Reviewed: Stephanie Slade, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right (University of Notre Dame Press, 2026).
What does American conservatism stand for? Over the past decade, it has certainly seemed as if it doesn’t stand for conserving much of anything. From 2016 onwards, Republicans have been the party of the “elitist system is rigged and broke” line and its follow-on: “only an outsider New York billionaire can fix it.” Glenn Elmers no doubt spoke for many in the MAGAverse when he declared that “conservatism is no longer enough!” because “practically speaking, there is almost nothing left to conserve.” Only a complete re-founding of the country can return America to what it once was— where the purity of McDonald’s and KFC Kings on every corner is restored, and the decadence of Joli Bee and Chipotle is banished for good.
As a work of scholarship, this book is of a very high quality. But as a rehabilitation of fusionism, it is unconvincing.
Stephanie Slade’s new book Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue and the Future of the American Right aims to bring the right back to 80s basics. Not retvrn, but rather the era of Return of the Jedi is its aspiration. Slade has a deep nostalgia, though apparently not quite as deep as Elmers’s and company, and with a different object in mind. The object of Slade’s nostalgia is the good old days when conservatism stood for Reaganite pieties and the fusionist philosophy of Hayek, Buckley, Frank Meyer and the classic National Review canon. Slade is well placed to make such an argument. A senior editor at the libertarian flagship Reason magazine and a devout Catholic, Slade has written a crisp and valuable history of fusionism that will be of great value to scholars of the political right. As a work of scholarship, this book is of a very high quality. But as a rehabilitation of fusionism, it is unconvincing.
Getting Liberty and Virtue Into Bed Together
Slade describes fusionism as a “synthesis that combines two rich strands of philosophical thought: the classical liberal political tradition and the Judeo-Christian moral tradition.” Slade argues that for fusionists “…liberty and virtue are the two pillars on which a good society rests. Both are necessary to human flourishing, and each fortifies the other; if either is allowed to decay, the whole society becomes structurally unstable, and both may be lost.”
Slade contends that this fusionist synthesis was the philosophical core of American conservatism for a long time, and she contends it served the country (and the world) well. Much of Slade’s book is a fascinating and well-written history of fusionism as an intellectual movement, with considerable asides that look at practical politics. She begins with a discussion of the founding figures.
The most significant of these is Frank Meyer. Little known to non-conservative philosophers, Meyer was a giant on the American right who did more than anyone to enact the fusionist synthesis. He began his career as a literate communist before, in his telling, becoming dissuaded by reading F.A. Hayek. Upon moving right, Meyer brought a convert’s zeal to proselytizing against his old creed, becoming a framing figure of gestating mid-century conservatism. His main achievement was theorizing the aforementioned fusionist synthesis—though Meyer himself did not call it that—by reconciling classical liberalism with forms of traditionalist conservatism. The former tradition tended to strongly emphasize the importance of freedom, especially in the economic realm. The latter tradition was more wary of freedom as a good in itself, associating it with libertinism and a lack of concern for the virtuous ends humanity should set for itself. Meyer was able to harmonize the two by arguing that a high degree of personal freedom was a necessary prerequisite for individuals to live virtuously. As Slade says:
Meyer’s view was that government should prioritize liberty (in the sense of freedom from coercion, aggression, and fraud) so that the human person, and the vast array of nongovernmental institutions that people might form, can aim at virtue. A state that puts virtue first—that goes beyond the essential functions of protecting life, liberty, and property and that is willing to overrule the individual’s right to choose how to live, not just when he is threatening someone else’s freedom, but “for his own benefit”-is flirting with tyranny.
Slade goes on to acknowledge that Meyer’s synthesis always faced pushback from different wings of the conservative movement. Hayek himself had a considerable degree of respect for the functional role that conservative religious norms could play in a society but never identified with them in any meaningful way and famously rejected being labelled a conservative. On the other flank, traditionalists like Russell Kirk and the radical-right Catholic Brent Bozell expressed deep reservations about the moral purity of liberalism (and, in the latter case, even offered apologias for authoritarians like Francisco Franco). Many of these battles were carried out in the pages of the flagship National Review, presided over by William F Buckley—who did much to reconcile these competing factions on the right.
