Freedom and virtue are essential complements to one another.
Freedom and virtue are essential complements to one another.
T hat both freedom and virtue are essential to human flourishing is one of the great truths of Western civilization and the Judeo-Christian ethic. The two can be in tension — freedom obviously subsumes the option to choose vice — but they are never in total conflict. Freedom is achieved primarily through the political world, and virtue primarily through intermediate institutions like family and church. Fusionism does not provide specific answers to many of the practical questions we face today, but it does provide a framework for thinking them through. It takes its foundations in theories of natural law going back centuries.
While the term “fusionism” has stuck, it should be remembered that it was coined by its opponents to attack the idea (nonetheless I will use “fusionism” in this piece as described in the first paragraph). It’s often suggested by current skeptics that fusionism may well have been an apt tool to fight communism, but its pragmatic value in that battle has become outdated.
That’s incorrect because it takes too cramped a view of the philosophy. Fusionism was indeed helpful in fighting communism, but it wasn’t — and isn’t — so limited. Its central ideas were true yesterday, are true today, and will be true tomorrow. My father, Frank Meyer, outlined them in his 1962 book In Defense of Freedom. One of the most ominous dangers to human flourishing is the concentration of unearned power in state actors — concentration that inevitably leads to favoritism and corruption. Robust individual freedom is one key to preventing such concentration. The other is virtue. Neither is spelled out in the back of the book; both require judgment.
Power exercised even — or perhaps especially — by democratically chosen rulers who don’t care about virtue erodes freedom because their indifference eventually helps weaken the moral backbone the governed need in order to resist. Likewise, “virtue” enforced by the state by squelching freedom will be false virtue, first because enforcement requires the use of power in a destructive way, and second because forced virtue is phony virtue: The individual does not make the ostensibly virtuous choice voluntarily. What all this shows is that not only are freedom and virtue not contradictory, but in the real world, they are essential complements to one another.
This matters today more than ever. The rift we see in the conservative movement presents questions about how to achieve political goals, and the related desire to use power for good even if it impinges on freedom and its allied institutional safeguards. We are urged to quit worrying about outdated fusionism, an idea designed for another time and the different problem of defeating communism. Today, it is said, we need to fight the encroaching takeover by a belligerent and authoritarian domestic left — a battle every bit as important as a pragmatic matter, even if “just” internal. The left has used power effectively if not ruthlessly, and if we don’t do the same, we are doomed to lose the battle with them.
It’s true that the cramped version of fusionism does not speak to this, but real fusionism does. Real fusionism still works because it aligns with human nature, and human nature hasn’t changed.
Still, skeptics will say, even if this is correct, what good will it do if we lose? Their argument, goosed by its urgency, is not without superficial appeal, but it embraces two fatal assumptions: first, that fighting the battle as they suggest is the best way to win it, and second, that once won, we will not have become the very thing we were fighting against. The answer lies in understanding that our history is both our strength and the best guide to a more wholesome future.
With all the faults that accompany any human enterprise, America exceeds the best of the countries to which it gets compared. To put it in one sentence, this is our 250th anniversary, and it’s the best 250 years the human race has ever had. The American Dream both gives life to and exemplifies much of what is most wholesome about the human spirit and human beings. No other country has attracted so much immigration, and none, overall, has welcomed immigrants so heartily. To a large degree, this is how America grew rather than by war and conquest. Its settlements flourished because the people who built them were grounded in both freedom and virtue. The rule of law embodied in the genius of our Constitution played a major supporting role.
Fusionism rests on a commitment to three things: freedom, virtue, and the rule of law. Those principles have provided our most important protections against the excessive growth and abuse of power. History teaches that it is the very rapture with power that usually destroys virtue no matter how much the goal was to safeguard it.
The America that has followed the principles of fusionism, supported in our Constitution, is an America worth the effort to preserve it. Recreating such a governmental structure once damaged by the ravages of time and a corrupted politics will prove difficult. Sometimes countries remain unified at the end, but even then, they sacrifice much of their dynamism in the process, and their people suffer. Often war breaks out, and afterward, the problems frequently remain if only in a different and often less tractable form.
This defense of fusionism may sound idealistic. Many bright young conservatives suggest that arguments from principle are promoted by fossils who don’t grasp the challenges of current times. And it’s true that the older generation sometimes tends toward fossilization — just as the younger one tends toward imprudence and hasty judgment.
It could be argued that truth and principle might prevail in the arid world of academic debate, but do they in the real world? Worry about the corruption of power justifies some concern, sure, but at the end of the day, the battle will be won or lost through power, determination, and a certain degree of ruthlessness. Those who see it differently might be nice guys, but nice guys finish last.
The catch is that American history and much of Western history paint a different picture. We didn’t advance from the rule of the jungle by adopting the rule of the jungle. Fusionist principles helped defeat both the Nazis and the communists despite mountains of pessimism about who would win. The most intellectually honest and perceptive writer of the time — George Orwell — said in the late 1930s that all talk of a third way was an illusion; every serious person knows it is a choice between socialism and fascism. The only question is which side are you on. The famously dour Whittaker Chambers, on breaking with communism and joining the West, feared that he had “left the winning side for the losing one.”
Both were wrong. You never know the future. The problems of any age may seem insurmountable. But our civilization and the American experiment to date have made astonishing progress in beating the challenges they faced, often against seemingly huge odds. Such challenges are hardly new. Consider A. E. Housman’s poem on a challenge to Western civilization going back thousands of years:
The King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;
Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air.
And he that stands will die for nought, and home there’s no returning.
The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.
Even in fiction, in The Lord of the Rings, the defense of civilization faces huge odds. Frodo asks Lady Galadriel to take the Ring because she would do good with it; she responds that, yes, “that is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas!”
That pessimism has turned out to be wrong in the past of course does not necessarily mean that it’s wrong now. But, appreciating that, it’s still important to stay grounded in what we’ve learned from the past and in fundamental principles supported by evidence. Indeed, it’s more important than ever where, as in today’s world, we see increasingly rapid change and a daily overload of information.
Most of the writing from young conservatives on fusionism has viewed it as outdated, but, fortunately, a very useful antidote has appeared. The recent book by Stephanie Slade, titled Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, displays a deep understanding of fusionism and the critical role it ought to play in our current dilemma. It’s precisely young conservatives who need to understand the dangers and temptations of power — and the structures created by the American experiment to contain them. (There is also a very good recent biography of my father by Daniel Flynn titled The Man Who Invented Conservatism.)
It’s always a subtle and difficult project to support proven, if ancient, principles against current demands. It requires both assurance about the importance of the principles and sensitivity to the felt urgency of the present threats. A successful civilization like ours gets those choices right.