Stephanie Slade joins the podcast to talk about her years of research on the evolving right and the eroding foundations of American conservatism. How can we preserve liberty and virtue at the same time? How does the next generation define the good life? And how can we resist the turn toward authoritarianism, big government, and even monarchism?
We discuss the ideas of Hayek, Meyer, Kirk, Reagan, the dissident right, and why rebuilding a resilient society may require recovering the moral and intellectual foundations that once sustained it.
Order or pre-order Stephanie's new book, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, here.
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
BEN KLUTSEY: Today on the podcast we have Stephanie Slade. She is a senior editor at Reason, where she covers the American conservative movement, and a fellow in liberal studies at the Acton Institute. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, among other outlets. She was a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow in 2016 and a Bastiat Prize finalist in 2013.
She is the author of Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, which will be published by the University of Notre Dame Press. Congratulations, Stephanie.
STEPHANIE SLADE: Thank you, Ben.
KLUTSEY: And thanks for being here to have this conversation.
SLADE: Really happy to be here.
Fusionist constitutionalism
KLUTSEY: To kick things off, let’s start with definitions. And I like the term that Meyer uses once or twice—I think you mentioned this in the book—fusionist constitutionalism. First of all, what is it and what problem is it trying to solve?
SLADE: Fusionism is the idea that both liberty and virtue are necessary for human flourishing. I’ve been working really hard to try to figure out how to boil it down to the simplest terms, and that’s what I’ve come up with. Liberty and virtue are both necessary. We need to care about both of them.
Now, it is basically a sort of political or philosophical synthesis that says we should bring together the classically liberal political tradition with all of its concerns about individual liberty, individual rights, limited government, rule of law, separation of powers, free markets, and all that stuff that goes into the classical liberal political tradition. But it needs to be married to something more than that. And so, fusionism, as it emerged in the conservative movement in America in the 20th century, marries classical liberalism to the Judeo-Christian moral tradition.
And so, the constitutionalism comes in because that’s part of the classical liberalism. This is how we in this country—the institution that we created, that we established to help accomplish that separation of powers and individual rights, individual freedom. But again, it’s not purely liberalism. It’s liberalism married to this thicker, moral tradition that comes down to us through the Judeo-Christian tradition and basically helps us answer some questions about right and wrong, good and evil, where did we come from, what we were made for, and how do we find meaning in life.
Parallels between Hayek, Kirk, and Meyer
KLUTSEY: Now, you draw parallels between Hayek, who is one of my favorites, and Kirk or Meyer. Both of them, I think, share the ways in which you draw these parallels. I’m wondering whether the parallels are mainly temperamental or are they more substantive?
SLADE: I don’t think it’s mostly temperamental. I actually think these three men you just mentioned, who are three of the main characters in the story I’m telling in the 20th century right-of-center politics in America that emerges, were quite different temperamentally.
Frank Meyer was a sort of fiery, argumentative guy who always wanted to fight you about why fusionism was right. Russell Kirk was a sort of Midwestern gentleman. He was a Burkean conservative, like a traditionalist Burkean conservative, which is not to say that he didn’t have strong opinions about things. In fact, Meyer and Kirk often, especially earlier in their careers, butted heads a little bit and wrote dueling negative reviews of each other’s books. But they eventually came around to realizing that they were much closer together on substantive issues and their commitment to individual freedom and virtue than they had originally, I think, thought.
They developed over time a positive, constructive working relationship. Frank Meyer was the books editor of National Review magazine. Russell Kirk wrote dozens and dozens of books over the course of his life. So, Meyer would commission reviews of Kirk’s books to run in National Review. And he also commissioned Kirk to write reviews of other people’s books and brought him in as a contributor to a collection of essays that he published on What is Conservatism? And he wanted to make sure that Russell Kirk’s voice would be in that, because he realized he represented a really important strain of thinking on the right in America. And both of them were similar to and influenced by Friedrich Hayek, who was a little bit older, who came before and was obviously, as many of us think, the patron saint of modern classical liberalism and libertarian movement.
And so, I argue in the book that one way of thinking about right-of-center politics is that you have these two poles. You have the traditionalist pole, somebody who’s more of a social conservative like Russell Kirk on one end. And you have the libertarian pole on the other end, somebody like Hayek, and that these two things are competing with each other or polling against each other.
