The Enduring Lessons of Fusionism

By George Hawley

Friday, April 24, 2026

 

The last decade was unkind to pro-freedom conservatives. Those of us who still find merit in the Reagan-era synthesis of free markets, limited government, moral traditionalism, and global leadership increasingly look like anachronisms. In the age of MAGA, a variety of insurgent factions—including new right populists, postliberals, national conservatives, and antisemitic groypers—compete for influence in a right united less by shared principles than by a common hostility to both the left and the conservative mainstream of the late 20^th century.

 

This is not the first time the American right has been little more than a loose collection of competing dogmas. In the years following World War II, the American right encompassed a jumble of ideological impulses. One faction included traditionalists such as Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, who themselves disagreed on fundamental questions. Pro-market thinkers like Friedrich Hayek exerted enormous influence, despite insisting they were not conservatives at all. Ayn Rand’s anti-religion Objectivists, the remnants of the Southern Agrarians, and conspiracy-minded cranks like Robert Welch likewise all occupied space within the broader right-wing ecosystem.

 

The eventual consolidation of several of these factions into a recognizable conservative movement was neither automatic nor inevitable. It required intellectual leadership, institutional development, and a willingness to draw lines. Figures like William F. Buckley Jr. of National Review were indispensable in this endeavor. Conservatives sought to build a tent large enough to contain a winning coalition, but not so large that it welcomed figures and beliefs antithetical to the movement itself.

 

The postwar conservative intellectual movement never lacked disagreement, but it eventually established a framework capable of containing and promoting its best elements. The political approach that was eventually named fusionism played an important role in maintaining an uneasy but influential coalition. Fusionism’s leading proponents also provided a principled argument against one of the right’s most persistent temptations: populism. Their arguments have largely been forgotten. They are worth recovering.

 

Fusionism, most associated with National Review editor Frank Meyer, emerged as the most successful effort to give the postwar right-wing movement coherence. Meyer’s essays as well as his 1962 book, In Defense of Freedom, played an outsized role in shaping American conservatism, despite its relatively modest sales.

 

Fusionism is sometimes characterized as a compromise between libertarians and traditionalists. This is incorrect. Instead, Meyer rejected the premise that libertarianism’s emphasis on individualism and social conservatism’s emphasis on the role of religion and family in American life were fundamentally in conflict. A free society depends both on individual liberty and individual virtue. Virtue requires genuine choice; a society that excessively polices private behavior is not virtuous but totalitarian. At the same time, liberty requires a populace capable of self-restraint.

 

Genuine conservatism, according to Meyer, “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.” At the same time, however, the conservative recognizes the “role of the state as an institution necessary to protect the freedoms of individual persons from molestation, whether through domestic or foreign force.”

 

The fusionist conservative vision never satisfied everyone, and even its greatest proponents did not always follow its logic to the letter. It did, however, provide a general framework for the right. More importantly, it established the principle that, when in doubt, conservatives should err on the side of liberty. Ronald Reagan was more pragmatic than many of his contemporary admirers and detractors acknowledge, but he articulated a fusionist vision when he famously declared, “The very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”

 

But the fusionist vision was never without right-wing critics. It was too abstract, some argued, and not always well suited to practical politics. Some voices on the right wanted a conservatism with a harder edge, more capable of whipping up popular resentment against the left. From the beginning of the postwar conservative movement, going all the way back to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade, important figures on the right recognized the political usefulness of right-wing populism, and they sought to harness it instrumentally to achieve their goals. Principle was less important than defeating their political adversaries on the left.

 

Some purveyors of this view looked to segregationist George Wallace, a Democrat, for guidance. The Alabama governor was no conservative, but he did attract a dedicated following and make the left apoplectic. Many on the right were inspired by Wallace, either hoping to replicate his tactics or supporting him outright. Rather than emphasize the Constitution and ordered liberty, they preferred to lean into the politics of cultural grievance. The electoral potency of this strategy was obvious enough, but such an approach can quickly become untethered from any genuine conservative principle.

 

Many conservatives of that era, especially those who eventually became associated with the new right (a term since revived by the current generation of right-wing populists), were encouraged by Wallace’s movement. As new right activist Richard Viguerie put it, “I want to strengthen the Right wherever I can.” He had no compunctions about fundraising for Wallace, despite the governor’s lack of interest in conservatism.

 

But other conservatives correctly identified the danger Wallace represented. They warned what would happen if conservatives followed the siren song of populism. It is worth revisiting their arguments.

 

Meyer warned that populism, while opposed to left-wing liberal elitism, represented a different but equally serious threat to the country. Where liberalism sought to impose abstract designs using government power, populism elevated the unchecked will of “the people” at the expense of constitutional order and individual rights. It was, in his view, no more compatible with the American conservative tradition than the ideology it opposed. Meyer’s critique of right-wing populism has only become more relevant in the intervening decades:

 

Populism is one of the elements in opposition to liberalism, because the arrogant and naked elitism of the liberals, isolated from the ethics and tradition of the people, is populism’s polar opposite. But the polar opposite of a political perversion is not necessarily itself a good. Thus, while liberalism stands for the imposition of utopian design upon the people because the liberals know it is right, populism would substitute the tyranny of the majority over the individual, the pure will of “the people,” untrammeled by considerations of freedom and virtue. It is in its own way as alien to the American conservative conception of constitutional republican government as liberalism.

