Was 'Fusionism' Ever Really Tried? - Part II
Why the old Fusionism didn't happen, and a path forwards.
In the last section I talked about what Fusionism was, why it was not really ever tried in the United States, and what a real Fusionism would have looked like.
In this second part, I’m going to explain WHY Neoconservatism was so attractive to the American right in the 1980 - 2008 period, and why something similar to the Fusionist paradigm I talked about never came into being. The article will then talk about prospects for the future, phenomena like Javier Milei in Argentina, figures like Chris Rufo and Richard Hanania in the US, and finally, what are the lessons that we in Britain can learn from these various movements?
Why Neoconservatism Triumphed
Christopher Caldwell’s book ‘The Age of Entitlement’ (1) is an invaluable resource at understanding a large part of the reason why Neoconservatism emerged so dominant in the Reagan administration and beyond. I will therefore be citing many passages.
Managerial Inertia and Difficulty of Cutting Spending
When it comes to reducing the size of government and balancing the budget, it is very difficult to cut spending on entitlements that people have become accustomed to. This issue has plagued the GOP, and indeed virtually all centre-right governments in the Western World, for decades: how do you balance the budget without raising taxes, and without causing huge voter backlash through cutting payments that they have grown to depend on?
As Caldwell writes in regards to Reagan’s tax cuts without cutting spending:
‘Reagan’s tax cuts never forced Congress to balance the budget. The supply-side windfall never happened, either. By the autumn of Reagan’s first year in office, it was evident the government was growing apace, and the deficit along with it. “We cut the government’s rate of growth nearly in half,” he told Congress, but it was a weak boast—for it was the size of government, not the velocity of its growth, that he had promised to reduce. Government would continue to grow by 2.5 percent a year throughout his administration.’ (pp. 94)
The project to downsize the federal government, that the National Review conservatives had advocated for, hit a brick wall of reality. Richard Nixon, due to his proximity to the creation of the Great Society, was probably the last chance of rolling it back without huge political backlash. As Caldwell writes:
‘In retrospect, we can see that by acquiescing in the ouster of Nixon after the previous landslide, those who voted for him had lost their chance to moderate the pace of that change. With the impeachment of Nixon, promoters of the Great Society had bought the time necessary to defend it against “backlash,” as democratic opposition to social change was coming to be called. In the near-decade that elapsed between Nixon and Reagan, entire subpopulations had become dependent on the Great Society. Those programs were now too big to Fail.’ (pp. 96)
Caldwell also talks about a phenomenon that numerous academics have spoken about; once there is a law passed and a government programme in place, it is very hard for it to be dismantled. This is because that programme will have a huge amount of supporters within the bureaucracy who are tasked with running it, as well as giving it the potential to create a PR disaster, as a specific group has grown accustomed to the benefits of that law.
‘They were, as we have said, gigantic. Once debt was used as a means to keep the social peace, it would quickly run into the trillions. One of Johnson’s lower-profile initiatives from 1965, the Higher Education Act, created the so-called Pell Grants to help “underprivileged” youth go to college. Their cost had risen to $7 billion by the time Reagan came to Washington. Although their effectiveness was disputed, there was an iron coalition of educational administrators and student advocates behind them. So Reagan didn’t touch them. They would swell to $39 billion by 2010. And they were not the whole story of federal support for education. According to one sympathetic account, federal grants and loans to college students, adjusted for inflation, were $800 million in 1963–64, $15 billion in 1973–74, and $157 billion in 2010–11. (pp. 96)
Lack of Equal Group Outcomes
This also extended to the issue of desegregation. Ronald Reagan had railed for years against affirmative action, but still held to the ideals of racial equality. Once in power, the reality dawned that abolishing racial quotas and affirmative action would strike at the heart of desegregation and barely change black representation in elite positions compared to the time of Jim Crow, which would cause an enormous backlash as ‘equal group outcomes’ was advertised as the promise of the Civil Rights Movement.
