The MAGA New Right

Fusionism

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Fusionism (Reagan-Buckley Conservatism)

The dominant intellectual framework of American conservatism from roughly the mid-1950s through the 2010s; theorized by Frank Meyer in In Defense of Freedom (1962) and the 1964 edited volume What Is Conservatism?; embodied politically by Barry Goldwater (in The Conscience of a Conservative) and Ronald Reagan; institutionalized by William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review and the Heritage Foundation; the consensus the MAGA New Right has explicitly repudiated.

Also called: establishment conservatism, movement conservatism, the Reagan coalition.

What It Was

Frank Meyer’s formula — sometimes glossed as “utilizing libertarian means for traditionalist ends” (Donald Devine), or as “reason operating within tradition” (Meyer’s own phrase) — held that the postwar American conservative movement could be a “consensus among divergence” comparable to the constitutional consensus the Founders achieved at Philadelphia in 1787.

The three legs of fusionism (Reagan’s “three-legged stool”):

  1. Social conservatism / traditionalism — family, church, community, “an objective moral order” of “immutable standards by which human conduct should be judged.” Theorized by Russell Kirk, reinforced by Catholic and evangelical contributors.
  2. Free-market economics / libertarianism — limited government, low taxes, deregulation, free trade, suspicion of state planning. Theorized by Hayek, von Mises, Friedman, M. Stanton Evans.
  3. Anti-communism — the ideological glue. The Soviet Union as common enemy made it tactically irrational to escalate intramural disagreements about ends.

The 1964 Meyer-edited volume What Is Conservatism? canonized the synthesis. Per The Conservative Consensus (Edwards 2007), the contributors agreed on six fundamentals:

  • An “objective moral order” of “immutable standards by which human conduct should be judged.”
  • “The human person” as the center of political and social thought.
  • Opposition to liberal use of the State “to enforce ideological patterns on human beings.”
  • Rejection of centralized power needed for “planning” of society.
  • Defense of the Constitution “as originally conceived.”
  • Defense of Western civilization against communism’s “messianic” intentions.

Institutional Architecture

  • National Review (1955) under William F. Buckley Jr. — the intellectual anchor; institutionalized fusionist editorial culture under senior editor Frank Meyer until Meyer’s death in 1972.
  • The Sharon Statement (1960) — Young Americans for Freedom’s founding document, drafted at Buckley’s family home in Sharon, Connecticut; first explicit fusionist platform statement.
  • The 1964 Goldwater campaign — fusionism’s first national political vehicle, even in defeat. Harry V. Jaffa drafted the “ordered liberty” passage of Goldwater’s acceptance speech.
  • The 1980 Reagan campaign and presidency — fusionism’s high-water mark. Reagan as “master fusionist” (Edwards).
  • The Heritage Foundation (founded 1973) under Ed Feulner — the policy infrastructure of fusionist governance; produced the Mandate for Leadership documents Reagan drew on. By 2007, The Conservative Consensus (Edwards) presented Heritage as the institutional steward of fusionist self-understanding.

What Fusionism Always Suppressed

Three intramural splits were managed by fusionism’s anti-communist cement rather than resolved:

1. The Bozell-Meyer split (1962). L. Brent Bozell Jr., Buckley’s Catholic brother-in-law and the actual ghostwriter of The Conscience of a Conservative, wrote in 1962 that “the purpose of politics… is not the promotion of freedom but the promotion of virtue and the building of ‘a Christian civilization.’ The story of how the free society has come to take priority over the good society is the story of the decline of the West.” Bozell’s was the postliberal position avant la lettre — defeated in 1962, dormant in Triumph and Catholic-traditionalist circles, vindicated post-1991 as Postliberalism and Catholic Integralism.

2. The libertarian rejection (Hayek and Hamowy). Hayek’s “Why I Am Not a Conservative” (1960) prophetically charged that conservatism “uses the powers of government to prevent change,” recognizes “no limit to the use of coercion in the furtherance of moral and religious ideals,” and is prone to “strident nationalism” that “can provide a bridge from conservatism to collectivism.” This is, with frightening accuracy, a description of the actual MAGA New Right. Ronald Hamowy’s narrower critique — “It is no solution to contend… that reason must operate within tradition when the crucial problem to be answered involves the choice of which tradition to follow” — pinpointed the unresolved conceptual gap that the post-Cold War period would expose.

