Fusionism—the union of libertarian political economy and traditional Judeo-Christian morality and spirituality—has been dubbed “the dead consensus” for some time. The consensus persists among American conservative intellectuals, but few have the energy to defend it against recent attacks. The day of fusionist manifestos like The Theme Is Freedom and The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism seems long behind us. Traditionalists appear to be in rapid retreat, and where libertarianism matters, it has no traditionalist underpinnings. Even if fusionism isn’t dead, it is undoubtedly sick.
I think some form of fusionism is correct and has great value in helping us figure out how to shape our shared social world. I hope then, with others, to resurrect the dead consensus. But to do so, fusionism requires reinvigorated philosophical foundations, a process that must begin by identifying fusionism’s central problems. In a previous essay, I focused on difficulties in how fusionist thinkers relate liberty and virtue—the liberty-virtue puzzle. In this piece, I focus on a second puzzle, that of order.
Fusionism wove together traditionalists and libertarians. Some cast their disagreement as one of order vs. liberty. I’ve never found this contrast helpful. Both libertarians and traditionalists have theories of social order, and both ask how a society uses norms and values to perpetuate itself and, with good fortune, to flourish. The proper contrast concerns which form of order endures and advances human flourishing.
From here, I see two problems of order. The first is what I call the culture-political causation problem. Fusionists maintain that culture shapes politics, while the New Right contends that something closer to the opposite is true. Why do fusionists think we must win the culture to win politics, not vice-versa?
The second difficulty is the local-national order problem. Fusionists claim that small groups like families, churches, and civic associations can flourish locally despite facing the market’s creative destruction at the macro level. But can traditional local institutions coexist with dynamic national and global markets?
To bring the culture-politics relationship into focus, let’s review the claims fusionists made about it. Richard John Neuhaus was perhaps its leading spokesperson. As he put it in his famous book The Naked Public Square, “Politics is largely a function of culture, and religion is at the heart of culture.” Similarly: “Politics is, in largest part, an expression of culture, and at the heart of culture is religion.” George Weigel agrees, and argued that Pope John Paul II thought similarly:
John Paul argued for the priority of culture over politics and economics as the engine of historical change, and at the heart of culture, he proposed, is cult, or religion: what people honor, cherish, and worship.
Cultural renewal must begin in civil society. Government should remain limited so as not to interfere with these institutions, which will grow and proliferate. It will then provide the goods that people would otherwise demand from governments.
One reason that fusionists thought culture was upstream of politics is that government cannot cultivate virtue. As Frank Meyer argued,
The coercive organs of society cannot establish or enforce virtue, since, by its nature, virtue must be the free choice of persons.
In a free society, politics is downstream from culture in that good politics can only spring from a good culture, and a good culture can only arise under free conditions. That is why we should limit government: expansive state intervention will undermine virtue. Note the key assumption: Cultural revitalization precedes and drives political change. That makes big government unnecessary; indeed, big government is harmful.
A central claim of the New Right, however, is that fusionists get things precisely backward. Political power and the law must mold cultural institutions. Minimal government cannot preserve local cultures with strong families, churches, etc.
“Localism” is easily destroyed in a globalized system but can flourish if protected under an umbrella of public policy.
And Vice President J.D. Vance:
Whether it’s the incentives that you put into place, funding decisions that are made, and the curricula that are developed, you really can use politics to influence culture. And we should be doing more of that on the American Right.
Adrian Vermeule envisions shaping culture in a grand style:
The vast bureaucracy created by liberalism in pursuit of a mirage of depoliticized governance may, by the invisible hand of Providence, be turned to new ends, becoming the great instrument with which to restore a substantive politics of the good.
For the New Right, if the state remains too hands-off, progressive power centers (like universities and the arts) will capture social power, and political power will then quickly fall into their hands.
The other problem of order asks whether traditional communities can flourish under capitalism. A free market creates prosperity while allowing pluralistic local cultures outside the state, and those cultures and groups return the favor. Markets supply prosperity, while local institutions shape the moral character required for markets.
