Was 'Fusionism' Ever Really Tried? - Part I
A hypothetical look at what ‘True Fusionism’ could have, and still could, look like.
I have frequently talked about the tactical necessity of ‘Fusionism’ (economic neoliberalism/social conservatism) in Britain today, a situation that in many ways parallels how the American right was in the 1960s and 1970s, rather than the American right in present times. To give one example of this comparison, Boris Johnson has many parallels with Richard Nixon, i.e, of the political establishment, who started a populist realignment with the Southern Strategy/Red Wall, but ultimately governed as a liberal, and who’s personal flaws and the venom of the deep state brought him down, etcetera.
Another comparison is the start of a strong right-wing media ecosystem, with The Critic, UnHerd, and GB News coming to prominence, equivalents of which the American conservative movement has enjoyed for decades. There are also various groups within the Conservative Party that are trying to push it towards the right, though still an insurgent movement at present, akin to Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in 1976. Of course nothing is an exact parallel, but I would say we are at a similar point in terms of defining what the British New Right stands for and breaking away from ‘status-quo conservatism’ that defined their Rockefeller Republicans and our Cameronites.
With outfits like the ‘Popular Conservatives’ being created, with an attempted blend of Thatcherite economics and cultural and social conservatism, a British Fusionist paradigm is needed, as I have discussed previously. But to be able to draw lessons from the American experience, we need to understand what Fusionism was, why it was the synthesis that was arrived at for the American right, and why it is considered to have failed by so many today.
Developed by Frank Meyer and promoted by other authors of National Review like William F. Buckley, the American conservative movement is said to have had its Fusionist heyday under Ronald Reagan and have informed GOP orthodoxy from 1980 all the way to 2016. It has largely been judged to have been a failure by the ‘Third New Right’ (Postliberals and National Conservatives), a convenient band-aid to distinct ideological tendencies: economic libertarians, social conservatives, and foreign policy hawks, doing nothing to stem the ‘Long March Through the Institutions’.
But in order to have been a failure, something has to have at least been tried, and whilst there was certainly rhetoric in favour of Fusionism, there is no sense it was sincerely tried in the United States in the period between 1980 and 2008. It was instead subverted by Neoconservative infiltrators, that were loyal to the managerial state, corporate interests, and the religions of democracy, human rights, and universalism, that justified constant foreign interventionism and America’s role as a peacekeeper.
So, if that wasn’t Fusionism, and to avoid falling into the ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy, what would a faithfully applied Fusionist America have looked like? I am going to have a bit of fun here and be a bit creative and hypothetical, but I will try to ensure that my alternate history of America is compatible with Fusionist ideology.
I will not pay high attention to realism (i.e., could this pass through a Democratic-controlled congress?), but will mostly focus on the mistakes the conservative movement made and the influence of Neocons in making what I describe impossible, as well as the lessons we can learn for Britain.
What is the Difference Between Fusionism and Neoconservatism?
Firstly, we should clear up some key terms.
‘Fusionism’ is the political synthesis of economic libertarianism and social conservatism developed by Frank Meyer and the consensus of the ‘First New Right’ of William F. Buckley and James Burnham. It also involved a large degree of foreign policy hawkishness and a militant anti-communist posture.
Whilst to some extent a pragmatic alliance of convenience that was opposed to communism, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights Movement, there WAS an intellectual underpinning and consistency to it. It supported the idea that personal and economic liberty allowed personal virtue, civil society, and community to flourish, essentially supporting the subsidiarity institutions like church and family, and being complimentary to the maintenance of a socially conservative society rooted in tradition.
As I have said in other articles, this does make a degree of sense, and is not incompatible with Patrick Deneen’s view of how the centralised state destroys community (1). The social liberals like John Dewey, Herbert Croly, and James Landis believed in utilising centralised state power to make people more ‘free as individuals’, and modern/social liberalism has essentially adopted that creed ever since, emerging in its modern form with John Rawls. Things like the welfare state allow family breakdown in a way that a laissez-faire economy would not, and didn’t, as Thomas Sowell has discussed.
The Fusionist paradigm is at its core a desire to return to the traditional Anglo-Saxon virtue of voluntary institutions within the framework of a limited government, where it is up to civil society to give social support and care, not the state.
