Might the "New Right 5.0" Be the Old Fusionism?

Anyone who studies fusion energy will know that the physics of fusion are easy to describe, but practical fusion engineering is exceedingly difficult. That's one reason the standing joke in the energy world is that fusion power has been 10 years away for the last 50 years.

The same could be said of "fusionism," and the modern conservative movement: theoretical treatments of the fusion of individual liberty (and free markets) with traditional or Burkean conservatism are abundant, but engineering this fusion sustainably in practical politics has always been difficult. The hot plasma of fractious intellectual sects is breaking out of the containment field. Conservative "fusionism" is forever thought to be a promising and necessary endeavor, but always seems to be out of reach and abandoned. Nowadays, fusionism is regarded as a musty relic of a bygone era. But maybe it could have its day again?

The question is newly salient in the wake of Ross Douthat's widely noticed New York Times speculations on how a "post-Trump new right" might be constituted. Douthat's premise is that the second Trump presidency marks the definitive end of previous iterations of conservatism. Douthat assumes that there is no going back to a recognizable version of pre-Trump conservatism but suggests that one of several current and conflicting vectors may emerge as the dominant factor in the post-Trump era. Among them are Silicon Valley technologism, heartland Protestant or integralist Catholic Christianity, ethno-nationalism, outright "Caesarism," foreign policy realism, a paternalistic industrial policy, and pro-natalist ideology. "Trump's unique status as a personalist vessel for incompatible ideas has postponed some of these questions," Douthat thinks.

Like any forecasting exercise, Douthat's is indeterminate, aside from his own preferences for a watery soupçon of the best face of some of his various threads, so much so that you can almost audibly hear the air coming out of the balloon by the end of the article. Largely missing from his inventory of possibilities are some hitherto core principles of conservatism over the last several generations, especially a dynamic economy driven by open markets (and trade!), and above all, individual liberty. These latter two principles are under direct attack from different vocal factions on the right today.

A new "new right" comes along roughly every other decade, so the exercise is neither frivolous nor untimely. While Douthat is correct that much is up for grabs at the moment, some aspects of the emanations and penumbras of Trumpist conservatism resemble a version of a long-ago "new right," and as such, we have come full circle. The remedy for the confused, uncertain conservatism of the immediate postwar years turned out to be fusionism, and perhaps it is worth recalling the full cycle for clues about how conservatism matches permanent principles to changing circumstances.

The idea of conservative fusionism is usually associated with Frank Meyer, though the term was coined by Brent Bozell, who was something of a “post-lib” in his exchanges with Meyer. Meyer didn't like the term. He thought its premise was mistaken, as it held that individual liberty (and free markets) and moral virtue were incompatible. To the contrary, Meyer thought liberty and virtue (and the social structures that inculcate virtue) were reciprocal qualities that naturally belong together. Meyer and others in his camp pointed out that big government was a threat to both individual liberty and moral virtue, especially when conservatives enabled the supposed dichotomy between libertarianism and traditionalism (or Milton Friedman versus Russell Kirk, if you'd like to use representative figures) to create practical political divisions. Meyer further noted that those charged with creating virtue by statute tend to enforce its “simulacra,” not the actual thing. Power does that to anyone licensed to steer human behavior towards lofty ends, he argued. This old debate may be freshly relevant with some conservatives becoming friendly to what might be called "conservative welfare state" measures in support of family, communities, and legacy industries that have not fared well over the last generation.

Meyer would be horrified at these proposals. But it is worth stepping back from the moment and recalling how fusionism got its start way back in the 1950s. Since the self-conscious conservative movement came together in the 1950s, a "new right" has emerged every few years, so that for old-timers (like this author), previous versions of the "new right" seem like antiques indeed. By my count, we are today living in the middle of "New Right 4.5," though with a slightly different classification scheme, it could be version 6.0.

Meyer's fusionism should actually be considered New Right 2.0, but it arose in reaction to what the mainstream media of the late 1940s heralded as the "New Right" of the time, or what we can now retroactively date as New Right 1.0. This was the "conservatism" (the scare quotes are deliberate here) of Peter Viereck, Clinton Rossiter, Walter Lippmann, and others whose moderate prescriptions for conservatives, Meyer said, "present nothing in its essential principles and programs with which Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., or Adlai Stevenson would seriously disagree." Indeed, Rossiter and Viereck thought the most essential thing for post-war conservatism was to accept the New Deal, government economic planning, and co-existence with Communism. Aside from the last proposal (coexistence with Communism), there is a rough symmetry with some proposals of today's national conservatives.  Meyer thought there was nothing new at all about this "new right"; he called it "collectivism rebaptized."

