Getting Real About Fusionism

May 27, 2025

by Avi Woolf

It is often the fate of great men that they are popularly known only for some pithy quote or bumper-sticker idea. We know Reagan as the man who said government is the problem, not the solution. We know Clausewitz as the man who said war is politics by other means.

Another such unfortunate great man of the right is Frank S. Meyer. Anyone familiar with American conservative thought knows him as the father of “fusionism”. Ostensibly, the term designates a great melding of the minds between the traditionalists and libertarians.

This was once an important insight. But today, fusionism has become a catch-all slogan and even almost magical incantation, meant to handwave away real problems in American life or politics. To appreciate Meyer’s achievement, it’s not enough to cite his words. We need to understand the conditions he faced—and learn to do the same in our own time.

Think back to the 1950s, when Meyer became prominent as a journalist and organizer. In the wake of World War II. Meyer saw a right squabbling over theory when there was serious work to be done to dismantle or at least weaken the then-dominant liberalism, with its axiomatic support for government intervention in both the economy and ordinary life. In his view, there was a real chance for an energetic right to break through the ossified and cumbersome liberal establishment. But this was only possible if everyone on the right recognized certain basic realities of midcentury America.

Perhaps the most important such reality was that America was no longer a “conservative” society. Since at least the New Deal, traditional assumptions about how the constitution should work, how government should relate to society, and many more such ideas about the world had been rejected outright or transformed beyond recognition.  Appeals to stability and continuity, therefore,  could no longer serve as the bulwark against materialism, collectivism, and socialism. To the contrary, conservatives needed to make the case for change.

Meyer knew that this was an uncomfortable position for conservatives. As he put it in his seminal essay “Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism”:

[Effective conservatism] cannot now be identical with the natural conservatism towards which it yearns. The world in which it exists is the revolutionary world. To accept that, to conserve that, would be to accept and conserve the very denial of man's long-developed understanding, the very destruction of achieved truth, which are the essence of the revolution.”

Like it or not, Meyer argued, Americans who rejected the leftist revolutions of the 20th century would have to adopt elements of the revolutionary perspective. Rather than instinctually defending a political and moral order that no longer existed, they would have to become “conscious” conservatives, seeking to drive back the tide of modern liberalism even at the cost of conflict and disruption.  Meyer recognized that traditionalists might blanch at this strategy, which did not match their understanding of a conservative disposition. But in a “revolutionary” age, he insisted, simply doing the same thing is to fighting a losing battle.

This strategy famously bore fruit with Reagan’s victory. But too many people misunderstand why Meyer and the conservative movement succeeded. Addicted to the concept that “ideas have consequences” (another slogan that is only superficially understood), they think arguments only need to be expressed to take effect in the world. In the triumphal narrative of the legacy right, Reagan won in 1980 because Meyer and his allies published some articles in the 1950s and 1960s. But that ignores the decades of effort, thousands of people, and changing circumstances that who were involved in that effort.

Take the economic reforms embraced by Reagan. These were possible not just thanks to National Review but also by changing economic conditions and masses of new voters and volunteers who were disillusioned with the Great Society, tired of inflation, and willing to try something new. Fusionism did not sell in the early ‘60s, when it seemed that the US government could spend endlessly without affecting prosperity. It took the stagflation of the ‘70s to make a different approach seem necessary.

Or consider the Federalist Society—not strictly speaking a “fusionist” effort but one that reflects Meyer’s commitment to organizing for change. It did not succeed by publishing articles for a monolithically liberal judiciary to read. It did so by training and recruiting cadre after cadre of judges and lawyers to challenge and ultimately to replace them through political means. Magazines and seminars were part of that effort, but only a part.

 The conservative movement, in short, was a revolution of people who embraced and pursued conservative ideas against the consensus of their times. Those people not only made arguments but also formed institutions and associations, managed budgets, provided advice and mobilized groups to ensure not only political but also social wins. It was not a battle fought and won in heaven but on earth. This is the element of “fusionism” that Meyer’s admirers today often miss.

It’s a lesson we need to learn once again. We, too, live in a revolutionary age. The institutions old-guard conservatives could once take for granted—large-scale religious and social affiliation and belonging, relatively healthy families, at least theoretical neutrality in otherwise liberal institutions, such as academia—have all been severely weakened.

Yet in the face of this dangerous collapse, conservatives who claimed inspiration from Meyer have failed to mobilize in the same way they did for the judiciary, economic policy, or fighting communism. Until very recently, their efforts amounted to libraries’ worth of articles and books bemoaning the current situation. The books were fine and some sold well, but they never changed or improved anything tangible. Meantime, hardly a dime or minute was spent on the kind of hard, arduous, but ultimately fruitful work in training a critical mass of people who could work in and even take over such institutions from an increasingly radical left—let alone establish alternative ones.

The lessons of Meyer’s revolution were forgotten because conservatives did not recognize the changing realities. America was a place of stagnant politics but a relatively healthy society in Meyer’s time. We now live in an era of turbulent politics and a struggling society. Political institutions, the only ones the right knows how to control, play a role in helping rebuild matters—witness the wave of school choice laws being passed or the destruction of DEI in public universities via state laws. But theirs is a secondary role.

Rather than arguing about abstractions, conservatives need to start devoting their energies, money, time, and ideas for building and rebuilding community in the broad sense. No-one is going to do it for us, and in far too many places, “just do it like you used to” will not mean anything to generations who have no idea what that is. In Meyer’s time, we needed theoreticians, lawyers, economists in Meyer’s time. What we need today are administrators and bureaucrats, teachers, curators, and artists.

And these institutions and activities cannot just be for national elites, important as they are. We need action in helping to slow and if possible, reverse the decline of families throughout the country, not just books bemoaning that fact. To take a line from progressives: we need to think nationally but start acting much more locally.

            With public dissatisfaction increasing, education offers great opportunities. A network of students, teachers, and administrators could be organized in school districts and education schools bringing together the like-minded and persuadable to confront the progressive education blob. Such an organization—call it the E.D. Hirsch Society—might devote some attention to theoretical issues. But it would be would need to be a practical organization, concerned not only with also all the nuts and bolts of training and practice.

Similar efforts should be made regarding the training of government bureaucrats, the cultivation of artists, writers, and curators. In each case, the general direction—resisting the revolutionary establishment—is more important than the specific doctrines.

            Such efforts would be closer to the old fusionism than they might appear. Contrary to the misunderstanding that the leaders of the old conservative movement agreed with each other, the right succeeded in breaking the grip of midcentury liberalism with an often volatile mix of people who often squabbled with one another. Remember Reagan’s saying that an 80% ally is not a 20% traitor. The same flexibility is necessary today. Trying to impose rigid dogmas in fields that have already traditionally skewed liberal is a recipe for failure.

            Some people might respond that there is no need for such efforts, since Trump will destroy the power of the institutional left that has caused so much wreckage. But even if that happens, we’re going to need people to occupy the important nodes in civil society and institutions, where they can help rebuild what was lost.

            In Meyer’s day, conservatives were searching for a set of principles they could use to challenge the conventional wisdom of their day. The conscious conservatism that we need is different: not an ideology per se but a perspective that recognizes the world as it is, which seeks to bring about change in practice and not just in theory. Fusionism today is a discarded bumper sticker. It’s time to remake it into the revolution America needs.

Avi Woolf has published articles in Commentary, National Review, and The Washington Examiner. He also hosts a podcast series on the Gilded Age entitled Stumbling Colossus.