Conservative Thought

RELIGHT THE FUSE:

Reagan’s Philosophical Fusionism: Conservatism’s political power is derived from its ideas, not the other way around. (Donald Devine, Apr 4, 2014, American Conservative)

How did Meyer, Buckley, and Reagan think about fusionism? Fusionism to them was a philosophical concept. It was a philosophy that considered the principles of freedom and tradition as naturally interrelated in a tension whose resulting moral force created Western civilization and its American offshoot. Tension (the term Meyer preferred to fusion) was a force that could hold traditionalism and freedom together, which made both part of one potential whole. It was not the unitary logic of an ideology from a single principle deducing necessary conclusions, but a synthesis, a synthesis that Reagan said described modern conservatism. Yes, he conceived a city on a hill, but one always fighting to uphold both principles; for he also argued “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

The idea that both principles were required was lost when progressivism insisted that tension, balance of power, duality, pluralism, and decentralization could all be unified under a single science of administration. By mid-20th century, the triumph of progressivism was complete. Both freedom and tradition would be subject to science. What Meyer et al.—explicitly following F.A. Hayek—did was to give the old ideal of synthesis new life. In fact, it did take a “debating club” at Buckley’s old National Review to draw out its conclusions. The freshly stated fusionist synthesis inspired a generation on the right and did become successful enough that some of its principles did have a brief life under Reagan’s administration. Once he left, however, political leaders only interested in the coalition as a step to power lost the sense of interrelatedness between the two principles and became confused and then exhausted. That is the problem today.

Even under Reagan there were factions that only viewed their own single ideology as the whole. There was always a coalitional aspect to “fusionism,” but those leading the coalition at the beginning understood the necessity of both freedom and tradition. They also understood that while communism was the preeminent threat, it was—as the founding conservative document, the Sharon Statement, put it—only “at present” the greatest threat. Anti-communism was not a principle but one aspect of a tradition that justified self-defense, a pragmatic necessity to preserve freedom and tradition. Likewise, libertarianism by itself had no rooted value structure even to minimize theft under the guise of reducing inequality. Traditionalism alone could become authoritarian and rigid but, as libertarian Hayek noted, free societies require customs and traditions to sustain them.

While factions will always exist, leaders of such single ideological perspectives necessarily will be viewed as partisans of that faction and will not be accepted as movement-wide leaders. Only one who internalizes the necessity of both liberty and tradition can make it work. That was Reagan’s secret to success and the only path forward. He was not a carpenter of stools but a synthesizer of Western wisdom, recognized as such by a sufficient number to be granted power. What the conservative movement needs most today is more philosophical debating clubs and less talk about power. If it gets the former right, the latter will follow.

CONSERVATISM SEEKS TO CONSERVE LIBERALISM:

Moderation as Pursuit of Justice: John Kekes and Aurelian Craiutu ask what virtues make a society truly good. (Daniel J. Mahoney, February 3, 2025, Modern Age)

John Kekes’s lucid and for the most part compelling book begins with a self-correction. As the author of several books making the case for conservatism and taking on academic egalitarianism on the left, he now wishes to emphasize what his “moderate conservatism” has in common with a “moderate liberalism” that also wants to preserve the American political system against extremists on the left and right. In making this change, he has clearly been unnerved by certain forms of populist activism and by soi-disant conservatives who refuse to acknowledge what remains valuable in liberal theory and practice. At the same time, however, he remains deeply skeptical of theorists and activists on the left and right who appeal (in Adam Smith’s phrase) to “ideal plan[s] of government” that treat “the different members of a great society” as “different pieces upon a chess-board” to be moved about at will. With Smith, Kekes opposes as “the highest degree of arrogance” the pretension of ideologues and abstract theorists that their “own judgment” is “the supreme standard of right and wrong.” Tocqueville aptly called this destructive propensity “literary politics,” as if these irresponsible theorists believed they were free to write a political play that ignores historical experience and the limits that define the human condition. This preference for abstract theorizing over practical reason and historical experience is shared by reactionary thinkers and those who hold up models of a “postliberal” utopia, along with the far more numerous class of “progressive” ideologists.

In a striking passage, Kekes takes pointed, and well-deserved, aim at those “motivated by an immoderate moralistic fervor and indignation at the history of the wrongs that have been done to those they suppose themselves to be defending.” These purveyors of egalitarian dogmatism and “crusaders” for liberation and emancipation are angry, “immoderate and intolerant,” and thus “blind to the complexities of moral and political evaluations.” They weaponize the law “against their opponents” while ignoring or being “unaware of external threats and of the domestic necessity of maintaining order, peace, and security.” They are feverishly committed to untenable “overriding ideals” and are contemptuous of the moral achievement that is a constitutional order rooted in liberty and law, which has the great merit of having “met the test of time.”

In contrast to this attitude of unrelieved repudiation and negation, moderate conservatives display gratitude for what has been passed down from previous generations and support gradual and cautious—moderate—reform when it is called for. They studiously avoid indignation and prefer “civility” to “contempt” in dealing with fellow citizens. They want “to heal the nation’s wounds,” in the noble words of Lincoln’s second inaugural address, and not to irresponsibly exacerbate them. They prefer thoughtful citizenship to reckless activism. This is a noble and emphatically non-utopian “ideal” precisely because it is much more than simply an abstract ideal.