As Caldwell writes:
‘The legislation of the mid-1960s made legal equality a fact of American life. To the surprise of much of the country, though, legal equality was now deemed insufficient by both civil rights leaders and the government. Once its ostensible demands had been met, the civil rights movement did not disband. It grew. It turned into a lobby or political bloc seeking to remedy the problem according to what Freeman would call the victims’ view: “lack of jobs, lack of money, lack of housing.” The federal government made it a central part of its mission to procure those things for blacks. The results were disappointing on almost every front—naturally, since the country had never signed up for such a wide-ranging project.’ (pp. 23)
He continues.
‘Though no one had thought that those brought up under segregation would be able to make up for the opportunities they had been denied in their youth, it had been assumed that the first generation to benefit from standard American higher education would thrive, on the model of immigrants before them. That did not happen. Blacks, as Allan Bloom put it in his 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, proved as “indigestible” in university systems as they had been in earlier generations.’ (pp. 24)
Therefore, once the Civil Rights Regime had become well established, and the results of getting rid of affirmative action became known:
‘Reagan stinted on none of the resources required to construct Johnson’s new order. Having promised for years that he would undo affirmative action “with the stroke of a pen,” lop the payments that LBJ’s Great Society lavished on “welfare queens,” and abolish Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education, he discovered, once he became president, that to do any of those things would have struck at the very foundations of desegregation. So he didn’t—although Democrats and Republicans managed to agitate and inspire their voting and fundraising bases for decades by pretending he had.’ (pp. 97)
Summing up what the Reagan years represented, Caldwell writes:
‘Like Taft, Reagan changed the country’s political mood for a while, but left its structures untouched. Once he left office, Reagan’s adversaries and bogeymen recovered their ambitious projects from receivership. His supporters were left outside to warm themselves by the embers of Reaganite rhetoric. It was as if the conservative political wave of the late 1970s and early ’80s had never happened.’ (pp. 84)
Outside Considerations
Another significant reason why there emerged such a large consensus in favour of desegregation, and the Great Society that was inherently tied to it, was due to geopolitical considerations.
The Civil Rights Movement had been a major PR disaster for the United States, allowing the USSR to gain support from newly independent countries at their expense. Any perceived rollback of civil rights would have ripple effects on the global stage. This 1988 document by Mary L. Dudziak indicates that these considerations were a major driving force as to why the US undertook desegregation in the first place, and with the heightening of the Cold War in the 1980s, the Reagan administration would not have wanted it to seem like America was backsliding.
The business community had also doubled down on the Civil Rights Regime by the 1980s, first due to legal sanction, but then, as they do today, had rationalised it with the ‘business case for diversity’.
Reagan’s Personality
Ronald Reagan, as a former-Hollywood actor with deep connections to liberal circles, was somebody who wanted to be liked. He therefore tried not to ‘rock the boat’, and in office, despite his conservative views, was very compromising with the Democrat-led Congress.
Democrats often reference Reagan as representing a time when Republicans, even conservative ones, were driven by a need to find consensus. With a Democratic Congress for most of his presidency, and even the GOP not fully behind him and more liberal than he was, Reagan was forced to try and work with them.
However, when they obstructed him, he did not tend to put up much of a fight; for instance with Robert Bork’s failed confirmation to the Supreme Court. He did not try to appoint another justice with similar views, but capitulated entirely by nominating Douglas H. Ginsburg and finally appointing Anthony Kennedy.
The reason why Democrats romanticise the period of ‘bipartisanship’ is because it ensured that on cultural issues, they got basically whatever they wanted, and indeed ‘bipartisan’ laws like the so-called ‘Respect for Marriage Act’ show this process today.
Reagan also did not want to embrace the role of ‘Scrooge’, and therefore endure the backlash that dismantling the Great Society and balancing the federal budget would have brought. Talking about the Republican strategist and close Reagan advisor Jude Wanniski, Caldwell writes:
‘Wanniski would become the great salesman and impresario of so-called supply-side economics. He urged it on Republican politicians as a political strategy two years before he laid it out as an economic theory. With the toastmaster’s language that was his trademark, he argued in 1976 that Republicans kept losing elections because Democrats forced them to “embrace the role of Scrooge,” while Democrats played the role of Santa Claus. “The first rule of successful politics,” he wrote, “is Never Shoot Santa Claus.” Democrats had claimed an identity as the party that generously offered benefits and security, leaving Republicans the responsibility of announcing which taxes they would raise to keep the budget balanced. Wanniski was alerting Republicans who stood behind the Reagan revolution that they could play this trick in reverse.’ (pp. 93)
As a result, the conservative movement increasingly became dominated by special interests. There was no coherent message or plan for dealing with issues like spiralling medicine costs or record high immigration levels. It is why you got legislation like the 1986 Reform and Control Act, basically designed from the start so that the ‘control’ would not be enforced. Businesses liked that they could employ workers outside legal channels, and the fines were low enough that many of them thought it was a ‘price worth paying’.
