FUSED AGAINST/UNFUSABLE FOR:

We can forget how recently the Democrats and Republicans began to divide on Left/Right lines. Well into the 1960s, party allegiances were as much regional and hereditary as doctrinal. Only from Richard Nixon's time can we properly regard the two parties as coherent ideological groupings.

Political conservatism was, to a greater degree than is often acknowledged, the creation of one man: William F. Buckley, Jr., the handsome and eloquent editor of National Review. In the 1950s, Buckley brought together various groups with a shared interest in opposing the USSR and its American apologists. They were a disparate bunch -- patriots, evangelicals, libertarians, foreign policy hawks, monetarists, strict constitutionalists -- and they all had their own reasons for being anti-socialist. Yet their alliance turned out to be a thing of awesome power, carrying Ronald Reagan to the White House and, through him, defeating communism, slashing taxes, and reversing America's decline.

Once those victories were won, some libertarians no longer wanted to march alongside those they regarded as big-state religious nuts; and some trads no longer wanted to associate with those they regarded as crazed enthusiasts of drugs and pornography. The alloy began to melt into its two component metals.

In the absence of revolutionary socialism, could something else bind the coalition together?

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