By Joseph Bottom
Thursday, October 23, 2025
It seemed to be there, almost for the taking,
after World War II — as though we needed only to reach out and pluck from the
tree of culture a complete account of conservatism, a coherent and elegant
theory of conservative thought.
In a well-known passage in The Liberal
Imagination (1950), Lionel Trilling would insist, “It is the plain fact
that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general
circulation.” Moreover, he said, conservative impulses do not “express
themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which
seek to resemble ideas.” Trilling was probably right in part: that there were
no conservative ideas “in general circulation” would be an explicit reason for
the founding of National Review in 1955. About the rest, however, he was
simply wrong. The problem of conservatism in those days wasn’t too few ideas
but too many.
From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, many of those
ideas were attempts to grasp the whole of conservatism: to seize the fruit that
seemed within reach. All the elements were known — and Frank Meyer, a senior
editor of National Review, was one of the people who believed he could
almost taste their unity. The compelling simplicity of Richard Weaver’s
ideas-have-consequences thesis, the God-haunted South of Flannery O’Connor’s
stories, the adamant brilliance of Étienne Gilson’s neoscholastic philosophy,
T. S. Eliot’s traditionalist turn in modernist poetry — even a homegrown
libertarianism and self-reliant agrarianism: It looked as though it might all
come together in a grand conservative package, the West’s truest answer to the
lure of communism.
It didn’t. Meyer would go on in the 1960s to describe a
common-cause-making among traditionalists and libertarians, giving conservatism
a fusion of disparate elements. And the result would form the central idea of
the Republican Party for the next 30 years, culminating in Ronald Reagan’s “big
tent” party that finally brought victory to conservatives in 1980. That alone
would make Meyer a figure who deserves our remembrance — a conservative
parallel to Fred Dutton, who came up with the idea of the modern Democratic
Party in 1971. If not quite The Man Who Invented Conservatism, as the
title of Daniel J. Flynn’s recent biography would have it, Meyer was
nonetheless someone whom Reagan himself would praise in a 1981 speech for
having “fashioned a vigorous new synthesis.”
But mention of what L. Brent Bozell would dub Meyer’s
“fusionism” (a term that Meyer rather disliked) brings several old questions to
mind — questions that have been reinfused with significance in our own peculiar
moment of uneasy common-cause-making among conservatives and populists in the
Republican Party.
The first question we have to ask is how much of that old
fusionism relied on a shared rejection of Soviet communism. In a 1967 National
Review essay, Meyer would note six elements he thought essential to
American conservatism: political individualism, a dismissal of utopianism,
clear limits on the power of government, dedication to the Constitution, belief
in an objective moral order, and rejection of communism. There’s something in
this list to make a slew of different conservatives squirm. “Individualism” was
not a term of praise among Catholic traditionalists. “Objective moral order”
was not something embraced by many libertarians. But they could all hold their
noses and support the Republican Party because they agreed on the last element:
the absolute refusal of communism. The question is what now, since the fall of
the Soviet Union, unites these different political notions.
The second question concerns the intellectual seriousness
of conservative thought, and it requires the recognition that fusionism was, in
effect, a practice rather than a philosophy. It would prove a strategy for the
electoral politics of the Republican Party rather than the longed-for coherent
and elegant theory of conservatism. It would even assume an
anti-intellectualism at certain points, as though the feeling of being
conservative should not be threatened by philosophy.
Meyer recognized this problem. His impassioned writings
against George Wallace’s campaigns for president, for example, denounced the
demagogic populism of the Southern governor as irreconcilable with genuine
conservatism and outside any big tent that Republicans should erect. But his
most serious effort to give a philosophical account of conservatism had come in
1962, when he published In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo.
Born in New Jersey in 1909, Frank Meyer led one of those
peculiar American lives that are somehow woven deep into the national
character. Studying originally at Princeton (where he formed the uncomfortable
relationship that would last decades with fellow Princetonian and National
Review co-founder James Burnham), he left for Oxford — generally ignoring
his studies there to found radical student clubs. He would become something of
a cause célèbre during the British attempt to have him deported as a communist
agitator. Back in the U.S., he continued his work for communism until the
mid-1940s, when he turned against the party. It’s curious that he did so
without the kind of road-to-Damascus conversion that other ex-communists
underwent, although Meyer would later say that F. A. Hayek’s The Road to
Serfdom (1944) played “a decisive part in helping me free myself from
Marxist ideology.”
