Wikipedia Deep Dive

Fusionism

8 min read

In the 1950s, a group of intellectuals gathered around William F. Buckley Junior's National Review magazine and attempted something audacious: they tried to merge two political philosophies that seemed fundamentally incompatible. One camp believed in tradition, social order, and virtue enforced through cultural norms. The other camp championed individual liberty, free markets, and minimal government interference. The synthesis they created became known as fusionism, and it would define American conservatism for the next half-century.

The architect of this intellectual marriage was Frank Meyer, an associate editor at National Review. Meyer had himself made what Ronald Reagan would later call "the awful journey" out of communism, and his experience with totalitarianism shaped his thinking profoundly. He understood the dangers of concentrated state power. But he also recognized that pure libertarianism, with its sole focus on individual freedom, lacked the moral and cultural foundation necessary for a healthy society.

The Core Philosophy

Meyer's most influential work, In Defense of Freedom, laid out his vision. He defined freedom in what the philosopher Isaiah Berlin would call "negative" terms: freedom meant minimizing coercion by the state. The government had exactly three legitimate functions: police, military, and operating a legal system. All three existed solely to prevent one person's freedom from intruding on another's. Everything else should be left to individuals.

But here's where fusionism gets interesting.

Meyer argued that virtue was absolutely critical for society to function. He believed freedom must be balanced by responsibility. The tension? Both freedom and virtue were inherently individual in nature. You couldn't force someone to be virtuous through government coercion. Coerced values, Meyer insisted, cannot be virtuous by definition. A government that tries to legislate morality defeats its own purpose.

Yet freedom without moral grounding leads nowhere. As Meyer put it, freedom by itself has no goal, no intrinsic end. It's not an abstract utopian ideal like the utilitarians imagined. In a real society, traditional order and freedom must exist together, or neither can survive.

Meyer's solution was to embrace the tension. He called it "grasping the dilemma by both horns." Accept that freedom and tradition pull in different directions, but recognize that both are necessary. Create a philosophical synthesis that honors both values without trying to dissolve the creative tension between them.

The Reagan Revolution

Fusionism might have remained an academic curiosity if not for Ronald Reagan. An early reader of National Review and personal friend of its editors, Reagan took Meyer's synthesis and made it the governing philosophy of the modern conservative movement.

When Reagan assumed the presidency in 1981, he invited conservative leaders to Washington and gave them a lesson in their own intellectual history. He rattled off names: Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Ludwig von Mises. But he devoted special attention to Frank Meyer, who had died just a decade earlier.

Reagan described Meyer's achievement: "He fashioned a vigorous new synthesis of traditional and libertarian thought, a synthesis that is today recognized by many as modern conservatism." Then the president explained what this meant in practice.

We do not have a separate social agenda, separate economic agenda, and a separate foreign agenda. We have one agenda. Just as surely as we seek to put our financial house in order and rebuild our nation's defenses, so too we seek to protect the unborn, to end the manipulation of schoolchildren by utopian planners, and permit the acknowledgement of a Supreme Being in our classrooms.

This was fusionism in action: free markets, social conservatism, and a hawkish foreign policy, all bound together by a coherent philosophy. Reagan's presidency represented the high-water mark of fusionist influence. He successfully held together the coalition of libertarians, traditional conservatives, and anti-communists that Buckley had assembled decades earlier.

The Cracks Begin to Show

The 1994 Republican takeover of Congress marked another fusionist peak. But the coalition was already beginning to fracture. During George W. Bush's presidency, the social conservative wing appeared ascendant, at least in domestic policy. Bush called his approach "compassionate conservatism," which included new government programs like the prescription drug entitlement.

This enraged the libertarian wing. Increased spending violated their core principles about limited government. Meanwhile, the Iraq War exposed long-simmering tensions between neoconservatives, who supported aggressive democracy promotion abroad, and paleoconservatives, who favored a more restrained foreign policy.

The 2006 midterm elections delivered a stinging defeat to Republicans. Some political observers began calling for a new fusionism, this time between libertarians and liberals in the Democratic Party, united by opposition to government interference in private life. The 2008 financial crisis and Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 further strained the libertarian and social conservative alliance.

Many fusionists blamed Bush's departure from fusionist principles for these defeats. They argued that compassionate conservatism, with its acceptance of big government programs, had betrayed the movement's intellectual foundations. A return to fusionism, they insisted, was necessary to reclaim the presidency.

Then came Donald Trump.

