Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right
By Stephanie Slade
Notre Dame, 291 pages, $30
For centuries, conservative thinkers have asked themselves: Where did it all go wrong? A few of them have settled on impersonal historical transitions like the agricultural or industrial revolutions, but most answers have tended to involve wrong turns in thought: the Gnostics, William of Ockham, Machiavelli. As Richard Weaver put it in the title of his 1948 book (the locus classicus of the “blame Ockham” narrative): Ideas Have Consequences. Among other advantages, this approach assigns a heroic role to the conservative intellectual, whose intervention might well prove capable of righting the course of history once again.
Stephanie Slade’s Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right is a new entry in this genre that also examines the careers of several earlier practitioners, Weaver among them. For Slade, our current malaise dates to a relatively recent fall from grace: the political rise of Donald Trump and the seduction of the American right by ideologies associated with his MAGA movement. Her concern is less with how nefarious ideas have gained traction—she seems to regard MAGA-aligned intellectuals as opportunists rather than substantive thinkers—than with how what she regards as a beneficent idea was abandoned by her fellow conservatives. That idea is “fusionism,” the brainchild of Frank Meyer, the ex-communist, National Review editor, and co-founder of the American Conservative Union.
Meyer’s core idea, Slade writes, was the “fusion of liberty and virtue.” Fusionists, she says, hold that “questions about the pursuit of virtue … ought to be decided by individuals and families” and “ought not be decided by the state, which in a well-functioning society has the narrower mandate of protecting basic rights and liberties.” MAGA and its fellow travelers, she believes, have fatally strayed from both precepts, disdaining virtue—for one thing, by elevating a man so obviously lacking in it—and at the same time pursuing the aggressive deployment of state power to achieve their ends.
For Slade, it is important that fusionism be understood as “a philosophical synthesis, not a political alliance.” The latter understanding is often cited as grounds for dismissing it as outmoded: an ideological artifact of the Cold War era, when free marketeers, religious conservatives, and hawkish anticommunists made common cause to defeat the Red Menace. Fusionism aims to show that the titular worldview is no mere strategic alliance, but an enduringly true normative account of human affairs.
By Slade’s account, fusionism possesses a cohesiveness its would-be successors lack. The groups she calls “theocons,” “natcons,” and “neoreactionaries” all define themselves against fusionism to varyingly explicit degrees, but as she notes, their objections are often at odds with each other: Some on the MAGA right lament that the fusionist right failed to “use … government force to create a more virtuous world,” even as others are openly contemptuous of Christian morality, whether in theory (Bronze Age Pervert’s neopaganism) or practice (Trump’s own general impiety). In terms of Slade’s core dichotomy, while elites often seem drawn to Trumpism as a vehicle for the authoritarian imposition of virtue, many voters seem to appreciate its libertarian—and libertine—bent. Hence, paradoxically, right-wing intellectuals began to flirt with ideas like making divorce illegal even as the GOP base was becoming more pro-gambling and pro-weed.
Slade is more honest than other Never Trump conservatives about the contradictions and conflicts that plagued the conservative movement in earlier eras. She discusses the illiberal views and authoritarian sympathies of many of the leading figures of the National Review era, including Meyer himself. She quotes Richard Weaver writing enviously of the “discipline” enforced by Soviet authorities, in contrast to the moral chaos of the democratic West. But, she argues, under Meyer’s influence Weaver became more skeptical of state coercion. Something like this even happened, she claims, with a key Meyer antagonist: William F. Buckley’s Franco-admiring brother-in-law Brent Bozell, who although never altogether comfortable with Meyer’s libertarianism, focused in operational terms on “voluntary cooperation through civil society institutions” as a “consummate institution builder.” Meyer’s fusionist vision, Slade says, eventually prevailed over its rivals and became coterminous with American conservative ideals.
