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

Both had part of the truth. The conservative -- and, at the time Meyer wrote, the traditionalist -- was correct in affirming the existence of an objective moral order and the importance of virtue. The classical liberals, and now the libertarians, were right to oppose statism. These truths were not at war, but merely "contrary emphases in conservatism" as Meyer was trying to define it. But either emphasis, if pursued to the exclusion of the other, risked error.

Traditionalists could slight the cause of freedom, failing to see that virtue cannot be coerced. They could fail to see that the individual was the locus of virtue. (Toward the end of his life, as he moved toward the Catholicism he would embrace on his deathbed, Meyer increasingly stressed that this failure missed the significance of the Incarnation.) They could be too critical of reason, leaving them no way to choose among traditions where conflict existed. Against Russell Kirk and Edmund Burke, Meyer wrote that "to make tradition, 'prejudice and prescription,' not along with reason but against reason, the sole foundation of one's position is to enshrine the maxim, 'Whatever is, is right,' as the first principle of thought about politics and society."

The characteristic error of libertarianism was to undermine "belief in an organic moral order," even though this belief was in truth "the only possible basis for respect for the integrity of the individual person and for the overriding value of his freedom." So "both extremes" were "self- defeating: truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave the way for surrender to tyranny."

As M. Stanton Evans notes in the foreword to Smant's book, Meyer was both a polemical and a unifying figure. He never hesitated to do intellectual battle with representatives of either "extreme" within conservatism. He also moved from theory to practice, advising Young Americans for Freedom, the American Conservative Union, and the New York Conservative Party. Arguments were also settled, and intra-conservative unity forged, in long late-night phone calls from his home in Woodstock.

Meyer's fusionism was not without critics, even within NR circles. Whittaker Chambers, in a letter to WFB, had a memorable put-down of Meyer as doctrinaire. James Burnham found him insufficiently realistic about tactics. Still, Meyer largely prevailed. His writing may have been "often heavy and stiff," as Smant rightly notes. But conservatives were ready to accept his thesis, no doubt in large part because so many of them had both libertarian and traditionalist tendencies themselves. From the 1960s on, the federal government gave fusionism a powerful boost by seeming to promote moral and social decay at every turn, subsidizing illegitimate births and blasphemous art.

Fusionism lingers among conservatives and Republicans to this day. Meyer's influence can be seen in Charles Murray's remark, in his book In Pursuit, that if Adam Smith and Edmund Burke could admire each other, why can't he admire both? In 1995, Ralph Reed, then executive director of the Christian Coalition, spoke as a fusionist in counseling the new Republican Congress that "in an essentially conservative society, traditionalist ends can be advanced through libertarian means." Around the same time, William Kristol urged conservatives to practice a "politics of liberty" and a "sociology of virtue."