The MAGA New Right

The Conservative Consensus

Properties1
tags

6 min read

The Conservative Consensus: Frank Meyer, Barry Goldwater, and the Politics of Fusionism

Lee Edwards (Heritage Foundation report, 22 January 2007). Genre: Heritage in-house intellectual history / movement apologia. Argues that postwar American conservatism cohered around Frank Meyer’s fusionist synthesis, that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were its political vehicles, and that the post-2006 conservative movement’s path forward is “not a new but a renewed fusionism.” Preserved here as the canonical self-portrait of pre–Kevin Roberts Heritage — the exact frame the contemporary MAGA New Right has repudiated, including by the same Heritage Foundation under Project 2025.

What It Is

Edwards is a longtime Heritage Foundation fellow and historian of the American conservative movement. The 24-minute report appeared as part of Heritage’s “First Principles Essays” series. Its purpose was to give the post-2006 (post-midterm-loss, mid-Iraq-debacle) conservative movement an authoritative narrative of its own intellectual coherence: traditionalism, libertarianism, and anti-communism, fused by Meyer, embodied by Goldwater and Reagan.

The piece is roughly evenly divided between intellectual history (Meyer’s debate with Hayek, Kirk, Bozell, Hamowy) and political narrative (Goldwater 1964, Reagan 1980–1988, the Contract with America, post-9/11 fusionism).

The Argument

1. The Disputatious Movement (1950s).
Postwar American conservatism was internally fractious. The traditionalist Russell Kirk vs. the libertarian Hayek and the individualist Frank Meyer. The Whittaker Chambers / Ayn Rand split (Chambers’s NR review of Atlas Shrugged: “To a gas chamber — go!”). Hayek’s “Why I Am Not a Conservative” (1960) charged that conservatism distrusts the new, lacks principles, 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.” (The wiki notes: Hayek’s bill of indictment substantially describes the MAGA New Right.)

2. Meyer’s Synthesis (early 1960s).
Meyer reversed his earlier individualist hostility to Kirk and produced In Defense of Freedom (1962) and the 1964 edited volume What Is Conservatism? The synthesis: “reason operating within tradition,” fusionism, “consensus among divergence.” Edwards canonizes the 1964 volume as the moment fusionism became the movement’s official self-understanding.

3. The Bozell Counter-Position (1962).
Edwards records the Bozell critique: “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.” Edwards treats this as a defeated dissent. The wiki treats it as the dormant position that becomes Postliberalism sixty years later.

4. Goldwater as Political Embodiment.
The Conscience of a Conservative (1960, ghostwritten by L. Brent Bozell Jr.) sold 3.5 million copies; “more widely read political manifesto of the 20th century, rivaled in American political history, perhaps, only by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.” 1964: presidential nomination, the “ordered liberty” passage of the acceptance speech (drafted by Harry V. Jaffa), “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” landslide loss to LBJ.

5. The Anti-Communist Cement.
The single most analytically valuable passage in Edwards. Quoting George Nash: fusionism was “immensely assisted… by the cement of anti-communism.” Edwards admits: in the 1990s, “without the soothing presence of Ronald Reagan and with the collapse of communism, large fissures appeared in American conservatism. These fissures produced paleoconservatives pining for the isolationist 1930s and neoconservatives resurrecting Wilsonian dreams of a world made safe through democracy.” 9/11 only “temporarily united” the movement. The fissures are still open.

6. Reagan as Master Fusionist.
Edwards traces Reagan’s 1964 “Time for Choosing” speech, 1966 California governorship, 1980 presidency, “evil empire” speech (March 1983), 1989 farewell. The picture is a fusionist hero who balanced traditionalism, libertarianism, and anti-communism in a way that won elections and ended the Cold War.

7. The Renewal Plea (2007).
Edwards’s prescription: “a renewed fusionism based on limited government, the free market, individual freedom and responsibility, a balance between liberty and law, and a commitment to moral order and to virtue, both private and public.” This is the fusionist creed in catechism form. It is exactly what the post-2016 MAGA New Right explicitly rejects.

Why It Matters for the Wiki

The Edwards essay is most useful as evidence of what was being preserved in 2007 — and who was preserving it. Heritage Foundation in 2007 was the institutional steward of fusionist self-understanding. By the time Kevin Roberts became Heritage president (October 2021) and Heritage published Project 2025 (2023), the institution had explicitly broken with this frame. The same Heritage that in 2007 was telling itself “renewed fusionism” was the answer is, in 2025, the operational headquarters of an explicitly post-fusionist project that wields state power for substantive moral ends — exactly Bozell’s 1962 position.

The Edwards essay is therefore preserved in the wiki less as a description of what conservatism is than as a snapshot of what it was telling itself before the floor fell out. The MAGA / postliberal turn is intelligible only against the conceit Edwards is articulating.

Suppressions and Omissions

Edwards’s 2007 narrative omits several developments that would have complicated the renewal story:

  • No mention of the 1981 Bradford-Jaffa fight over the NEH chairmanship — the constitutional civil war was a generation old by 2007 (see Beyond Originalism).
  • No mention of Pat Buchanan’s 1992 “Culture War” speech or the paleoconservative revolt — Edwards mentions paleoconservatives only in a glancing reference to “isolationism.”
  • No mention of Sam Francis — the most theoretically rigorous critic of fusionist conservatism.
  • No mention of Curtis Yarvin’s then-emerging neoreactionary critique, or of the early signs of a Catholic-postliberal current within Heritage’s own donor and intellectual ecology.
  • No serious engagement with Bozell’s later career — Triumph, the abortion-clinic raids, the post-Vatican II Catholic-traditionalist ferment — that would have shown his 1962 position was already mutating into the next century’s Catholic Integralism.

These omissions make Edwards’s “renewed fusionism” thesis more confident than the available evidence in 2007 warranted.

Cross-References

Graph View

Backlinks