But what actually happens, what I found when I studied the history, is that they’re much closer together. Hayek, Kirk, and Meyer all believe things that are deeply overlapping. They really had many of the same commitments.
Hayek actually cared a lot about traditionalism. He thought tradition was how we handed down wisdom through the generations, through a process of trial and error, and transmitting that wisdom to the next generation. Meanwhile, Russell Kirk, who’s not thought of as a libertarian, was extremely libertarian on a lot of things, I found, when I actually sat down and started reading him.
So I think that this is fusionism in action. Many people who are part of that movement in this era are committed to both liberty and virtue, even if they’re not necessarily remembered by most people today as such.
KLUTSEY: But Hayek wrote that famous essay, Why I Am Not a Conservative, in ways that seemed like he was trying to insist emphatically, “Yes, you may perceive me as traditionalist and so on, but I’m really not.” What’s the rationale behind that?
SLADE: Yes. And in fact, that essay was originally a speech that he gave at the Mont Pelerin Society against Russell Kirk. Kirk was there as his respondent. And so Kirk was there as a conservative and Hayek was saying, “I am not a conservative.”
However, if you actually read it, what you’ll find is he’s talking very much about European or a British style conservatism, which is something different than what he says in the essay conservatism looks like on our shores in the United States. In America, liberalism or whigism—he talks about being an “old Whig,” that’s how he really identifies—is the basis upon which our entire politics here, in his opinion, was founded, because of our founding commitments to separation of powers, rule of law, limited government, and individual rights.
And so even the conservatives here are basically liberals, in his view. He’s basically saying, “I’m not against those guys. I’m not against the classical liberal conservatives that you find in America. What I’m against is the sort of European, Old World conservatism that is blood and soil, throne and altar, and is committed to defending monarchy, aristocracy, and the idea that you’re born into a certain state in life and you’re expected to stay there and be happy with it, as opposed to this very American way of approaching social mobility, where you can make anything of your life if you’re hardworking, if you have good ideas, you can be born poor and become rich, or vice versa.” That’s a sort of whiggish approach that Hayek likes. And he recognizes that’s actually the thing that most American conservatives have at least claimed to be defending.
KLUTSEY: And he also talks about change, and even though he thinks change is good and institutions evolve over time, he had a bit of a Burkean sensibility about studying previous institutions before you try to destroy them or change them, right?
SLADE: Yes, very Chestertonian. Chesterton’s fence—not tearing down the fence until you understand why it was built in the first place—I think that’s very Hayekian also. I think that when you actually go beyond the superficial reputations that some of these men have, you find a lot more overlap than you might be expecting.
Fusionist dissenters within the right
KLUTSEY: Very interesting. Now, fusionism always had dissenters from within the right. And you named some of them: Bozell, Zoll, Kevin Phillips. What was their core objections, if you could boil them down?
SLADE: Well, it depends. There are different ways to object to fusionism.
If fusionism is liberty and virtue, and a dual commitment to both those things, you could be a radical libertarian or a secular libertarian who cares about liberty but rejects the virtue piece and says, “We ought to dispense with or leave that Judeo-Christian moral tradition in the past, because it has no relevance to us today.” And so there always have been some dissenters from fusionism on the libertarian side in that way.
You could also be a dissenter on the right who’s all about virtue, a sort of theocratic, authoritarian conservatism that says, “I want virtue and I want it at the point of a gun. And I think that liberty and libertarianism is standing in the way of us having a good, morally virtuous society.” And in fact, we have seen a resurgence of this way of thinking about the relationship between liberty and virtue in our politics in recent years. There’s some people who say, “I care about the common good, I care about virtue. And I think libertarianism, free markets, limited government, or the rule of law is actually standing in the way of that.”
And then there are some of the people that I talk about in the book, and many people in our politics these days, the neo-reactionary faction today, who basically say, “All of this philosophizing about liberty and virtue is all beside the point because this stuff is all for suckers. Really, politics is war. Politics is entirely about friends, enemies, and acquiring power, coercive power, violent power, by whatever means necessary in order to reward our friends and punish our enemies.”
And this very cynical approach to politics says, “We’re not here to try to build a system where we can live peacefully with those who don’t share our values. We want to defeat and destroy the people who don’t share our values or force them to adopt our values and our way of life.”
Fusionism and foreign policy
KLUTSEY: And over time, fusionism becomes associated with foreign policy hawkishness, as well. How does that happen?