Suddenly, a specific line in William F. Buckley, Jr's famous mission statement for National Review in 1955 comes into sharper relief:

"Conservatives in this country — at least those who have not made their peace with the New Deal, and there is serious question whether there are others — are non-licensed nonconformists; and this is dangerous business in a Liberal world. . . We consider 'coexistence' with communism neither desirable nor possible, nor honorable; we find ourselves irrevocably at war with communism and shall oppose any substitute for victory." [Emphasis added.]

Pretty clear Buckley had soi-disant "conservatives" like Viereck and Rossiter in mind, and wanted to read them out of the conservative movement. Certainly Meyer did. There was one relevant point of convergence, however, between Buckley and Meyer versus Viereck and Rossiter: both camps regarded Russell Kirk's "donnish speculations" (Meyer's words) in The Conservative Mind to be insufficiently robust to meet the political moment. One thinks of Whittaker Chambers's comment that

We must give Russell Kirk an A for effort in The Conservative Mind. But looked at coldly. . . if you were a marine in a landing boat, would you wade up the sea-beach at Tarawa for that conservative position? And neither would I!

And Willmoore Kendall, Buckley's principal mentor at Yale and a major figure in the early years of National Review, also dismissed Kirk as "an improbable spokesman for the emergent conservative movement, because he simply does not 'identify' with those who are fighting the battles on which the outcome of the war must ultimately turn."

The point is, a serious conservative movement needed to be politically-oriented as well as intellectually intransigent. And it needed to demand a rollback of both the New Deal and international Communism. There could be no co-existence with Communism, Soviet or otherwise, and no compromise with the New Deal. Hence, the view of National Review that President Dwight Eisenhower was unacceptably weak on both main causes and thus needed to be opposed.

Conservatism 2.0 had its early successes, including wrenching control of the Republican Party from the moderate "Eastern Establishment" through the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and then the arrival of Ronald Reagan as governor of California two years later. And while Richard Nixon, mounting his comeback in 1968, did not like "the Buckleyites," he knew he had to pay attention to them.

Then, in the mid-1970s, "New Right 3.0" arose suddenly: social or religious conservatives who were agitated by abortion on demand, the normalization of homosexuality, the end of school prayer, declining educational standards, feminism, and the decay of the traditional family. This conservatism was distinct from old, culturally conservative (and racially-compromised) southern agrarian traditionalists; it was more Biblical than Burkean. Many were long-time Democrats who voted Democratic one last time for the Born-Again Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Around the same time, a more secular and distinct strain also emerged: the "neoconservatives." Most neoconservatives were ex-liberals, often empiricist social scientists, who did not object to the welfare state in principle, but recognized it didn't work, when it wasn't in fact doing great damage. They also recoiled from the anti-Americanism of the new left of the 1960s, and the "McGovernization" of the Democratic Party. Neoconservatives might be considered "New Right 3.5," for the most part, easily blending with social and religious conservatives, with whom they agreed on many issues.

The "three-legged stool" of New Right 3.0 — social conservatives, libertarians, and anti-Communist Cold Warriors now reinforced with the cross-beam of neoconservatism — was a durable winning coalition through the Reagan years in the 1980s and the Gingrich years in the 1990s, but started to fray in the aughts, when George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" and Wilsonian idealism in foreign policy began to open large cracks on the right.

The arrival of Donald Trump and his upending of the Republican Party can be said to have launched "New Right 4.0," with its emphasis on nationalism and the embrace of a populist backlash against our incompetent and overweening ruling class. Much of this was a legitimate response to, or corrective of, failures of the conservative movement as then constituted. This was more than just a critique of the lack of policy success, which seemed at times like appalling incompetence. Why can't a Republican Congress defund NPR and Planned Parenthood for god's sake, conservatives sensibly asked year after year.

This was merely a symptom of the conservative establishment's surprising lack of perception of the shifting tectonics of the electorate, arguably combined with a lack of boldness or courage when in power. This was not brand new with the Trump era. As far back as the Nixon Administration, M. Stanton Evans complained, "Why is it that when one of us [conservatives] gets in a position of power, he is no longer one of us?" (The later version of this, fitting for the arrival of Trump, is that too many conservatives come to Washington intending to "drain the swamp," only to find DC is a comfy hot tub.)

