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“Fusion conservatism,” the brainchild of National Review’s William F. Buckley and the canonical philosophy of the Reagan Revolution, is one of the many casualties of the Trumpian era of American politics. There is, as always, a remnant. A number of these banded together and, in 2023, issued a new manifesto, the Freedom Conservative Statement of Principles, seeking a new lease on life for the “dead consensus.” These few, these unhappy few gathered Monday at the Freedom Conservative convention to rally the troops for retaking their place as the torchbearers nonpareil of True American Conservatism.
The atmosphere of FreeCon 2025 would have been familiar to anyone brought up—as I was—through the circuit of college conservative intellectual organizations, down to the seating arranged around circular tables and the many bowties—by my count, 23. Conversation was dominated by the trivialities common to the class, stuff that would make angel-counting schoolmen blush: a professor musing on the qualities of a local Catholic basilica, a think tanker and a government consultant discussing the philosophical grounds for school choice. A comfortable environment for the bookish and bespectacled, an orderly, stoop-shouldered affair far from the raucous populists at CPAC. My kind of gathering, really—but completely unfit for anything that might approach effective American political leadership in 2025.
The day’s starpower rested disproportionately on the aging, uneasy shoulders of Jonah Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Dispatch, and an ever-pinker, more moribund George Will of the Washington Post. The venerable Charles Murray provided the single discussion of serious intellectual substance. The rest of the program was padded out with gray people from the second-tier think tanks. The only politician to address the audience was Adam Kinzinger, the irrepressible former Illinois congressman on an inexhaustible quest to leverage his anti-Trump credentials into a political future in the Democratic Party.
The purpose of FreeCon 2025 was to defend and renew the principles of 20th century movement conservatism, particularly the approach adopted by Buckley and laid out in the Sharon Statement of 1960. The movement is reactionary in the literal sense—a response to the growing intellectual influence of populism and postliberalism on the American right and the concomitant question of old conservative pieties of free markets, free trade, the separation of church and state, the status of civil rights, and the proper use of state power.
These are questions that the Freedom Conservatives are ill-equipped to answer, if FreeCon is any guide. How did fusionism fall out of favor so rapidly—reduced from a powerful guiding force in Republican party politics to an intellectual backwater out of favor even among conservatives? This was at least partly the subject of one of the panels, the discussion between Goldberg and Will. Goldberg obligingly laid out one potential argument for the precipitous decline in factional fortunes: It is the result of failures by successive Republican administrations after the end of the Cold War, as attempts to lower trade barriers with Mexico and China destroyed American jobs and the communities of the industrial heartlands while a limp, overly libertarian response to social issues left families vulnerable to decay and disintegration.
Is that where our intrepid mastodons think things went so wrong? To the contrary—in fact, nothing went wrong at all. “I don’t think conservatives made any mistakes in the postwar era,” said Will. The loss of jobs to Mexico and China were the natural results of the free market, and so must be considered a good thing. As for social issues, Goldberg argued that the fusionists did take action—by publishing articles in National Review. Having gotten the self-absolutions out of the way in record time, Will and Goldberg turned the rest of the discussion over to critiquing the excesses of various non-fusionist groups.
A central element of the conference was a basic inability to come to grips with the political reality of the United States in 2025. Not only did the speakers conclude that fusion conservatism did nothing wrong in its journey to the fringes of the American right; they concluded that most Americans are actually fusionists in ignorance. How convenient! From what they read in the polling data, Americans agree with them on the issues already. They want lower taxes, smaller government, more power to the states! They want freedom and equal opportunity! Isn’t this what conservatism has always been about? The problem, one panel discussing the issue concluded, was that Americans simply didn’t realize that fusionism is what they really want. With just a little better messaging, a more extensive campaign to get FreeCon principles in front of the American people, and (inevitably) stronger outreach to Latinos, the American people will come to their senses once again.
Easily the most bizarre moment of the conference was an interview with Kay Cole James, the former head of the Heritage Foundation. James—a black woman—looked out on the almost uniformly white audience and proclaimed joyously that “in 30 years, people of color will run America.” Cue a few awkward chuckles from the seats.
This demographic change, she said, necessitates a new, grand strategy from conservatives, Joy argued. Conservatives must recognize racism in America and promise to put an end to it by providing equal opportunity. By 2040, minorities will be a majority of the American population, so, she warned, conservatives had better inform those minorities that we care about them and dedicate American resources to prepare them for the mantle of leadership which will inevitably be theirs.
She had been terribly disappointed, she recalled, that conservatives had not seized the moment after George Floyd’s death to make their case against racism to the American people. “Regardless of what the hard statistics were,” Republicans should have taken the opportunity to tell minorities “we hear you and understand you” instead of allowing Black Lives Matter to take leadership of the movement. Likewise, James argued, conservatives should have claimed DEI, but with “equal opportunity” in place of “equity.”
“I don’t know anybody in this room who doesn’t disagree with the idea that diversity makes things better,” she said. Perhaps she had forgotten that Charles Murray was in attendance.
A favorite accusation leveled against establishment conservatives is that “conservatism is just progressivism driving the speed limit.” What better evidence for this could one find than bringing on a speaker to celebrate American demographic replacement and advocate for Republican-flavored racial diversity programs? Perhaps bringing in a “conservative” Latino activist to decry mass deportation because “the undocumented are our family?” (They managed that, as well.)
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the conference was the negative tone speakers and panelists adopted when discussing Christianity. Religious traditionalism, one of the key components of old fusion conservatism, has become an object of suspicion to the Freedom Conservatives, who position themselves in fierce opposition to the dark forces of inchoate postliberal, integralist, and Christian nationalist movements.
Mark Tooley, president of the Institute for Religion and Democracy, began his remarks on religion by asserting that American Christians, dismayed by rising secularism, have given up on society and taken refuge in “statism,” thus displaying their lack of confidence in the efficacy of Christianity. Other commentators throughout the day took up a similar theme: Christians have become a positive danger to freedom by seeking to inject religious considerations too deeply into the business of the state. Behind every corner, the diminutive specter of Patrick Deneen lies in wait.
The United States of America in 2025 faces a multitude of grave civilizational challenges: diminishing rates of birth and family formation, mass migration, racial and ethnic conflict due to demographic change, the consolidation of political power in the administrative state, great power competition from China, economic anxiety from globalism and technological development, the decline of religion and community life in general.
Freedom Conservatism not only fails to identify the source of these problems; it has precious little to offer in terms of remedies. Instead, it prefers to confine itself to the murky glory of past successes long-since tainted with present failures, or to wrestle with the phantoms of irrelevancies like Catholic integralism. Instead of offering a renewal of American conservatism, it offers a facsimile of a political tradition that is a failure by its own standards.
Whatever can be said for the virtues and vices of Buckley’s vision for fusionism in the 20th century, there can be little doubt that modern Freedom Conservatism is rotting on the vine. It couples an almost fanatical confidence in the efficacy of free markets and limited government with a pathological incapacity to reckon with the problems and realities of contemporary American society.
In a sense, it may well be the rightful heir to Buckley’s claim to stand athwart history shouting “stop.” History has long since passed the fusionists by, but here they remain planted, yelling at an empty sky.