All in all, Neoconservatism chimed well with Reagan’s natural temperament. His approach to the Presidency was informed by his liberal background as a former-Democrat and ex-Hollywood actor, his liberal record as governor, his strong desire to be liked, and essential acceptance of the changes of the 60s but hoping to tone it down slightly. If the 1960s was ‘three steps forward’ for the cultural left, the 1980s was perhaps ‘one step back’, a pattern we continue to see play out today.
War of Position
One also must put the victory of the Neocons down to a Machiavellian war of position, whereby Neocons expelled everybody who did not affirm their narrative. This is something Paul Gottfried has extensively documented, himself excluded from various positions to his Paleoconservative sympathies, and Sam Francis also discussed it in a 2003 essay for Chronicles Magazine called ‘The Real Cabal’.
The most infamous of these examples was the Mel Bradford Affair, where Neoconservatives successfully pressured Reagan to withdraw Mel Bradford from consideration of being chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities due to his Southern Agrarian background and dislike of Abraham Lincoln. This was the real test to see who’s side Ronald Reagan was essentially on, and with the go-ahead of William F. Buckley, Reagan denied Mel Bradford the nomination and appointed Neocon William Bennett instead.
The fact that the Neoconservative movement was overwhelmingly Jewish will no doubt be used as proof by the Groypers and those adjacent to them to vindicate their obsession with the Jews. But the presence of many non-Jewish Neocons, as well as the fact Paul Gottfried is Jewish, proves that it is not all Jews, even if Neoconservatism did serve Jewish interests when it came to American policy towards Israel.
Pat Buchanan extensively documents this in ‘Where The Right Went Wrong’ (2) specifically focusing on the foreign policy aspect and why Israel is so important in the conservative movement, and how a well organised minority of predominantly Jewish Neocons were able to successfully push for their interests. The foreign policy ‘blob’ was dominated by Neoconservatives that pushed, throughout Republican and Democrat administrations, for a foreign policy geared towards democracy promotion and Wilsonian ideals.
As Sam Francis mentions in his essay Beautiful Losers, and Auron MacIntyre has echoed, the Neocons had the advantage of having a certain respectability amongst left-wing establishment circles that the true right lacked. But this is of course a vicious cycle, and ensures that the culture will move ever further leftwards.
Lack of Hindsight
There was also the lack of the hindsight benefit.
It may have been possible to believe in the first ‘Neocon Cycle’ that Civil Rights for African-Americans really was just a one-issue thing. The fact that Jim Crow was still in living memory for all politicians back in the 1980s, and Asian Americans hadn’t shown the possibility of non-white success as much as they have today, made talk of ‘systemic racism’ more plausible. The taboo on biological racial differences still lingering from WW2 also prevented other explanation other than ‘racism’.
There was not the same sense that compromising on this issue would inevitably mean compromise on everything. It is only when conservatives similarly folded on gay rights in the 2010s that a pattern emerged.
We now have the experience of Neocons to stop the ‘IDW’ from leading us down the same process, and therefore no excuse for making the same mistakes as were made in the 1980s.
As Marx said, ‘history repeats itself, first as a tragedy, and then as a farce.’
Javier Milei: A Future Fusionism?
So with all those obstacles I have mentioned, that pushed the American conservative movement towards a Neoconservative direction in the 1980s and beyond, could another way have been found? Could the policies I described in the last section, representing a true Fusionism, have actually been implemented?
Javier Milei, current President of Argentina, is proving that they could have been, and still could be.
