Stephanie Slade on Fusionism and Frank Meyer

Excellent interview of Stephanie Slade, author of the recent book Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right (University of Notre Dame Press, 2026), by James M. Patterson on the Law and Liberty Podcast, episode “Fusionism’s First Principles with Stephanie Slade” (Sept. 1, 2026).

Though she does buy into the simplistic and erroneous “liberty is libertarians’ highest value” canard when talking about, say, Ayn Rand: 

one way you can reject fusionism is you can say, no, no, this virtue stuff is getting in the way of freedom. We need to be prioritizing freedom. Individual liberty is what matters. Liberty is the highest value, and it’s up to every person to decide for themselves what virtue means for them.

… And so Brent Bozell, I think Ayn Rand is an interesting character because her whole thing about objectivism is that she’s not a moral relativist. She thinks there are better and worse ways to live, but her highest value is liberty, I guess I would say. And so the Judeo-Christian understanding of virtue is absent from her worldview.

For a response to this, see Kinsella, The “Liberty Is Your Only Value” Canard.

Related

• Kinsella, The Three Fusionisms: Old, New, and Cautious (Jan. 16, 2022)
• Hoppe, Where the Right Goes Wrong (1997)
• Rothbard, Freedom is for Everyone (Including the despised “Rightists”) (Liberty, March 1988)
• Classic Hoppe on the Realistic Right vs. the Egalitarian Left
• Sebastian Wang and Sean Gabb, Freedom Under the Sun: Proceedings of the Property and Freedom Society, Bodrum, 2025
• Conservative Fusion with Charles C.W. Cooke , Samuel Goldman & Stephanie Slade, hosted by James M. Patterson, The Law & Liberty Podcast (October 8, 2024)
• Daniel J. Flynn, “Murray Rothbard’s Lost Letters on Ayn Rand,” J. Libertarian Stud. 29, no. 2 (2025)
  • Rothbard’s Lost Letters on Ayn Rand, a discussion between Ryan McMaken and Daniel Flynn
• From Communist to Conservative with Daniel J. Flynn, hosted by James M. Patterson, Law & Liberty Podcast (Feb. 3, 2026)
• Daniel J. Flynn, “Synthesizing S. Frank Meyer,” Law & Liberty (Aug. 26, 2026)
• Daniel J. Flynn, The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer (Encounter, 2025)
• FUSION: In the Tradition of Liberty, (Samuel Goldman, Editor)
• Murray N. Rothbard, “The ‘New Fusionism’: A Movement For Our Time,” Rothbard-Rockwell Report, Vol. II, no. 1, pp. 1, 3–10 (Jan. 1991), and his similar “Fusionism”, Rothbard-Rockwell Report, Vol. VI, no. 8, pp. 1–5 (Aug. 1995)
• Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., “The Case for Paleolibertarianism,” Liberty (January 1990): 34–38 (response by R.W. Bradford, “Make Sense, Not War,” Liberty (May 1990): 16.)
• Rockwell, “Realignment on the Right?,” Conservative Review, vol. 1, no. 3 (May 1990)
• Jeffrey A. Tucker & Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., Ayn Rand is Dead
• Hoppe, From Nation to Household: The Middle American Illusions of Sam Francis (and Pat Buchanan)
• Hoppe, The Property And Freedom Society—Reflections After Five Years, The Libertarian Standard (June 10, 2010); also published at VDare and as ch. 24 in The Great Fiction; video
• Hoppe, Libertarianism and the Alt-Right: In Search of a Libertarian Strategy for Social Change (2017) (on Richard Spencer etc.)

Summary (prepared by Grok based on the transcript)

Stephanie Slade’s Law & Liberty podcast conversation with James Patterson (published September 1, 2026) presents fusionism as a coherent American conservative philosophy, not a mere tactical alliance. The occasion is Slade’s book Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right (University of Notre Dame Press).

Fusionism as philosophy, not coalition

The common story is that post–World War II conservatism married traditionalists (Russell Kirk) and libertarians (Friedrich Hayek) against domestic big government and Soviet communism. Slade rejects that as incomplete. Frank Meyer—founding senior editor at National Review, book-section editor, and “air traffic control” for the movement—argued that American conservatism uniquely conserves both classical liberalism (liberty, rule of law, limited government, free markets) and Judeo-Christian virtue. The two are mutually reinforcing: liberty without a moral tradition leaves people without guidance on how to use freedom; virtue without liberty invites coercion. Meyer disliked the word “fusionism,” but it describes what he saw as already native to the American founding rather than a European “throne and altar” conservatism.

