The Fusionist. - 'Principles and Heresies: Frank S. Meyer and the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement' - book review

National Review, June 17, 2002 by Ramesh Ponnuru

Principles and Heresies: Frank S. Meyer and the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement, by Kevin J. Smant (ISI, 425 pp., $29.95)

For fifty years, most American conservatives have stood for three basic propositions: that American foreign policy should seek to end totalitarian regimes; that the domestic functions of government, and especially of the federal government, should be strictly limited; and that the moral precepts traditionally associated with Christianity (sometimes the formulation includes Judaism as well) should be upheld.

These propositions attracted distinct, though overlapping, constituencies to conservatism: defense hawks, libertarians, social conservatives. The coalition thus created has achieved some political success. Arguably, it had something to do with the achievement of its paramount goal, the overthrow of Communism.

But whether the coalition made sense in terms other than those of expedience has always been disputed. Sometimes, it has been disputed by people who accept one or more of the conservative propositions but reject others. Some libertarians, for example, opposed the Cold War. Often, the intellectual coherence of conservatism has been challenged by people who shelter under none of its tents. Thus liberals charge that there is a deep contradiction between advocating low taxes and condemning low morals.

In the founding generation of modern American conservatism, no one tried harder to answer that charge than Frank Meyer. Meyer attempted to show that traditionalism and libertarianism were indeed compatible and that both were necessary. He succeeded in persuading most conservatives. His thought became, to a large extent, the philosophical basis for American conservatism. But conservatism has grown less philosophically inclined over the years, and most young conservatives have never heard of him. For those who wish to make his acquaintance, Kevin Smant's new biography, appearing on the thirtieth anniversary of Meyer's death, is a good place to start.

Like so many of his generation of conservative intellectuals, the Newark- born Meyer had been a Communist -- working for the party as an organizer first at Oxford and then in the Midwest. He met the woman who would be his wife, Elsie Bown, at a party class he was teaching in Chicago. In the 1940s, however, both of them began to develop ideological doubts.

In Smant's telling, the key episode came after Meyer enlisted, for both Communist and patriotic reasons, to fight the Nazis. He was quickly discharged for having flat feet. The recovery from surgery on both feet kept him immobilized for eighteen months. Naturally, he read -- the Federalist Papers, for example, with much of which he found hihimself agreeing. Other readings impressed on him the strength of the West's belief in the dignity of the individual. Meyer became a sort of moderate Communist. He wanted a democratic, gradualist, and peaceful Communist party, one more deeply rooted in American tradition. For a while, he thought the party was moving in his direction; but the re-imposition of Stalinist discipline dashed those hopes. Elsie and he argued their way out of the party together.

He was briefly a Truman Democrat. But books like Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences pushed him rightward. In addition, liberals seemed to his mind not to understand the nature of the Communist threat. Liberalism had grown too relativistic and too collectivist to grasp any longer the moral case for freedom, and thus lacked the intellectual resources to resist Communism. Worse, both major political parties now drank deeply from this liberalism.

Meyer started to write for the conservative publications The Freeman and The American Mercury. When William F. Buckley Jr. asked him to write for a magazine he was starting, Meyer accepted. For fifteen years, he served as NR's book-review editor. He also had a regular column, titled "Principles & Heresies."

Meyer believed that he must "unremittingly trace his errors to their sources" and start over. In his columns and elsewhere -- most notably in his book In Defense of Freedom -- Meyer argued for a recovery of what he took to be the main current of the Western tradition. That tradition, he wrote, held both freedom and virtue "in balance and tension." It regarded virtue as the highest end of man, but over time it came to see freedom as both a precondition of true virtue and man's highest political end. Traditionalists and libertarians both objected to Communism and liberalism. Meyer claimed, however, that they had not only "a common enemy" but "a common heritage."

Meyer's mix of libertarianism and traditionalism came to be called "fusionism," but he didn't think he was fusing anything. America's Founders were concerned about both freedom and virtue. Only in the 19th century were these ends divided. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, classical liberals became too utilitarian and hostile to religion and tradition. In reaction to them, classical conservatives defended authoritarianism.