Javier Milei is best known for his hardline economic libertarian and free-market views. However, he is also a social conservative and extremely anti-Woke, and one of his first acts as President was to immediately dismantle Argentina’s diversity department. He is also openly anti-abortion, a position the liberal elites have less and less tolerance for.
Milei is notable for explicitly campaigning on cutting spending, with the motif of the chainsaw representing how he would dismantle the managerial state and balance the government budget, both agendas that have traditionally been seen as unpopular. He turned what for most conservative politicians would lead to electoral oblivion into a winning message. This is because he made his ideas seem anti-establishment and radical, although one must also put his appeal in the context of a severe economic crisis in Argentina, as well as the consistent failure of Keynesian solutions to reverse a century of national decline.
But despite his party, Liberty Advances, having just over a quarter of the seats in the Argentine Chamber and Senate, Milei has been able to get a huge amount done. Through his decrees, Argentina is now in budget surplus for the first time in over a decade, even if his Omnibus law has not gotten through Congress. He is also somebody who, like Trump, relishes in being against the status quo and being confrontational.
People take Klaus Schwab praising Milei as proof that he is controlled opposition and therefore not valuable, but that is looking at things the wrong way. The billionaire class is a countervailing group that our movement must get onside against the managerial class to have any chance of success. Some like Academic Agent would rather say everybody is compromised but him, and see ‘putting the Woke away’ as some proof of co-option. But it would be absolutely fantastic if the ‘woke was put away’. However, unlike Academic Agent’s dangerously optimistic predictions, it will not happen automatically. The pendulum did not swing against Wokeism in the 2010s, and it won’t do so now, unless we ‘will’ it.
Javier Milei can get away with shutting down diversity departments, being pro-gun liberalisation, and even being anti-abortion, because he is a conviction capitalist, tax cutter, and deregulator. If you can do that effectively, you can buy the support of the billionaire class, enough for a large section of them to turn a blind eye to your cultural values. The very rich do not really care for Wokeness, but are forced to tolerate it due to their credentialed employees, manipulative marketing and social attitude research suggesting it benefits them, the ESG asset-management cabal, and legal requirements they are forced to comply with.
Reagan faced a similar situation to Milei in 1980 in some ways. There was a large movement behind him, and a desire for a new political direction, whilst his ‘core allies’ were very much a minority in Congress, though the severe economic crisis was not present.
However, Reagan was not nearly as combative about gutting leftist programmes and rolling back the frontiers of the state. He, of his own accord, had Sandra Day O’Connor nominated as his first Supreme Court judicial appointment, who would go on to vote against his policies, for the pure and simple reason that it would be the ‘first woman’. Reagan’s laid back, compromising, non-combative attitude was a feature of both the Bush’s as well (at least when it came to domestic policy.)
It was only Trump who changed this, and whilst I hope if he gets a second term this year he will be better, now that he has Project 2025 behind him, his first term did not have a consistent team behind him and therefore was unable to get much done.
The one exception to either the pre-Trump lack of combativeness, or Trump’s poor organisation, was Newt Gingrich, who was not even President, but Speaker of the House. However, Gingrich arguably got more done under a Democratic president (Bill Clinton) than Reagan got done in the Oval Office. The second half of the 90s was one of the only times in the past 50 years when America was in budget surplus, the Defense of Marriage Act was passed (tragically not an amendment), a Balanced Budget Amendment came one vote away from going to the states to be ratified, social security was dramatically downsized, etcetera.
So a huge part of the problem is the lack of both administrative ability and ideological zeal. People like Milei and Newt Gingrich can get stuff done, whereas somebody who always tries to ‘work across the aisle’ like George H. W. Bush or even Reagan, will only see the culture move leftwards. One needs to embrace being controversial and polarising, or else society will end up becoming more and more Woke.
Future American Fusionism: The Rufo-Hanania-Cofnas Synthesis
You also see the emergence of a new type of Fusionism emerging in the United States, which has been much lamented by the Postliberals, who see it as a betrayal of the promise of the ‘Third New Right’. But in my view it is greatly encouraging.
I will discuss the three tendencies of this, and see how they compliment one another.
Ron DeSantis and Chris Rufo
The textbook example of this was Ron DeSantis’ Governorship in Florida, much of it the work of his right-hand man and ‘brain’: Chris Rufo.
