It’s Not Just the Economics, Stupid

By Mark Miller

Tuesday, September 01, 2026

 

In her new book, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, Stephanie Slade sets out to describe and recover a political philosophy that faded in the years after it succeeded. Fusionism helped shape the movement that Ronald Reagan led. But what it fused — liberty and virtue — came apart over the four decades since he left office, at least in part because its adherents found it easier to talk about economics than virtue. Slade argues that recovering that connection offers a better path for the future than the alternatives that what she calls “the dissident right” offers.

 

So, to start: What is fusionism? According to Slade, fusionism is a philosophical synthesis, developed in the 1950s and ’60s, holding liberty and virtue together. The two sides of that synthesis began from different concerns. Classical liberals emphasized individual freedom, private property, free markets, limited government, and protection against concentrated political power. Traditionalists like Russell Kirk, on the other hand, emphasized religion, family, community, inherited wisdom, and the moral order. Fusionism argued that these commitments were not rivals; virtue supplied the purposes for which freedom should be used.

 

Fusionism’s leading architect, National Review editor Frank Meyer, did not regard freedom as the highest human good. Virtue was higher. But virtue, to be virtue, must be freely chosen. Government can protect life, liberty, and property, preserve public order, and administer justice. It cannot make a person good. Fusionism married what classical liberals and traditionalists were inclined to separate.

 

Slade also describes those who rejected the fusionist synthesis early on, providing an overview of the relevant philosophical disputes of the second half of the 20th century.

 

For example, Kevin Phillips, the political consultant who developed Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” felt that conservative politicians needed to set aside their preoccupation with free markets and embrace wealth distribution — except to distribute the wealth to those the right favored rather than groups who vote for Democrats.

 

Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley Jr.’s brother-in-law and Meyer’s colleague at National Review, presented the most important early challenge to that synthesis. If people repeatedly use freedom to undermine religion, family, and the moral order, Bozell asked, why should law — that is, government force — not “guide” them toward the good?

 

Meanwhile, leading libertarians criticized fusionism because they believed that even the limited government role that fusionism supported granted too much power to those in charge of that limited government.

 

But the most important early critic, especially considering where we are today, was Bozell, and Slade devotes pages to describing his objections and his personal history. Bozell eventually concluded that fusionism gave freedom priority over virtue, and for this reason he rejected it as a proper political philosophy. By his lights, that the government should exist only to protect life, liberty, and property was fatuous. Rather, government should be used “to reduce the occasions for sin,” as Slade describes it.

 

“If the state made it harder to legally obtain a divorce, fewer people would be tempted to abandon their spouses; if the state prohibited business from operating on Sundays, fewer people would be tempted to skip church,” Slade writes. “Too much political freedom enabled vice.”

 

Meyer answered that Bozell’s objection to fusionism confused freedom as the politically necessary condition for virtue with freedom as the end in itself. Once properly understood, Meyer’s point was simple: A Bozell approach to virtue could not create virtue, because government cannot make people virtuous. Virtue requires free choice; if virtue is compelled, then it is nothing more than compliance. To force people to be virtuous invites tyranny. Bozell denied “the difference between the authoritarian imposition of human power and the persuasive authority of truth and good.”

 

After making the best case she can for Bozell’s point of view, Slade sides with Meyer. Yet Bozell’s objection is not easily dispatched. The years since have demonstrated that many Americans, from Pat Buchanan in the 1990s to those of today whom Slade labels “the dissident right,” see the world as Bozell did (more on the “dissident right” below). After all, government plainly must prohibit some acts. The question is where we draw the line.

 

Perhaps the best way to make the case that Meyer’s fusionism had it right and Bozell had it wrong is told through invocation of one person and his era: Ronald Reagan. And indeed, Reagan emerges as Slade’s best case for fusionism in practice. She does not contend that he was a perfect fusionist — on his watch, federal spending grew and the national debt increased. But Reagan possessed an unusual ability to connect economics to a morally intelligible account of ordinary life, and it is in this strength that the best case for fusionism is made.

 

Slade does not mention Reagan’s famous “Morning in America” 1984 campaign commercial, but recalling that commercial makes the fusionist case for her. The commercial begins with economic facts. Employment is up. Inflation is down. Interest rates have fallen.

 

But the argument does not stop after making those economic points. It goes on.

 

Lower interest rates mean that families can buy homes. Lower inflation means that young couples can marry with greater confidence in the future.

 

Reagan completed the fusionist argument — he did not rely only on free market economics. By the commercial’s telling, improved economic conditions gave people greater freedom to work, marry, establish homes, support families, assume responsibilities, and build lives together. Economic freedom did not make people virtuous. But it enlarged their practical freedom to pursue virtue.

 

Many of fusionism’s latter-day heirs retained Reagan’s economic claims but lost his ability to explain their human purposes — in the manner that he explained them in the “Morning in America” ad and more generally. Explaining why government planning and too many regulations are bad is not the same as explaining why economic freedom is good. The modern fusionist argument increasingly stopped too soon. It became less adept at explaining what economic freedom allows people to build.

 

In this failure, the heirs to fusionism opened the door to thinkers that Slade calls, collectively, the “dissident right.” Slade uses the term to describe post-liberals, national conservatives, populists, and others who reject the fusionist settlement. They are willing to use government power to direct economic and social life toward preferred moral ends, just as Bozell articulated.

 

And their diagnosis has force. “Markets work” is not an adequate answer to people who believe that their families and communities have stopped working. That people believe their families and communities have stopped working is well described in JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. By speaking chiefly in economic terms, latter-day fusionists ceded much of the language of virtue and morality to people eager to use government power to force those traits on others for “the common good.”

 

But identifying the latter-day fusionist order’s imperfections does not establish a better alternative. The dissident right’s economic populism concentrates political and economic power in the same hands, placing that power behind the state’s monopoly on the use of lawful force.

 

The contemporary dispute between the heirs to fusionism and the dissident right thus revives the 60-year-old disagreement between Meyer and Bozell. Slade’s answer, as the book’s title telegraphs, is a return to fusionism: Government must preserve the freedom by which virtue can be chosen. Families, churches, communities, and other voluntary institutions must then form individuals capable of using that freedom well.

 

But how do we do this? If the institutions that cultivate virtue have already deteriorated, how are they to be rebuilt without the government coercion that Slade rightly rejects? She shows why the state cannot restore civil society by taking on its functions. She does not quite show what can restore it.

 

Still, Slade has described the central dispute on the American right more clearly than anyone else has. Slade’s Fusionism should remind all of us that an economic argument is not complete until it explains what economic freedom allows human beings to build. Reagan understood it. Reinvigorating the fusionist synthesis will require the heirs of Meyer and Reagan both to understand what it was and learn to make its case again.