Professor Bainbridge offers his thoughts on how President Bush's policies fractured fusionism and drove away libertarian-minded conservatives:
The GOP succeeded in breaking out of 40+ years as a minority party because people like Ronald Reagan and, yes, Newt Gingrich consistently embraced a fusionist approach to policy that enabled libertarians, social conservatives, and fusionists to live together more or less peaceably under the same big tent. Bush's departures from fusionism broke the back of that coalition.How did Bush do this? Utopian foreign policy, profligate spending, and the embrace of big government programs like "No Child Left Behind."
Interestingly, Bainbridge cites conservative thinker Russell Kirk repeatedly in his discussion of fusionism. Yet Kirk never embraced Meyer's fusionist philosphy. Indeed, Meyer and Kirk were often at odds. Indeed, in a 1955 article for The Freeman, "Collectivism Rebaptized," about Kirk and other "new conservatives," Meyer concluded:
Only the principles of individual freedom--to Dr. Kirk the "conservatism of desolation"--can call a halt to the march of collectivism. The New Conservatism, stripped of its pretensions, is, sad to say, but another guise for the collectivist spirit of the age.As a result of this essay, Kirk did not wish to join the National Review masthead once Meyer became a senior editor in 1957.
UPDATE: Bainbridge has more here. I agree with him that Kirk was an important figure in post-war conservative thought. I respectfully disagree that Kirk was a particularly reliable friend of liberty, and would add that Kirk also expicitly rejected Meyer's fusionist philosophy as "weary liberalism of the nineteenth century."
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