The Old Fusionism Revisited

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the American right consolidated around a shared antipathy to the power of government. For social conservatives such as Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, technocratic control must be resisted because it uprooted traditional forms of life. The dead hand of bureaucracy calculated and classified, turning men into numbers. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman were not patrons of tradition. But they had concerns about state control as well. Management by experts, especially economic management, marked the end of freedom, the road to serfdom.

National Review editor Frank Meyer summarized the point of fusion in his 1962 book, In Defense of Freedom: “The desecration of the image of man, the attack upon his freedom and his transcendent dignity, provide common cause in the immediate struggle.” And the danger was evident: the totalitarian monster state and its enlarged ambition to manage and control the lives of men.

The fusionist concern about state control was fitting. As I document in Return of the Strong Gods, the postwar consensus was concerned to fight against totalitarianism. Hitler’s Germany was a fresh memory. The Soviet Union was a clear and present threat. Moreover, intellectual leaders of the postwar right had come of age during a period of rapid expansion of government power in the United States. Between 1930 and 1960, government spending doubled, going from 15 percent of GDP to 30 percent. At every turn, the greatest danger seemed to rest in the relentless expansion of centralized control. The enemy was coercion; the cause was freedom.

There were dissenting voices, however. In 1953, the sociologist Robert Nisbet published The Quest for Community. He recognized and regretted the enlargement of government and its inhuman methods of bureaucratic control. But he argued that artificial mechanisms of coordination and ideological sources of meaning were becoming predominant because traditional forms of life were disintegrating.

In the mid-twentieth century, left-wing thinkers presumed that the proletariat functioned as the agents of revolutionary change. Nisbet exploits this conceit to good effect. He cites Arnold Toynbee:

The true hallmark of the proletarian is neither poverty nor humble birth, but a consciousness—and the resentment which this consciousness inspires—of being disinherited from his ancestral place in society and being unwanted in a community which is his rightful home; and this subjective proletarianism is not incompatible with the possession of material assets.

The gravamen of The Quest for Community is that modern individualism and the commercialization of society have disinherited middle-class Americans. They are prosperous but disconnected, materially satisfied but uprooted. This condition makes the bulk of Americans into “subjective proletarians” who clamor for security and protection, which in a post-traditional society must come from the technocratic mechanisms of the administrative state. 

Put simply, weak social ties invite the state to fill the void. As Nisbet writes elsewhere, “It is the pulverizing of society into a sandheap of individual particles, each claiming natural rights, that makes the arrival of collectivist nationalism [his term for totalitarianism] inevitable.” Nisbet anticipates Patrick Deneen’s argument: Tradition and cultural authority are necessary foundations for any healthy society, and we presently suffer “from annihilation of this authority in the names of individualism and freedom.”

I recently observed that a great deal turns on what one considers to be the gravest problem facing the body politic (“Our Problem Is Disintegration,” November 2024). Postwar fusionism feared over-consolidation, especially the concentration of power in the state and the dead hand of bureaucratic control. Without doubt, these threats to freedom and human dignity remain.

But our times are different. The disintegration of the moral and spiritual coherence of middle-class life is much further advanced than it was when Nisbet penned The Quest for Community—as is the demand for ever more comprehensive guarantees of security and social control. A generation ago, who would have conceived of “safe spaces”? Homelessness, drug addiction, out-of-wedlock births, sexual harassment, and other social dysfunctions give rise to an array of legal, administrative, and therapeutic methods to impose a modicum of order where the moral order has collapsed. The “Julia” phenomenon has become a powerful political force, as single women serve in the leading phalanx of left-wing progressivism.

As a new fusionism forms, we should commend Robert Nisbet and other spokesmen for a conservatism of authority to Elon Musk and other right-wing progressives. (Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Philip Rieff, and Christopher Lasch come to mind, as do Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt in their own ways.) Their observations about the dangers of atomized existence in a liquid world are more relevant to our present circumstances than are the insights of the old patrons of freedom who see peril only in coercion. In the early 1960s, Milton Friedman wrote, “The greatest threat to freedom is the concentration of power.” That was more than sixty years ago. Today, as Marc Andreessen seems to recognize, the greatest threat to freedom is demoralization, a pessimism that simmers in a culture dissolved by a left-wing progressivism.