Returning to the original question, where did it all go wrong? After fusionism’s triumph, why did the GOP fall so precipitously to Trump? Never Trumpers who remain loyal to fusionism have tended to answer in two ways. The first is to claim that it didn’t go wrong at all—that the displacement of an older, more virtuous version of conservatism by the Trumpian heresy is something like a historical accident: the result of misinformation, perhaps, or other contingent factors. The second is to claim that “real fusionism has never been tried,” that it was undone by its compromises with big government, rather than by flaws in its basic ideological framework.
To her credit, Slade offers a more nuanced picture of fusionism’s shifting fortunes. As an electoral project, she argues, it reached its zenith in the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who praised Meyer as a “great thinker” early in his first term. But she also shows that Reagan was less of a fusionist in practice than many of his admirers and detractors believe. She highlights in particular his failure to curb the growth of government spending, which led to the massive ballooning of federal deficits. She also acknowledges this was a concession to a reality many conservatives prefer not to face up to: Shrinking government just isn’t very popular.
“Shrinking government just isn’t very popular.”
In this area, Slade reluctantly admits that Trump is less of a deviation in practice from Reagan than it might seem. “In a few areas,” she even concedes, “Trump has arguably hewed to Reagan’s campaign promises more faithfully than Reagan did”—especially when it comes to cutting and defunding disfavored government programs. At the same time, he has also “been a shameless profligate” when it comes to spending—but something similar was true of Reagan, as Slade admits. The difference, she seems to think, was that Reagan and other earlier GOP leaders at least “made gestures … to the importance of basic fiscal responsibility,” whereas Trump doesn’t.
Again, conservatives limited themselves to making “gestures” because such cuts are perpetually unpopular. The fusionist view that shrinking, privatizing, or eliminating Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid would enhance the liberty and virtue of the American citizenry makes little sense to most American citizens. The reason for this is, in part, a measure of what might be seen as fusionism’s success. The expansion of personal, professional, and entrepreneurial liberty in modern America has been very real. Yet the society forged by this vastly expanded freedom is also afflicted by precarity and vulnerability. Entitlements at least theoretically mitigate that condition, offering an island of relative certainty. Fusionists may perpetually lament this fact, but it is a stubborn one that Reagan acceded to—as, later, did George W. Bush when he retreated from his widely reviled plan to privatize Social Security. A decade later, Trump capitalized on this fact by bucking the Republican party line on cutting entitlements. What Slade calls the “timeless American idea” of fusionism seems incapable of responding to this political reality.
When we turn to the newer issues facing the body politic, a similar inadequacy emerges. The most dramatic case concerns artificial intelligence, which has become one of the central issues in American politics. It is an interesting and revealing fact that the “conservative” position on AI is radically unsettled. The Trump administration has largely adopted an accelerationist stance, and plenty of right-of-center thinkers can be found who will argue that such an approach is in line with the longstanding principles Slade puts under the heading of liberty: essentially, minimal state intervention in economic activities. Yet as Gregory Conti has argued several times in these pages, a conservative should regard the laissez-faire approach as seriously flawed and possibly catastrophic when it comes to AI. The reason for this is that the inventors of AI openly seek to bring about a revolution more radical than any previous one in history, one in which humanity is reduced to a state of dependency far more absolute and abject than welfare dependency.
At one point, Slade mentions that the conservative sage Russell Kirk referred to automobiles as “mechanical jacobins.” She treats this as a sign of his personal eccentricity, but Kirk was hinting at a serious point: Material and technological forces, and not just ideas, have consequences. What should the fusionist, who seeks to balance liberty and virtue, have to say about a revolution carried out not by statist ideologues but by entrepreneurs in the private sector? Like many conservatives, Slade tends to treat liberty as something that can only be curtailed by governments; subjugation by privately owned technological systems doesn’t figure in her account. But judging by the surging revolt against data centers and Flock cameras, many Americans take the prospect of private coercion seriously. Until it can speak to this concern, fusionism isn’t likely to make a comeback.