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 |  Subject: The Fusionism That Failed  Sat Jun 01, 2019 10:15 pm | |
| Understanding the upheavals of American conservatism requires the study of its history—in particular, the fortunes of Frank Meyer, inventor of the Cold War synthesis that reigned for decades as conservative orthodoxy and has only recently met with serious challenge.
Like many other figures on the Cold War right, Meyer had a communist background. He had studied at the London School of Economics, but was expelled and deported from the United Kingdom in 1933 for subversive activities, including publishing the Marxist newspaper Student Vanguard.
He was still a communist in 1940. That year, in an essay for the theoretical journal of the Communist Party USA, he saluted the “brilliant power of Marxism in the hands of so great a master as Stalin.” During World War II and its aftermath, however, Meyer had second thoughts. Many communists turned away from their beliefs in light of the horrors of the Soviet Union; Meyer’s conversion was bookish by comparison. His reading of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences led him to reject Marxism and the Communist party in favor of limited government and individualism. Veering to the right, he contributed first to the libertarian magazine The Freeman and then to the young National Review, and he soon made a name for himself as a defender of liberal conservatism against the traditionalist ideas of Russell Kirk. He argued that the fundamental political division facing the U.S. was between, on the one hand, “collectivism and statism which merge gradually into totalitarianism,” and on the other hand, “individualism: the principles of the primacy of the individual, the division of power, the limitation of government, the freedom of the economy.” His analysis reflected the Hayekian fear that once the state begins to grow, it swells inexorably into a totalitarian force. The threat of the Soviet Union around 1950 seemed to confirm this analysis all too well.
In 1961, Meyer wrote The Moulding of Communists, which explained the means by which communists recruited and indoctrinated members. Drawing on his own experience, he described how young Americans were signed up and put to work by the Communist party. Whittaker Chambers’s Witness was a moving meditation on the author’s time as a communist. By comparison, Meyer’s book was as cold and impersonal as a medical text that details the treatment of a dangerous infection. Meyer detested his former beliefs. But as the libertarian Murray Rothbard observed in a perceptive review, this detestation clouded Meyer’s judgment. He viewed communism as uniquely diabolical and showed no understanding of the fact that inflexible dogmatism can seep into other systems. In doing so, Meyer revealed that though he had abandoned communism, he had not moved beyond his ideological cast of mind.
His 1962 book In Defense of Freedom further developed his individualist ideas. It laid the foundations of the settlement for which Meyer is best known: “fusionism.” The conservative contributors to National Review had fierce disagreements over concepts of freedom and virtue, with libertarians on one side and traditionalists on the other. Meyer’s fusionism appeared to bridge the gap by advocating a political commitment to libertarianism and a moral commitment to traditional values. One should preach virtue, in other words, but not prohibit sin.
This would have been an interesting synthesis even had it been born of pure pragmatism, but Meyer was more idealistic than that. Virtue, for him, depended on the individual’s having a free choice between good and bad deeds. “Freedom can exist,” he wrote, “at no lesser price than the danger of damnation.” Freedom was “the essence of man’s being,” and so man “must be free to choose his worst as well as his best end.” Otherwise, he is not virtuous, but slavish.
More: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/06/the-fusionism-that-failed |
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