3. The Bircher entanglement. As Debunking a Longstanding Myth About William F. Buckley (Dallek 2023) documents, fusionism’s mainstream gatekeeping was a cordon sanitaire drawn around individuals (Robert Welch, later Sam Francis, later Pat Buchanan in 1992) while keeping the underlying constituencies inside the tent. The fusionist boundary was always tactical, never substantive. See John Birch Society.

The Anti-Communist Cement

Edwards (citing George Nash) acknowledged what kept fusionism standing: “the cement of anti-communism.” Almost all conservatives, “of whatever philosophical disposition,” were bound together by the reality of a deadly common enemy.

When the Soviet Union collapsed (1989–1991) the cement dissolved. The “fissures” Edwards described in the 1990s — paleocons (Buchanan, Sam Francis) on isolationism and immigration, neocons on Wilsonian democracy promotion, libertarians on the welfare state — were the real disagreements that the Cold War had suppressed. 9/11 only “temporarily united” the movement. By 2016 the unity was gone.

Why the New Right Revolted Against It

The New Right’s primary case is that fusionism failed, and that its failure was structural, not contingent on bad leadership:

  1. It won elections and lost the country. Sam Francis’s “Beautiful Losers” (1993) is the canonical formulation. Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution (2023) is the contemporary restatement.
  2. It enabled mass immigration under Reagan (1986 IRCA) and Bush 41 — what the New Right treats as the original demographic betrayal.
  3. Free-trade dogma (Pat Buchanan 1992; later Oren Cass, Sohrab Ahmari) destroyed American manufacturing.
  4. Neoconservative interventionism (Iraq, Afghanistan) was catastrophic; the New Right wants restraint or isolation (Tucker Carlson, JD Vance).
  5. Social-issue accommodation. Fusionism allowed cultural progressivism to advance through the courts, the universities, and corporate culture; the New Right wants to use state power to reverse it (Postliberalism, Common Good Constitutionalism, Schedule F).
  6. The fusionist boundary was theatrical. From Birchers to Buchanan to Sam Francis to Trump, every supposedly disqualifying moment was eventually re-absorbed; the boundary policed personalities, not politics (Counterrevolution).

The New Right’s Four-Legged Stool

Where Reagan had three legs (traditionalism, libertarian economics, anti-communism), the New Right has four:

  1. Substantive (state-enforced) traditionalism — replacing private virtue with “common good” jurisprudence and policy.
  2. Economic nationalism — replacing free-market dogma.
  3. Restraintist or isolationist foreign policy — replacing Cold War / War on Terror interventionism.
  4. Anti-immigration — explicit demographic politics.

The repudiation is conceptual, not just programmatic: the New Right denies fusionism’s first premise that freedom is the means to virtue. With Bozell, the New Right asserts virtue (or “the good”) is the end of politics, and freedom is justified only insofar as it serves it.

Heritage’s Self-Reversal

The clearest single piece of evidence for the death of fusionism is the trajectory of the Heritage Foundation:

  • 2007: The Conservative Consensus (Edwards) — Heritage’s flagship intellectual-history report calls for “a renewed fusionism.”
  • 2021: Kevin Roberts — Buchanan-1992 volunteer, Catholic — becomes Heritage president.
  • 2023: Heritage publishes Project 2025, a 920-page operational program for state-led cultural restoration, Schedule F, and Administrative State dismantling — exactly the politics the 2007 essay’s “renewed fusionism” was structured to forestall.
  • 2024: Tucker Carlson keynotes Heritage events; National Conservatism orbits move into Heritage’s ecosystem.

The same institution that in 2007 was the steward of fusionist self-understanding became, by 2023, the operational headquarters of post-fusionism. The wiki treats this trajectory as one of the most useful single indicators of the systemic shift the MAGA New Right represents.

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