SLADE: I think it’s understandable. The people who were the main fusionists, so this is mostly people like Frank Meyer, who were in the National Review magazine orbit during this era, they really were all super Cold War hawks. They really believed that the Soviet Union posed an existential threat to the American way of life and to the liberal elements.
They wouldn’t have used the word liberal because back then, the word liberal was only in these spaces as it is often today for many people, as associated with left-of-center politics or the Democratic Party. So, they wouldn’t have said, “We’re in this to defend liberalism.” Hayek understood that because he was European. He understood this is true liberalism.
But basically, these conservative, fusionist, but hawkish, conservatives in the 20th century saw the Soviet Union as a threat to the free world and to the liberalism of our way of life, to the liberal, democratic capitalist order. They saw it correctly, as militantly atheist, militantly anti-capitalist, and militantly bent on domination of the world, a coercive domination of the world.
And so they said, “We have to have a strong response to this. We have to be treating this as the existential threat that we think it is. And that means a strong military that cares a lot about whether or not the Soviet Union is able to expand its sphere of influence.” And so they believed this. And they argued for it in National Review, Buckley argue for it on his TV show, and so on and so forth.
What I argue in my book, though, is that this is not a core component of fusionism as the philosophical synthesis that I’m defending, which is again this classical liberalism married to the Judeo-Christian moral tradition. You can be a fusionist who cares about liberty and virtue and be a pacifist. You can be a fusionist who looks at the world and comes to different conclusions about the prudential question of whether, back then or now, we ought to have a more restraint-oriented or a more interventionist kind of approach to military, because that’s a policy question.
So we start with our principles, liberty and virtue, and then we apply them to the circumstances that we find ourselves in, and then we come to a conclusion, and we might disagree about the conclusion, about whether it’s a good idea for us to be involved in the world militarily or not.
I think there are plenty of people who, by my definition of fusionism, care about liberty and virtue, but who might say, “Look, us going out and getting involved in other people’s conflicts around the globe, it hasn’t produced the outcomes we thought it would. And we need to learn that lesson. And by the way, it also inevitably produces less freedom here at home. For example, having a draft is an obvious example, but also all the spending, all the money that we pour into a strong military, the lives that we sacrifice, all these things—these are not worth it. If you care about liberty and virtue, in fact, we should not be taking a more hawkish foreign policy approach.”
So, I think people can disagree and you can still be a good-faith fusionist and disagree about foreign policy and about many policies you can disagree. But specifically, I mean, especially this one, I think it’s a mistake to think that hawkish foreign policy or interventionist foreign policy is a core part of what it means to be a fusionist, even though, in practice, in the 20th century, in the Cold War context, most of them were.
Fusionists and free markets
KLUTSEY: On the liberty side of the conversation, how strongly did the fusionists hold on to free markets as the foundational principle that should drive our economy, outside of Meyer and Kirk and a few others? How strongly did fusionists hold that?
Because, obviously, when the rubber hits the road, and you actually have to make decisions and policy related to this, I know people are a little wishy-washy about that.
SLADE: That’s exactly how it plays out in practice. At a rhetorical level and at the level of ideas and intellectual debates, I think it was a really widespread, deep commitment to free markets.
And Frank Meyer, his position was that he was really quite a radical libertarian, although he was associated with National Review and was conservative. He thought that the government has three legitimate functions and three legitimate functions only, and that’s to protect our borders from external threats, to keep law and order on our streets, have a police system, and to have a court system so that we can adjudicate disputes like contract disputes between citizens. And so the courts, police, and military—that’s it. Get government out of everything else.
And especially—I think this was a really important insight that has gotten lost in many cases—he said that the same entity that has this monopoly over the use of violence, that in order to do those three functions that are legitimate and that you have to have a government, he thought, to carry out those functions, you don’t want to then empower that same entity with the power to decide how markets are going to run, how people are going to make a living, or how people are going to dispose of their property. Everything in the market sphere needs to be kept completely outside of that government sphere as much as humanly possible, because that would be way too much concentration of power to have the same entity that gets to police our streets and lock people in cages for breaking the law also be deciding how the economy is going to be run. So he was quite libertarian on that. And I think that was a very influential position.
But when you actually get into office, there’s a difference between intellectual debates, ideas, and rhetoric, when you actually have people who identify as fusionists or who are influenced by fusionist ideas coming into office, what you find is that it can be easier said than done.
