Where Has Conservatism Been — and Where Is It Going?

‘I f this account has a main character,” Stephanie Slade writes in Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, “it is Frank Meyer, a little-remembered but extraordinarily influential National Review writer and editor.”

She had me at Frank Meyer.

I spent an awful long time writing a book about who Frank Meyer was. Slade spent an awful long time writing a book about what he believed. For the uninitiated, Meyer, a former communist leader, espoused fusionism as a contributor and then senior editor at National Review for its first 17 years and through his slim but dense 1962 book In Defense of Freedom.

Slade’s Fusionism stands as the greatest bound exposition of Meyer’s big idea since M. Stanton Evans’s The Theme Is Freedom. Whereas Evans’s focus therein on history subtly imparts fusionism to readers, Slade presents a more full-throated case for fusionism through an emphasis on theory and policy. Not merely Meyer but Friedrich Hayek, Ronald Reagan, and Russell Kirk play starring roles in the narrative.

“Properly understood, fusionism is a marriage of two value sets or intellectual lineages, not merely an alliance of political factions,” Slade explains. “To be a fusionist is to cherish both parts of America’s civilizational patrimony.” That lineage includes the more libertarian-inclined exponents of freedom and the more traditionalist champions of virtue.

Formal reviews, which accumulate rapidly, offer a more comprehensive analysis of Fusionism. It seems worth pointing out here a few of Slade’s especially perceptive observations regarding where the conservative movement has been and where it now goes.

Politically, Slade posits that fusionism, given its triumph within Ronald Reagan’s GOP, acted as the victim of its own success. With both no need to defend the victorious and the compulsion for posterity to scapegoat past philosophies because of current political failures, fusionism became more of a passive punching bag than a fighting faith as the new century progressed. She correctly sees Pat Buchanan as the philosophical forerunner of Donald Trump. She concedes “a rhetorical extremism” to MAGA but points out a “supremely flexible” stance on policy, a point so recently buttressed by the president’s plan for a federal payment of $5,000 for every adult.

Philosophically, and deeper into the weeds, Slade grasps the shift missed by others in Ideas Have Consequences author Richard Weaver’s transformation from Southern agrarian to fusionist during his 15 or so years as a leading thinker on the American right. He influenced Meyer first; Meyer probably influenced his friend to a greater degree. She observes here what others overlook.

Slade offers a helpful guide for where virtue should take primacy over the freedom side of fusionism, and where freedom should take primacy over the virtue side:

The distinction between the governmental and nongovernmental spheres is crucial because it helps us know whether, in a given instance, we ought to be prioritizing liberty or virtue. When talking about public policy — whether it should be illegal to work on Sundays, for example — libertarian ideas should be our guide. (No, failing to keep holy the Sabbath should not be punishable by law, because it is not a proper function of the state to enforce virtue.) But when approaching questions in our personal and professional lives — whether to heed our marriage vows, for example — we should look toward traditional morality. (Yes, we should be faithful to our spouses, because there are more important things in life than maximizing individual freedom.)

Whereas Meyer famously debated Brent Bozell in National Review’s pages in 1962 on the state of the movement, Slade points to such present-day philosophically questionable factions as “right-wing progressives” and “will-to-power conservatives” that seek to seize the rudder of a rudderless right. “Today, there are whole generations of young Republicans who can’t define ‘fusionism,’ who think ‘conservative economics’ has always meant Trump-style protectionism, and who imagine that they are the first to ponder the importance of concepts such as ‘ordered liberty’ and the ‘common good,’” Fusionism points out. “This is particularly tragic because of how steeped in philosophy the American conservative movement once was.”

The retreat from an undergirding philosophy explains much. Printed words once fueled young conservatives. Now pixelated images, many of them featuring very good-looking people with less attractive brains, do. Not authors but influencers, not thinkers but TikTokers, and not as much Stephanie Slade as Savanna Cannon occupy an increasingly central role on the political right. This stems not from any inherent defect in conservatism but instead from a broader societal shift in which we skim more than read and watch more than skim. Conservatism, which never succeeded in limiting government to the boundaries Frank Meyer set down of defense, courts, and police (what Bozell ridiculed as his friend’s “holy trinity” of the state), seems especially impotent to reverse a trend that has led to fewer than half of Americans reading even a single book annually.

If this desolate intellectual landscape fuels pessimism for a fusionist revival, then the structure of fusionism gives hope. What tradition, precisely, do American conservatives aspire to conserve? This question seems as inevitable as its answer. Any American conservative who ponders what he or she seeks to conserve necessarily comes back to the Founding and its meaning: freedom. Such epiphanies tend to occur during transitions between one ruling clique and whatever takes its place. In other words, soul searching on the right comes sooner rather than later.

As conservatives look for a guide more reliable than the whims of a charismatic leader or a reflexive opposition to leftism, fusionism looks more attractive. As Slade writes, “Fusionism need not be seen as a rigid ideology offering a universally applicable solution to every problem; it can instead be treated as an ideological framework for thinking through how best to approach different issues.” The elasticity gives it lasting power beyond whatever trend momentarily captivates on YouTube shorts and X posts. It also relieves conservatives from their peculiar current circumstance: dogmatism minus an underlying dogma.