In a kind of Chestertonian paradox, it took a narcissistic, vulgarian president of no fixed ideology to break through the miasma and complacency of the conservative establishment to advance several long-held conservative priorities. But Douthat is right that the discordant strains of the moment are held together by the overpowering personal force of Trump, which likely will not transfer even to a hand-picked successor.

And quite aside from the ructions on the right that Trump has generated for a decade now, there are some emergent strains no one could have predicted that can be summarized in one name: Nick Fuentes. The hold he and other so-called "groypers" have on young conservatives may be overestimated (one can only hope), but "groyperism," whatever it may be beyond a generational revolt not unlike the student New Left of the 1960s, could be a force in contention and deserves the tentative designation as New Right 4.5.

The arrival of New Right 5.0 at some point is inevitable, as the news media and political analysts always have a demand for something new to define or describe. But each iteration of a "new" right can be said to represent not new ideas or new principles as much as adaptations to changing circumstances, and as such, the tech-derived numerology is a contrivance. What is new is not the right so much as the era and its challenges.

No one in the 1950s could have predicted that by today we would have cut income tax rates roughly in half and deregulated key parts of the economy, rather than increasing centralized control and planning as was expected and demanded, or that the Soviet Union would go away peacefully before the end of the century. Back then, the best that optimists could do was envision a "long twilight struggle" that would last well into this century, with some serious thinkers believing we would eventually lose. We don't focus as much on these anymore because we've largely won.

Today's challenges are arguably more difficult. No one in the 1950s anticipated the decline of the American family and the extreme destructiveness of an expanded welfare state over succeeding generations, though there were a few early but unheeded warnings. Immigration was not controversial at all. This list is not exhaustive. Add in the self-destruction of education at all levels, and the rise of identitarian politics that directly reject the core principles of individual freedom and equality.

To suggest that conservatism changes in necessary reaction to new and more precarious circumstances is not to say it is reactionary. What changes is the ordering of the hierarchy of core conservative principles and the vocabulary of argument in new circumstances. But whatever the issue map or the rhetorical needs of the moment, at its heart, conservatism is above all dedicated to defending Western Civilization itself against its enemies.

This, rather than recycling "fusionism," was the focus of Frank Meyer's last major essay before his death in 1972, "Western Civilization: The Problem of Political Freedom." Decades before Roger Scruton succinctly summarized the character of the progressive left today as "the culture of repudiation," Meyer got right to the heart of what was driving the left ineluctably in this direction: the frustration of leftist utopian dreams, which always happens when reality intrudes, would make it an increasingly destructive force.

The frustration of younger conservatives today that defensive-crouch conservatism, or mere 10-point policy reform proposals, don't match up to the exigent character of the times, is not wholly wrong, though the charge that the conservative movement has never conserved anything has about it the "What have the Romans ever done for us?" character of the famous Monty Python scene. Still, conceiving the next conservatism merely as finding the right amalgamation of foreign policy planks, techno-dynamism, "re-shoring" industry, and finding common identity somehow, and calibrating trade relations won't add up to a robust movement.

A reinvigorated conservatism ought to step up its public rhetoric, recognizing our many grave problems under the general theme that nothing less than Western Civilization itself is at stake. The tension between reason and revelation — between Athens and Jerusalem — that has been a part of the West's vitality for two millennia has been overtaken by the left's assault on both traditions. What those two rival traditions have in common now looms more important than what has divided them, which may, oddly enough, be a cause for optimism. (In other words, Voltaire might be a conservative if he were alive today.) And descending from the level of thought and ideas, perhaps we should consider a serious effort to turn out thousands of conservatives in street protests — something that conservative resistance groups in Europe have, for once, been ahead of American conservatives. Now that would be a genuinely "new" right. There have been hints of this potential before, such as the Tea Party protests of 2009-2010. And the Charlie Kirk memorial service also demonstrates the potential impact large-scale demonstrations can have. Let's stop ceding the streets to the left. This might provide a new burst of conservative energy that resembles actual fusion power.

As Meyer ended his essay, "The establishment of a free constitution is the great achievement of America in the drama of Western Civilization. The struggle for its preservation against Utopian corrosion is the continuing history of the United States since its foundation, a struggle which continues to this day and which is not yet decided." 

If only he knew!

Steven F. Hayward is visiting professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.