And so, Ronald Reagan—very much fusionist in his rhetoric and in his commitments—he talks in speeches that he gives when he’s running for office and when he’s elected about the importance of liberty and virtue. He name-checks Frank Meyer and Friedrich Hayek. And he’s trying, right? He wants to reduce the size and scope of government. He believes in cutting taxes. He believes in cutting spending. But what ends up happening is he cut taxes, but he isn’t able to get the spending cuts pushed through. And so we end up with ballooning national debt.
And so, the point is that when you have the messiness of actual politics, it ends up being quite hard to actually do the things, even if you want to. Even if your intentions were good going in, you end up having to make compromises on the margins, and sooner or later you can really lose sight. The goal can get away from you, I think.
Institutions and the spread of fusionist ideas
KLUTSEY: Yes. Now, Frank Meyer helped spur a wave of institutions—Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Young Americans for Freedom, the Federalist Society, and the Philadelphia Society. How much credit do these institutions deserve for advancing fusionism versus simply reflecting it?
SLADE: That’s a great question. I opened my book with a description of the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, which is this institution founded by Hayek right after World War II. And he says when he’s founding this organization that it’s for scholars. It’s a lot of economists, but also historians and whatnot. And he says, “This is not going to be a public-facing organization. It’s going to be a forum and a gathering place for scholars who believe in the free society to come together and to discuss, to debate, and to get clear on our ideas without worrying about what’s politically possible right now.”
Because he said, “If we put good ideas out into the conversation and into the bloodstream, in the long run, that will change what’s politically possible a generation from now.” So, we shouldn’t be constrained by what we think is possible right now. We should be thinking long term and we should be thinking about putting good ideas out there.
That was how Hayek approached political change. And I think that Meyer, Buckley, and some of these guys in the United States who were the sort of founding fathers of the institutional conservative movement as we know it from the 20th century, they were really influenced by that. And Meyer really believed that, too.
We’ve got to get the first principles right. You can’t build a movement if you don’t have a good, sound philosophical grounding for that movement. Then, it’s not going to work. And so, engaging with ideas, debating ideas, getting clarity on ideas, really grappling with the challenges of the contradictions, or seeming contradictions, in our commitments, this is really important to him and transmitting those ideas to the next generation.
So, Intercollegiate Studies Institute is a student group, Young Americans for Freedom is an organization for young people, helping young people be steeped in these ideas and to have the habit of engaging in thinking, reading, and debating ideas—he thinks is super, super important. And that has to come first before you actually move into the electoral politics arena where you’re trying to get people elected and get policies implemented. That’s the order of operations that they all believe in.
So, these organizations are doing that. And they’re pretty successful for a while. My argument is that over time, actually, the focus on ideas peters out and a focus on purely getting our guys in office, acquiring power, seizing power, and using it against our enemies comes to supplant this focus on ideas. And that’s part of what’s gone wrong on the American right in our right-of-center politics in recent years.
Fusionism on the left
KLUTSEY: Super, super interesting. Now, was there such a thing as a fusionist left or left fusionist?
SLADE: If by fusionism you mean bringing different strains of thinking together, or if it’s the way many people use it today as another word for a coalition—you have two different factions and you’re bringing them together and trying to get them to play nicely and vote for the same person—then of course that coalition building is part of our politics always on left and right.
But the particular philosophical synthesis that came to be known as fusionism was specifically about liberty and virtue. It was about classical liberalism and the Judeo-Christian tradition. And this has been a right-of-center phenomenon in our country, in our actual history.
So there probably are other syntheses going on the left, and there certainly are coalitions being put together on the left. But I think the thing that I’m trying to resurrect with my work and with this book is the specific fusion of liberty and virtue that I think is the key to a good society and a good life. And I think that has unfortunately started to disappear from our political conversation.
Fusionism and Reagan
KLUTSEY: Now, Reagan is in some ways an embodiment of fusionism. And I’ve wondered after reading your book, whether the ideas of fusionism in some ways start and end with him. It starts, yes, before him, but he reflects these ideas, and as you talk about in the book, he does quote Frank Meyer, Friedrich Hayek, and others in his Conservative Political Action Conference speech as the kind of person who carries this idea into fruition. But then, at the end of his presidency, it peters out, right?