In a manner befitting what some have called “conservative liberalism” and what he calls “moderate conservatism,” Kekes defends the full range of common decencies that “make possible political moderation” and “peaceful coexistence with others in our society.”

COMMON SENSE IS CONSERVATIVE:

A Common Sense Democrat manifesto: Where do we go from here? (Matthew Yglesias, Nov 12, 2024, Slow Boring)

Nine principles for Common Sense Democrats

Over the next few weeks, I’ll share posts elaborating on each one individually, but in the meantime, these are the principles I’d like to see the Democratic party embrace:

Economic self-interest for the working class includes both robust economic growth and a robust social safety net.

The government should prioritize maintaining functional public systems and spaces over tolerating anti-social behavior.

Climate change — and pollution more broadly — is a reality to manage, not a hard limit to obey.

We should, in fact, judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin, rejecting discrimination and racial profiling without embracing views that elevate anyone’s identity groups over their individuality.

Race is a social construct, but biological sex is not. Policy must acknowledge that reality and uphold people’s basic freedom to live as they choose.

Academic and nonprofit work does not occupy a unique position of virtue relative to private business or any other jobs.

Politeness is a virtue, but obsessive language policing alienates most people and degrades the quality of thinking.

Public services and institutions like schools deserve adequate funding, and they must prioritize the interests of their users, not their workforce or abstract ideological projects.

All people have equal moral worth, but democratic self-government requires the American government to prioritize the interests of American citizens.

ALL ABOUT THE SPECTACLE:

Adam Smith: He shows how to reconcile natural liberty with ordered justice (Ian Crowe, September 10, 2024, Modern Age)

The Theory of Moral Sentiments places Smith firmly among the thinkers, such as Hutcheson and Hume, who emphasize the role of aesthetics and the natural human passions in the shaping of principles of moral philosophy. In the way he links sympathy, imagination, and ambition, however, he moves beyond his contemporaries in two main respects. First, in developing the “sympathetic” link between the impartial spectator and the individual conscience, he injects an objective quality of imagination into the impulse of sympathy (in which sense Smith might be seen as a “philosopher of the normal,” a term used by Dr. William Campbell to describe the political economy of Wilhelm Röpke). Secondly, his treatment of the motive of “self-love” reveals a subtle combination of utility and benevolence that passes between Hutcheson’s reliance on a separate moral sense and Bentham’s utilitarianism. Both of these concepts, conscience and self-interest, reveal the powerful influence of Stoicism on Smith’s thought, and are vital in appreciating how Smith linked the natural and the moral—motive and judgment—within his system.

THEY’RE STUCK ON REASON:

The Trust Trap: Greater public faith in elite institutions requires evidence of restraint, not just of competence (Yuval Levin, August 11, 2024, Sapir)

In 1970, in what may well have been the best of his many landmark essays, Irving Kristol took up this peculiar challenge of legitimacy. “The results of the political process and of the exercise of individual freedom — the distribution of power, privilege, and property — must also be seen as in some profound sense expressive of the values that govern the lives of individuals,” Kristol wrote. If elites hold power or privilege for reasons that most of their fellow citizens don’t consider adequate, the entire society will lose respect for the rules by which it says it lives.

Not many would enjoy living in such a society. It would feel not only unequal but also unfree. “People feel free when they subscribe to a prevailing social philosophy; they feel unfree when the prevailing social philosophy is unpersuasive; and the existence of constitutions or laws or judiciaries have precious little to do with these basic feelings,” Kristol concluded. The principles according to which our elites exercise power must somehow be, as he put it, persuasive.

So how do our own elites now justify their status and that of the institutions they lead? Implicitly, without ever quite articulating it, they tend to fall upon a mix of technocratic credentials and progressive high-mindedness. This broadly describes the self-image of the unusually cohesive elite class that now runs most of our major institutions. Its members (at least most of them) earned their places by demonstrating a peculiar sort of merit — through admission to a selective university, followed by various honors, certifications, rites of passage, jobs, and stamps of approval that signify competence.

This is a cold and almost clinical standard of worth, but the nagging guilty feeling that it may not be a sufficient rationale for status and authority is then allayed by a kind of secondhand atonement — a ritual acknowledgement of the sins of others that played a part in creating today’s conditions of inequality. This might entail, for instance, naming the privilege that results from the inegalitarianism of prior generations or naming the Native American tribes that once occupied the lands we now possess.

The bizarre intensity with which such rituals are enforced sometimes feels like the working out of an authoritarian instinct, but it is at least as much a function of the depth of the guilt they are meant to placate. And if, after all that proof of formal qualifications and moral purity, the public is still skeptical of elites, then their skepticism is presumed to result from the failure of ordinary people to value rational competence, or from their bigotry or small mindedness. What else could explain it?

Their failure to ever reckon with the dubious foundation of their belief system leaves them overconfident in an ideology most in the Anglosphere have long rejected.