Both Britain and America have a long tradition of this, with mutual aid networks and friendly societies. America’s weaker welfare state is part of the reason why church membership stayed high for longer, as Americans were forced to rely on a personal, social support network in case they got ill or fell on hard times. But the small-scale, personal nature of that social support meant that people inherently understood that social rights came with social duties, as opposed to the welfare state which, through detaching the receiving of the benefit from a name and a face, is seen as a ‘right’.
However, whilst the term ‘Neoconservative’ has come to mean simply a foreign hawk and interventionist, this actually isn’t what Neoconservatism is at its core philosophical root, and some like Jeanne Kirkpatrick became non-interventionists after the Cold War. Foreign hawkishness predated the Neoconservatives (Neocons), and the National Review team like William F. Buckley and James Burnham were very much Cold War Warriors in the international arena, as was Barry Goldwater, but none could accurately be described as Neoconservative.
In contrast, the Claremont Institute, now known as one of the most significant radical right-wing organisations in America, is actually what I like to term ‘Orthodox Neocon’ (West Coast Straussian is the official term used) in ideology.
Originating with Leo Strauss, Harry V. Jaffa, and spread by Irving Kristol and his son Bill Kristol, Neoconservatism is the belief that the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence were events with universalistic applicability, that transcended their Anglo-Saxon roots. The phrase ‘all men are created equal’, was based on a conception of universal and natural rights that represented the perfect fulfilment of classical western philosophy, and Neocons believe that Abraham Lincoln was the fulfiller of the promise of the American Revolution because he made good on its promise of ‘all men are created equal’ by abolishing slavery. They are generally scornful of regionalist traditions like Southern Traditionalism, and embrace a strong federal government to carry out the promises of Lincoln and the Declaration, as well as providing a ‘shining city on a hill’ to the world and being a champion of global democracy (2).
If this sounds familiar, this is because it is. This dreamy, idealistic discourse was a feature of the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both essentially Neoconservatives, as well as to an extent that of Barack Obama. But American conservatives did not always have this confident belief in American Exceptionalism. Whilst it existed to some extent, it became much more heightened in the 1970s as the Neoconservatives began to influence the conservative movement, whereas figures like Russell Kirk saw America in the context of its Anglo-Saxon origins. This Jacobin article is a rather good summary of the movement from a leftist perspective.
Some other prominent Neoconservative intellectuals include Daniel Bell, Norman Podhoretz, Paul Wolfowitz, Ben Wattenberg, David Frum, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, Michael Novak, William Bennett, Allan Bloom, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, David Horowitz, Robert Kagan, Paul Bremer, David French and Andrew Sullivan. Some politicians I would describe as Neoconservative include Ronald Reagan (mostly), George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Nikki Haley.
How Neoconservatives Ruined Conservatism
In order for the Postliberal blame of ‘neoliberalism’ for the rise of Woke, a common refrain particularly from left-sympathetic individuals like Sohrab Ahmari, to have weight, we need to have seen an absolute triumph of economic libertarian ideas across America. The managerial state developed during the New Deal, as well as basically all of the ‘Civil Rights Regime’ that ended free association, would have been completely dismantled.
But of course, that is not what we saw at all throughout the 1980-2008 period.
It’s true that blue collar industrial workers lost their jobs and inequality grew as free trade was embraced, legal and illegal immigration skyrocketed, and organised labour reduced in influence. However, the size of government and the federal debt kept on expanding, the majority of the Great Society was not dismantled, including the Higher Education Act of 1965 which did so much to expand access to poison-filled universities, as well as pyramid schemes like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and even more Civil Rights laws were passed in 1987 and 1991.
Whilst it may be safe to say that the period from 1980 to 2008 was pro-corporate and anti-worker, to call it ‘economically libertarian’ is also inaccurate.
I am not using the word ‘Neocon’ to describe every overly compromising Republican. The GOP only became conclusively ‘conservative’, in any sense of the word by the 1990s. So some of the things I talk about are more the fault of bipartisan-inclined moderate Republicans than true Neocons, with George H.W Bush and those ideologically aligned with him being part of that ‘moderate’ tendency. These non-ideological politicians tended to be fronts for special interests more than any sincere set of beliefs, and can be blamed for stitch-up compromises that ended up using government intervention to benefit their corporate donors.