And I think part of the issue you talk about is that people think that victory has been achieved and people rest on their laurels a little bit. But there’s also this tension between whether ideas live in institutions or they live in people who actually carry them. And I’ve been trying to parse this out as I’ve been reading your book. What are your thoughts on that?
SLADE: I do think that, taking what starts out as ideas being debated in journals and magazine articles and at conferences and translating that into actual politics, popular politics at the presidential, the highest possible level, national politics, it does seem like it required the right man at the right moment to carry that message.
It’s hard to imagine somebody who didn’t have the sort of charisma and ability to connect with the American people and that sort of empathetic ability. People liked him. They wanted to have a beer with him. They believed that he understood their problems and wanted to help them. That stuff is also necessary in order to take ideas that live at a high academic level and bring them down to where the American people are and translate them into terms that will speak to them where they are. So I do think there’s a sort of great man necessary sometimes for that. But he couldn’t have existed at all if not for the intellectual groundwork that had been laid beforehand, because he was so influenced by these thinkers and writers.
There’s a story that the conservative historian Lee Edwards used to tell before he died about how he was working as a journalist and he was with the Reagans during their time. I think it was when Reagan was still governor of California. So, Lee’s traveling around and covering Reagan. And at one point, the Reagans invite him into their home and sit him down in their library and say, “Would you like some tea?” And they go into the kitchen to get tea.
And Lee Edwards gets up and starts flipping through the books on the shelf in Reagan’s library and he starts picking them off. And he sees Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. He opens it up and he sees that it’s dog-eared and marked up. He sees Bastiat’s The Law. These books have been read and they’ve been really engaged with, according to Lee Edwards. Reagan was not this sort of dumb Hollywood empty suit that some people wanted to make him out to be. He really had read, thought, and been influenced by ideas and by thinkers who came before him.
So I think that’s the argument. You might need the man with the political talents in order to take the message to the people. But he’s got to get those ideas from somewhere. And just very rarely do you have somebody who can do both those things—invent a philosophy and take it to the people all in one person—and there’s usually an intellectual lineage there that person has drawn upon.
The decline of fusionism after Reagan
KLUTSEY: Yes. So back to the victory point, is it indeed the case that fusionists became complacent because Reagan won? And toward the end, the Berlin Wall comes down—it was actually in the beginning of the George H. W. Bush presidency. People are like, “Look, we’ve got this.” Francis Fukuyama writes this in The End of History, which you note as well in your book. Is that really the cause of, or the beginning of the decline of fusionism?
SLADE: It seems that way to me. There’s this 11-year period from 1980 to 1991 when you have Reagan winning two landslide elections, a second one even bigger than the first. You have the fall of the Berlin wall, and then you have the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.
I think it was naturally and understandably a sense that their ideas were so obviously vindicated. “How could anybody possibly doubt us anymore? These fusionist ideas of a free society over an unfree system of government and unfree economy, which is American,” they would say, “and innately fusionist. Our founders were fusionists. They believed in liberty and virtue. That’s what they were trying to accomplish was the enduring union of those two things. And so, this American experiment is so obviously superior to the alternative. It’s been demonstrated. Our global enemy is now in ruins. It’s time for us to move from the phase of building the case for the thing we believe in and move from that into the phase of trying to implement those ideas, get them enacted, get good people elected, and get policies on the books and in the world that reflect the lessons that we’ve learned.”
I think that’s natural. I sort of raise this question in the book and I don’t try to answer it because I don’t know the answers. Could it have been otherwise? Could you possibly have a victory like that, feel so vindicated, and not then turn your attention away from the ideas or toward what feels like the natural next step?
A visual that helps me is that the ideas and the philosophy are the foundation and then you’re trying to construct a structure, a building on top of it. That’s the political mechanism of winning elections and getting policies enacted. And you think, “Okay, we did the hard work for decades of laying that political, philosophical foundation. So now it’s time to build.”
And that’s natural. That’s understandable. But what you don’t realize is that the foundation will erode out from under you if you don’t tend to it. If you’re not continually rebuilding that foundation, it will disappear over time. At least, in this analogy, in the intellectual sense.
If you’re not doing the work of passing your philosophical commitments, the arguments, and the reasoning behind them on to the next generation, you’re going to end up with what we have now, which is a whole generation of young conservatives who don’t actually know what conservatism means or once meant in the American context. They’ve only ever been politically aware during the Donald Trump era. This is conservatism to them, that is, economic protectionism, industrial policy, a sort of belief in an almost unlimited, strong central executive. This is the stuff that would have been anathema to conservatives 50 years ago.
