Why the Right Needs a More 'Muscular' and 'Masculine' Conservatism

At last month's National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, I used my speech to criticize "Fusionism," the postwar conservative movement's default political alliance built upon an attendant "Fusionist" political philosophy, and instead argue on behalf of an alternative path forward. Fusionism, as formulated and popularized by the midcentury theorist Frank Meyer, "fused" together economic laissez-faire dogma with privately held social and cultural conservatism. Fusionism remains today the philosophical lodestar for many of the leading institutions of Conservatism, Inc., such as National Review and The Heritage Foundation.

In the speech, I criticized Fusionism as "effete, limp and unmasculine" because the political philosophy, which relies on liberalism's purported beneficence to safeguard private institutions' intergenerational passing down of virtue, "removes from the political arena ... the very value judgments and critical questions that most affect our humanity and our civilization." Some of Fusionism's defenders, among them paradigmatic right-liberal David French, have taken umbrage. Writing earlier this week in The Atlantic, French accuses me of helping to foster a "culture that idolizes a twisted version of 'toughness' as the highest ideal."

The "national conservative" criticism of the reigning Fusionist, right-liberal orthodoxy as "unmasculine" is not predominantly one of mere attitude or disposition. True, it is a small component of our broader condemnation of the institutional right as unduly complacent in the face of an ascendant and deeply toxic woke ideology. As former New York Post Op-Ed Editor Sohrab Ahmari wrote in his (uniquely germane here) 2019 First Things cri de coeur, "Against David French-ism," "civility and decency are secondary values." The problem we now confront, as Rabbi Dr. Ari Lamm wrote in a 2020 op-ed for Newsweek, where I am opinion editor, is "not that we're no longer nice and polite, but that we are increasingly losing faith in our deepest, truest values."

The overarching issue is that the Fusionism of Conservatism, Inc., as a structural matter and due to the very nature of the liberal order on which it is necessarily dependent, is incapable of resisting the left's "long march through the institutions," let alone positing its own substantive vision of a good society and the good life. And it is incapable of doing so because it improperly relies upon the illusion of a values-neutral liberal order -- a values-neutral free market, a values-neutral town square and a values-neutral U.S. Constitution -- to secure its "private" culture at the same time that the progressive left champs at the bit to remold the nation in its dystopian image and subjugate us "deplorables" into second-class citizens.

History has shown that a values-neutral liberal order amounts to a one-way cultural ratchet. The wokesters are all too happy to fill the ever-larger void left behind by a "naked" public square. Indeed, the wokesters are abetted by Fusionist right-liberals who refuse to inject any sense of overt value or morality into the national fabric as a matter of high-minded principle and who instead prefer the relative governing safety of slashing taxes and regulations and calling it a day. In a nutshell, the left knows precisely which (immoral) values it stands for, and it aggressively seeks to advance and disseminate those values. Against such an unrestrained adversary, Fusionism's plea for liberal procedural neutrality rings hollow.

The predictable result has been the unprecedented metastasis of the woke ideology through more and more of the nation's leading institutions, from elementary school classrooms to Fortune 500 boardrooms. Against this terrifying new threat, the Fusionist playbook that reached its zenith during Ronald Reagan's presidency is largely impotent. It makes no sense whatsoever to spout platitudes about corporate tax cuts and slashing unnecessary red tape when the new threats look more like critical race theory indoctrination in the classroom and forcing Christian bakers to bend the knee and "bake the damn cake" for a same-sex wedding. The issues confronting us have fundamentally changed. Any conservatism worthy of the name in 2021 must, to use a phrase associated with the "very online" right, "know what time it is."

A conservatism that "knows what time it is" is one that robustly asserts and fights for its values in the public square, and that refuses to cabin itself to appeals to "live and let live" liberal bromides. The conservatism demanded by the moment is one that fights the culture war with the aim not of "neutrality" but of outright victory. In that structural sense, it is "muscular" and "masculine."

Having 60y/o Beta males with low T probably doesn’t help.

Mandatory TRT for all Republican males...

The author is 100% correct on this.

Unfortunately for America, this type of conservatism rarely wins elections anymore. If this COVID debacle has proven anything, it has demonstrated that this nation is filled with simpering cowards.

3 posted on 12/03/2021 4:08:14 AM PST by Alberta's Child ("All lies and jest, ‘til a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.")

Just someone talking about taxes and the intricacies of regulations and making things more efficient won’t work. The left has all the emotional gimmicks - get people angry at each other over race, promise endless free stuff, the intersectionality scam, where the LGBTQWERTY and the Islamists are married under the banner of socialism, announce a world-ending environmental cataclysm Nature will visit us for the sins of capitalism - you have 10 years to repent and convert to socialism. It is possible that the mass of humanity is too stupid to appreciate freedom and being manipulated by demagogues is all that “works” for them.

What the writer calls "fusionist" is a kind of patrician who visits the ancient ruins because others have told them it's what cultured people do, but who never stops to ask why the ancient structures were ever abandoned.

It has been my observation that conservatives just blog angrily. They have not and probably will not participate in their society. If they had taken an active interest years ago, we wouldn't be in the situation we are now.

I have also observed, even right here on FR, that conservatives aren't a very cooperative bunch. They can't even compromise among other conservatives; and, they tend to "eat their own".

Male conservstism: Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Female conservatism: Jarred Kushner and Ivanka.

You can’t have a masculine conservatism with the liberal woke crowd unless you have a high tolerance for crying.

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