 

Meyer was not the only conservative to note that Wallace’s populism represented a diversion from the movement’s core values. Writing in National Review in 1968, Republican Rep. John Ashbrook (himself no stranger to pugilistic politics) noted that “Wallace has repeatedly demonstrated a chameleon-like character which is anathema to our conservative commitment to consistency of principle.”

 

Wallace was a problem because, like so many populists, he had no patience with existing political institutions, including those institutions that had long served the country well. According to Ashbrook, Wallace wanted the government to conform to his own political will, giving no thought to long-standing traditions and constitutional arrangements: “If a judge displeases him, let’s get another judge. If a professor displeases him, throw the rogue out. Conservatives cannot go along with this.”

 

In his famous 1968 debate with Wallace, Buckley similarly noted the problem with the governor’s political tactics. He described Wallace as a conservative “imposter,” only using the rhetoric of conservatism for “illicit” purposes.

 

These conservative arguments against populism have been echoed by the remnant of anti-MAGA conservatives of the current era—voices, though few in number, that are perhaps more important today than ever before.

 

President Donald Trump’s movement triumphed in part because a critical mass of conservative writers, pundits, politicians, and ordinary voters threw their support behind an unprincipled demagogue in the hopes that he could revitalize the right. What they got in return was two presidencies that cast aside the right’s principled commitment to free markets, limited government, and traditional values. As conservatives consider how to move forward in the post-Trump era, it will be important to reflect on how we reached this situation in the first place.

 

America’s two-party system leads us to think in binaries. At its worst, this can inspire a kind of political Manichaeism: If our political opponents represent absolute evil, anyone on our side of the barricades must also be on the side of the angels. We are willing to overlook a leader or movement’s troubling flaws, provided they sit on the correct side of the ideological spectrum. If they appear to be effective fighters against our shared enemies, so much the better.

 

This mindset can inspire conservatives to make common cause with figures who reject basic conservative values. Instead of emphasizing the rule of law, the Department of Justice seems intent on pursuing the president’s personal enemies. In place of “peace through strength,” or any apparent guiding framework whatsoever, we have an erratic foreign policy seemingly motivated by little beyond the president’s whims. Meanwhile, today’s right-wing media landscape is increasingly dominated by deranged conspiracy theorists.

 

The rise of right-wing populism in the 21^st century did not occur in a vacuum. The failures of the George W. Bush administration undermined confidence in the conservative establishment that had long sought to steward the movement. What might have prompted a period of reassessment instead triggered something more sweeping. Disillusionment with particular policies metastasized into a broader rejection of the framework that had produced them.

 

This created an opening for a new kind of politics. The populist right, culminating in the rise of Trump, offered not a refinement of conservative principles but an alternative to them. Right-wing populism has demonstrated real political energy. But it has not demonstrated a capacity for effective governance. In power, it has shown a tendency to erode institutional norms, intensify polarization, and substitute personal loyalty for stable principle. These outcomes were predictable. They align with the critiques advanced by an earlier generation of fusionist conservative thinkers who understood that the rejection of principle in favor of mobilization carries predictable costs.

 

The American right now faces a familiar choice. It can continue down a path defined by grievance, personalization, and demagoguery. Alternatively, it can recover a tradition that, while imperfect, offered a more durable foundation.

 

Such a recovery does not require nostalgia or a thoughtless return to the policy preferences of a previous era. It does, however, require taking seriously the arguments that were laid out by fusionist thinkers and activists. Meyer and his contemporaries did not simply hold together a coalition. They articulated a theory of how a free society sustains itself. Less remembered, but just as important, they also explained why populist alternatives were a dead end.

 

Until conservatives relearn those lessons, they will remain vulnerable to the same temptations that led to our current dilemma.

Hasan Piker Is the Enemy

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, April 23, 2026

 

The lefty streamer repeatedly made clear he is disdainful toward the fundamental rules that keep our society together.

 

Contrary to the mewling declaration of that eternal political weathervane, Ezra Klein, it seems clear to me that the most apposite way to describe the online left’s latest darling, the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, is, indeed, as “the enemy.”

 

In a rambling group chat that was filmed and transcribed by the New York Times this week, Piker repeatedly made it clear that he is disdainful toward the fundamental rules that keep our society together. Inter alia, Piker defended the murder of the United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, whom he deemed to have been guilty of “a tremendous amount of social murder”; suggested that he would happily “steal a car” if he “could get away with it”; and laid out a complex framework for when it is acceptable to shoplift (when the victim is “big corporations”) and when it is not (when the victim is “taxpayer-funded” with “union labor” and “adjusted prices”). Also “okay,” per Piker, is “I.P. theft, stealing movies, things like that.”

 

To which Piker’s interlocutors, the Times’ Nadja Spiegelman and the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino, responded, “Wow, that all seems utterly psychotic, have you considered getting professional help?”

 

Nah, I’m just kidding. In reality, Tolentino responded by explaining that she is opposed to “profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive” actions such as “getting iced coffee in a plastic cup” or flying on airplanes for pleasure, but that she is supportive of selfless, moral, collectively constructive actions such as “blowing up a pipeline,” and Spiegelman responded by saying, “I can relate to what you were saying, Jia. It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society.”