The New Fusionism

Trump's election in 2016 scrambled the traditional fusionist formula. Some commentators described the resulting ideology as a "new fusionism" that combined traditional conservative positions with right-wing populist themes. This new synthesis embraced national conservatism, protectionism, and cultural conservatism. It favored a more realist, less interventionist foreign policy. It explicitly rejected neoconservatism and showed little interest in rolling back entitlement programs. It also displayed, according to critics, a conspiracist subculture and a disdain for traditional checks and balances.

Whether this represents an evolution of fusionism or its complete repudiation remains hotly debated.

The Critics Speak

Fusionism never lacked for critics. Ironically, one of the sharpest critiques came from Russell Kirk, one of the very thinkers Reagan had cited as a founding father of modern conservatism.

Kirk, quoting T. S. Eliot, dismissively called libertarians "chirping sectaries." While conservatives and libertarians both opposed collectivism and the bureaucratic state, Kirk argued they had nothing else in common. He saw the libertarian movement as "an ideological clique forever splitting into sects still smaller and odder, but rarely conjugating."

The fundamental divide, in Kirk's view, came down to worldview. Conservatives believed in "some sort of transcendent moral order," while libertarians were "utilitarians admitting no transcendent sanctions for conduct." You couldn't bridge that philosophical chasm through clever synthesis.

Kirk also attacked libertarians for treating capitalism as an absolute good. Economic self-interest, he argued, was insufficient to hold a society together, much less preserve order. By glorifying the individual, the free market, and the ruthless competition for material success, libertarianism undermined community. It promoted materialism. It eroded appreciation for tradition, love, learning, and aesthetics—all the things Kirk believed made civilization worth preserving.

Libertarians fired back. Activist Jerome Tuccille drew a philosophical contrast: "Libertarianism is basically Aristotelian: reason, objectivity, individual self-sufficiency. Conservatism is fundamentally Platonic: privileged elitism, mysticism, collective order."

Author Carl Bogus identified concrete policy disagreements that fusionism papered over. Libertarians wanted completely unregulated markets. Traditional conservatives worried that unconstrained big business could impoverish national life and threaten freedom. Libertarians feared a strong state as the primary threat to liberty. Traditional conservatives believed a properly constructed strong state, with power distributed across different branches, was necessary to ensure freedom.

These weren't minor quibbles. They were fundamental disagreements about the nature of freedom, virtue, and the good society.

The Current Moment

Since 2014, fusionism has faced intensifying attacks from a new quarter: Catholic integralists and postliberals. By 2018, these critiques had entered mainstream conservative commentary. The integralists reject fusionism's attempt to separate individual virtue from state power. They argue for a political order explicitly oriented toward the common good as defined by Catholic social teaching, even if that requires using state power to promote virtue.

This represents a direct challenge to Meyer's core insight that coerced values cannot be virtuous. The debate echoes the original tensions that fusionism tried to resolve, suggesting that the synthesis was always more fragile than its proponents claimed.

What Made Fusionism Different

To understand fusionism's significance, it helps to see what distinguishes it from adjacent ideologies. Neoconservatism, for instance, is more comfortable with government power when deployed for conservative ends. Paleoconservatism emphasizes cultural traditionalism and skepticism of foreign intervention. Pure libertarianism prioritizes individual liberty above all else, including traditional social arrangements.

Fusionism's distinctive move was giving equal weight to both traditional morality and free markets. Not free markets in service of tradition, not tradition constrained by libertarian principles, but both as co-equal values held in creative tension. This made fusionism uniquely American—an attempt to honor both the nation's revolutionary commitment to individual liberty and its inherited cultural conservatism.

The question facing American conservatism today is whether that synthesis can survive the polarization and populism of the current era, or whether the tensions Meyer identified as productive will instead tear the movement apart.

Some prominent conservatives who engaged with or criticized fusionism include L. Brent Bozell Junior, a traditionalist Catholic writer; Ayn Rand, the novelist and founder of Objectivism who clashed with both traditional conservatives and libertarians; Murray Rothbard, the libertarian economist; Patrick Buchanan, the paleoconservative commentator; and more recently, Sohrab Ahmari, opinion editor of The New York Post and a leading voice of the post-liberal right.

What these figures share is a recognition that fusionism posed the central question of American conservatism: Can freedom and virtue coexist without one subordinating the other? Meyer's answer was yes, if you're willing to live with the tension. Whether that answer remains viable is the question conservatives continue to wrestle with today.