‘Fusionism’ explores the tensions between liberty and virtue in conservatism

A Republican president waged an unpopular war in the Middle East and threatened to erode civil liberties at home. He was also jacking up federal spending, expanding the welfare state, and running large deficits. “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move,” this president told union workers in Ohio, whose votes he had not long ago pursued by raising tariffs.Many of the president’s media and intellectual allies thought this was a good thing. “They simply believe in using what would normally be seen as liberal means — activist government — for conservative ends,” an influential conservative journalist wrote at the time. “And they’re willing to spend more and increase the size of government in the process.” The name for this political tendency? The president was “a big government conservative.”In response to these trends, a libertarian magazine editor urged his fellow travelers to stop thinking of themselves as operationally part of the Right. The mainstream conservative movement, he wrote, had become “the greatest advocates of an imperial foreign policy, of massive defense spending and of invading people’s homes in the names of the Wars on Crime, Drugs and Terrorism.” Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the American Right; By Stephanie Slade; University of Notre Dame Press; 291 pp.; $30.00 Surveying all this, a young conservative writer lamented that fusionism was fraying. When it all came crashing down after a devastating election loss, Mike Pence concluded, “We did not just lose our majority, we lost our way.”Ripped from the headlines as this might seem, this all happened more than 20 years ago. The president was George W. Bush, the war was in Iraq, the conservative journo was a founding editor of the Weekly Standard, writing in the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, the libertarian was the late editor of the now-defunct Liberty magazine, Pence was a House member, and the young writer lamenting the sad state of fusionism was me. (That’s how you know it was a long time ago.)It all seemed newly relevant as I read Stephanie Slade’s excellent new book Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right. Slade, a senior editor at Reason, is writing in a similar time in which the fusion of traditionalism and libertarianism that has animated modern American conservatism for decades is seemingly coming apart.But the more things stay the same, the more they change. Among the key differences: Bush’s steel tariffs were wee things compared to President Donald Trump’s Liberation Day levies, though the Medicare prescription-drug benefit was not small by any means; Iraq at least happened in the aftermath of a bloody terrorist attack on U.S. soil; many Bushies thought of themselves as part of the fusionist tradition, to the extent that they thought about it at all; many in the “Dissident Right” Slade discusses at length do not, but they opposed Bush if they were of age and developed at least some of their ideas in reaction to his perceived failures.The Bush-era welfare-warfare state adventures were often explicitly defended as advancing freedom. The opening of the Iraq war was called Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the overarching foreign policy dubbed the freedom agenda. “The essence of Bush’s big government conservatism is a trade-off,” Fred Barnes observed at the time. “To gain free-market reforms and expand individual choice, he’s willing to broaden programs and increase spending.” Trumpian proponents of greater conservative use of political power don’t talk this way, preferring instead to say, “You can just do things.”It was often the libertarian critics of Bush administration excesses who saw themselves as being outside the fusionist umbrella. But as late as when libertarian-tinged conservatism experienced a revival — a moment, even — a decade later under Bush’s Democratic successor, the journalist Ben Smith described it as “the split between Liberty Conservatives and Freedom Conservatives.” (In a great unifying moment for the Right, most conservatives replied, “Huh?”)The history of Fusionism goes back much further than this, when the Right was also having debates similar to the ones raging now but without much political power to show for it. Libertarians and traditionalists alike railed against the postwar New Deal consensus to little immediate effect. “Yet neither of these views would manage to establish itself as the dominant philosophy of American conservatism,” Slade (which she actually prefers to be called!) writes. “Instead, a blending of the two — a synthesis of libertarianism and traditionalism eventually labeled ‘fusionism’ — became the intellectual foundation on which the conservative movement in America was built.”Slade differentiates fusionism from the “three-legged stool” description of the conservative political coalition with which it is often confused, the latter describing the Right as an alliance or mixture of economic, social, and national security conservatives who found common cause during the Cold War. But fusionism does help explain at a theoretical level why American conservatives were and remain people who tend to respect traditional values and question the growth or centralization of government.Substantial credit goes to Frank Meyer, “the eccentric midcentury National Review editor” and “reformed communist who saw the error of his ways and went on to articulate a vision of American conservatism in which liberty and virtue are both non-negotiable.”“A fusionist,” Slade continues, “recognizes that each of these philosophical orientations is prone to excesses and requires balancing out by the other.” She later acknowledges, “Despite that warning, Meyer could fall prey to libertarian excess.”That’s not where the excess now mainly lies, Slade argues. And indeed, Slade’s employer, Reason, has historically been a non-fusionist libertarian magazine, but many of its younger staffers are at least somewhat conservative. But much of the New Right — that is, the new New Right of the Trump years, not the direct-mail conservatism that traveled under that name in the 1970s — believes the country suffers from too much liberty and not enough virtue. Like Christopher Walken treating his fever with cowbell in a Saturday Night Live skit, to them, the only cure is more government.“Politically this is where the Dissident Right goes astray: Its adherents seek not to shrink the state but to control it, not to level the playing field but to tilt it in their own direction,” she writes. Many of them would plead guilty as charged, contending that rewarding one’s friends and punishing one’s enemies is simply politics.Fusionism has always been about managing the inherent tension between liberty and virtue, while too many of its proponents write and speak as if a perfect synthesis was achieved sometime in Ronald Reagan’s first term. This has created space for conservatives who question whether traditionalist ends can really be achieved by libertarian means and vice versa. Fusionism should have more to say about community, civil society, and solidarity, but the focus in practice has often been on government versus the individual. This has created space for conservatives who believe fusionism has given short shrift to things like national sovereignty or the family, but the overcorrection has been almost instantaneous. Slade lists a variety of would-be theocrats, monarchists, and others who would prefer that America had a radically different founding than the one our country actually had. While the influence of such people can be exaggerated, it is sufficient to be a liability to the Right. But much of this is so implausible electorally that it will likely be a problem that solves itself, especially if it comes to define the more populist and nationalistic variants of conservatism Slade generally dislikes.Fusionism has more pressing problems than the postings of Bronze Age Pervert. It has become difficult to cut taxes at the national level without increasing the debt, undermining their pro-growth effects and the broader conservative argument for fiscal responsibility. Republican presidencies are now synonymous with war in the Middle East. Conservative leaders were never able to build the necessary consensus for entitlement reform when they wanted to, and have now been replaced by those who don’t want to, just as these programs teeter on the brink of insolvency.2026 MIDTERM ELECTIONS LIVE UPDATES: LATEST NEWS, RESULTS AND ANALYSISIt is possible that the most productive forces on the Right that see themselves as enemies of fusionism will help restore it by pointing toward the necessity of winning popular support. Should the three-legged stool be rearranged to give social conservatism the primacy once enjoyed by the economic variety and perhaps now claimed by the hawks? As socialism rises, is the hyperglobal economy the most politically defensible form of free markets to present as an alternative?You don’t have to agree with Slade’s answers to these questions to find the history laid out in Fusionism valuable and the storytelling impeccable. She is a smart, principled voice in a dumb, opportunistic time. But times have been bleak before.W. James Antle III (@jimantle) is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.