 

Is it? I must confess that I do not find it so. But then, unlike Piker, Tolentino, and Spiegelman (what a peculiar law firm that would make), I do not spend my days sitting on sofas pondering aloud whether it would be proper to rob the Louvre. No doubt this makes me some sort of plodding, unfashionable reactionary, but I am rather steadfastly of the view that the norms that the Times’ trio are hoping to dismantle are the core nonnegotiable building blocks of our civilization. It is not, in fact, acceptable to murder people because you think they are “social murderers.” It is not, in fact, acceptable to steal cars if you can “get away with it.” It is not, in fact, acceptable to shoplift if the store in question is owned by a “big corporation.” And no, blowing up pipelines is not, in fact, a “thing that should be legal that isn’t.”

 

John Locke contended that all individuals possess a natural right to “life, liberty, and property,” and, as a guiding principle, this has served us pretty well. It has not, of course, ended political debate or forced us into universal accord. But it has established the rule that one does not get to infringe upon those things simply because one has deemed oneself exempt. Hasan Piker seems to believe that his reference to Friedrich Engels’s “social murder” concept is extremely clever. In truth, it represents nothing more than solipsistic special pleading. If permitted to do so, everyone could play this game. Piker’s argument is that, by allocating resources as he did, Brian Thompson “killed” people. But one could offer precisely the same justification against politicians who run the government health-care systems that Piker covets, or against contractors whose budgets do not perfectly inoculate their apartment buildings against arson — or, if one were to fixate upon his refusal to donate his wealth to the world’s poor, against Piker himself. In this country, we do not leave it up to each person to determine to what extent each individual is murderable; we insist upon a blanket rule. To chip away at that dictum, even rhetorically, is to play with ancient fire.

 

The same goes for carjacking, shoplifting, and “IP theft.” It is entirely irrelevant whether we are discussing Citarella, Jimmy’s Roadside Grocery, or the Greater Manhattan Unionized Cooperative; stealing is verboten. Morality notwithstanding, this injunction provides us with the predictability that is necessary for our culture to flourish. Hasan Piker does not strike me as a particularly thoughtful person, so it is probable that, like so many affluent would-be revolutionaries, he has falsely assumed that the stability he enjoys every day is an intrinsic feature of the natural world. It is not. Each time he receives a payment, or swipes his credit card, or interacts with his accountant, he is mindlessly assuming that the rules about which he is so painfully glib will hold fast. If, as he insisted twice, it is acceptable to steal from Whole Foods, then there is no good reason that it is unacceptable to steal from Hasan Piker. Relative to most, both are rich, but, thankfully, that is not our standard. If it were, our society would become chaotic within a matter of weeks, and it would not be the privileged who paid the highest price for that.

 

The central conservative insight is that civilizations are fragile and that it takes constant effort to sustain them. Cretins such as Piker, Tolentino, and Spiegelman are free to emit their bilge without formal sanction, but they are not immune from the judgment of the sober. There are many words to describe figures whose worldview calls for the dismantling of the architecture that keeps us all secure, and, for my money, “enemy” is as good as any other. If heeded, Hasan Piker would walk us straight off the cliff. Yes. “Enemy” it is.

The Fake Radicals Stealing Lemons

By Graeme Wood

Friday, April 24, 2026

 

The late political scientist James C. Scott endorsed what he called “anarchist calisthenics”—the regular practice of small acts of lawbreaking and disobedience. Jaywalk at an empty intersection. Have a beer in the park. Smuggle a pudding cup past the TSA agents. The point, Scott said, was to keep the civic muscles strong. Without constant reinforcement, these muscles will atrophy, and when real tyranny arrives, the flabby citizen will be powerless to resist. Scott particularly enjoyed telling Germans to get their reps in, because their grandparents had not.

 

Tuesday a New York Times podcast hosted the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and the New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino for a discussion of lawbreaking, which they both endorsed not as a habit of mind but as resistance to actual tyranny, today. They agreed that shoplifting from grocery stores such as Whole Foods is laudable, because (as Tolentino says, without evidence) “every major grocery chain” steals from workers and customers. Streaming services—they specifically name Spotify, which carries the Times podcast—are bad for creators and, they say, worthy of being ripped off. Piker said he would steal cars, “if I could get away with it.” Channeling Abbie Hoffman, Tolentino encourages people to steal from her own employer, The New Yorker, but does not explain which high crimes David Remnick has committed to earn this comeuppance.

 

They are more circumspect about violence against people. Both Piker and Tolentino giggle their way to a “no” when their host, Nadja Spiegelman, asks if they endorse murdering executives of a health-insurance company or burning down companies they dislike. (Piker says his answer is prompted by legal advice, and Spiegelman joins Tolentino in tittering at his saucy qualification.) But Piker and Tolentino both accuse health-insurance companies of “social murder,” and use that concept to (rather sympathetically) explain why Americans might react with actual murder. The host and her guests have an awfully good time agreeing about everything.

