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 20th 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 21st 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.
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