Book Review: The once and future Fusionism

Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right

Author: Stephanie Slade

University of Notre Dame Press (2026). $30.00 (hardcover) $23.99 (eBook)

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The Whig-Republican American political tradition and the conservative movement that grew up alongside it—or at least a faction thereof—has sought to promote American life by joining together commercial growth and public virtue. This trendline passes through anti-slavery Whigs who sought to unite national markets with “internal improvements,” Gilded Age pro-temperance Protestant Republicans who like their Whig forebears sought to build (and get rich) on transcontinental projects, stodgy “return to normalcy” 1920s New England Republicans who cut spending and at least publicly upheld Prohibition, Robert Taft- and Dwight Eisenhower-era post-New Deal pro-business and suburban-order types, Nixon-era Republicans who put the brakes on progressives’ Great Society dreams while declaring war on drugs, Reaganites who cut taxes and unsuccessfully cracked down on pornography, Bush-era conservatives who also cut taxes and got the government in the business of faith-based initiatives, and even Trump-era figures who have tried to gut certain regulations while opposing novel “gender identity” practices.

But intellectuals don’t like historical trendlines, or longstanding practices, or a “long tradition of existence” that is often observed in the breach. They like ideologies—full-spectrum, all-encompassing Weltanschauungen that spring forth from human Reason without compromise. And it is there that we encounter “fusionism,” mid-20th-century ex-Communist conservative writer Frank Meyer’s attempt to systematize the (apparently) odd alliance of ideological libertarians and dispositional conservatives into a proper ideology. As formal, ideological fusionism of the Meyer-ite sort recedes in American electoral politics, Reason Magazine senior editor Stephanie Slade has written Fusionism, a book detailing the ideology’s postwar intellectual history and setting it up as superior to alternative forms of right-wing ideology found in American Compass-style nominally socially conservative progressivism and the identitarian fanaticism of the “dissident right.”

The emergence of fusionism

The fundamental question that faced mid-20th century right-of-center intellectuals like Meyer was this: Is the historical American right-of-center alliance between those of a conservative disposition—those interested in public virtue—and those of a libertarian disposition—those interested in personal freedom, especially economic freedom and entrepreneurship—natural or contingent? That is, was it a consequence of both philosophies aligning in important ways, or of historical factors such as the existence and power of the Marxist-atheist Soviet Union in the mid-to-late 20th century?

Meyer, and those who took after him, concluded the answer was “natural.” Slade argues that Meyer saw himself as describing a pre-existing conservative consensus; the name “fusionism” was derogatory and coined by his institutional rival Brent Bozell (the father of the Media Research Center founder and second Trump administration’s Ambassador to South Africa), a radical Catholic traditionalist and admirer of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.

In Slade’s telling, Meyer’s fusionism rose in influence within the American right, overcoming the challenge from Bozell (who suffered from serious mental-health conditions through most of his later life) and culminating in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Since Reagan’s departure, the true faith has been lost — a former Reagan official is quoted condemning a speech by George W. Bush for abandoning fusionist principles — and now the gates of Hell, in the form of a new generation of “national conservative” progressives and an identity-obsessed (when not outright racist and anti-woman) “Dissident Right,” might prevail against it.

How different is now?

I can only reservedly endorse Slade’s book; the intellectual history of the Meyer-Bozell feud is interesting to people like me who find that sort of history interesting, and the broader right would be wise to heed Slade’s warnings about the “dissident right.”

But I question a few analyses. Specifically, I don’t quite understand why President Reagan gets the fusionist seal of approval, but his Republican successors don’t. Reagan’s government was open to using state power to promote virtue (see for instance its expanded War on Drugs and the Meese Report condemning pornography and proposing policies to combat it) and spent like a drunken sailor on its military buildup. Fundamental reforms to New Deal programs were not a priority of a president who was a proud New Deal Democrat in his youth, and they were not undertaken; the 1983 Social Security amendments raised taxes to shore up the program’s finances, hardly orthodox libertarianism.

The George W. Bush administration wasn’t that out of step with Reagan’s fusionism-in-practice. It broke with fusionist doctrine (to the extent such a thing exists) on health and education spending and spent like a drunken sailor on the Global War on Terror, but enacted tax cuts and a Taft-Hartley Consensus labor-relations policy. Like Reagan’s, Bush’s administration sought to promote virtue using state power with little success. Even Donald Trump’s administrations, together the least “fusionist” Republican administrations since Richard Nixon’s, have sought to blend a deregulatory agenda favorable to commerce and economic freedom with its statist trade tariffs, and they have stumbled into a “this far and no farther” approach to public vice, curbing the Biden administration’s aggressive transgender promotion while tolerating gambling and brain-rotting short-form video platforms like TikTok.

Swiftian normality

If the current right-of-center environment is more in line with the classical Whig-Republican political or fusionist ideological tradition than intellectuals think, why might that be—and why might intellectuals think wrongly? For that, we must resurrect a concept from a retired internet personality and pseudonymous Taylor Swift fan expounded in the mists of two years ago: “Swiftian normality.” Cut to its essence, the concept centers on “inoffensive, law-abiding, upwardly-mobile, middle-class culture” as a social aim.

In a largely secularized and highly religiously pluralist society, that quadrivium might be as close as one can get to “virtue” on which most people can agree. But if that is the virtue target, the political class is too often not aimed at virtue. On the right, this manifests in a strange dynamic described by former political commentator Peter Spiliakos. He writes (I have edited the formatting from a Twitter/X thread):

What you have going on is a segment of rightwing elites making a bad bet. The bet goes like this: Trump is a bad person (they know this) who says wild things, therefore the next big thing will be even *worse* people saying even worse things and the ambitious should find these people and get on board. […] They [conservative elites] have lost confidence that they can discern what will be popular and they know that they will eat crap and call it ice cream if that’s what it takes to keep their foundation job or talk show. They are, in every sense, demoralized. They have given up on both judgment and courage but their careerism has failed them. […] This segment of the right-intelligentsia are not wrong to suspect that they are out of touch. They are. And thinking that the social media nutcases are the next big thing are an example of that phenomenon rather than the remedy for it.

Distilled, the conservative intellectual movement, the people who would feature in a future volume of Fusionism, has lost its confidence and in many cases its connection to reality—or at least to the Grill Dad Republican whose interests it claimed to represent. Spiliakos identifies one species of these confidence-losers; those who channel the French revolutionary quoted as saying, “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” And when the loudest people online are the “dissident right” types, and when the sitting President of the United States has spent ten years blowing through moral scruples without obvious consequences, then the only thing holding one back from leading the dissidents is fear for one’s immortal soul.

But Spiliakos outlines only one of several paths a rudderless conservative intellectual might take. Not all will follow the mob; some will seek affirmation from their erstwhile intellectual opponents, which is where the Continuity Never Trump Army and the Hewlett Foundation grant-seekers have wandered. Others, perhaps most notably the “integralist” successors to Bozell the elder’s ultramontane Catholic reactionism, seek to deploy Trotsky’s tactic of injecting a minority faction into positions of control in a larger movement to redirect its priorities and orientations to break the longstanding alliance between commercial interests and public (if not, given history, necessarily private) virtue.

To the extent our Grill Dad Republican character can be discerned, that “inoffensive, law-abiding, upwardly-mobile, middle-class culture,” perhaps with a smattering of old-fashioned, small-c, change-averse conservatism is probably a reasonable place to start. To the extent he favors “non-fusionist” policy or “offensive culture,” it’s probably because it’s the only way back to that culture he can conceive. He must be shown a better way, just as the original fusionists showed his grandfather a better way in their time.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/book-review-the-once-and-future-fusionism/