 

Six years ago, the New York Times opinion editor lost his job for publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton because he advised invoking the Insurrection Act to quell riots. The op-ed, the Times explained, fell short of the paper’s standards. This same publication today recommends listening to this podcast about the sunny side of chaos, rather than just reading the transcript, “for the full effect.” I would go further and recommend watching the video, whose Scandinavian-minimalist set, along with the participants’ chic outfits (Piker is wearing Ralph Lauren), greatly enhances the comedic effect. A previous generation of Marxists would dress down, the better to relate to the workers they tried to organize at the factory gates. These podcasters are, I suppose, the hard-left equivalent of those prosperity-gospel preachers, who dress rich so that they can give others a vision of something to aspire to.

 

They could not look or sound more unoppressed if they tried. Spiegelman invokes Jean Valjean, the Misérable who stole a loaf of bread to feed his family, but when offering a modern example of virtuous theft, she asks why she should have to pay for “organic avocados.” Piker says that “we’ve got to get back to cool crimes,” including Louvre heists, “bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.” Crime, to these people, appears to be a series of Thomas Crown affairs, punctuated for some reason by free guacamole. Tolentino is at least self-critical. She lists the immoral acts that unsettle her conscience: “getting iced coffee in a plastic cup,” going on vacation in “so many planes,” and failing to organize workers.

 

The belief that workers frequently get a raw deal is an old one, and roughly 200 years of leftist R & D has gone into figuring out how to configure governments to make it easier for labor to negotiate with management on fair terms. Also old is the idea that health is a collective responsibility, and that giving a dignified life to the poor is part of the government’s job. (The belief that you are oppressed by Whole Foods, however, is a modern psychosis.) Among the remarkable aspects of this conversation is the ignorance of this long, eventful history—as if the upshot of the past century of leftism is that you can simply take things, and maybe the justice of it all will start to even out, as society gives way to what Piker approvingly calls “full chaos.”

 

It is difficult to take any of this seriously, especially from someone like Piker, who has compared America unfavorably to China and Cuba, two countries where you will be thrown into a dark hole if you do so much as an anarchist jumping jack. Cuba is miserable, and to travel there without noticing the misery is grotesque all by itself. China is a more interesting case, and much more ironic as a comparison. Piker’s romantic view of crime is, shall we say, not shared by the Chinese Communist Party. Nor, for that matter, is his view of communism. For decades now, China has functioned on the premise that wealth and social stability emerge only from a market economy in which big, unseen forces—not to be questioned or defied by individuals—control everything important. The value of the individual is nil, as is the value of workers, should they differ with those forces about their pay and treatment. One can agree or disagree that this model is the right one, but one cannot love the Chinese system and love rampant criminality, even “cool crimes.”

 

What is really going on here? Spiegelman, the interviewer, is correct to notice that something is happening “with our moral code,” and that Piker is a driver of that moral change, or an example of it. “There are so many moral compromises I make every day,” she says. I am sure she is right: So do I. Fretting over moral trivia such as using a plastic cup, then treating weighty matters such as murder with the same gravity may be a source of the moral vertigo.

 

Piker and Tolentino deserve some credit for sensing that their theory of social change is incomplete. They might even sense how pathetic they sound, when pretending to be outlaws, even though all that is at stake is a few lemons or a Netflix password. “We have lost the muscle that is built up to be able to engage in” collective action, Tolentino says. “We lack the willpower,” Piker agrees, “because we don’t even know what that would look like.”

 

Piker says, in my favorite part of the interview, that he hates stealing stuff because when Piker was a boy, his father caught him stealing from a friend and punished him. (Good dad.) Piker also says, rather gallantly, that he could not countenance dining and dashing, and that he would even cover the bill if he saw someone else steal services this way.

 

To them, it seems, theft is fine as long as you don’t have to look anyone in the eye when you do it, and as long as you get away with it. (Conveniently, corporations have no faces. It is no coincidence that Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, was shot in the back.) This is the opposite of gallant—and I think the lack of willpower and “muscle” is related to the cowardice inherent in almost all the acts they endorse or excuse. Spiegelman calls shoplifting “micro-looting,” a euphemism whose purpose is to avoid the inglorious term shoplifting, because shoplifting is what children and petty criminals do.

 

Civil disobedience, as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, should be done “openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty,” because to be penalized for a righteous act only multiplies the act’s merit. You have to break the law proudly—not break it, then run away to another state and get caught with a fake ID in a McDonald’s. Getting clubbed because you refused to use the bathroom designated for your race—that is something your grandchildren will brag that you did. I wonder what is wrong with people who feel like they are on an odyssey against a comparable injustice but who evade responsibility for shoplifting produce. Leftists need calisthenics too. These people are all flab.

 

 

Moral Collapse Goes Mainstream

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, April 23, 2026

 

The liberal establishment has decided it can’t get enough of Hamas enthusiast and 9/11 fan, Hasan Piker. Democratic midterm candidates campaign with him by their side, and the New York Times seems determined to give him a daily platform. Yesterday, for example, on the Times’ homepage you could find a podcast featuring Piker in conversation with the writers Nadja Spiegelman and Jia Tolentino. The nominal topic was what Spiegelman dubbed “microlooting”—stealing items from corporate-owned stores as an act of political resistance. But the discussion quickly turned into a celebration of crime and terrorism committed in the name of justice.