Fusionists understood that markets provide prosperity and that markets have cultural preconditions. Most draw on Wilhelm Röpke, who famously claimed that
Self-discipline, a sense of justice, honesty, fairness, chivalry, moderation, public spirit, respect for human dignity, firm ethical norms—all of these are things which people must possess before they go to market and compete with each other. These are the indispensable supports which preserve both market and competition from degeneration. Family, church, genuine communities, and tradition are their sources.
At the same time, free-market capitalism, in tandem with other free institutions, help build community. They do this by creating the material abundance required for communities to flourish. But free-markets do not promote community merely by creating wealth. They also allow for the formation of virtue, given that virtue can only arise under conditions of freedom.
Fusionists see the local and the national as separate but complementary social domains. The civic domain contains local institutions like churches and families, which provide the social capital required for a free-market order. The national economic domain creates prosperity and, rightly ordered, does not undermine valuable local customs.
The New Right disagrees. Market forces are a solvent of tradition. If we allow unconstrained markets, communal bonds and traditional ways of life will wither, and our culture will become crude and commercialized.
[The global free market] … has consistently been supported by classical liberals for its solvent effect on traditional relationships, cultural norms, generational thinking, and the practices and habits that subordinate market considerations to concerns born of interpersonal bonds and charity.
[Liberalism] … constantly, and at an ever-increasing tempo, disrupts deeply-cherished traditions among its subject populations, stirring unrest, animosity, and eventually political reaction and backlash.
Oren Cass makes a similar claim:
Market forces are not the family’s friend, and public policy plays an indispensable role in protecting the family’s foundations from relentless erosion by the market’s push for profit.
For the New Right, fusionists face a dilemma. They can accept market-driven disruption or impose governmental controls that violate classical liberal principles.
We can now see the two challenges for fusionists:
Culture-Politics Causation: If politics shapes culture, fusionism’s minimal state may fail to preserve traditional values and institutions.
Local-National Order: If markets transform and undermine local social bonds, fusionists must either restrict economic freedom or allow local traditions to die.
At present, however, fusionists and their critics on the New Right share a problem: Few on either side justify their claims based on our best empirical social science. The first fusionists did not have access to the social scientific insights we do. That might excuse them. But the New Right often scorns the social sciences. Indeed, their hostility is often so great that they reject elementary economic insights, such as the case for free trade.
To solve these questions of order requires the opposite approach. These are empirical questions that require empirically serious answers. High rhetoric and brief assertions cannot resolve them. I cannot provide you with answers here. Instead, I hope to explain how to determine which side is correct.
The current debate deploys social constructs that are far too vague. What, after all, is “culture”? And what is “politics”? I would disaggregate these categories. “Culture” consists of values, conventions, descriptive norms, social norms, and civil institutions. “Politics” includes regulation, legislation, elections, and parliamentary decision-making. If we disaggregate culture and politics, we can generate many focused hypotheses, such as whether social norms protect us from an activist judiciary. Or we can ask whether popular elections preserve churches. Or many other claims.
We must also consider the relationship between these categories. Fusionists and the New Right ultimately make causalclaims to connect these constructs, yet both mistakenly focus on one domain as the origin of the other. It seems to me obvious elements of politics and culture have feedback relationships. Culture and politics shape each other. To defend fusionism anew, we must articulate these hypotheses and then sponsor and conduct a scientific inquiry into their truth.
The same holds for local communities and market forces, though we have a superior grasp of the empirical issues here. Behavioral scientists have asked, for instance, whether market society makes people more cooperative, and they have addressed whether capitalism destroys or supports family life. Today’s most exciting work on these matters flows from Elinor and Vincent Ostrom’s research on polycentric order. They have brought into focus how institutions interact across levels of social organization and within them, particularly how local cooperative norms and meso- and macro-level policy can productively interact. Ostromian political economy must be one tool of 21st-century fusionism.
It may be disappointing to end by saying that fusionism doesn’t know how to resolve either problem of order. But it is the truth. The New Right has few empirical resources to answer fusionism, but to win back the right, fusionists must venture deeper into the behavioral sciences. Without economic science, fusionism would never have existed; today, without the social sciences, fusionism will never recover. Our return must begin by formulating and answering focused, tractable research questions.
