Phil Klein describes the political coalition ascendant on the right today as “the new fusionism of wanting to blow stuff up.” He elaborates:

Adherents to this new fusionism may have previously come from the far right or the far left, but they share an overriding belief that so-called experts and elite institutions have royally messed things up roughly since the end of the Cold War. As a corollary, they believe that those people need to be driven away from all levers of influence and power. And a good number of them believe that Trump is the vehicle by which to make this happen.

This new political coalition contains some elements of the old one, which was defined by the three-legged stool of the Reagan/Buckley conservative movement. The legs of that stool were traditional values, limited government/free markets, and an assertive American foreign policy. The new fusionism fits so unevenly into this framework that Phil puts the stool in the attic for the moment.

If this is a new fusionism, was the old fusionism also a political coalition? On the surface, yes: one consisting of people brought together through the aforementioned principles (though the intent was that adherents would have all three). That coalition, however, was not the extent of fusionism, which is also a worldview. As articulated by National Review’s founding fuser Frank Meyer, fusionism is a way of comprehending the two seemingly distinct strains of thought in the Western tradition — its emphasis on “freedom and upon the innate importance of the individual person” and its emphasis on “value and virtue and order” — as fundamentally reconcilable. He favored “that fused position,” which

recognizes at one and the same time the transcendent goal of human existence and the primacy of the freedom of the person in the political order. Indeed, it maintains that the only possible ultimate vindication of the freedom of the individual person rests upon a belief in his overriding value as a person, a value based upon transcendent considerations. And it maintains that the duty of men is to seek virtue; but it insists that men cannot in actuality do so unless they are free from the constraint of the physical coercion of an unlimited state. For the simulacrum of virtuous acts brought about by the coercion of superior power, is not virtue, the meaning of which resides in the free choice of good over evil.

This philosophical framework of fusionism made the older political expression of fusionism Phil describes possible, as William F. Buckley explained in a 1995 article for National Review. But it remains distinct from, and larger than, that political expression. Which is why many of the Right’s most impressive political accomplishments over the past decade (and more) have been consistent with that framework. That remains true in the early period of Donald Trump’s second term, which has immense potential to dethrone the engorged, centralized progressive state.

A risk for this new fusionism, however, is that it functions only as a political coalition, without a philosophical framework from which to operate. There is much that needs to be blown up, as Phil might put it. But there is also much that needs to be rebuilt. Antipathies toward the centralized state and cultural progressivism are necessary but not sufficient for what the Right must achieve. So far, those who have attempted to articulate a new framework have come up short. But without one, the new fusionism threatens to become merely a ratifier, whether intentional or not, of the status quo.

The fusionism of Frank Meyer now has a reputation for defending that self-same status quo. That reputation is unearned. It has much to offer us today. For example: Rooted in this transcendent worldview, Meyer recognized more than half a century ago that a conservatism which only conserved was inadequate. “Today’s conservatism cannot simply affirm,” he wrote. It must

select and adjudge. It is conservative because in its selection and in its judgment it bases itself upon the accumulated wisdom of mankind over millennia, because it accepts the limits upon the irresponsible play of untrammeled reason which the unchanging values exhibited by that wisdom dictate. But it is, it has to be, not acceptance of what lies before it in the contemporary world, but challenge. In an era like ours the existing regime in philosophical thought, as in political and social actuality, is fundamentally wrong. To accept is to be not conservative, but acquiescent to revolution.

A new fusionism guided by this wisdom can do far more than just blow stuff up.