In the Tradition of Liberty.
In the Tradition of Liberty.
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FUSION’s archive of commentary.
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In his masterpiece “The Three Waves of Modernity,” the preeminent 20th century philosopher Leo Strauss explained the political crisis of his time—and, arguably, for our own. According to Strauss: The modern crisis begins for Strauss in the 16th century with Machiavelli. For traditional right and wrong, Machiavelli substituted a “realistic” view that understood “right” as simply power, which was determined by political force and cunning. But the first crisis only came into “full force” a century later with Thomas Hobbes. To pure power, Hobbes added a natural right to self-preservation…
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Last week, during an interview on CNBC, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump proudly declared “I am not a conservative.” His third nomination is undeniably a sign that the Republican party is moving away from the twentieth century conservative movement. In a recent essay for Fusion, evangelical Substacker Aaron Renn labels this trend the emergence of a “post-conservative world.” According to Renn, attempts by National Review’s writers and Republican politicians to “fuse” together libertarianism, traditionalism, and anticommunism may have succeeded in the 1980 election. Yet a similar “fusion” would…
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The new debate on the American right is a very old debate on the American right: whether freedom or virtue should be our first public principle. Broadly, the libertarian wing of American conservatism supports putting liberty first, while the traditionalist wing supports putting goodness first. The quest for ordered liberty has never been free of spirited disagreement, and likely never will. That is good. Groupthink is stultifying. My contention is hardly original, but it is one I think we need to consider anew: There is no necessary opposition between being free and being…
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Since its creation more than six decades ago by Frank Meyer and his associates, “fusionism” has enjoyed both a glittering track record of political success and a dismal legacy of failure. As a political movement, it scored some remarkable electoral successes, and helped the Republican Party, seemingly stuck in perpetual minority status, achieve parity in national politics and build a formidable majority of statehouses and governorships. Fusionism can also, more indirectly, claim credit for many of the very real conservative victories in the courts in the past generation. These achievements…
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For the last seven years, and perhaps even longer than that, figures within the conservative chattering classes have been filing reports on the supposed death of fusionism. If those sweeping declarations didn’t strike you as questionable at the time, last summer’s release of a statement of principles for “freedom conservatives,” which boasts more than 250 signatories who have decidedly not given up on fusionist ideas, should prompt at least some pause. But if reports of its death are exaggerated, so is the notion that its triumphant return is assured. Will…
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Postwar conservatism emerged from three general strands of thought: libertarianism, traditionalism, and anti-communism, which formed the “three-legged stool” of conservatism. Political scientist and FUSION contributor George Hawley wrote in Right Wing Critics of American Conservatism, “Without knowing any context, there is no a priori reason one would infer that these three attributes are correlated with each other, or even that they are necessarily right wing.” As part of creating an at least somewhat unified conservative movement, emerging postwar conservatives had to both correlate and reconcile these strands with each other. Much…
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My title disputes the claim that fusionism was a practical alliance in the fight against communism but inadequate and dated as a philosophy of politics. I believe this critique fundamentally misunderstands the idea of “fusionism.” Critics of fusionism applied the term derisively. It is not the first time that critics have labeled an idea and the label stuck. However, the label is misleading, even though it is too late to change it. The core idea of fusionism is not that it is an effort to in some way “fuse” virtue and freedom, or…
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For most of the twentieth century, libertarians and conservatives found themselves fighting shoulder-to-shoulder in the major ideological battles of their day. Initially drawn together by a shared opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal, both groups largely defined their worldviews in terms of opposition to socialism, both at home and abroad. As long as the expansion of state power in the direction of socialism seemed inexorable, both conservatives and libertarians could see their primary role as standing athwart history, yelling “stop.” That changed in 1989. As writers like Matthew Continetti have argued with…
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National media returned to a familiar storyline this past weekend, as two Harvard student organizations (the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and the African and African American Resistance Organization) and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine apologized for promoting what it admits was anti-Semitic imagery. In an Instagram post linking the Palestinian cause to American race politics, the groups included a 1960s-vintage image of hand stamped with a Star of David and a dollar sign holding nooses around the necks of Egyptian ruler Gamal Nasser and the boxer Muhammad Ali.…
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America’s public education system is ripe for an overhaul — and desperately in need of a coherent reform agenda to bring one about. It’s time to wrest control of the schools from out-of-touch education bureaucrats and the ideological groupthink that dominates the teacher training-policy complex. For too long, our schools have focused on the clinical, technocratic, and academic — think drudgery of reading, writing, and arithmetic — while giving short shrift to career and technical education and the arts. And they have largely abandoned the cultivation of character and skills…