The New Fusionism of Wanting to Blow Stuff Up

By Philip Klein

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

 

This week, the Senate will consider the cabinet nominations of a Kennedy scion who has previously endorsed full-term abortions and of a surrogate for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. That Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard became nominees of a Republican administration, and that they developed a passionate fan base among many conservatives, speaks to the evolution of the party’s coalition under President Trump.

 

Political philosophy junkies have long evaluated Republicans by where they stood on each of the legs of the “three-legged stool” (comprising economic, social, and national security issues). They have debated whether certain candidates were limited-government advocates or more open to social welfare, whether they were culturally conservative or liberal, and whether they were hawkish or dovish on defense. But this approach isn’t particularly useful to understand Trump or his unique appeal.

 

Since the Reagan Revolution in 1980, how people felt about the proper role of government was a good proxy measure for how they voted. For instance, when Barack Obama won in 2008 in the midst of the financial crisis, 51 percent of voters surveyed in exit polls said “Government should do more to solve problems,” compared with just 43 percent who said government was “doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.” Two years later, when Republicans made historic gains amid the backlash against Obamacare and his other expansionist policies, the numbers reversed, with a solid 56 percent of the electorate saying that the government did too much, compared with just 38 percent who said it should do more.

 

Yet in the 2024 election, the question wasn’t particularly predictive. The Republican candidate coasted to victory despite the fact that 53 percent of voters said that the government should do more, according to a Fox News voter survey, compared with 45 percent who said that the government was doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.

 

It would be easy to look at this information and conclude that Trump is just a big-government Republican better positioned to thrive in such an electorate. But that doesn’t quite fit either.

 

It’s true that the winning coalition that Trump put together had plenty of anti-libertarian elements: protectionism on trade, restrictionism on immigration, warmness toward unions, opposition to reforming entitlements, and assertiveness about the use of executive power. Yet at the same time, it is hard to miss Trump’s appeals to a certain strain of libertarianism. Beyond the more traditional Republican issues such as deregulation, cutting taxes, slashing government waste, and gutting the federal bureaucracy, Trump has embraced a lot of positions that were pushed by libertarians in the post-9/11 years and rejected by Bush-era Republicans.

 

However self-serving it may be, Trump has offered jeremiads about the weaponization of justice and assaults on free speech. His broadside against the intelligence agencies and the “surveillance state” ultimately led to the nomination of Gabbard (who overlaps with libertarians on these issues) to be director of national intelligence. Kennedy’s relationship with Trump also fits into this complicated narrative. RFK Jr. has a long career of supporting more aggressive regulation, and yet his criticism of vaccines, pharmaceutical companies, and the medical establishment has appealed to many people who hated the draconian lockdown-and-mandate policies of Covid.

 

Trying to place Trump on the traditional Republican spectrum also runs into difficulties when it comes to other parts of the three-legged stool. On values issues, we could describe Trump as pushing for a more pugilistic approach to the culture war if we are talking about transgenderism, but not so much if we are discussing his positioning on abortion, on which he has opposed any national ban and criticized six-week bans passed at the state level. Trump’s foreign policy statements have been a mix of noninterventionist rhetoric about ending “endless wars” and hawkish, chest-beating declarations of strength. His personnel picks have reflected all these tensions.

 

Thus, as a way to represent political ideology, the three-legged stool analogy needs to be moved to the attic (where it can be stored in case it becomes useful again) to make way for an alternate description of the eclectic coalition Trump has patched together. For lack of a fitting furniture item to compare it to, I will simply refer to this partnership as the new fusionism of wanting to blow stuff up.

 

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 loose collection of individuals may not necessarily have all the same grievances. It could be that they were disillusioned by NAFTA and other trade deals that, they believe, relocated American jobs abroad; by the protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; by the financial gurus who tanked markets and the economy; by the intelligence community that wiretapped within the U.S. and said the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation; by Big Tech’s cooperating with government to suppress speech; or by the campaign to delegitimize, impeach, and jail Trump, spanning the Russia collusion story through the Biden-era prosecutions.

 

Above all, there was Covid. The same public health experts whose social distancing guidance prevented kids from going to school, businesses from staying open, and people from holding funerals for loved ones supported mass racial justice protests because they agreed with the underlying message.

 

At nearly every twist and turn, there were the media, who theoretically pride themselves on being adversarial towards those in power but who used their platforms to amplify whatever the “experts” had to say, accusing anybody who pushed back against the prevailing narrative of spreading “misinformation.” The media that once fought for the release of the Pentagon Papers and sought to expose corporate wrongdoing suddenly became mouthpieces of the defense and intelligence establishment and of multibillion-dollar companies.

 

Whatever the issue was that made them skeptical — Iraq, the financial crisis, Covid — this group of Americans wants to take dynamite to the people and institutions behind all of it. And anybody who raises objections to this approach is immediately dismissed as part of the problem. This latter point is a source of frustration to those of us who are sympathetic to many critiques of the failures of the old order, but not all of them, and who attempt to point out that the skill sets required to demolish old institutions aren’t the same as those required to build better ones.

 

In time, there may be a different coalition of voters that becomes disillusioned by the incendiary impulse of the current moment. But until then, those of us who support traditional conservatism have to recognize that, on many issues, we will be debating in hostile territory even among those ostensibly on the right. We can no longer take it for granted that certain foundational ideas are agreed upon. When arguing about an economic proposal, for instance, we cannot assume that all conservatives will agree that the free-market approach is preferable or that the one that requires more government intervention is to be avoided on principle. Instead, we must make arguments calmly, free of emotion, rooted in facts and reason, and be prepared to relitigate many issues that seemed settled decades ago — and we must do so with a keen awareness of why it is that we’re speaking to a skeptical crowd.