But by and large, Meyer’s fusionism prevailed, in no small part because, through the mid-20th century, American conservatives felt surrounded by far more significant enemies than one another. The New Deal and Civil Rights movements were ascendant. Through the 1960s, a New Left emerged which seemed to demand even more radical changes to the American social fabric. And, of course, looming over all this was the Red Menace: a major, nuclear-armed, communist state that wanted to spread its godless ideology across the world.
Staying united worked for American conservatives, who in the late 1960s began to break further into the mainstream despite their preferred candidate, Barry “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice” Goldwater, losing badly in the 1964 presidential election. Slade clearly thinks that the halcyon days of fusionism occurred under the Reagan administration. She acknowledges the Gipper did oversee big deficits and big prison populations, but nevertheless displayed an “intuitive libertarianism [that] was evident throughout his career.”
Slade clearly thinks that the halcyon days of fusionism occurred under the Reagan administration.
And, of course, Reagan also won big elections and was, for a time, extremely popular. Slade attributes much of this to Reagan’s personal virtue, lauding his “…decency, humility and optimism [which] stand out sharply in contrast to the cruelty, vulgarity and apocalypticism often on display in the Trump-era GOP.” His commitment to liberal politics and personal virtue helped Reagan defeat the Soviet Union and might have inaugurated a better world for all. Slade describes it like a scene out of one of the Westerns that Reagan might have starred in when he was still an actor:
A national renewal of leadership and moral authority is more or less what Reagan eventually accomplished. He rose into the sunset of his life with Soviet communism a thing of the past and the disintegration of the American liberal order nowhere in sight. By the time Francis Fukuyama published his famous tract, The End of History and the Last Man, the sense was pervasive among educated Westerners that liberal democracy had vanquished totalitarianism once and for all. If this was a screenplay, the credits would roll here, at fusionism’s apex moment. Alas, history is not a movie…
Alas, it was not. And history probably didn’t feel much like a movie for the doubtless millions of people that Reagan cheerfully marched into chains, either. At the end of the Reagan/Bush years, there were more people imprisoned in “free” America than the totalitarian Soviet Union. But at least you’d never catch Reagan talking about shithole countries…
Reckoning With the Legacy of American Conservatism
Slade’s book would be somewhat strengthened by a more realist description of the ideological needs that the work of Meyer and others fulfilled.
As a history of conservative intellectuals and their permutations, Slade’s book is of great interest. It would be somewhat strengthened by a more realist description of the ideological needs that the work of Meyer and others fulfilled. By focusing so heavily on individuals, whether intellectuals or the President, Slade tends to understate how and why the different factions of American conservatism organized around fusionist themes and propagated them in the first place. Oftentimes, she conveys the rise of fusionism as something close to an organic mobilization of virtuous and concerned citizens.
For instance, Slade describes how, from fusionist “conviction,” came “a veritable explosion of conservative education and advocacy groups, nearly all of them deeply influenced by Meyer’s fusionism. From the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (later renamed the Intercollegiate Studies Institute) in the fifties to the Fund for American Studies and the American Conservative Union in the sixties to the Heritage Foundation in the seventies and the Federalist Society (co-founded by Meyer’s son Eugene) in the eighties, these groups formed a thriving institutional ecosystem that continues to this day.”
What Slade ought to have said is “a very well-funded institutional ecosystem that continues to this day.” One that has received enormous support from those who saw “War on Poverty” and interpreted it as “War on my Yacht Fund.” In his book Taking America Back, David Austin Walsh describes how early conservative magazines were lavished with seed money from grateful millionaires. This enabled them to sustain themselves even when subscriptions were low, and therefore provided the comfortable digs from which manor-born Yale graduates like Buckley could present themselves as brave rebels against the system.
In The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, Steven M. Teles makes clear that some of the major reasons why organizations like the aforementioned Federalist Society gained ground over the 1970s were a combination of enormous anger towards the growing welfare state, alongside fear of advancing civil rights and feminist movements. These resentments coagulated into a movement capable of one day delivering Citizens United and the Dobbs decision (which Slade applauds) in no small part because they were lavished with enormous sums of money from the wealthy. A bunch of Socratic free thinkers bravely resisting elite power they were not. Describing the real “secret” to the Federalist Society’s success, Teles makes clear it isn’t having an especially thoughtful constitutional philosophy. It’s the “…diversity in its sources of support, in particular the (financial and in-kind) contributions of its members and the long-term support of conservative foundations.”