 

Piker noted that he’s “pro-piracy all the way” and said “we gotta get back to cool crimes” such as “bank robbery, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.” Tolentino believes that when it comes to “stealing with a purpose,” “we love that in America.” She also thinks that blowing up pipelines should be legal and private schools should be outlawed.

 

It's three cheers for piracy, robbery, and terrorism on the homepage of the New York Times! The podcast seems to have shocked many people. They can’t understand how we’ve gotten here.

 

I can. It’s precisely the kind of thing I would expect to see from a culture that’s turned against its Jews. Piker, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a bunch of woke-right podcasters, has been celebrated by the liberals for his brazen anti-Semitic incitement in the years since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. That’s what made him, and so many others, a beloved star of the left and, eventually, the liberal establishment.

 

When a culture decides to protect and even reward people for promoting anti-Jewish terrorism—you know, intifada—that culture breaks the civic bonds that hold society together. If you think you can get away with encouraging Jew-hatred while preserving taboos and proscriptions on other destructive impulses, you’re in for a wild ride.

 

In permitting and elevating anti-Semitism, leftists and liberals have not only sanctioned violent bigotry, which is ruinous enough. They’ve unleashed a tsunami of evil. Because anti-Semitism is fundamentally a form of scapegoating, they’ve sanctioned the idea that victims are responsible for the transgressions committed against them. This legitimizes all manner of thuggery.

 

It was after a year of mob-led Jew-hatred that UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered, and his suspected killer was made a left-wing martyr (Tolentino described Thompson’s killing as “an effective act of political consciousness-raising”). It was after two years of pro-Hamas protests and anti-Jewish violence that Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

 

Would these horrors have been carried out in the absence of a left-liberal establishment that valorized anti-Semitic terrorism? I don’t honestly know. But I do know that once you glorify Jew-hatred and dispense with personal responsibility, you don’t get to choose or filter what forms of violence and destruction follow. And there’s nothing “micro” about the disaster the left has wrought. 

 

Yesterday, with the airing of this grotesque podcast, the New York Times announced that the social contract is null and void.

What’s with the Allergy to Patriotism?

By Daniel J. Flynn

Friday, April 24, 2026

 

The left's various efforts to prevent the rest of us from celebrating America’s 250th illustrate a lack of tolerance and humility.

 

The California Coastal Commission, more a collection of Almira Gulch impersonators than John Muir types, rejected a permit application for a Fourth of July fireworks display over Long Beach.

 

New York City Mayor Mamdani issued an emergency order that allowed his underlings to deny a permit for a public celebration with a Times Square ball drop on the eve of Independence Day.

 

Schools in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and points beyond have canceled stops on the Department of Education’s “National History Rocks Tour.” Activists, including teachers, decried the America 250 events as a politicization of education. A spokeswoman for the department responded, “Engaging young students with fun games and questions like ‘When was our nation founded?’ and ‘Who primarily wrote the Declaration of Independence?’ isn’t indoctrination — it’s sparking excitement about the story of freedom and democracy.”

 

America, surely, does not celebrate its Semiquincentennial in the full-throated and near-unanimous way that it did its Bicentennial. We do not watch Barney Miller, wear polyester, or sing along to “Let Your Love Flow” the way we did in 1976, either. But the decline in patriotism to such a degree as to make reflexive anti-Americanism de rigueur in certain professions and enclaves is disturbing.

 

Last weekend, the Philadelphia Society, which naturally met in Tampa, celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by essentially holding a rolling debate about it.

 

Speaker Robert Alt, president of the Buckeye Institute, acknowledged “genuine disagreement” on the right on this and so many other questions. Rather than the cancellations and pulled permits one sees from the left, Alt called for “vigorous debate” with a mere “modicum of civility” to encompass such rhetorical extravagances as “standing on chairs.”

 

The society’s members (full disclosure: I am one) and guests witnessed quite a “vigorous debate” on “The Declaration of Independence at 250: The American Revolution Then and Now.” Panelists and the audience disagreed on such questions as whether the American Revolution overturned an order or restored one, whether free and independent or united states went to war against the British, and whether the declaration established an independent nation or something more ambitious based not on ethnicity or religion but on core principles of citizenship.

 

Clemson University Professor Brad Thompson described the United States as a “creedal nation” founded upon philosophical ideas. Another speaker countered by describing the Declaration of Independence as setting up “a legal, not creedal” nation and its famous second paragraph as “bubbly, aspirational statements.”

 

Michael Lucchese, a Law & Liberty associate editor, drew a distinction, and said he believes the Founders did too, “between a lawful revolution in favor of the old moral order and an unlawful revolution in favor of ideological speculation.” He explained that the Founders “saw their republican revolution as a restoration of civilizational continuity, not a rupture.” Others presented the American Revolution as, well, revolutionary.

 

Colleen Sheehan of Arizona State’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership described Revolutionary-era Americans as “one people acting together under natural right.” The emphasis for others involved not the “United Colonies” referenced in the declaration but the “Free and Independent States.”

 

Like most good conversations, the weekend did not settle an argument but started many. Nobody tried to pull the microphone cord from the socket (what fun would that be?). Instead, the right-of-center intellectuals dared to discuss, disagree, and debate — three concepts feared by all those muting the conversation that naturally accompanies the nation’s birthday — and in doing so expressed agreement, implicitly at least, on one unifying theme of the American Founding: freedom.