Ron DeSantis is most known for his brave stand against Woke ideology, but he also liberalised gun restrictions, cut taxes, and implemented universal school choice, whilst being very fiscally conservative and maintaining a balanced budget. Even his withdrawal of Disney’s tax privileges could be seen as compatible with the tenets of Fusionism, as Disney was getting unfair favours from the state of Florida.
DeSantis’ and Chris Rufo’s transformation of the education system in Florida with actions like banning LGBT and Critical Race Theory indoctrination in schools and universities with impressively crafted legislation, as well as taking over and transforming New College Florida, is not a real departure from Fusionist ideology, but simply its faithful application. This is because all of those decisions are around where taxpayers money will go, as well as the fact that universal school choice, a long-time neoliberal policy proposal, is part of the strategy for culling Wokeism in education.
The DeSantis administration differed from Fusionism in a few crucial ways, like banning private companies from demanding proof of Covid vaccination as well as trying to class social media companies as common carriers, and therefore sue them for not allowing free speech on their platforms. I support the latter though not the former, as I share Richard Hanania’s ‘anti-lockdown, anti-mask, pro-vaccine’ stance.
However, it is still broadly true that DeSantis’ governorship was within the Fusionist paradigm, and did not represent a substantial break from it. Chris Rufo, some would say to a fault, is committed to limiting the fight against Wokeism to what the state is directly subsidising, and does not support a tax on university endowments (though he does support removing exemptions for particular universities).
Whilst DeSantis’ presidential campaign was a disaster, reasons for which I will explore in a later article, his governorship was probably the closest to what a ‘true Fusionist’ policy would look like. If every American conservative had been as bold in the 80s, 90s, and 00s as Ron DeSantis was as governor, we would be in a very good place.
Christopher Caldwell and Richard Hanania: Wokeness as Civil Rights Law
Whilst DeSantis and Rufo are still operating according to the traditional paradigm, this has limitations. Rufo is very good at tracing the ‘Long March Through the Institutions’, but he isn’t very good at acknowledging that the reason why Wokeness became so dominant, at least on race and gender issues (LGBT is another story), is because it is required by law. Whilst some fruitful debates have happened on this subject in the past year, and Rufo now acknowledges the 1964 Civil Rights Act needs reform, the movement behind Rufo still seems relatively reluctant to get to the root of Wokeism: Civil Rights Law.
People like Richard Hanania come into mind to represent a distinctly new type of Fusionism, one that is more tech-oriented and Nietzschean in its emphasis. Hanania’s book ‘The Origins of Woke’ (3) made a convincing case that the origins of Woke ideology are from the law itself, specifically the endless expansion through the institutions and the courts of the mandate that the 1964 Civil Rights Act provided. He has also done extensive writing on the Reagan presidency, and provided some much needed optimism for the right, showing the successes that they did have, and what they could do to ensure their success in the future.
Far more people in conservative elite positions are talking about how the roots of our problems go back to Title II and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, compared to the 1980s where, as mentioned above, Jim Crow was still fresh in people’s minds and there was a sense that the after-effects still lingered. More time has passed showing that Asian Americans performed better than whites despite none of the same favourable treatment that Blacks got, and Asians too being discriminated against by the affirmative action regime in addition to Whites.
Race Realism: Nathan Cofnas and Bo Winegard
Since the mapping of the human genome and the publication of ‘The Bell Curve’ by Charles Murray in 1994, once taboo ideas about the link between race and specific attributes like intelligence have become more and more discussed. Bo Winegard from Aporia Magazine, as well as Nathan Cofnas, an American researcher at Cambridge University, come to mind. The evidence for biological differences between groups is becoming developed to the point where it will soon be difficult to ignore.
Cofnas’ contributions here are particularly important, because he gets to the absolute crux of why those of ‘above average’ intelligence are so inclined towards Wokeism. It is because the idea of racial equality has been taken as gospel since WW2, but yet despite the state bending over backwards to give underperforming minorities a (better than) fair chance, we still do not see equal group outcomes. For an intelligent person who nevertheless views biological racial equality as an article of faith, unequal group outcomes would logically conclude you to believe that racism is manifesting in increasingly insidious ways, something that Christopher Caldwell has talked about as well.