Hayek and Kirk themselves were more fusionist than the usual “two poles” framing suggests. Hayek’s “Why I Am Not a Conservative” targeted old-world, status-quo, monarchical conservatism, not the American variety; he called himself an old Whig and said Americans generally were Whigs. Kirk was more libertarian than his traditionalist reputation implies. The famous Mont Pelerin Society exchange between them looks like a debate but, in Slade’s reading, is two people on the same team. Anti-communism mattered, but fusionism as a philosophical synthesis predates the Reagan coalition by about two decades and is not reducible to “strange bedfellows voting for the same candidate.”

The two ways of rejecting fusionism

Slade uses two mid-century figures as foils:

• Ayn Rand (Objectivism): liberty as the highest value, no Judeo-Christian account of virtue, contempt for religion. Slade recounts Buckley sending her a Christmas card in Latin after she told him he was “too smart to believe in God.”
• L. Brent Bozell Jr. (Buckley’s brother-in-law): started as a Goldwater libertarian and ghostwrote The Conscience of a Conservative, then converted to a militant, theocratic Catholicism. He left National Review, founded Triumph, moved his family to Franco’s Spain, became more statist, and later helped found what became Christendom College. He and Meyer remained close friends and nocturnal phone debaters despite the break. In later life, after bipolar illness, Bozell largely abandoned political imposition and turned to daily Mass and service to the homeless—an ending Slade reads as more fusionist in practice (civil society and voluntary action) than his integralist writing.

Civil rights, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush

The civil-rights record of mid-century fusionists is treated as a genuine problem, not a footnote. Buckley’s 1957 “Why the South Must Prevail” editorial is called horrific; even Bozell objected. Meyer, a New York Jew and former communist, was less racially prejudiced in the Southern sense but turned against the movement as militant, socialist-tinged, and disorderly. Slade does not excuse this, but she notes that federalism and fear of concentrating power in Washington also shaped positions that look indefensible today—a “Sophie’s choice” between racial justice and Madisonian limits on the federal government.

Nixon is largely absent as a hero: the National Review circle saw Eisenhower–Nixon Republicans as mushy moderates (China, price controls) and identified with Goldwater–Reagan instead.

Reagan was a self-conscious fusionist; he cited Meyer at CPAC in 1981. His record is mixed: tax cuts without matching spending cuts, exploding debt, reluctant auto import restraints to forestall worse congressional tariffs. Steve Hayward’s line that he won the Cold War but not the culture war is treated as a fair summary of fusionism’s political limits.

George W. Bush represents further drift: No Child Left Behind (federalizing education), bank bailouts (moral hazard), and the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (entangling church and state). Don Devine’s reaction at CPAC—that this was “liberalism”—captures the fusionist critique. Reagan-style fusionism wanted the governmental and non-governmental spheres kept more separate.

Why the illiberal right has the upper hand

The last part of the conversation turns to the “dissident right”: theocons who want less liberty so virtue can be imposed, and neo-reactionaries who treat politics as war and power as the only real prize. Slade offers two explanations for their appeal, especially among the young:

1. Failure of transmission. After Reagan’s landslides and the Soviet collapse, fusionists treated their philosophy as vindicated and shifted to electoral machinery. The intellectual foundation eroded. A generation grew up thinking “conservative economics” means tariffs.
2. Reaction to left overreach. Young people experienced cultural institutions as imposing woke identity politics with career-destroying force. “Fight fire with fire” and “the fusionists want unilateral disarmament” became persuasive, even if Slade calls the argument dangerous and morally bankrupt.

Patterson frames the choice some young conservatives feel as “fight” (Yarvin, Vermeule) or “flight” (Benedict Option)—neither of which is the American founding’s emphasis on choice and reflection.

The close

Slade’s conclusion is chastened but not despairing. Fusionism still has the resources—classical liberalism plus the Judeo-Christian, philosophical, and literary traditions—to answer the existential questions young people are actually asking (how to live a good life, form a family, find meaning). Economic-growth talk alone is insufficient if people feel adrift. The task is to reopen that “treasure chest” rather than invent something new or cede the field to the darker corners of the internet.

The episode is a book-length argument compressed into a conversation: fusionism as America’s distinctive conservative inheritance, its mid-century architects and heretics, its mixed political record, and the reasons it lost ground to illiberal alternatives.