And young people today don’t know the arguments for why their predecessors felt the way they did and felt so strongly about it, because they’ve never encountered those arguments. All they know is that, “We’re Republicans and we want to own the left.” That’s all they’ve been taught. And so, the foundations, that philosophical foundation, it disappeared while we weren’t looking, while we were focused on other things.
The fusionist remnant
KLUTSEY: Are there any fusionists left?
SLADE: Absolutely. Yes. I feel this very strongly.
A few years ago, I think the conventional wisdom was that fusionism is dead. Maybe it was morally bankrupt all along, or maybe it was suited to the 20th century and the Cold War era, but it has no relevance to our problems today. That was sort of the conventional wisdom. Fusionism’s dead. Forget about Reagan. Time for something new and more muscular. The word muscular government or muscular conservatism I was seeing everywhere. And I think there’s a whole faction, I call them the dissident right, who does believe this still.
But there is also still a fusionist or classically liberal right, and there are lots of people still on it. And I’ve learned that because as I’ve been writing about these debates and these changes over the last five or 10 years, I’ve increasingly had people from various free market think tanks and intellectual institutions, scholars, and readers of Reason magazine where I write, reaching out to me and saying, “This is crazy. This big government conservatism that we’re seeing, it doesn’t resonate with me at all. I’m troubled by this. I feel like I’m the only one left, though.”
And I started to realize a lot of people out there are feeling like they’re the only one left, the lone remnant…
KLUTSEY: Remnants, yes.
SLADE: …of this old-school fusionist conservatism or fusionism. And so, I started trying to connect some of these people to each other, especially from different institutions on the right that are still committed to free markets and limited government.
And there is now what I would call a sort of countermobilization of people who are old-school fusionist, classically liberal types, Reagan-style conservatives, and libertarians who understand the importance of virtue also, who are saying, “We’re not okay with this change. This movement has gone off in this other direction that we don’t recognize. We’re not going to roll right over and accept it. We are going to try to fight back. We’re going to try to fight for the soul of this country.” And so I think there is a countermobilization happening.
The freedom conservatism statement of principles a few years ago, I think, was an expression of this—a really obvious expression of this—saying, “We’re not all nationalist, protectionist, and populist conservatives. Some of us still believe in the principles that we once claimed to hold, and we haven’t just abandoned them because it’s politically expedient.”
The dissident right
KLUTSEY: Right. And you coined the term dissident right. What constitutes the dissident right? I mean, you talk about the populists, the right-wing progressives, the post-liberals or anti-liberals, the theocons, and the new reactionary movement. Is there one or a couple of animating principles or ideas that you would identify as constituting the dissident right?
SLADE: I should say I didn’t exactly coin it. I adopted it. There have been others who have used it. Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist podcaster and YouTuber, has called himself dissident right. So this is not a term I invented.
But I adopt it because I think it is a useful umbrella term for all the different sort of factions and voices that you’re talking about who are all united by essentially rejecting the fusionist consensus of the last century. So they’re dissenting from what was once a consensus, and they’re saying we reject this. I also chose it because I needed an umbrella term and I wanted something that didn’t seem like I was tilting the deck against the people I’m arguing against, but I do think they’re wrong, and I am arguing against them.
So they all reject the liberty-virtue fusion in some way, but I do think there are, as we alluded to earlier, two broad ways that you can reject it. One is you can say, “I care about virtue, and I think your liberty is getting in the way.” And so there are some who are more of what I call the theocons, or they call themselves often the post-liberals. This tends to be the Catholic integralists, Christian nationalists, and it’s the social conservatives who say, “I want a virtuous society, and I think that too much libertarianism stops people from being able to attain virtue. So if we have laws on the books that make it easy to get divorced, if we have laws in the books that allow stores to operate on Sundays, if we have laws in the books that don’t ban pornography or obscenity, then people are going to make choices that are unvirtuous. And so we need government to help them be virtuous. We need less liberalism—we need less liberty—in order for people to make good choices and live good lives.” That’s one way of dissenting from the fusionist sort of equation of liberty and virtue.