Hanania, who is also a Race Realist but has a different approach than Cofnas, counter-argues that a justification for Woke ideology would have been found by those who currently occupy the elite institutions regardless of the accepted facts, due to their emotional attachment to egalitarianism and ‘social justice’. Whilst that may be true for ‘some’ of the elite, I do think that the majority of those with above-average intelligence, without any particular gravitation towards activism, would accept racial differences in achievement if the idea of inherent biological racial differences was hegemonic.
Whilst there will of course still be ethnic grievance even in a meritocratic system where racial differences are accepted, as Keith Woods points out, a genuinely meritocratic system would be less inclined towards Woke ideology. Singapore proves that this is possible, though a lid must be kept on ethnic grievance by all groups (not just Whites) through an authoritarian state.
Racial meritocracy will mean that Asians and Jews are overrepresented in elite positions, and therefore the approach would not be blindly ‘pro-white’. This will no doubt enrage the Groypers and Academic Agent, who will still be complaining online saying the ‘Woke being put away’ is proof of ‘co-option’. But the ‘Rufo Reich’ sounds awesome to me.
Old Fusionism vs New Fusionism
The American Right therefore needs to move in the direction of a Rufo-Hanania-Cofnas synthesis. This would involve gutting every cent of taxpayer funding for Woke ideology in the bureaucracy, deep state, public services, and the education system at all levels (Rufo), repealing virtually all civil rights law and court precedents expanding it (Hanania), and making talk of innate biological differences between groups no longer taboo but instead the predominant scientific narrative, giving the majority of upper-IQ people a convincing explanation for consistent unequal group outcomes.
This Fusionism would not be the same as what it would have been back in the 1980 - 2008 period if it had in fact been done. It would be far less explicitly religious and far more Nietzschean and Vitalist. In some ways this is good, I am part of the ‘Vitalist’ faction of the Dissident Right and am not a Christian. However, whilst there are many positives to this, there are also some issues.
Hanania specifically is fanatically pro-abortion, which whilst I am somewhat sympathetic, is passionate about it to the degree that he now insults his conservative readers more than the Woke left. His increasing ideological affinity with pro-LGBT techno-elitist and traitor Anatoly Karlin is even more disappointing.
But whilst he is the worst example, none these three individuals I feel are sufficiently tough on the LGBT agenda, though Rufo has done some impressive work with transgenderism specifically. None of them are brave enough to say that LGB led to T.
The re-opening of gay marriage I have talked about extensively because, as opposed to some other issues like race, it is barely talked about today when compared to the 1990s and 2000s, when opposing it was within the Overton Window. But I believe gay marriage must end in order for the LGBT agenda to be attacked at its root. I talk about my proposal for privatising marriage in the article, something that was originally a libertarian idea and could find broader support.
All in all, the mini-manifesto I made in the last section could still mostly be implemented, though Trump has changed the orientation of the right toward immigration restriction and high tariffs. An Article V convention would still be a good idea, included within it the court reform I proposed sensible for locking in Originalist hegemony and stopping the Supreme Court from ever being activist again. Unfortunately, constitutionally banning gay marriage will be basically impossible now, so it should instead be gradually dismantled through the guise of privatisation, and the GOP should lay off abortion and contraception.
Is Fusionism Enough Now?
I make the argument in the last section that, if Fusionism had been faithfully applied back in the 1980s, Woke would never have become so dominant. However, this is not the 1980s.
Because we did not stop funding this ideological poison back then, it has now infested the establishment and credentialist institutions to such a degree, just ‘abolishing civil rights law’ and ‘cutting all taxpayer funding’ would probably not be sufficient. The corporations have enough true believers that them leading a huge backlash and digging their heels in, affirming their uncompromising commitment to DEI and being on the ‘right side of history’, could strangle the counterattack from birth. It is understandable corporations would act this way; they have never known a time when the cultural left was decisively and utterly crushed, not just for a while, but for good,
A flaw of ‘The Origins of Woke’, is that Hanania just hopes that, gradually and in time, these Woke corporations will fail compared to non-Woke competitors once the legal incentives to be Woke are removed.
