Libertarian-ish Philosophy and the Future of Fusionism - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Libertarian-ish Philosophy and the Future of Fusionism

Over at Cato Unbound, writers have been reflecting on the state of political fusionism, from a libertarian perspective.

To summarize, after World War II when classical-liberal politics were in shambles, Frank Meyer and William F. Buckley launched a new brand of American conservatism in the pages of the National Review to fuse libertarians, religious traditionalists, and anti-communists. Broadly speaking, this endeavor drew upon a Burkean and Tocquevillian faith in gradual change and civil society, a classical-liberal respect for free markets, and a general distrust for statism.

Jacqueline Otto, in a thoughtful introduction of the Cato debate, captures many of my own sentiments about political identity on the Right:

There is a grey area between the well defined conservative and libertarian movements. Those of us building our ideological frameworks between the two have found it becoming increasingly crowded. Even though many of us on the Right describe ourselves as “conservative/libertarian-ish,” when we do we are often viewed as either squishy libertarians or overly hard-nosed conservatives, and we are viewed askance from either side.

But is fusionism still relevant today? Are libertarians and conservatives still cooperating? Should they even try?

Clark Ruper doesn’t think so. He argues that fusionism is a “losing strategy” for libertarians because it closes them off from working with the left. Similarly, Jeremy Kolassa writes that fusionism is an “unequal treaty” and that libertarianism and conservatism are actually incompatible because conservatives are too interested in broader community at the expense of the individual.

Since the 1950’s, American conservatives have no doubt gained real political sway in Washington. That power has emboldened conservatives and convinced them of their cause. But real political responsibility often gives way to pragmatism, complacency or worse—outright philosophical contradictions. Libertarians, who have never experienced the blessing (or curse) of government leadership have fewer political contradictions. That’s not to excuse conservative misdeeds, but it is to contextualize the pitfalls of conservative leaders in what is an inherently imperfect political arena.

As a whole, libertarians are still very much on fringe of political influence, but they have enough of a following within the policy world and blogosphere that they can establish legitimacy and intellectual purity without relying on conservative compatriots.

The breaking point in the fusionist project, in my assessment, was the George W. Bush Administration. Mainstream Republicans went along with massive increases in federal spending and the neoconservative ambitions of the Iraq War, and, in doing so, alienated small government conservatives and free market libertarians. Since the Bush years, libertarians and the so-called “liberty movement” have grown in popularity. In addition to Cato, libertarians now have thriving think tanks like the Mercatus Center and a more robust Mises Institute.  Meanwhile, the prevalence of the libertarian Students for Liberty chapters on college campuses has skyrocketed. While libertarians and Austrian economists still pay homage to Ludwig von Mises and Frederic Hayek, their current philosophy seems to be trending away from classical-liberalism and toward the more anarcho-capitalist arguments of Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand. Whereas Buckley welcomed Hayekian libertarians into the common fusionist project, he was famously wary of Rothbard and Rand, who promoted what conservatives have interpreted as a radical individualism and disregard for family and faith. If today’s libertarians are headed in a more Randian direction, it makes sense that fusionism is failing.

From my experience at libertarian conferences, SFL’s effort to build political street-cred has been to explicitly market itself as anti-conservative and, by extent, anti-fusionist. If anything, today’s libertarians seem more eager to ingratiate themselves with the social justice-oriented Left than the more traditionalist American Right. This is often the message at popular blog, Bleeding Heart Libertarians, which promotes free markets using language of vulnerability, poverty, and injustice.

The most convincing essay in the Cato series, in my opinion, comes form Jordan Ballor, who nicely summarizes:

What these differing conceptions of liberty amount to, in my view, is this: one views liberty, particularly political liberty, as an important and yet limited good, while the other views liberty as an end in itself, in fact the highest end of human life itself. The former view of political liberty is primarily that it is an instrumental good that is a necessary condition for the realization of even greater goods in other spheres, like the family, the church, voluntary associations, markets, and so on. The latter view holds liberty in the political realm to be, in some significant sense, the highest expression of human good and a codification of the freedom of choice as a good as such. To put it bluntly, one views liberty as the freedom to do what we ought, while the other views liberty as the freedom to do what we want.

Ballor goes on to cite the importance of institutions and the need for civil society—which bring together the libertarian impulse for freedom and the conservative call for order.

Personally, I find the tug and pull between moderate, Hayekian libertarianism and moderate conservatism, of the Russell Kirk variety, healthy for the movement. We need figures like Rothbard, if nothing else than to remind us of the radical extreme of any one political philosophy. But I think Buckley was prudent to keep Rand and Rothbard on the outskirts of the mainstream American Right.

As we continue to reexamine American conservatism after the 2012 election, I hope we can revive a principled interest and commitment to fusionism. At the very least, it makes personal introductions at political theory conferences more interesting.  As I like to say, “Hi, I’m Danielle, and while I’m a classical liberal on the outside, I’m a Burkean on the inside…”

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