 

Conversation, not cancellation, seems suited to the spirit of the Founding. The title of the conference’s last panel asked, “Can we keep the republic?” — a question the onslaught against free inquiry also raises.

 

“The only antidote to dictatorship is classical liberalism,” Duke University Professor Michael Munger, the incoming president of the Philadelphia Society, noted at the conference’s end. Munger pointed out that a free society requires two virtues: “tolerance” and “humility.”

 

People who stamp out freedom predictably don’t celebrate it. The various efforts to prevent the rest of us from celebrating it illustrate a lack of tolerance and humility and the wisdom of Munger’s observation of what a free society requires.

Where’s Marco?

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, April 23, 2026

 

The Iran war is the most serious foreign policy crisis that Donald Trump will ever have to manage, God willing. So why hasn’t his most serious deputy—who, as it happens, is in charge of foreign policy—taken a lead role in solving it?

 

“Secretary of State Marco Rubio is an oleaginous little sycophant, and he probably is the best of the lot,” Kevin Williamson wrote recently of the president’s Cabinet. Both parts of that statement are true; whether or not most Americans agree with the first, I suspect most would agree with the second.

 

How could they not? In an administration full of unfit clowns and cartoonishly sinister villains, Rubio is the only figure in a top job who inspires a degree of confidence. He speaks intelligently about policy, eschews cringe tough-guy social-media posturing, and remains unfailingly self-possessed as his boss resorts to ever more embarrassing histrionics. There’s a reason the phrase “adult in the room” is often used to describe him, increasingly even in Republican focus groups.

 

It sure would be nice to have an adult in charge of the Iran mess right now. Especially with the man at the top sounding somehow more incoherent than usual.

 

So where the hell is he?

 

Rubio pops up periodically in television interviews to deliver talking points on the war, but he’s made only two bits of real news on Iran since the conflict began on February 28. The first came 48 hours after the bombs started falling, when he implied that Israel had maneuvered America into the war by resolving to attack regardless of whether the White House approved.

 

The second came when U.S. and Iranian officials met to talk peace in Pakistan earlier this month. The news in that case was that Rubio … didn’t attend the talks. He had more important business to take care of, like sitting ringside with the president at a UFC event in Miami.

 

His low profile in Iran diplomacy would normally lead me to speculate that he’s in the doghouse with Trump, “sidelined” due to some petty new grudge that our grudge-loving leader is nursing. But the UFC photo op makes that hard to believe, as does the fact that the president reportedly continues to tout Rubio among confidants as a potential 2028 nominee.

 

Considering how opaque the White House is about why underqualified deputies are assigned momentous tasks, it’s also tempting to chalk up Rubio’s absence to the vagaries of Trump’s personnel preferences. After all, this isn’t the first time the president has bypassed his top diplomat and farmed out high-stakes foreign outreach to less capable people. From Russia to Iran to the Gulf states, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have been his go-to envoys more so than Rubio has.

 

But that’s not very persuasive in this case either. Rubio isn’t just secretary of state, he’s the national security adviser. How does a guy who holds like 15 different jobs in this administration end up a minor player behind Witkoff, Kushner, and J.D. Vance in resolving a war that threatens U.S. national security, not to mention the global economy and the remainder of Trump’s presidency?

 

It’s baffling. Let’s see if we can spitball a theory to explain it.

 

Scenario one: Rubio has been sidelined.

 

The fact that the president is on good terms with Rubio doesn’t mean that the latter hasn’t been frozen out of the Iran process. It’s possible that the secretary of state craves a bigger role in settling the war but that forces have conspired to thwart him.

 

Forces on both sides of the conflict, I should add.

 

The Iranians have an obvious reason to insist on a strict “no Rubio” policy in talks with the United States. Not only did America’s chief diplomat spend 14 years in the Senate as an outspoken hawk, he was particularly hawkish when staking out positions on Iran. He opposed the nuclear deal between the regime and Barack Obama, called for sanctions on the country’s ballistic missile program, warned in dire terms of the potential nuclear threat Iran posed, and met with Reza Pahlavi, the son of the shah deposed by the Khomeinist revolution.

 

If you were a Shiite fanatic eager to make the White House buckle in negotiations, wouldn’t you rather bargain with Steve Witkoff than with someone like that?

 

For similar reasons, the president himself might prefer to have someone other than Rubio at the table. He’s grown bored with the war, New York Times reporter and Trump biographer Maggie Haberman told CNN on Wednesday: “My sense is the president would like to just be done with this, and he has other things he’d like to focus on.” If that’s true, and if it’s likewise true that the Iranians would be more receptive to an offer that isn’t coming from one of their least favorite figures in the administration, Trump has a political incentive to keep Rubio far away from negotiations.

 

Maybe a personal incentive, too. Should the Vance-Kushner-Witkoff team strike a bargain on terms favorable to the United States, Trump can and will take all of the credit by pointing to his pressure tactics against the regime. If not for my mad threats to end Iranian civilization, he’ll say, the enemy never would have caved. And that will seem plausible: Lord knows, no one expects them to be intimidated by Jared Kushner’s steely mettle.

 

But if Rubio is the lead negotiator, the president will inevitably share credit for the result. “The adult in the room” rescued the White House from its own incompetence, the media will claim. The secretary of state’s longstanding hostility to the regime cowed the Iranians into tempering their demands.