However, what he fails to recognise is that the Democrats could just come right back into power and implement it all again. Unless you have a plan to stop such tendencies from ever coming to power again, and starving them of their resources, abolishing the laws themselves will only allow Woke corporations to mobilise.
The Fusionist paradigm is still broadly correct. Unlike the Postliberals, I do not think the problem is capitalism itself, but specifically ‘Woke’ capitalism. The ‘economic left’ and ‘organised labor’ are not our friends; the ‘Old Left’ is never coming back. They are totally on board with intersectionality and radical transgenderism, and no matter how many ‘Tyranny Inc’-style books and criticisms of Elon Musk Sohrab Ahmari writes, the socialist left will only ever see him as a ‘bigot’.
But due to the gravity of the situation, a result of decades of not rolling back the frontiers of the state and allowing tax money to continue to go towards funding Wokeism, much more radical measures are now needed that would break from a strictly Fusionist policy.
There should be state measures to reduce the influence of the universities and punish woke corporations, whilst rewarding corporations that shun such ideology through tax breaks and a generally improved regulatory environment.
Here are some additional, non-Fusionist measures we will need at this present time to break Woke capital.
Ban graduate degree requirements in the public and private sector, unless the employer can prove in a court of law it is necessary for the job, and issue extensive fines for discriminating against non-graduates, a policy that American Compass has proposed. Doing this at the public and private contractor-level would be within Fusionism, but doing it in the private sector as well would be breaking with it.
Heavily tax university endowments, like J.D Vance has proposed. This has been opposed by Rufo but embraced by Donald Trump. Due to the fact that institutions like Harvard run primarily on private donor grants, I believe it is necessary for a carefully targeted tax, making sure not to tax conservative universities like Hillsdale, to bring them to heel.
Whilst all of the ‘disparate impact’ and ‘affirmative action’ laws and precedent should be completely repealed, Title II and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act should be temporarily retained, but the tables turned so that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission relentlessly litigates and sues companies that discriminated against straight white men with diversity quotas. The fines given out to Woke companies for such discrimination should be high enough to be dissuasive. We should only return to ‘free association’ once corporations have absolutely got the message that to be associated with ‘DEI’ is to suffer massive financial losses and legal action.
Companies with HR departments considered to be ‘excessively large’ should pay a large tax, and the whole HR profession should be bankrupted.
Luckily, many of these ideas are included in Trump’s agenda for a second term. Trump opens up the Fusionist paradigm to innovation, which is a very good thing. But when we break with it, political capital should be spent on the policies that will do an enormous amount of damage to the Woke regime, not Michael Lind/American Affairs vague platitudes about ‘industrial policy’ and the ‘American School’, both of which needlessly alienate wealthy elites which will be needed to fight Woke.
At the end of this, a return to ‘free association’ could be advocated by the left, as the provisions of civil rights law would have been weaponized against them. Long-term, we should move away from weaponizing the state against private business, as it ultimately allows the managerial state to grow and be used against us. But the left must be made to understand that the way they have empowered the federal government has been turned on them, to crippling results.
British Fusionism
So finally, what are the prospects for a Fusionist movement in Britain?
Margaret Thatcher was very different in temperament to Ronald Reagan, as I have discussed previously. She was much more driven by conviction and far less conflict averse, something which made her very hated. She was a true Fusionist to a greater degree.
However, due to the lack of a history racial conflict (something we have suicidally brought to our shores), and the fact that Britain was a far more economically left-wing country than the United States at that time, Thatcher did not really touch social issues, although in terms of her personal beliefs she was far more socially conservative than Ronald Reagan.
It is light of this that I talk about how the British right is at an earlier stage of development. It isn’t that we didn’t have a right-wing movement at the same time America did, but that this, unlike in the US, was almost entirely economic in focus. It is only recently, as Britain becomes more and more Americanised on both the left and the right, that the British right has developed a substantive movement in defence against the Woke onslaught.
