I had intended yesterday to say more about Stephanie Slade’s new book on Fusionism, which I’ve been reading with enjoyment. Stephanie is a friend, and she and I share many assumptions and goals, so I was eager to get her thoughts. In the big picture, the book gives an accessible explanation of fusionism and its history, followed by an account of what happened to the political right as the old fusionist alliance crumbled in the mid-2010s: theocons, natcons, neoreactionaries, etc.
It’s widely reviewed (and Law & Liberty will also run some reviews in the near future), so I’m not going to devote much space to summary. You can listen to Slade herself discussing the book with James Patterson here, read Mark Miller’s sympathetic review here, and enjoy an excerpt here.
Compact ran a review from Geoff Shullenberger arguing that fusionism “failed” because, essentially, people often like the state to handle their problems for them, especially when they’re anxious about the future. That’s an uninteresting critique. It’s sort of like telling the Catholic Church that it should stop teaching the Catechism because “people kinda like to sin.” Yeah, we know. But it doesn’t always work out well for them (or others), which is why we keep banging on about this. We’re aware that people will go on ignoring us a great deal of the time.
This does at least point to a common problem in talking about fusionism: People sometimes confuse it for a political program or platform. It’s more of a broad framework for approaching politics, though that can of course give rise to more particular policies, platforms, or institutional efforts. Yesterday I wrote about American conservatives’ internal battles concerning the nature of fusionism, and it occurs to me to add here that sometimes American conservatives, in decrying or bucking the label, strike me as “fusionists lacking perspective.” That is, they’ve spent most of their time inside an American conservative world, and don’t have a clear sense of how different they look from other strains of conservatism or traditionalism. They’re more interested in nuanced sub-debates, but they smell like fusionists to most of the world.
Kevin Vallier had a much more interesting critique, published here by the Acton Institute. He thinks Slade’s framework would be strengthened by a greater engagement with Michael Novak, who could help flesh out the role of order in holding liberty and virtue in balance. Vallier writes:
Hayek, for example, was not speaking for liberty against Kirk’s defense of virtue; the Hayek-Kirk debate is not the Bozell-Meyer debate. The core question for Kirk and Hayek is the nature and sources of social order. Both agree that much of it is unplanned and undirectable. Kirk’s order “was not manufactured: rather, it grew,” as stated in the one Kirk book absent from her bibliography. They disagree about direction. Hayek builds from below: Order arises from our material nature, biological and cultural, and morality evolved rather than originated in the Good. Kirk, by contrast, proceeds from above, not denying our biology but stressing our spirituality. An order is authoritative when it conforms, however hard to detect, to what he called the permanent things.
He’s right that a deeper appreciation of order is helpful. It’s worth reading his full review.
Here’s the point of greatest interest to me. Is there real hope of moving American conservatism back in a more fusionist direction?
Near the end of the book, Slade suggests that fusionism needs to expand the scope of its interest, taking in a broader range of questions. She discusses a speech from C. Bradley Thompson to this effect: Why are we always so focused specifically on economics, the so-called “dismal science”? Economics matters, but these principles properly understood should apply to many disciplines, many arts, a whole array of questions relating to human thriving. She notes Kirk’s championing of “moral imagination,” and suggests that fusionists need to revitalize this idea in a robust way. This strikes me as a promising line, and even if those ideas are more referenced than developed in this particular book, the suggestion is not trivial, especially because it indicates that Slade (in keeping with other fusionists?) is not a narrow ideologue, looking to re-impose a decades-old straitjacket on a political situation that frightens her. Rather, she’s looking to draw forward some wisdom from the past, hoping it can be replanted and grown in a new way. This is what conservatives should be doing.
To me at least, it seems very evident that right-wing populism is tired and going nowhere. Admittedly, it’s difficult to distinguish one’s own personal feelings from the “vibes” of the time; I found the shock jock crowd wearisome and juvenile more or less from the start, but clearly not everyone felt that way. (And yet, I do laugh remembering how many times I’ve been assured that some new one will lead the angry young men, with all their bulging vitalist muscles, on a sweeping charge to reclaim the nation. The world will never stop throwing up another Milo or Nick Fuentes or Bronze Age Pervert; we’ll never stop being reassured that “if you listen to him he’s surprisingly articulate and may have read a few philosophy books!”; the vast majority will continue to be swept away with the next tide, while not-so-edgy people like me continue placidly manning our editorial desks. Such is the world.)
There have been a thousand autopsies for Reaganism, with varying levels of merit, but my general view is that natural disasters do happen sometimes, and political disasters likewise. A decade ago we had something of a flash flood. This is not to say that I don’t blame anyone for anything. “For it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.” I just think what happened was bigger than any particular person or idea, which is also the way of the world. I like the “flash flood” analogy because it did really feel like that. The drizzle turned into a rain; the streams quickly turned into waterfalls; suddenly you were desperately scrambling to get to higher ground.
Now though, at least on my sunnier days, I feel like someone standing on a flood plain surveying the wreckage. It does seem as though the waters have receded somewhat, at least for a while, and I reflect that there may now be some opportunity to recover and rebuild. We’re still assessing what’s salvageable, and guessing at how long that moment will last.
But I’m not alone. There are others here too, like Slade, Vallier, my colleagues at Law & Liberty, and many others. Actually, I find myself rather inspired these days by how many people are still here. I appreciate that I inhabit a bit of a bubble, but still, there are people in this bubble, some of them quite impressive. Many have done impressive scholarly work or risen to positions of real institutional influence, while the shock jocks got swept along the river. Who knows? For years it felt to me like the conservative intellectual world was in absolute shambles, hell-bent on chasing absurd fantasies and fighting civil wars, a mess of clownish attention-seeking and posturing. Now it’s starting to feel less oppressive. Like maybe it’s possible to build something worthwhile again. Maybe I’m wrong.
You know what, though? That’s not the worst kind of mistake to make.