 

If you don’t think Donald Trump would saddle himself with a lamer-than-necessary diplomatic team in the name of maximizing his own share of the glory from their endeavors, you’ve been watching a different movie than I have since 2015.

 

Having said all that, though, no one inside or outside the White House has a stronger incentive to keep Rubio on the sidelines in resolving the Iran war than J.D. Vance does.

 

It’s true that the vice president is taking a huge political risk by further involving himself in an unpopular conflict that might do him serious political damage in 2028, but what choice does he realistically have? He’ll be saddled with Trump’s baggage in the next presidential primary no matter what he does. So why not seize an opportunity to position himself emphatically on the side of peace?

 

I can’t say whether Vance has the juice with Trump to “pull rank” on Rubio and call dibs on leading peace talks, but I can surely imagine him begging the president for the chance. If he can make a deal that ends hostilities and reopens the Strait of Hormuz, he’ll rebuild some of his lost anti-war credibility with swing voters and the “America First” right, giving himself a compelling rebuttal in the next cycle when some opponent lays Trump’s war at his feet. “I’m the guy who ended that war, remember?” he’ll say. Americans will remember.

 

Conceivably, Rubio was all set to take the reins on Iran diplomacy with Trump’s blessing only to have J.D. Vance petition the boss to hand those reins to him instead. And the president would have reason to do so, as Vance’s longtime dovishness would make him more agreeable to the Iranians as a negotiating partner than the secretary of state. That can only help Trump achieve his supreme strategic goal of, uh, “just being done with this.”

 

But if you tend toward believing that Marco Rubio’s recent disappearing act is more voluntary than involuntary, there’s a good argument for that too.

 

Scenario two: Rubio has sidelined himself.

 

Despite his hawkish past, evidence suggests that the secretary of state wasn’t enthused about this war.

 

Even in the conflict’s planning stages, it appears, he kept a low profile. Rubio is no more than a minor character in two lengthy play-by-plays that the New York Times published about White House deliberations, and while he “did not try to talk Mr. Trump out of the operation,” he was reportedly “ambivalent” about moving forward.

 

He “did not believe the Iranians would agree to a negotiated deal,” the Times alleged, and so “his preference was to continue a campaign of maximum pressure rather than start a full-scale war.” He advised Trump that “If our goal is regime change or an uprising, we shouldn’t do it. But if the goal is to destroy Iran’s missile program, that’s a goal we can achieve.” At one point Rubio supposedly went as far as to dub Benjamin Netanyahu’s happy talk about deposing the mullahs “bullsh-t.”

 

All of which seems remarkably prescient in hindsight. (Well, not quite “all.” The U.S. reportedly hasn’t come close to fully destroying Iran’s missile arsenal.) Go figure that the most competent member of the president’s Cabinet might have listened to the Pentagon’s warnings about the Strait of Hormuz, envisioned oil-market convulsions and inflationary chaos, and resolved to distance himself from the sh-tshow to come as thoroughly as his official duties would permit.

 

In this scenario, Rubio knew a looming disaster when he saw one and, like any capable politician, he set about doing everything possible to keep his fingerprints off of it.

 

And he is an extraordinarily capable politician. Last year I argued that, aside from J.D. Vance, no one had navigated the Trump era in Republican politics more skillfully than he had: “He’s the only conservative left from the Before Trump era to have made himself valuable to the president and the Jacobin movement that now leads the American right. Everyone else who’s tried has stumbled at some point in trying to reconcile Reaganism with Maoism, yet Marco has somehow pulled it off.”

 

A year on, one can plausibly counter that Rubio has now outperformed Vance himself. The VP is caught in political no-man’s land, unable to prevent or resolve a war that his chud base despises and humiliated by his failure to rescue postliberal icon Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Meanwhile the secretary of state keeps chugging along, somehow Trumpy enough to keep impressing the president’s MAGA base and un-Trumpy enough to reassure everyone else.

 

I would have bet good money before the war that the grassroots right would scapegoat him for it if it went sideways. He’s Hispanic, famously pushed comprehensive immigration reform while in the Senate, and espoused dogmatic Reaganite beliefs right up until the moment Trumpism became the only path for advancing in the GOP. The populist script writes itself: Rubio is a uniparty neocon infiltrator. He talked Trump into this catastrophe.

 

But I would have lost that bet. Blame for the war on the right has been assigned to actors ranging from Israel to, er, Satan, but not once have I encountered an accusation that the secretary of state is the hidden hand behind Trump’s folly. Come to think of it, apart from the newsletter you’re reading right now, I don’t recall so much as a sustained inquiry about why Marco Rubio hasn’t played a bigger role during the most perilous chapter of the president’s two terms. That’s how deft he’s been about avoiding the crisis while not making his avoidance conspicuous.

 

As for what he’s been doing with his time while the rest of the White House flails on Iran (apart from watching UFC, I mean), my guess is that he’s being pretty deft about that too.

 

To all appearances, he’s focused on Cuba.