For many years, particularly since the 2019 election, many assumed that the force on this insurgent British right would be a populist ‘economically left/socially conservative’ party. Boris Johnson seemed to represent this, when he campaigned on behalf of the ‘Red Wall’ for an interventionist, developmentalist state that would restore Britain’s confidence in itself, as well as championing a paternalistic state through the NHS and welfare state.
However, Boris was inherently a compromised force. He did not truly believe in this style of politics, changing his colours almost immediately when he got into power, to govern as a globalist liberal. If anybody could have been the British Trump, it was him, but he craved the approval of people who despised everything he stood for too much, and was brought down because of it.
Without the glue of Boris Johnson, economic populism does not have much of a future in Britain, lacking an elite base of support. Sure, there is the modern Social Democratic Party, which is the most ideologically consistent of the insurgent right parties in Britain today, but it does not have a high media profile or big financial backing, and that seems unlikely to change. The ‘New Conservatives’, made up of MPs like Miriam Cates and Lee Anderson, do represent a sort of ‘Borisim without Boris’. But the fact that after his departure, despite being popular with the grassroots, Conservative Party MPs members immediately resorted to Liz Truss, showed that the ‘British Gaullist’ approach did not have widespread establishment support. Liz Truss’ brief premiership was a disaster which practically undid the Red Wall realignment overnight, but free-market orthodoxy has not gone away, indeed Reform UK is championing the agenda of Liz Truss more than 2019 Boris Johnson.
However, an understanding of our current situation necessitates an orientation towards unity with the economic right. There is not space for a both an economically left and economically right culturally left-wing party.
UKIP showed that Red Wall voters were fine with economically neoliberal policies like flat taxes, so long as the party promised to keep immigration down. By promising to get a handle on immigration and be tough on crime and integration, a large part of working-class voters would be inclined to vote for them, even if it endorsed a traditionally neoliberal view of taxes, budgets, and the economy. This is the secret weapon in British politics: ‘Thatcherism in One Country’, to keep both the wealthy Tory donors and the Red Wall happy, something championed by Popular Conservatives.
Reform has started to do this, but it’s delivery is very poor. I have already discussed my issues with Reform UK, but in addition to its micromanaged corporate structure, it does not have much in the way of imagination. It not laser-focusing on immigration, like various third-party-made posters on X show them doing, is a major mistake.
Whilst the electorate generally favours economically left and anti-immigration policies, they will ignore economics if you tie everything to immigration. This is what Reform needs to be doing; it needs to stop distancing itself from UKIP and the so called ‘far-right’, as it will never be seen as respectable by the liberal elite media. The Guardian refers to it as ‘far-right’, which is utterly ridiculous, but only proves further that if you’re called racist and extremist anyway, not actually being so is a waste, as you endure the same amount of backlash.
I have explained my theories for how the British right can go in a different direction after their inevitable defeat this year or the start of the next. However, it is essential that we learn from the experiences of other countries. ‘Fusionism’ can be a viable strategy and consistent political ideology, so long as it is actually implemented, and does not overly compromise with a managerial regime and liberal elite that will never accept them.
Once in power, this party should root out Wokeism in all sections of the state bureaucracy and public sector, repealing each and every law enabling it, and refusing to back down despite the crocodile tears of Guardian columnists. Stuff like repealing the 1998 Human Rights Act, 2003 Communications Act, 2004 Gender Recognition Act, 2005 Constitutional Reform Act (created the Supreme Court), 2006 Equality Act (created the Equality and Human Rights Commission), and the 2010 Equality Act (after a period of it being weaponised against DEI and anti-white, male, straight, and conservative discrimination in the private sector) would obviously be part of this government’s programme, but to list all policies would take a whole separate article, and possibly a whole book.
Realistically, we in Britain should hope for Trump’s victory this year, and for Project 2025 to be implemented, so that we can have a blueprint for how to save our own country when the time comes, which will unfortunately not be soon. As I have frequently discussed, we have a long road of institution building ahead of us; but the experiences and tendencies of the American conservative movement provide us with a rich tradition from which we can adapt to our unique national conditions.
Bibliography
Caldwell, C. The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. Simon & Schuster, 2020.
Buchanan, J. P. Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2005.
Hanania, R. The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics. Broadside E-Books, 2023.
Very interesting