Frank S. Meyer (1909–1972)
Senior editor of National Review; the intellectual architect of Fusionism; ex-Communist Party organizer turned individualist; author of In Defense of Freedom (1962); his synthesis of traditionalism and libertarianism, captured in the formula “reason operating within tradition,” was the consensus mid-20th-century definition of American conservatism — and is the precise framework the MAGA New Right has rejected.
Who He Was
Born 1909; an effective Communist Party organizer in his youth, Meyer broke with communism in the late 1940s and became one of the most ferocious anti-communists in American intellectual life. He joined National Review near its founding and served as a senior editor until his death in 1972, his Long Island home famously functioning as a 24-hour movement coordination center over a chain-smoked telephone.
Meyer’s posthumous reputation rests on two interlocking achievements:
- The fusionist synthesis — the theoretical reconciliation of traditionalism and libertarianism within American conservatism.
- The infrastructure of consensus — Meyer was the organizer who turned a fractious, magazine-and-pamphlet movement into a coordinated political force capable of supporting Barry Goldwater and, later, Reagan.
The Two Phases
Phase 1: The Quarrel (mid-1950s)
Meyer attacked Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind on the grounds that Kirk and like-minded traditionalists had no grounding in “any clear and distinct principle.” Meyer argued from a strict individualist position: “freedom of the person” was the primary end of political action; the State had only three functions — national defense, the preservation of domestic order, and the administration of justice between individuals. The achievement of virtue was not the State’s business.
Kirk’s response was equally sharp: “individualism” (the period’s word for libertarianism) was “social atomism,” even anti-Christian, and would issue politically in anarchy.
Phase 2: The Synthesis (late 1950s onward)
Meyer reversed course. The political reality of the postwar conservative coalition required a theoretical reconciliation. His 1962 In Defense of Freedom and the 1964 edited volume What Is Conservatism? (contributors: Hayek, Kirk, Buckley, M. Stanton Evans, Wilhelm Roepke, others) advanced the formula:
- “The Christian understanding of the nature and destiny of man” is what conservatives are trying to preserve.
- The Western inheritance is “reason operating within tradition.”
- Despite differences of emphasis, conservatives share an “objective moral order,” the human person as the center of political thought, opposition to liberal use of state power for ideological ends, defense of the Constitution “as originally conceived,” and defense of Western civilization against communism.
Meyer’s gloss: a “consensus among divergence” comparable to that of the Founders at Philadelphia.
What Fusionism Actually Was
The standard fusionist formula — sometimes glossed as “utilizing libertarian means for traditionalist ends” (Donald Devine) — held that:
- The free market and limited government are the means.
- A traditionalist moral order (family, church, community) is the end.
- Individuals must be free to choose virtue; coerced virtue is no virtue.
This bundled disagreements rather than resolving them. The libertarian Ronald Hamowy already pointed out the unresolved gap: “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.” Meyer’s answer — “the Christian understanding of the nature and destiny of man” — was a Christian-Western choice of tradition that the fusionist formula could not derive.
Why Fusionism Held — And Why It Broke
Meyer’s synthesis cohered for ~40 years on what George Nash called “the cement of anti-communism.” A common existential enemy made it tactically irrational to escalate intramural disagreements about ends.
When the Soviet Union collapsed (1989–1991) the cement dissolved. Within a few years the coalition fractured: paleoconservatives (Buchanan, Sam Francis) on isolationism and immigration; neoconservatives on Wilsonian democracy promotion; libertarians on the welfare state. Lee Edwards’s 2007 The Conservative Consensus is in effect a Heritage Foundation eulogy disguised as a renewal sermon — by the time Edwards wrote, the consensus was already gone.
The MAGA New Right is the explicit post-fusionist condition. Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018), Sohrab Ahmari’s “Against David French-ism” (2019), Adrian Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism (2022), and Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) all argue, in different idioms, that the fusionist arrangement is a category error: liberty is a means, not an end; “libertarian means for traditionalist ends” was the disease, not the cure.
Meyer in the New Right’s Memory
Meyer is treated by the contemporary right in three modes:
- Heritage and the older fusionist establishment (Lee Edwards 2007, Donald Devine, Dick Armey) memorialize Meyer as the architect of a still-renewable consensus.
- The postliberals (Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeule) treat Meyer as the architect of the broken arrangement that needs to be undone.
- The Hard Right and BAPist current treat Meyer as a representative figure of “Conservative Inc.” — credentialed, magazine-bound, ineffectual.
The figure most under-credited by all three is the organizer Meyer: the senior editor whose Long Island house was the night-and-day coordination center of an actual political movement. The successor function in the MAGA New Right is split among Heritage Foundation under Kevin Roberts, the Edmund Burke Foundation under Yoram Hazony, and the Claremont Institute under Ryan Williams — none of whom would acknowledge the inheritance.
Meyer in the Birch Episode
Meyer figures in the wiki’s John Birch Society case study as the senior NR editor who urged Buckley toward caution: “Some of the solidest conservatives in the country are members of the John Birch Society… we should act in such a way as to alienate them no more than is strictly necessary from a moral, political, or tactical point of view.” Meyer’s caution is a small but telling data point: even the architect of the fusionist consensus understood the consensus depended on keeping the Bircher rank-and-file inside the tent. The fusionist boundary was always tactical.
Cross-References
- Fusionism — the synthesis Meyer built
- The Conservative Consensus — Edwards’s 2007 Heritage canonization of Meyer
- Russell Kirk — antagonist and then partner in the synthesis
- William F. Buckley Jr. — the publisher and brand who institutionalized Meyer’s framework
- Barry Goldwater — the politician who carried fusionism into national politics
- L. Brent Bozell Jr. — Meyer’s Catholic-traditionalist critic; ghost-wrote The Conscience of a Conservative
- Heritage Foundation — the institution whose 2007 self-conception was Meyer-fusionist; whose 2025 Project 2025 has broken with it
- Postliberalism — the current that has explicitly rejected Meyer’s synthesis
- John Birch Society — Meyer’s caution about NR’s response is documented in the Dallek source