But the more important flaws appear in Slade’s defense of fusionism, which flows from many of the same instincts that lead her to wish history had indeed ended the year The Tonight Show with Jay Leno aired. There is a deep nostalgia for a time when conservatives were allegedly so committed to freedom that they’d fund every dictator who believed in it enough to throw elected socialists out of helicopters, and so virtuous that every one of them would only refer to Cardi B’s song “WAP” by talking about “the ‘P’ word.” I, for one, do not in fact think that the fusionists were especially committed to either freedom or virtue. It is closer to say they believed in freedom up to the point where it contravened those virtues they believed in, and they got to decide when too much freedom lapsed into immoralism.
I, for one, do not in fact think that the fusionists were especially committed to either freedom or virtue.
Take fusionism’s most emblematic movement man, William F. Buckley. Slade admirably acknowledges that Buckley had flaws—for instance, when “…applying fusionist principles to America’s midcentury racial reckoning.” But she clearly has a real soft spot for him, lauding “…Buckley’s warmth and magnanimity.” Yet sadly, the warm and cuddly Buckley insisting that whites, as the “advanced race,” were entitled to disenfranchise blacks was not a one-off (perhaps it is less egregious if one appreciates that Buckley also didn’t want poor whites voting). As far-right activist Nate Hochman gleefully reminded us in his God and Man at Yale, Buckley rejected the importance of academic freedom of speech. He insisted instead that academics ought to teach the right “values,” by which, of course, he meant his own.
In his 1986 article “Crucial Steps in Combating the Aids Epidemic; Identify All the Carriers,” Buckley mused that one way to combat AIDs was that anyone “…with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.” Lest one think this was all in good homophobic fun, a “…Scarlet letter, but only for homosexuals.” Buckley concludes this article by insisting that he is in no way kidding about any of this. And that’s before we get into Buckley’s many charming paeans to conservative dictators around the world, from Franco to Pinochet. Apparently, it was permissible to coerce virtue every now and then. When one looks closely at what figures like Buckley actually believed, much as when one looks at what Reagan actually did, what becomes clear is how predictable the rise of someone like Trump was.
When one looks closely at what figures like Buckley actually believed, much as when one looks at what Reagan actually did, what becomes clear is how predictable the rise of someone like Trump was.
Now, without a doubt, Buckley’s powdery use of a thesaurus might be more intellectually stimulating than listening to the Auron MacIntyre Show’s 10,000th description of white genocide. But were Buckley still alive, the two would have plenty to agree on when it comes to the importance of dictators like Franco gunning down communists and republicans in the tens of thousands. Yes, Reagan may have described America as the shining city on the hill rather than wasting gallons of water producing Mark Carney memes and renaming Lake Ontario. But Reagan still propped up continent-spanning dictatorships and offered support to Saddam Hussein, the precursors to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and many other unsavory groups and regimes besides. All in the name of making the world a little safer for all of those who wanted to fire tens of thousands of working-class people who dared to strike for better conditions.
It is noteworthy that, in fusionist thought, freedom and virtue are thought to be self-reinforcing, but equality is nowhere to be seen.
The problems are not just practical but philosophical—and they get to the root of why Meyer’s fusionist synthesis is unattractive. It is noteworthy that, in fusionist thought, freedom and virtue are thought to be self-reinforcing, but equality is nowhere to be seen. But one cannot take freedom and virtue seriously without a commitment to equality, since it is from that commitment that we learn to appreciate that everyone’s life is equally sacred. The achievement of this egalitarian view is what Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor stresses in his important Cosmic Connections. It is what, Taylor argues, elevated the ethics of modernity over those of pre-modernity.
The fusionists ignored this ethical imperative. Throughout their history, they endlessly supported vulgar causes in the name of upholding the right of the “advanced” races, countries, and individuals to make decisions for their alleged inferiors.
It is admirable that Slade recognizes that we cannot go on this way, and that she wants to set the country right. But doing so will not mean walking back. Rather, it will mean taking a different and more virtuous road entirely.
In so doing, fusionism helped pave the road to a Trumpist end. It is admirable that Slade recognizes that we cannot go on this way, and that she wants to set the country right. But doing so will not mean walking back. Rather, it will mean taking a different and more virtuous road entirely.
Matt McManus is an Assistant Professor at Spelman College. He is the author of The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, What is Liberal Socialism?, and other books.
Image created using “Donald Trump,” by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic. All other images used are in the public domain.
