyer’s last quarter century. The question animated Meyer’s last quarter century. Fusionism, the idea that — along with Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and much else — inevitably helped lead Meyer away from the Communist Party, brought him to conservatism. The germ of fusionism started, the way so many theories do on the left, as a utilitarian construct. In time, it owed to something organic — a history that developed over time and not one instantly wished into existence. Neither a theorist’s imagination nor a foreign soil fueled it. Instead, fusionism rooted itself in America and the West from which it sprang. In its distilled, simplistic form, it saw the Founding as America’s big tradition and freedom as the Founding’s big idea. Thus did traditionalists and libertarians unite in a common cause. By convincing traditionalists and libertarians, despite (or because of) the natural tension between their outlooks, to cooperate rather than remain in conflict, fusionism forged an effective political coalition. In a very simplified form, it served more or less as the default philosophy of American conservatives from Barry Goldwater through Ronald Reagan.
Like the sex-secret-agents-and-Stalin Meyer bursting out in 3-D, fusionism’s provocative provenance makes it more interesting and attractive, not less. Nevertheless, a “who moved my cheese?” quality colors reaction to new information brought forth by The Man Who Invented Conservatism in terms of both Meyer and his political theory. This same dumbstruck response from fusionists greets the new century’s reality that competing strains of conservatism — a few quite difficult to trace back to a common ancestor — displaced fusionism’s centrality.
For partisans of would-be conservatisms that look to Budapest or Rome or points more exotic for inspiration, it seems worth reflecting upon the rootedness of fusionism in the founding of this country. For Dr. Mueller and others who issue optimistic forecasts of a fusionist comeback, they must come to terms with a difficult phenomenon for conservatives: change.