Stephanie Slade is a senior editor at Reason and the author of Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right.
“While truth and virtue are metaphysical and moral ends,” wrote Frank Meyer, a senior editor at National Review in the magazine’s early years, “the freedom to seek them is the political condition of those ends.” This is one of the core claims of fusionism, the philosophy that modern Anglo-American conservatism was built upon.
Fusionists like Meyer believe that liberty and virtue are both necessary for human flourishing. An ideal political regime is one that prioritises the protection of basic rights and liberties, while a worthwhile life is one that puts those freedoms to good use.
The tradition of the West “has conceived virtue not merely in the negative terms of subduing evil inclinations,” Meyer explained, “but also in positive terms – in terms of achievement of potentialities which, although finite, are immeasurably great.... Its concept of virtue is positive, the performing of acts honorable, noble, valorous, glorious, generous.”
That’s a formula that requires a lot of us as individuals. Many on the right today have therefore jettisoned it in favour of a more “muscular” approach to politics that would proudly use the coercive power of the state to constrain people’s choices in the name of producing better outcomes.
In this view, a commitment to limited government is actually preventing people from being moral. Free trade allows companies to selfishly ship manufacturing jobs overseas, while unregulated social media allows young people to opt into a life of endless doomscrolling and dissipation. What we supposedly need instead is a legal regime that takes a hands-on approach to helping people be virtuous.
There are more and less extreme iterations of anti-fusionist conservatism, but a forthright version is jarring to hear indeed. “We should not blink, we should not hesitate to tell people,” William Wolfe, a former Trump administration official, proclaimed in a speech in March. “Frankly, yes... I am going to enforce my morality on you inasmuch as our morality is God’s morality.”
Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard law professor and proponent of Catholic integralism, has admitted something similar. “We have learned from behavioral economics that agents with administrative control over default rules may nudge whole populations in desirable directions,” he wrote. “It is a useless exercise to debate whether or not this shaping from above is best understood as coercive, or rather as an appeal to the ‘true’ underlying preferences of the governed.”
In other words, the right should be willing to impose its values on society, whether the electorate likes it or not, and assume that people will thank conservatives for it later.
Conservatives, at least in the Anglo-American context, have traditionally opposed progressives for exhibiting just such hubris. While the left embraced policies aimed at protecting people from their own poor choices and instantiating values such as equity and inclusiveness, the right adopted a posture of hostility towards big government and the so-called nanny state.
And for decades conservatives held that it was naive of leftists to think politicians and bureaucrats could engineer greater prosperity through top-down management of the economy than free people working through free markets bring about practically without trying.
Fusionism offers a better way – one that sees government by its nature as well equipped to protect our basic rights and liberties but ill equipped to tell us how to live.
This doesn’t mean that some habits and lifestyles aren’t more conducive than others to finding meaning and fulfilment. Fusionism is far from moral relativism. In fact, Meyer argued that virtue was a higher good than freedom. “All that I am contending is that it is not a political problem,” he wrote, “that it is not the concern of the state, that virtue cannot be enforced or brought about by political means.”
Expecting the state to make you virtuous is a little like expecting your cardiologist to give you spiritual rather than medical advice.
The anti-fusionist might point out that securing eternal salvation is of greater long-run importance than is the attainment of mere physical well-being. True enough, but that doesn’t make a physician qualified to help in the spiritual arena – and the health and longevity that a physician is competent to help with, even if they aren’t the highest imaginable ends, are valuable preconditions for human flourishing.
Likewise, sound government and the rule of law, including the protection of private property and the right to free expression, are instrumental goods. By safeguarding individual liberty, they increase our opportunities to put our gifts and abilities to creative use, cultivating upright habits and becoming more excellent versions of ourselves.