 

Loosening the Castro regime’s grip on the island is an obvious passion project for the Floridian son of Cuban émigrés and so his role in that process has been emphatically hands-on. He’s in direct contact with Raúl Castro’s grandson/caretaker, has dispatched envoys to the island for talks, is courting potential strategic allies in the Caribbean, and wielded enough influence over the operation to yank Venezuela out of Cuba’s orbit that some joked about him being the new “viceroy” of that country.

 

At a Senate hearing in January, he half-boasted about his plans to phone Venezuelan leader Delcy Rodríguez three times a week to make sure she acted in accordance with America’s wishes, which naturally began with cutting off the cheap Venezuelan oil that had been propping up the Castro economy for years. Rubio stands a real chance of parlaying the subjugation of Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Caracas into successful gunboat diplomacy in Cuba, ending communism on the island at last.

 

And if he does, it’ll be a political master stroke in four or five different ways. It will give him an airtight alibi with Trump and Americans writ large for sidelining himself on Iran. (“I was ending Castroism!”) It will create a favorable contrast between him and Vance, whose diplomatic efforts with the Iranians are likely to be far less successful. It will thrill the right by engineering an outcome that White Houses of both parties have sought since 1959 and further endear him to Trump, who reeeeeeeally wants an easy win after the Iran mess to reestablish perceptions of his strength.

 

And it will enhance the legend of Marco Rubio as the last competent Republican, the lone survivor in the Trumpist extinction event that depopulated the American right of capable conservatives and left only dopes, kooks, bigots, grifters, and postliberal chuds in its wake.

 

Call him an oleaginous little sycophant, by all means. Call him “missing in action” in Iran, too. But whatever you do, don’t call him stupid.

There Is No Winning in Iran

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, April 24, 2026

 

There is no victory coming in Iran. There are better and worse possible outcomes.

 

There is no victory coming in Iran because it is an illegal war that will leave our constitutional mechanism, already running rough, further out of balance for a generation, with the presidential warmaking power now entirely untethered from Congress.

 

There is no upside to that. Repairing the damage would take a generation of work by better men and women than we currently have in Washington.

 

On top of this, the Trump administration has effectively conceded sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, a privilege Iran did not previously enjoy regarding the international strait, which is partly in the territorial waters of Oman. The Trump administration has set up opening the strait as a prominent—at times, it seems the only—goal of negotiations with Tehran. But the strait is not Tehran’s to open or close—or it wasn’t, until five minutes ago. In this war, the United States will lose no battles, but Iran has, in effect, gained territory.

 

Wishful thinking is the alchemy that turns fools’ gold into silver linings. But what would the better outcomes look like in Iran?

 

Regime change by means of a popular domestic uprising would be among the best imaginable outcomes. But it is not a likely outcome. And a popular domestic uprising would not necessarily ensure an improvement. A popular movement could very well throw up something as bad or worse than what Iranians suffer under today. One of the ironies of this conflict is that the ayatollahs’ regime and the Trump administration are political cousins: Both the revolutionary government in Iran and the modern Republican Party in the United States rely disproportionately on support from ignorant religious fanatics living in socially and economically backward rural enclaves and find their domestic enemies principally among the urban elites. Just as American populists found their way from George Wallace to Donald Trump, their Iranian cousins could very well find their way from Ruhollah Khomeini to someone more modern and much worse, difficult as the latter qualifier may be to believe.

 

For similar reasons, a more likely outcome—that of a regime change via factional coup, should the pressure of the war open the already visible existing fissures within the regime into fractures—might very well produce something no better than what Iran went into the war with. Factional warfare in such regimes rarely results in the victory of liberal democrats or even of more moderate Islamists, though there are precedents in the Muslim world for a more secular autocracy, as in 20^th century Turkey, or a more pro-Western military-backed junta with some liberal trappings, as in Pakistan under Benazir Bhutto. But it is worth noting that both Turkey and Pakistan have moved in a more Islamist direction since those periods, not in a more liberal direction or even a more responsible one. In Iran, it would be reasonable to expect the most vicious faction to rise to the top over the more humane factions, if there are more humane factions even in the running, about which American intelligence seems a bit fuzzy.

 

Donald Trump has many problems—moral, intellectual, possibly psychiatric—and one of them is that nobody apparently ever has gotten around to telling him that he is a … weak man, I will write, the truly appropriate Germanic vernacular being inappropriate to this forum. Trying to run a strongman foreign policy with a weak man at the center of it does not work. Trump has been begging—“like a dog,” as he would put it—the Iranians to back off the Strait of Hormuz and allow international shipping to return to normal. (It is not clear that it could return to normal.) Because Trump is a weak man surrounded by sycophants, you can be confident that when the Trump administration insists that there will be no “toll booth” by which Tehran can enrich itself thanks to its effective (effectively granted by the White House) sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, that such a financial mechanism is very likely what the administration ultimately is getting itself ready to swallow.

 

As usual, the Trump administration lacks a vigorous strategy for achieving its goals because it lacks goals—it may have preferences, but verifiable goals that can be objectively evaluated are something about which this administration remains very vague when it comes to Iran, and almost everything else. The psychology there is clear enough: Nobody can call you a loser if winning is never defined.

 

What we have is some dead Americans and diesel approaching $6 a gallon. I do not see how you hang a “Mission Accomplished” banner on that, but there is no point in trying to talk sense to people who are prevented from hearing it by disabilities that run the gamut from the political to the cognitive.