What Fusion will we build?

Over the past decade, right-wing political rhetoric has begun to tilt away from the traditional equilibrium of small government, economic freedom, and personal virtue – what we generally call fusionist ideas. Many long-standing advocates of those principles are understandably aggrieved by the change. In response, Stephanie Slade – who has been writing insightfully about conservative and libertarian politics throughout that period – has produced a that is, in a sense, two books in one: an intellectual history of US center-right politics since the 1950s, and a more immediate diagnosis of current strains of illiberal/postliberal thought and activism she terms the “Dissident Right.” 

The diagnosis of current events falls into two categories. Fusionists worry about a gradual drift away from free-market economic policies and “Leave Us Alone” Coalition minimalism, but they also have much weightier concerns about abandoning the rule of law and due process in service of pure authoritarianism. The label Dissident Right covers a lot of territory, from the federal government expanding industrial policy subsidies to the imposition of a future Christian nationalist state in which heresy would be punishable by death.   

Slade’s diagnosis is bracing for those of us at home with small-government conservatism and free-market economics. Not only are leading figures in the GOP, such as the current vice president, embracing mercantilism and corporatism as reflexive policy positions, but young voters and activists are allegedly leaning into this approach in record numbers. Far more alarming, though, is that smaller fringe of radical thinkers and self-proclaimed neo-reactionaries who show no loyalty to the Constitution. For Slade and many of her fellow critics, this is sides as serious as any in modern history – action must be taken to defend the governmental restraint and commitment to due process that were once the hallmarks of principled conservatism in the American political system. 

The degree to which this warning needs to be heeded depends, of course, on the accuracy of the author’s diagnosis. If her characterization is correct, conditions are dire indeed. But some will be skeptical. Supporters of J.D. Vance and Tucker Carlson will disagree that postliberal ideas are a threat in the first place, while a larger group on the center-right may wonder whether the rhetorical extremism of Internet chatrooms filled with indecipherable Zoomer slang is likely to have any significant impact.  

We therefore probably need to separate two things that often get conflated in this debate – what we have to fear from a peaceful, but unwelcome, takeover of the Republican Party by postliberal policy ideas versus the (hopefully less likely) literal takeover of the US government outside of the political process of the Constitution by such people. Let’s start by thinking about how the fusionist, Dissident Right, and progressive factions see themselves in the world of US politics. 

It is wise to be cautious about taking one’s own ideological perspective for granted when making society-wide characterizations. Almost every political movement imagines itself as part of a David-and-Goliath struggle, and every movement obviously casts itself as David – righteous and fated to triumph, but a seemingly outnumbered underdog. Anyone who has read political fundraising letters from the last half century will be familiar with this formulation. No matter how unlikely, everyone claims to be on the right side of history, yet besieged by overwhelming forces of evil. Amazingly, your $50 donation (if made soon) could well be the secret to beating these odds.  

The Dissident Right itself certainly says this – they claim they’re attempting to correct the excesses of both sides of the mainstream political spectrum simultaneously. They claim that the progressive left is forcibly transgendering their children in public schools, while the globalist libertarians are shipping manufacturing jobs – meant, by right, for blue-collar American men – to far-off lands. They are a spirited few battling against overwhelming odds.  

The same was true in the early days of the modern fusionist conservative movement, which cast itself in a very similar role. As Slade points out, the people who were staffing National Review, drafting the, and founding organizations like Young Americans for Freedom, the Philadelphia Society, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute thought of themselves as a hopelessly outnumbered remnant, valiantly struggling to keep their heads above cultural waters dominated by New Deal-era intellectuals. They saw themselves as free thinkers and “non-licensed nonconformists.”  

And lest we leave any major players out, the progressive left has embraced this view just as passionately. Even when fusionists and postliberal theorists insist the left controlled major societal institutions, left-leaning historians claim they have been routed and excluded from influence almost entirely. Some prominent on the left insist that their influence has declined dramatically since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 (or, in the UK, since Margaret Thatcher’s premiership began in 1979). How do we square this with the social conservatives who insist that American society has fallen so completely under the sway of “cultural Marxism” that virtually no vestige of our former virtue or greatness is to be found?         

Clearly, these characterizations cannot be simultaneously true. We are not all David, and our antagonists are not all Goliath. Each of these groups has, and likely will in the future have, varying degrees of influence based on the popularity of their ideas and effectiveness of their political operations. But in terms of real-world impact – presumably, the area most are worried about – it would be a mistake to imagine that politics is a function of ideologically coherent movements struggling to become the one victor over the others.  

When it comes to economic policy, for example, we have a distinctly mixed bag of trends since the early days of fusionism and its antagonists. Many of these policy outcomes have been negative, but not because a uniformly evil foe has implemented their malevolent agenda. Like most outcomes in American politics, a non-ideological blob of inertia, partisanship, self-interest, electoral convenience, logrolling, regulatory capture, and cowardice has given us the outcomes we currently contend with. 

Consider the – bigger than ever. Our annual is alarmingly large, too. The, though it has slowed somewhat under President Trump, is also more voluminous than ever. The federal Leviathan is staggeringly vast, expensive, burdensome, and metastatic. It shows no sign of shrinking anytime soon. If anything, renewed pledges by politicians of both parties to never cut or reform major spending categories like suggest the opposite. From to to, we have seen tax cuts of various kinds, but never any meaningful, sustained effort to actually shrink the federal budget (itself now deeply entangled with state budgets as well). 

So, who is this a victory for? We squint across the political landscape in vain to see any hands raised to take credit. But surely, if any of the most popular ideological narratives are true, some group, movement, or coalition must have been responsible. The truth, of course, is that governance in a multi-party republic is the result of, frequently a painfully pragmatic and non-ideological process and certainly not the result of high-minded (or purely malevolent) legislating.  

Thus, we see the threat of one side or another “taking over politics” – an imagined scenario much beloved by would-be Davids – is mostly an illusion created by motivated reasoning of later chroniclers. Political coalitions do exist, and policymaking sometimes delivers a series of related wins that favor the same part of the political spectrum. But true dominance is an illusion. The closest we have ever come, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legendary (or infamous) fourth presidential election, was followed seven years later by the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, permanently limiting US presidents to two terms in office. Given the requirements of the amendment process, it seems certain that a of the US electorate supported both FDR in 1944 and the ratification of the 22nd Amendment in 1951. No permanent majorities exist in a democratic polity.  

All of this may seem like an argument that Slade’s warning is superfluous – but it most definitely is not. It is precisely that final condition – democracy – that makes all the difference. As much as it grieves free-market enthusiasts – myself included – to see sky-high tariff rates and irresponsible debts soaring, they are policies that are playing out through the constitutional order. During his second term, Trump’s team has pushed executive maximalism, and the Supreme Court has. Congressional Republicans are facing an unfavorable midterm electoral map this year, and the president’s crude attempt to bribe Americans with $5,000 each has been. We are living in strange, yet non-revolutionary times.  

But as Fusionism warns in its later chapters, writers and social media pundits with large followings are openly attacking the premise of representative government and embracing authoritarianism. While it seems unlikely that someone with, say, Curtis Yarvin’s enthusiasm for esoteric grandiosity and shock-value theorizing will become a popular hero among “” voters, his attempts at political economy have already deeply irresponsible public statements by otherwise reasonable people who should have known better.  

Read the full article at Civitas Outlook.