Frank Meyer’s fusionism combined free-market libertarianism and religion-friendly traditionalism to create the modern conservative movement. As a political alliance against the threat of Communism, the movement served its purpose. But the principles that undergirded Meyer’s synthesis were not an adequate basis for attaining and sustaining national power.
The difference between the defeated Goldwater faction and the victorious Reagan coalition was the vote of white Catholic Democrats alienated from their former party by its anti-anti-Communism and embrace of the three A’s: amnesty (for draft evaders), acid, and abortion. Those former Democrats did not want smaller government, so Reagan preserved, for them and the country, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, along with generating ever-larger deficits.
Meyer’s synthesis, however, was not as new as is often claimed: in important respects, it represented 19th-century Bourbon Democracy spruced up for the post-World War II era, a 1905 Cadillac Model D with tail fins. What distinguished the Bourbons from the Republicans (and from the populist Democrats) was their commitment to smaller government, free trade, and cheap labor. That meant unfree labor in the 1850s, and more or less free labor once the South was successfully “redeemed” from Republican rule and black civil rights enforcement after the Civil War.
What America needs instead is fissionism. We need a clearer, more uncompromising articulation of a pure MAGA doctrine that distinguishes our agenda from the libertarians and the so-called “principled conservatives.”
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