Is Fusionism the Way?

American conservatives may have transposed the old “God and Caesar” tune into a different key.

It is a basic premise of this Substack that there is no such thing as a true Christian politics. Politics is by nature imperfect, ever-changing, dependent on circumstance. Even a “good politics” requires tremendous prudence, but realistically, politics usually isn’t all that good, because man is fallen and power corrupts.

Seeing that, it’s tempting to suggest that “good enough is good enough” and go looking for something livable and reasonably stable. (Embrace the “low but solid.”) But I don’t think that’s quite right either, because human beings will always yearn for greater justice, more social cohesion, the attainment of loftier civilizational goals. Perhaps we should. Is every construction a Tower of Babel? But even if that impulse is mostly mischievous, it’s clearly real, which means that the “low but solid” isn’t necessarily all that solid. Within the political arena, even a humdrum plan like “let’s all tend our own houses and gardens, while being generally pleasant to one another and not filling the streets with trash,” often needs to be sold in much loftier terms. Freedom and environmental protection! The brotherhood of man! Politics is a difficult business.

Insofar as we can talk about a “Christian politics” at all, I have argued that a defining aspect of it must be Christ’s command to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” This too is a very curious thing, because surely all things are properly God’s, and Caesar likewise tends to be quite expansive in his claims, and yet Jesus clearly meant for us to impose some separation between them. This looks like a recipe for endless turf wars, and so it has often proven. But the Christian Way, insofar as we have a way, seems to be to insist that yes, we must go on fighting those Forever Wars, rather than allow God and Caesar to collapse into one another, as they are perpetually threatening to do. It is a continual headache, and nothing ever truly gets settled. But perhaps that’s part of the point.

This leads us to today’s topic: fusionism. I think it can fruitfully be understood as a “modern face” of this longstanding Christian quest.

Fusionism is a strain of political conservatism that looks to knit together the best insights of the classical liberal tradition with an older and deeper Judeo-Christian moral tradition. The term was coined by Frank Meyer, a 20^th-century communist-turned-libertarian-turned-conservative who ended up as one of William F. Buckley’s primary lieutenants on the fledgling National Review. As a recovering ex-communist, Meyer had a deep and even visceral commitment to freedom as an essential part of a thriving society. His traditionalist friend Brent Bozell worked hard to convince him that a robust moral traditionalism was even more important, and Bozell does seem to have had an impact: Meyer did develop a deep appreciation of the Christian tradition. But he argued that this needed to be fused with the best insights from classical liberalism. Although there are real tensions between freedom and virtue, he insisted that we need both, and indeed that the tension itself may be beneficial and fruitful. Libertarians and social conservatives have a strong tendency to bicker and point fingers. But maybe they need one another.

Meyer’s religious background was interesting. He was raised Jewish, spent some time as an atheist communist, and was baptized a Catholic on his deathbed. He seems to have had a complex relationship with God.

Meyer didn’t like to think of himself as a pioneer. As Stephanie Slade notes in her new book on fusionism:

He saw himself as a mere articulator of truths that predated him by centuries. The history of the West is a story of societies learning to hold liberty and virtue in constructive tension with each other, he believed. Both were present (“fused”) at the American founding, so both are parts of America’s civilizational inheritance that deserves to be cherished and defended.

That seems broadly right to me. The particular “freedom and virtue” framing is more characteristic of a 20^th-century American conservative than, say, a 13^th-century Frenchman, but I think there are deep themes that do indeed span centuries, and I think Meyer was right to see that the political upheavals of the 18^th and 19^th centuries wrenched apart different strands of a larger political and moral tradition that we must now work to recombine. He saw this as a constructive continuation of the work of America’s own Founders. I basically agree with that too. It seems reasonable, nevertheless, to think of “fusionism” as an American conservative variant of a longer and broader tradition. The term was coined here, and the framework has also been actively employed here, not just among the theorists but in our actual politics.

Conservatives fight a lot about the True Definition of fusionism. The interesting thing about those fights, to me, is that they tend to put on full display the precise tension that fusionism itself is meant to preserve. Sometimes people call themselves fusionists, but race to specify that one component or the other is “dominant” in some important way. Arguably Meyer himself did this, specifying that freedom should be the defining principle for the state, leaving virtue to the realm of culture and private institutions. Seems like freedom’s got the whip hand there. And I think Meyer’s critics have a point when they argue that his view is too simplistic, flattening the complex relationship between law, order, and culture into a pat, didactic formula. It can’t make sense of patriotic duty, and it leaves us with inadequate resources to address a range of important questions, from environmental protection to military service to “sin markets” (e.g. markets for drugs, porn, and other destructive things). These are real problems with a specifically Meyerite formulation of fusionism.