The other way says, “I reject both your liberty and your virtue. This is all irrelevant to me. I think that thinking about these things is for suckers. In fact, we need to be realistic about politics being just purely a question of who has power and gets to use it to impose their way on everyone else.” That, I think, is more summed up by the group I call the neo-reactionaries in the book. And so this is people like the blogger Curtis Yarvin. It’s also some other even crazier people, like a guy who blogs and podcasts under the name Bronze Age Pervert. I talk about him in the book. But they’re essentially authoritarians, they’re philosophical authoritarians, and they’re saying, “What matters is acquiring power and using it for our ends. And so all this liberty and virtue stuff is beside the point.”
KLUTSEY: Yes, authoritarian and monarchist as well.
SLADE: Yes, right. It shows itself in different ways. But Yarvin, he actually wrote once where he basically said, “Look, I call myself a monarchist. As far as I’m concerned, a dictator is just a form of a monarch.”
The humanities and the case for freedom
KLUTSEY: You quote Bradley Thompson’s 2016 Mont Pelerin Society speech where he talks about the need for more historians, more philosophers, literature scholars, and not just economists. Do you agree with that? I mean, is the case for freedom better carried by the humanities than by economics?
SLADE: I don’t want to say anything against economics. My undergraduate degree is in economics. I love economics. And I think that it’s very frustrating to see people downplay or dismiss the importance of material well-being to any sort of coherent picture of a good society and the common good. Obviously, widespread abundance, material abundance has to be a part of that. And economics helps us understand realistically how to achieve that.
But yes, I came around, through the course of researching and reporting this book, to the conclusion which I did not know I was going to arrive at. I was trying to understand why so many young people are being seduced by what seem like very dangerous and toxic ideas of the dissident right. It seems, disproportionately, these ideas seem to be appealing to especially young men on the right. Why? Why are they being seduced? What is so appealing to them?
One of the things I came to realize is that they feel like we are missing the point when we’re talking about how to tweak policy in order to squeeze another few percentage points of productivity out of the economy or something, this tax rate versus this marginal tax rate, or whatever. They’re like, “You guys are just completely missing the point. Because what matters to us is how do I, as a young person in this age”—where they’ve been raised with moral relativism, and also with a very hostile sense of antagonism coming from all the cultural institutions that have been captured by the left, that are hostile to people like them—“want somebody who will fight for us and defend our rights in society against a hostile left that seems to hate us and want to use every weapon at its disposal, including state power, against us? We want somebody who will fight for us.” That’s the most important thing to them.
And, too, “We want some guidance on what does a good life even mean? What does that even look like? How do we begin to build toward something that would give us meaning and fulfillment?” And I think we, in the liberty movement broadly construed, are really good at talking about policy and how policy will lead to abundance and material well-being. But we have tended to be less comfortable talking about what are our answers to those more deep, existential questions about, “Who am I? Where did I come from? What was I made for? How do I find meaning in this world?”
And yet, I argue, the fusionist tradition actually has answers to those questions because philosophy, theology, and literature are part of that Judeo-Christian moral tradition. That’s that other piece of it besides just pure classical liberalism. But we have tended not to draw on that part of our inheritance as much, or we seem to be less comfortable with it.
We’re like, “Well, it’s for you to figure out what a good life looks like for you. We’ll leave that to you. We’re just going to figure out how to get government out of the way so that you can flourish and prosper.” And that seemed for a while like the right order to go in. We’re going to get government out of the way, so people are free, so that they can use that freedom to answer questions about what a good life looks like.
But what these young people seem to be saying is, “Until we know what a good life looks like and how to pursue it, and until we believe that there is an actual path to getting there somehow, we don’t care about you getting government out of the way. We would rather have big government if that means we can have a good life.”
And so we really have to engage with them on those existential questions more than I think we have tended to be comfortable doing over the last few decades. And I think that can only be done with the help from the humanities.
KLUTSEY: Does this connect with Kirk’s point about a moral imagination?
SLADE: I think so. Yes. So, this idea—it’s the hardest thing to write about because what is the moral imagination? He’s basically saying that a lot of what we know is not stuff we know from either empirical observation, or reading it in a book even, but it’s just the sense we get of things that you can get through literature, that you can get through poetry. It’s the way that we have knowledge that comes through these subrational means.
And if you’re not engaging with art—he would say basically literature, poetry, or art of all kinds—then you’re not reaching people and teaching people in some of the ways that are actually most important and forming their moral imagination so that they understand what is good, what is true, what is beautiful, and how to conceive of those things so that they can try to pursue them in their lives. We haven’t always done a great job of that.
