NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {Q} uestions about the status of fusionism and liberalism in the Republican Party are live amid the ongoing presidential-primary season. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 emboldened a nascent, self-styled “new Right” that sees the legacy of fusionism — liberal economics combined with various forms of social conservatism — as either morally bankrupt or powerless. That fusionism has actuated most of the conservative social gains of the last six decades and the rising prosperity of the United States counts for little among new Right intellectuals. A book published in 2023 provocatively titled Up from Conservatism declares unambiguously that fusionism has failed. “The Left currently rules every consequential sector of society, from the nation’s educational institutions (K-12 and higher education), to large parts of the media, corporate America, Big Tech, and the federal administrative apparatus,” writes Arthur Milikh in the volume’s introductory essay. “The Left now seems even to own the top military brass.” The stakes, according to the new Right, are too high for conservatives to continue supporting fusionism. New more statist or even Caesarist solutions are needed.

There are a variety of criticisms of this new Right to make. Some are more accurate than others. The notion that the new Right is de facto racist is unhelpful and not particularly accurate. Its true central failure is its inability to reckon with the history of American political development. Ever since the American republic promulgated its Constitution in 1788, the United States and its institutions have always been fusionist, even if that descriptor remained unused until the 20th century.

Even before the Constitutional Convention of 1787, citizens of the newly independent United States believed they were a part of a new political order that would be shorn of the political power exercised from the ancient conservative pillars of throne and altar. Of course, the Founders didn’t set out to create an anarchy, or a secularist order devoid of religion. In fact, they believed religion and government were not only necessary but good and that government and religion had a vital role in American society. But they didn’t believe these two institutions needed to exercise power as they had in Europe’s monarchies. When Charles Thomson designed the Great Seal of the United States in 1782, he declared that the American republic was a novus ordo seclorum — a new order for the ages. That order was based heavily on the writings and beliefs of English/British Whigs. Those Whigs were the natural forerunners to liberalism, and the Founders’ political beliefs were a testament to liberal beliefs that all humans yearned for liberty and that the best human governments guaranteed true liberty to their peoples. Historian Joyce Appleby rightly notes that liberalism “entered the history of America as a set of powerful ideas; it remained to dominate as a loose association of unexamined assumptions.”

One of the chief liberal assumptions and unexamined presumptions that endured throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries was that the American order guaranteed unparalleled economic liberty while simultaneously ensuring ordered liberty in the socio-civil order. Liberal economic freedoms could easily coexist in a conservative social order without interventionist state controls. As the American republic grew in geographic size, international power, and population, it remained wedded to liberal economics. In the antebellum era, Whigs wanted government assistance to business and Democrats generally wanted government to pay to prop up business, but neither party proposed a state-controlled national economy. Nor did they propose to revolutionize the social order. The closest thing to a nationalized economy that 19-century Americans saw was the Confederacy’s attempt at state socialism intended to keep its anemic economy running during the Civil War. That economy was hardly a paragon of prosperity. In stark contrast, Abraham Lincoln offered a vision of fusionism by making wage labor and capitalism his economic North Star while at the same time supporting a conservative social order that prioritized family, religion, and actual liberty for enslaved African Americans.

In the 20th century, politicians like Calvin Coolidge trusted the strength of the capitalist order. So did Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. Every major state intervention in the economic or social order ended in disaster, from FDR’s New Deal to the Clinton administration’s decision to coerce and also incentivize banks to change lending rules in order to make homeownership more affordable for working-class families with suboptimal credit scores. Cities took decades to recover from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. After initial prosperity, the 1960s and 1970s descended into stagflation and political instability. It was President Ronald Reagan’s commitment to fusionism, which he described as a “synthesis of traditional and libertarian thought” pioneered by National Review editor Frank Meyer, that allowed the United States to experience remarkable economic growth.

But the new Right sees social decay and poverty instead of a rise in American prosperity. A national economic program would have been a better alternative than what they call Reagan and his successors’ “laissez-faire” economics. But Reagan, though a believer in economic freedom, wasn’t a libertarian purist; he used government to support business when he thought it was appropriate. The proposition that the U.S. needs a nationally planned economy is not only difficult to reconcile with the longue duree of American history. It’s also hard to find an example of a country on our scale in the last 150 years that has successfully implemented a planned economy. The Soviet Union and Communist China certainly tried, but they were hardly economic successes; the latter owes its prosperity to its relaxation of market controls (and may be approaching collapse with the return of those controls, as commentator Peter Zeihan recently argued).

Much of the new Right’s moral energy comes from pointing to the hollowing out of the U.S. working class and the rash of progressive overreach regarding gender and sexuality during the Obama and Biden administrations. These are not examples, however, of fusionism run amok. The post-war virtual monopoly on productive capacity the U.S. held was never going to last, and in fact it spoiled American industry while enmeshing it in a web of government cronyism, leaving it unprepared for revived competitors. Besides, today American manufacturing output is higher than it has ever been. Modern gender and sexuality ideology is state-sponsored and state-sustained via idealogues in government-funded sinecures at state universities and in the federal bureaucracy. Yet the new Right really is convinced that somehow more government will help Americans sort out a bad economy and progressive overreach. A quick look at history shows that American families have prospered and been at their healthiest not when the government attempts to engineer the economy and the family, but when it protects healthy families and their finances from statist idealogues. American fusionists have understood this since 1787, and their track record is good evidence that they don’t need to be tossed aside quickly.