One also encounters self-described fusionists who race to explain that freedom can only be secured through a political tradition that protects order and promotes general flourishing; delving into the details of that, these people often seem functionally indistinguishable from any other statist authoritarian. That is: they have vaguely positive feelings about “freedom,” but those don’t seem to translate into any very meaningful constraint on what they regard as appropriate uses of state power. At the end of the day, one can find a “common good” justification for practically anything one wishes to do on the level of law or policy. Here “order” or “tradition” seem to be the real operative power, with freedom mostly tagging along as a nice-to-have. Modern political history strongly suggests that freedom doesn’t readily flourish as a tagalong. This really is quite the balancing act.

I have also met people who look pretty “fusionist” to my eyes, but insist they are not, generally citing the ostensible betrayals of one of the two groups mentioned above. (“Fusionism is just the mask those people over there use to hide their real intentions.”) I sort of understand, but is there perhaps a bigger picture here that’s getting missed in the infighting?

I sometimes think that it may be easier to be broadly fusionist if one isn’t too interested in political theory. In my experience, a large share of self-described “conservatives” in America really do share a general sense that tradition matters, that freedom also matters, and that we just have to do our best to find some kind of balance. This reflects our political history and tradition in ways that a moderately-educated American often grasps at least in broad form. When a person undertakes to read a huge stack of books and establish a clear position, he tends to want to smooth out some of the obvious tensions and inconsistencies in this juxtaposition, which is most easily done by giving one definite priority over the other. Many people do precisely that, and yet, I think it is possible even for “the learned” to recognize the mistake and intentionally course-correct.

We can choose to live with the discomfort of some unresolved tension, rather than settling for a foolish consistency. And there are some fairly strong reasons why we should. As I argued in “Godless Conservative” week, there is a well-established tradition that explores the logic of freedom and emergent order with a depth and nuance that the Aristotelians, to date, have never managed to match. Those insights are badly needed in an age when the state quite obviously has a strong tendency towards overreach. But the godless conservative tradition cannot really stand for long on its own (as we see in the cautionary tale of modern Toryism). Without continual nourishment from some thicker, more substantive foundation, it tends to become hollow and ephemeral, little more than a nostalgic taste for old things. The Judeo-Christian moral tradition is the clear candidate to supply that needed nourishment.

I have found (to my amusement) that British and Canadian conservatives are often a little uncomfortable with American conservatives, shamelessly celebrating our “one nation under God.” They tend to have more Whiggish sensibilities. American conservatism really did develop along more fusionist lines, through Reaganite Republicanism, Cold War anticommunism, and the George W. Bush “War on Terror” period, and we tend to be more effusive about both freedom and God, comfortable with public odes to each. They get a little squeamish about that. I mean, sure. Freedom is good. God is good. Need we be zealots about it, though?

I think perhaps we do. Indeed, I think we may need to be a bit zealous for both, even recognizing that those enthusiasms run a risk of bleeding into the Oakeshottian’s much-hated “ideology,” or overrunning the Burkean’s organic order. Nothing is safe in politics! I would suggest, though, that thinking of this as a reworking of the old “God and Caesar” tune may provide some reassurance that there is real potential for harmony here. Even dissonant notes may ultimately serve as a pleasing accent in the symphony. It has never been possible to make men good by force. Nor have we ever been satisfied merely to be left to ourselves to tend our bit of soil; the human drive to build and create is insatiable. When disparate components of human society are permitted to co-exist in fruitful tension, that is often the best we can get, for attaining real excellence but also for opening a space for freedom.

Fusionism is not dead. To the contrary, I think conservative Americans (still a substantial set) retain a strong intuitive understanding of its core. We still care about both freedom and virtue. Indeed, our political rhetoric makes clear that those remain our most resonant touch-points! But right-wing politics has been a real mess in America over the past decade, and it would take a very deliberate and prudently managed effort to return to such sane political principles. I don’t think it’s impossible, but politics is always thick with contingency, and our own moment is no exception.

When traditionalists insist on resolving all the dissonance, that can go pretty badly wrong. We may find ourselves marching to a single, martial beat. I’ll consider that problem in my next essay, on the perpetual allure of fascism.