It’s thereafter that Meyer became a night owl and a mad
telephoner, at one point spending 30 percent of his income on long-distance
charges. He joined National Review as one of the founding senior
editors, editing the book review pages (like the ones you’re reading now). His
lifelong chain-smoking led to his death from lung cancer in 1972. He converted
to Catholicism on his deathbed in a New York hospital. His influence can be
measured by his help in founding such enduring institutions as the Heritage
Foundation, the Fund for American Studies, the Intercollegiate Studies
Institute, and the Young America’s Foundation. But he wanted mostly “to
vindicate the freedom of the person as the central and primary end of political
society.” And so he would gather himself in 1962 to write what he thought would
be his most important work, arguing that “a social order is a good social order
to the degree that men live as free persons under conditions in which virtue
can be freely realized, advanced, and perpetuated.”
In Defense of Freedom was not well received across
the conservative spectrum. The traditionalists assumed that Meyer was promoting
libertarianism — not unfairly, since the book took swings at Russell Kirk’s
kind of “new conservative” — while some libertarians could not stomach Meyer’s
interest in virtue. But what he was trying to articulate was a philosophy that
would apply to all who claimed the name of conservatism. His argument is
essentially that we must defend the tradition of Western civilization because
that tradition is itself the great defense of freedom.
“A good society requires both a political order in which
men may freely choose, as well as a social order that emphasizes tradition,
reason, and the objective moral order,” he writes. “All value resides in the
individual” and not in political institutions, which are valuable only to the
extent they serve individuals. Therefore “freedom cannot be defined in terms of
the ends that a free person ought to choose.”
Freedom to do right necessarily implies freedom to do
wrong, and government has no right or capacity to impose superior life choices
on individuals — mostly because the supposed superiority will be set by the
political process and enforced against freedom by whichever political party is
in control: “Freedom can exist at no lesser price than the danger of
damnation.” Though he loved John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), he
refused to defend such principles as free speech on utilitarian grounds.
Freedom simply is, and it needs no further justification than its centrality to
human nature, as revealed by the advance of Western civilization.
And yet, Meyer also insists on virtue — which government
cannot impose without destroying the condition of freedom necessary for virtue.
We meet in this Meyer’s devotion to an objective moral order, but his argument
is that the need for virtue is not justifiable merely on philosophical grounds.
It also holds a practical significance for the continuation of the freedom that
lies near the core of Western civilization. “The only possible basis of respect
for the integrity of the individual person and for the overriding value of his
freedom is belief in an organic moral order,” he writes. “Without such a
belief, no doctrine of political and economic liberty can stand.” His solution
is to promote nongovernmental institutions such as those identified by Edmund Burke
and Alexis de Tocqueville. “If the state is endowed with the power to enforce
virtue, the men who hold that power will enforce their own concepts as
virtuous,” but the small platoons of society, the institutions that free people
build in shared interests and shared thoughts, can promote virtue without
limiting the power of individuals to choose among them.
Meyer saw clearly that conservatism required something
more than a joining at the ballot box of a variety of interests. It needed a
philosophy, a coherent account of itself. A guide for the perplexed. It needed
not just feeling but intelligence. In Defense of Freedom would not
achieve this goal. Western civilization produced modern freedom, but the idea
that freedom is the thread that runs through Western political history and
Western thought is dubious at best. Meyer refused to avail himself of the
West’s theology, to reach toward divinity as a source, which limited both his
story of civilization and his philosophical resources for explanation.
That Meyer didn’t produce a convincing unified-field
theory, that his hand fell short of plucking that fruit, is no indictment. He
gave a practical account that would last for decades, and he taught us the
seriousness with which we must face, perhaps especially today, the question of
what conservatism actually is.
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