October 8, 2024
By Matthew Malec and Natan Ehrenreich
On March 20, 1981, two months after his inauguration, Ronald Reagan delivered a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference outlining the ambitious agenda of his new administration. This was not your traditional Reagan speech, delivered to everyday voters or citizens, but a detailed account of Reagan’s intellectual philosophy. For those dismayed by the fractured nature of the conservative movement in our time, Reagan’s speech has much to teach. It offers a roadmap for fusionists to traverse in the years ahead, one that might hope to unite the factions of the Right that have been warring with each other nearly since the moment Reagan left office.
Reagan mentions a panoply of conservative intellectuals as inspirations, including Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman, James Burnham, and Ludwig von Mises. But he gives the most attention to Frank Meyer, the father of the “fusionist” philosophy he exemplified. Reagan notes that Meyer “fashioned a vigorous new synthesis of traditional and libertarian thought—a synthesis that is today recognized by many as modern conservatism.” Recovering this real fusion, in which a commitment to liberty is actually fused with a commitment to order and virtue, is key to unifying the Republican party, recapturing broad electoral appeal, and successfully implementing durable conservative public policy.
In his 1981 speech, Reagan emphasized the importance of one, unified agenda. He noted:
Because ours is a consistent philosophy of government, we can be very clear: We do not have a 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 just as we allow such acknowledgements in other public institutions.
Of course, part of the reason conservatives have since failed to achieve anywhere close to Reagan’s level of electoral or political success in the years since he left office is because he was a generational political talent. But it’s also because, even as conservatives continue to invoke Reagan’s legacy, they have failed to recapture the actual fusionism that Reagan embodied.
To illustrate using an example from Reagan’s speech: how many “establishment” conservatives, often associated with Reagan, would cringe at the thought of permitting “the acknowledgement of a Supreme Being in our classrooms just as we allow such acknowledgements in other public institutions?” How many would list it side by side with economic and national security goals? Truthfully, Reagan’s rhetoric and agenda were far more religious than many “establishment” conservatives would like to admit: He even declared 1983 the year of the Bible.
There is something, then, to the argument that the post-Reagan right drifted away from his religious rhetoric and emphasis while improperly labeling itself as “Reaganite.” Cultural issues, Reagan believed, are not simply sideshows to the only real goal of our politics: maximizing economic growth. In fact, as Reagan noted later in his speech, the “real task before us” is to “to reassert our commitment as a nation to a law higher than our own, to renew our spiritual strength.” He continued: “Only by building a wall of such spiritual resolve can we, as a free people, hope to protect our own heritage and make it someday the birthright of all men.”
The spiritual strength that Reagan spoke of is derived from the American proposition that all men are created equal by God. Accordingly, combatting the forces of militant social leftism, which substitute hierarchies of race and gender above natural equality, ought to be central to the fusionist vision in the years ahead. Defeating the cancer of race-based discrimination in the name of “social justice” or “equity” is essential to “[protecting] our own heritage.” So too is the effort to dispel the fiction that men and women are interchangeable. Yet, in fighting these battles, fusionists must reject the overbearing pessimism that characterized conservative engagement in the culture war in the Trump era. Whereas the Romney GOP failed to give appropriate attention to the culture war, the Trump GOP has fought it poorly.
There is a better path: As Reagan showed, optimistic rhetoric can go a long way. Conservatives will never win the culture war with the “American carnage” message of the New Right. And conservatives are correct to reject un-American theories like “post-liberalism” or integralism which have taken hold in certain segments of the New Right. These are not the weapons by which fusionists should fight the cultural battles of our time. We have a much better sword: the Judeo-Christian ethic which has always coexisted with America’s pluralistic tradition. And, more fundamentally, all we must do is demonstrate that we are on the side of common sense. Name-calling and apocalyptic freakouts only obscure our ability to do so.
Of course, fighting cultural battles is not all there is to the fusionist agenda. The fight for a sound economic policy, though not the sole end of our politics, as some establishment conservatives have tacitly suggested, is as important to our politics as it was in Reagan’s time. The conservative establishment and the New Right both have something to contribute to the policy specifics of a fusionist economic agenda.
The fusionist economic agenda should maintain support for the free market while acknowledging populist concerns, particularly regarding China.
To get into specifics: A 2023 survey from the populist economic group American Compass found that “American manufacturing has been gutted by globalization and trade with China” was the top economic concern among Republicans. Fusionists should not hesitate to be hawkish when it comes to the CCP, a ghoulish regime that combines Chinese nationalism and Marxism-Leninism into an expansionist agenda that is hostile to Western Civilization and global freedom. Decoupling from China may violate free-market principles, and Republican voters might have the economics wrong, but it doesn’t matter. This is a national security issue, and populists are right to observe that free-market fundamentalism made our biggest geopolitical threat more powerful. They are also right that nobody before Donald Trump seemed to care. It’s past time to admit that attempts to bring China into the liberal order failed—and made the world less safe. Fusionists should support free trade with free nations while acknowledging and responding to the danger the CCP poses to the West.
