The Great Divorce

A mericans are not ungovernable, but politicians, intellectuals, and administrators of all types have regularly dashed themselves on the rocks trying to get Americans to conform, to obey, to fill out their forms in triplicate, or to seek permission. In fact, this quality about the American people is so deep and so multifarious that the category of “libertarian” is inadequate to describe or contain the entirety of the impulse. Although they are today held out as antagonists and opponents, libertarians share this rebellious attitude toward authority with populists. But adding even that term still doesn’t cover the whole of it. There are also entrepreneurial and prophetic energies in American life, again as often opposed to each other as conjoined with one another. These also contribute to an anarchic, churning, irrepressible quality to American political life. Although the specter of “integralism” or political Catholicism haunts the minds of certain liberty-minded people who fear a handful of academics and Twitter accounts, the fact is that traditionalist Catholicism, as a religious movement, flourishes in the United States not because it is motored by an authoritarian in power, but because it’s a rebellious bottom-up movement, an entrepreneurial one, even if the enterprise is spiritual. Catholics telling their bishops to Make the Latin Mass Great Again aren’t all that different from cornpone prophets demanding that senators and their courting lawyers follow the Constitution.

The above is my own idiosyncratic formula for understanding the phenomenon of “fusionism” — the actual living combinations of virtue and liberty that Americans tend to produce the way carbonated drinks produce fizz. That phenomenon is, to my mind, very different from the theory of fusionism produced by Frank Meyer in the early years of National Review and roundly rejected by L. Brent Bozell in opposing essays also in National Review. And Meyer’s own theory is a different thing from the actual political allegiances, marriages of convenience, and occasional intellectual incest between political conservatives and classical liberals or libertarians.

Daniel McCarthy, who used to identify as a libertarian, recently wrote that libertarians were becoming irrelevant precisely because they’d had so much success in recent decades. There is an element of truth to his claims. But I think something else is happening.

The melding of political conservatism and libertarianism made a great deal of sense during the Cold War when it seemed like the New Deal state was captained by progressive intellectuals, and communism was arrayed against capitalism and private property altogether. The geopolitical need to ally the remaining democracies of Christendom against Sovietism favored security and trading arrangements that diminished sovereignty. Freer and more liberal trade was thus not just optimal for economic theory but also urgent as a form of diplomacy. For those who saw World War II as caused primarily by an excess of nationalism, free trade and collective security were moral imperatives.

To simplify things somewhat, the threat communism represented in the Cold War was a revolutionary power in favor of statist materialism. Libertarians hated the statism most, and conservatives the materialism.

As the Cold War becomes more distant history, there is an inclination to see former allies representing the very thing one feared about socialism. The issues of our time — mass immigration; further expansion of security arrangements; what to do, if anything, about foreign mercantile and industrial policy within globally merged markets — all tend to divide members of the Cold War coalition.

Fusionists who are more rooted in the liberal/libertarian tradition are suddenly reminded that conservatism was born as a defense of inherited institutions, including the state and nation. They see some conservatives’ rediscovery of their tradition’s original openness to tariffs, their devotion to the nation-state, and their reassertion of national sovereignty against arrangements that constrain it as only statism and nationalism — an echo of socialism, not a choice. Hayek’s essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative” could have been written today: “The liberal today must more positively oppose some of the basic conceptions which most conservatives share with the socialists.” He scolded conservatives for their lack of confidence in disruptive change, their lack of understanding of economics, and their distrust of abstraction.

Traditional conservatives look at libertarians and classical liberals and are tempted to see people who, like Marxists, believe Aristotle’s political man should be abandoned in favor of homo economicus. Marx also favored free trade, identifying protectionism as the policy of preserving nations. Many libertarians seem to celebrate, as Marx did in the Communist Manifesto, that capitalism disrupts and ultimately dismembers traditional social institutions. Friedrich List had called Adam Smith’s system “cosmopolitical economy” — economics that ignores the existence of nations. Ryszard Legutko’s book The Demon in Democracy was a personal account of how post–Cold War “liberals,” some of them his former allies against communism, seemed to share with Marxism a theory of how history should end: with the abolition of man from all inherited identities and loyalties, the very institutions in which conservatives believe true freedom for individuals is fully realized. Libertarians were, to conservatives, just as doctrinaire, self-certain, and ultimately intolerant as socialist fanatics. Robert Nozick described his vision as a “utopia of utopias” where “this morally favored state, the only morally legitimate state, the only morally tolerable one, we now see is the one that best realizes the utopian aspirations of untold dreamers and visionaries.”

Of course there will be rejoinders showing that not every single person inclined to one side or the other entirely rejects the values of the other. That’s true. And hybridity is common among intellectuals. But in general, the libertarian or modern classical liberal at best concedes the reality of the nation-state, as part of the facts of life, but celebrates the marketplace, and the traditional conservative respects the market as a reality but more readily honors the nation.

Even if conservatives and classical liberals are destined for a testy divorce from each other, they will each have challenges wrestling with homo Americanus.

Americans have a long record of not tolerating what they are told is the only tolerable thing. A man who resists paperwork might also resist the closing of his town’s factory as a legitimate market verdict, especially when the imports undercutting it were subsidized by the order of Chairman Xi. The imperious explanation that his loss of sovereignty and prosperity is just the price of greater aggregated gains on a universal level might strike him as just another form of imposter authority.

Similarly, the same American cussedness that first overthrew the planners of the Great Society, and has lately upset the planners of a frictionless and borderless world, will surely come and upset those who, in the course of trying to enhance national sovereignty or national cohesion, make pickup trucks and homes more expensive to produce and purchase. They will be reminded swiftly that people don’t just realize freedom within communities and as members of nations but also within their private property. That was a truth even anti-materialists such as Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton would acknowledge.

Americans will tolerate visionaries and fanatics, entrepreneurs and prophets as fellow citizens and love them as neighbors. But in government, ideologues tend to reveal in themselves an unlovely combination of moral confidence and intellectual righteousness. Here, the proud are almost inevitably brought low.