A Civitas Symposium on Stephanie Slade’s latest book.
Stephanie Slade’s latest work, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, argues that the political philosophy that shaped a large portion of the postwar American Right should continue to steer the American conservative movement into the twenty‑first century. As my recent piece on postliberalism indicates, I largely share Slade’s view. Fusionism offers a more solid course for American conservatism than either postliberalism or populist nationalism.
Recently, Civitas Outlook hosted a symposium dedicated to Slade’s book. The description below explains the purpose:
Civitas Outlook presents the Fusion Symposium, featuring commentaries from five noted authors and editors on Stephanie Slade’s new book, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right. This volume highlights the core ethos of postwar American conservatism as formulated by Frank Meyer during his tenure at National Review. This ethos connected virtue to human freedom, treating freedom not as an end in itself but as a condition that enables the pursuit of truth and the ennobling of the human person. Meyer argued in the 1960s that
We are today historically in a situation created by thirty years of slow and insidious revolution at home and a half century of violent open revolution abroad. To conserve the true and the good under these circumstances is to restore an understanding (and a social structure reflecting that understanding) which has been all but buried; it is not to preserve the transient customs and prescriptions of the present.
But Meyer did not advocate relying on the federal government to reestablish the “true and the good.” He asserted that “The decisive criterion of any political order is the degree to which it establishes conditions of freedom.” This freedom is meant to enable the pursuit of the cardinal and theological virtues. Yet, Meyer says, “virtue is not a political problem, it is not the concern of the state.” Freedom is “only a condition of that end, which is virtue.” We begin to see that fusionism is far more than an old political coalition and stands as a pivotal element of American conservatism.
Contributions to the symposium are:
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Elizabeth Corey, Fusion: Power Is Not the Last Word;
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Richard Morrison, What Fusion Will We Build;
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Paul Mueller, Recovering Fusionism;
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Veronique de Rugy, Fusionism and the Moral Prerequisites of Citizenship;
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Paul Seaton, The Bifurcated Fusionist Regime.
For additional discussion of the book and why Fusionism remains relevant today, you can also view an interview with Slade conducted by James Patterson on Law & Liberty.
