Free Republic

In 2022 many American conservatives are in a state of acute anxiety, convinced that they are under siege as never before and that they are losing. Across the nation, the commanding heights of the federal bureaucracy, the news media, the entertainment industry, Big Tech, and the educational system from preschool to graduate school are dominated by people who seem increasingly hostile to conservative beliefs. In social media and elsewhere, identity politics and the ideology of “wokeism” appear to reign supreme, and a censorious left-wing “cancel culture” operates with virtual impunity. Adding to the sense of conservative vulnerability is the declining...

Who lost the libertarians?” It’s a question you hear a lot from conservatives of late. The reason should be obvious to anyone who has followed the conservative movement’s internecine intellectual frictions over the last decade — or decades. Self-described libertarians are a minority, even among the ranks of people one could properly describe as libertarian. On many, or even most, contentious public-policy issues — economics, gun rights, health care, free speech, regulation, constitutional interpretation — most support for the libertarian position actually comes from people who describe themselves as conservatives. In other words, conservatives tend to be libertarian, but libertarians...

  As the discussion of individual liberty and civil order enters its 2,363rd year, the forum welcomes a new voice, pleading for definition, definition. In the September 11, 1962 issue of National Review an essay of signal importance was published under the title, “Freedom or Virtue?” Written with the grace and knowledge typical of all of Brent Bozell's work, the essay mounted an attack on the “fusionist” efforts of Frank Meyer and Stanton Evans, in effect affirming that there can be no peaceful coexistence of the “libertarians” and the “traditionalists” among conservatives. First, let’s take a moment to review Mr....

January 22, 2007 The Conservative Consensus: Frank Meyer, Barry Goldwater, and the Politics of Fusionism by Lee Edwards, Ph.D. First Principles #8 Conservatives have always been a disputatious lot. Their disputes are passionate and often personal precisely because they revolve around the most important thing in politics—ideas. Far from being signs of a crackup or a breakdown, intense uninhibited debate among conservatives is an unmistakable sign of intellectual vigor in a national movement whose influence and longevity continue to surprise many in the political and academic worlds. The dispute between traditionalists and libertarians has been among the fiercest and most...

I politically came of age in the early 80s. Reagan was president and fusionism was what got him there. He walked a tight rope of liberty versus virtue that are/were conservatism's highest ideals. I think too many conservatives either have forgotten about fusionsism, or disregard it, or never heard of it. I'll admit that this is an unabashed plea to social cons to willingly step down from their control of the republican party and join the rest of us in winning the next presidential election. I will be collecting and posting as many blog posts and articles as I can...