In 1960, Edwards helped found Young Americans for Freedom, a group that embraced the
fusionism of the burgeoning New Right.
Summary: Republicans need to identify a modern
fusionism with a unifying concept and a corresponding set of shared policy ideas tailored to the era
His answer is a form of
fusionism which "integrates the best insights of traditionalist conservatism, neoconservatism, and libertarianism" by combining and balancing their respective principles: tradition, reason, and liberty.
But
fusionism spun apart in the maelstrom of the 1960s: Most conservatives supported the Vietnam war, while figures like Rothbard not only opposed it but attempted to make common cause with New Left groups such as Students for a Democratic Society.
It's altogether fitting that a book throwing down the gauntlet for a libertarian-conservative fusion in the 2010s has emerged from an author linked to the same magazine as the progenitor of the original
fusionism of a half-century earlier.
This
fusionism would make its way, often imperfectly, on through to the rank and file of the Republican Party and surely was a key element in the movement from Goldwater's pasting in '64 to the acme of the Reagan years.
3) SFL is more vocally skeptical of
fusionism than YAL, but prominent members of the Republican Party still adorn its website.
There are seven chapters: the conservative canon and its uses; the traditionalist dialect; the libertarian dialect;
fusionism as philosophy and rhetorical practice; WFB; Whittaker ChambersAEs martyrdom; conservatism and canonicity.
While the highly energetic and polemical Buckley assumed the role of promoting
fusionism on the political scene, it was senior editor Frank Meyer's task to attempt constructing a political theory that was supposed to accommodate the major tenets of both conservatism and libertarianism (3).
This rhetorical resurrection of
fusionism lacks both nuance and precision even as it invites tremendous questions about definitions: What exactly is meant by "libertarian," "religious conservative," and "neo conservative?
Fusionism is the essence of mainstream American conservatism.
Someone seeing the
fusionism with a critical eye will be inclined to question whether it is not a bringing together only of the more superficial aspects of the various worldviews, since the medievalist consensus based on hierarchy, the centrality of religion, and a landed economic base is so very different from the classical liberalism, and its offshoots, that displaced it.