While American Compass hailed their results as a victory for the New Right, the data is more nuanced. After concerns about China, deregulation and lower taxes were GOP voters’ next biggest economic priorities. While the first Trump Administration did a solid job in these areas, Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate reveals an emerging schism on these issues. Vance has supported increased regulations on everything from banks to railroads, and he centers his tax philosophy around redistribution rather than innovation.
While Vance purports to be an economic populist, an articulate free-market response centered on prosperity and choice for everyday Americans could undermine his popularity with conservative voters. First, call tariffs what they are: hidden taxes transferred to the American people. While they may sometimes be necessary for geopolitical purposes, they raise prices and hurt the American workers they’re supposed to protect. Second, demonstrate the similarities between right-wing populist economics and failed left-wing economics. Vance has worked with Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse on regulations and tax policy. Fusionists, on the other hand, seek to unleash the full power of the American economy through energy independence, deregulation, and removing barriers to success, rather than putting them up and calling them “protections.”
Fusionists, in general, trust American workers to make the right choices for themselves. Americans don’t need government’s help to thrive economically, they need government to stay out of their way. Largely because of their low-tax, low-regulation agendas, red states have grown economically and in population, often bringing people in from unfree states like California, New York, and Illinois. While left and right-wing populists bluster about looking out for workers, free markets both bring the best results and show the most trust in hard-working Americans to succeed without meddling from Washington.
While economic issues still rank first in issue polling, immigration rides on its heels, especially among Republicans. Many conservatives feel that they were sold out by the establishment prior to the rise of Donald Trump, who moved the party closer to its base while adding new anti-immigration voters to the coalition. On this point, the voters were right, and elites got what was coming to them. A serious concern was ignored for too long, and as a result, conservative voters only trust the populist wing of the party on an issue they rightly see as important. Instead of ceding the issue to populists, fusionists should attack them from the right. Border crossings under Trump were similar to what they were under Barack Obama, and the Trump Administration was quick to back down in the face of media pressure on catch and release and E-Verify. Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis mandated E-Verify and banned localities from accepting IDs from illegals, even if obtained legally in another state. Trump did conservatives a great service by bringing immigration to the forefront, but ultimately, he is more bark than bite. DeSantis approached Trump’s failings too tepidly in 2024, but fusionists won’t have to hold back in a Trump-free 2028 field.
It is worth acknowledging that this immigration hawkishness is a slight departure from the traditional Reaganite view. America has been and should be a place where people can pursue a better life, but our current immigration system lacks adequate guardrails, and immigration levels are above what the general population wants. The foreign-born population has gone from six percent in 1980 to over 15% today. But far more alarming than the immigration itself are the handouts and special privileges given to illegal immigrants at the expense of American taxpayers. Reagan supported people coming here and working hard, not government paying their way.
Today, immigration is the linchpin holding right-wing populism together. We can see this by studying right-wing populism abroad. The clearest example of the pattern is in Denmark. In 2014, the populist Danish People’s Party (DPP) won nearly 27% of the vote in European Parliament elections, the largest share of any party. In response, the center-left Social Democrats lurched right on immigration and neutered the DPP. In the 2022 parliamentary elections, the DPP won less than three percent of the vote (though other populist parties won another 11%) and they combined for 25 of 179 seats, down from the DPP’s peak of 37. While populists in France, the Netherlands, and neighboring Sweden have only grown stronger over the last decade, Denmark’s populist movement is diminished and divided because the mainstream parties listened to voters on immigration.
Taken as a whole, the path we would like to see the conservative movement traverse in the years ahead is not one that draws only from the establishment or populist wings of the coalition. It grants that both have legitimate points: The establishment’s preference for free markets is correct. So too is its criticism of populists’ undue pessimism. But the populists are right about the need to combat illegal immigration, decouple from China, and fight the culture war. And they are right that the establishment ignored these issues for too long.
Some of today’s most successful Republican politicians—Ron DeSantis, Glenn Youngkin, and Brian Kemp—have embodied this fusion of establishment and populist priorities. They are forward-looking, optimistic, and receptive to their supporters' concerns without pandering to their every whim. But it’s been over 30 years since the national Republican Party had a leader who did the same. If that leader emerges, he or she will offer the conservative movement a chance to follow the fusionist path that made Reagan legendary.
Matthew Malec is a Research Assistant at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Natan Ehrenreich is a Writing Fellow at National Review
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