Pop quiz! Who said the following?
I regard the moral and spiritual virtues as — by all rational, prescriptive, and intuitive evidence — demonstrably the true end of man. I regard the materialist positivist Utopia to be as an end a lure to man’s degradation.
In today’s world of American conservatism, any number of thinkers, writers, professors, philosophers, etc., could be plausibly attributed this quote. Possibly it belongs to one of the ascendant integralists, such as Patrick Deneen or Sohrab Ahmari. It could just as easily be given to one of the national-conservative thinkers, such as Yoram Hazony or Brad Littlejohn. Perhaps it is drawn from the archives, pulled from the pages of the venerable Edmund Burke or Russell Kirk. Surely it comes from someone deeply invested in the religious and moral aspects of conservative thought.
If you had “Frank Meyer for 500, Alex,” you would be correct. If you didn’t, you’re likely surprised that such a conservative instinct came from someone who today is regarded as nothing more than a libertarian, whose fusionist theory misled conservatives from the start. In many circles on the intellectual right today, Meyer’s name is regarded with scorn, and his theories are found laughable. But the image of Meyer and fusionism that many hold is tarnished by a misconstrued understanding of what Meyer wrote and what fusionism wrought. Take this passage, plucked from Meyer’s essay “Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism”:
That end, to guarantee freedom so that man may uncoercedly pursue virtue, can be achieved in different circumstances in different means. To the clarification of what these means are in specific circumstances, the conservative must apply his reason. The technological circumstances of the twentieth century demand above all else the breaking up of power and the separation of centers of power within the economy itself, within the state itself, and between the state and the economy.
Again Meyer places virtue as the end for man, from which his politics is derived, as all conservatives do. Most of this could have been written by a libertarian, this much is true. But the “separation of centers of power within the economy” does not sound like the words of someone who believes in tax cuts and nothing else. These words reveal a man who understands, despite what our libertarian friends say, that there are circumstances in which civil society can threaten individual liberty and virtue just as well as the state can.
In short, these are not the words of an individual who believes solely in maximal freedom at the expense of human dignity. Frank Meyer understood, as all conservatives intuitively or explicitly understand, that the telos of man is to live a virtuous life. He reckoned with the fact, still true today, that such things as the free market and expansive individual rights come with the danger of utilitarian relativism. His theory asked more of conservatives than just tax cuts, as some would pejoratively tell it.
This is not to say that Meyer is without his flaws. It is self-evidently true that the American moral order has eroded in the last 100 years. Fusionism as understood today has certainly failed, and a recalibration is needed. But it is not the fusionism of Frank Meyer.
The American political tradition is deep, rich, and diverse. It is the job of the American conservative to understand and preserve it in the face of the statist utopianism of the Left. To do this, the conservative movement’s internecine struggles must subside and some sort of consensus must emerge. Frank Meyer understood this in the 1950s; his solutions are still valuable today.