KLUTSEY: Yes. So, doubling down on this theme—in your book, you write about modernity’s preoccupation with utilitarian pursuits crowding out “the patient work of forming and expanding our mind so as to know where those practical pursuits are supposed to be taking us.” I think it highlights the point that you previously made. What does recovering it look like in practice? How do we recover this?
SLADE: I think part of it is just a correction. I think it’s happening. I think that what you guys are doing at Mercatus is part of this, right? You’re not just focusing on pure economic policy anymore. Not saying that’s not important, not saying that you’re not going to keep doing that stuff, but you’re engaging with the humanities, you’re engaging with these deeper questions. And I think more of the institutions within the liberty movement and the broad, political right of center, sort of one-time fusionist space, are not afraid to go there, to have those conversations, and to engage with those questions and to bring that into the conversation. That’s really important.
Because, again, I think we just got a little bit squeamish about not wanting to seem like we’re passing judgment on anyone. “Everybody is welcome.” Because that’s been the dominant mode, and what I think some people on the post-liberal right or on the dissident right might say that we should take seriously, is they would say that’s actually liberalism crowding into a space where it doesn’t belong. Liberalism says we’re not going to use coercive force to make you live a certain way according to our values.
But it’s a mistake if we allow liberalism to tell us that we’re not allowed to have opinions, that we’re not allowed to share those opinions, that we’re not allowed to try to persuade people to make different choices because we think those choices actually will conduce to their flourishing, and these other choices won’t. If we are so afraid to take a stand on anything, even when there’s no coercion involved, then we’ve really lost an important part of that—we’ve lost a whole half of that fusionist equation, which is not just about non-coercion. That’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient.
Fusionism and resilience
KLUTSEY: Yes. As we wrap up this conversation, I want to get your pulse on how optimistic you are. This podcast is about resilience. By resilience, I mean the ability to absorb shocks, go through challenges, and bounce back even stronger than before and thrive.
To the extent that we’ve had these movements—populism, the dissident right, and so on, that I think weaken our ability to be a resilient society—are you optimistic that we’ll have a resurgence of the right kinds of ideas, advancing liberty, advancing the kinds of virtue that will make us a resilient nation for the next 250 years?
SLADE: In general, I’m very hopeful because I think a lot of people—I alluded to this a minute ago—wrote off fusionism and the ideas that I’ve been talking about, those commitments, those philosophical ideas, as dead, as if they died with the new millennium, suited to the Cold War era, but they’re not suited to today, and they’re not coming back. Reagan-style conservatism is not coming back.
Maybe Reaganism is not coming back. That’s probably true. But I think fusionism is something that has eternal relevance. These are eternal truths that we need liberty and virtue in order to flourish. And a good society needs both those things.
And so, I think as long as we have people who are continuing to pursue the good things in life and pursue the truth, then there is a fighting chance for the things that I think are true to make that resurgence. And I think we’re starting to see it now. I think there’s been a whole series of things just in the last year—let’s say a couple years—that suggests that this counter-mobilization that I’ve described is starting to take on, and that the idea that “the dissident right approach to politics is the future for sure, that’s already been determined”—that was a premature judgment that people made.
This is a live fight right now and it is being fought in the battle of ideas, of political organization, and all of the rest. It’s being fought right now. We’re getting to live through that, which makes this a very interesting time. It means the outcome is still uncertain, but I do think it could go either way, and I am hopeful.
There were not a lot of people who thought that the Soviet Union was about to collapse right until it did, right? People were taken by surprise because it seemed like these ideas were on the march, they were on the ascendant. Many people thought we were losing to the Soviets, losing the Cold War. We didn’t realize how weak and how internally hollow those institutions actually were from the outside.
I think something like that is actually true of these dissident right ideas and institutions. They look very powerful. They’re capturing mindshare among young people, and that is the thing that makes me most nervous about all of this. They certainly are associated with the current administration, especially both the president and Vice President J.D. Vance, who is very much a leading member of the dissident right, but I think their ideas actually can’t sustain the weight that they want them to, whereas I think ours can. So that’s what makes me hopeful.
KLUTSEY: Stephanie Slade, on that hopeful note, thank you very much for joining A Resilient Republic. Really appreciate it.
SLADE: Thank you so much, Ben.