However, in many cases such policies are motivated, to some degree, by Neoconservative ideology, and the inability of the conservative movement to get rid of these tendencies hampered the ability to fight these unconservative elements within the Republican Party.
Basically every concession to the left from Conservatism Inc. (not synonymous with the Republican Party, as ‘Rockefeller Republicans’ and their descendants would not even be included within it) over the past 50 years has been the product of Neoconservatives.
As touched on previously, true Fusionism would not be incompatible with Postliberal thought. American conservatives in the 1960s were having similar debates to the ones we are having now, and Fusionism was the solution in which they arrived at; free markets and traditional values reinforced one another, with a common enemy in the managerial state and collectivism.
But Neoconservatism as a tendency was of and for the managerial state. Its key advocates were people working within government bureaucracies in the 1960s, who maintained their previous Cold War liberal views whilst the Overton Window shifted to the left with the counterculture, hence the term ‘Neocon Cycle’, as it was this group that did this first. People like Harry V. Jaffa’s celebration of Lincoln also provided a rationale for managerial imposition of ‘equality’ that sounded American nationalist and ‘conservative’ on paper.
Just when it looked like conservatives were going to be in the driving seat with the election of Reagan, something that terrified the counterculture and the managerial regime, the Neoconservatives swooped in to save the day. Reagan was negatively influenced by them, for instance being encouraged to appoint Sandra Day O’Connor to the court and hire William Bennett instead of Mel Bradford for the National Endowment of the Humanities. The rhetoric of Ronald Reagan is of a strong Neoconservative flavour in the way it perceives the American founding and America’s role.
Of course, Reagan had to work with a Democrat-controlled Congress, but the reason he did not rapidly downsize the federal bureaucracy and push much harder than he did was because of these Neoconservatives, who both believed in the project of the Civil Rights Regime due to their idealised conception of the American Founding, as well as coming from the managerial state, especially the foreign policy blob. They were able to gradually assert control of the Reagan White House so that he ended up appointing people like Anthony Kennedy to the court.
But what if this hadn’t been the case? Say that William F. Buckley decides to side more with the Paleocons and rebuffs the Neoconservative movement in the early 1980s, and Reagan (though this would be contrary to who he was) surrounds himself with more ‘Old Right’ traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan. In this article I will try to outline what a true ‘Fusionist’ political paradigm would have looked like in various policy areas, and how the Neocon worldview shone through instead. I will ignore the presence of the Democrats and assume conservative Republicans got everything they wanted. Support for free trade remains a constant between this alternate history and our own timeline.
What Would a Real Fusionist America Have Looked Like?
Judicial Branch
First off, the absolute sham that is ‘New Originalism’ would have never existed.
The ‘New Originalism’ developed by Michael Horowitz and Clint Bolick, and which has poisoned the votes of Federalist Society justices like John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, was an 100% Neoconservative distortion, as Jesse Merriam has highlighted. It made the judicial ‘conservatives’ conservatives in the sense of respecting precedent and not wanting to rock the boat, rather than actually principled Originalists. In a truly ‘Fusionist’ paradigm, such tendencies would never have gained prominence, with the views of Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas being held across all Republican and Federalist Society judicial nominees.
Every Republican appointed judge would be from the Federalist Society and follow the Robert Bork-style of hard Originalism. I know that in the case of Robert Bork, it was the Democratic Senate that refused to appoint him because of his hardline views, but in order for ‘Fusionism to really have been tried’, it is necessary to assume that in this alternate timeline every justice appointed during a GOP Presidency is an old-school Originalist, with no concern for precedent and fully willing to undo the activist precedents of the Warren Court and Burger Court.
Using my imagination somewhat, and not entirely necessary so long as only Originalist judges are appointed through the current procedure, it would be ideal if this alternate timeline could pass a constitutional amendment to prevent future activist justices being appointed from the Democrats, and de-politicizing it all together, possibly through an Article V Convention that I will discuss later. Here would be my ideal Fusionist constitutional reforms for the court, contained within a single amendment:
The constitution must be interpreted by the original meaning of the text, and is not a ‘living document’. The vague ‘due process clause’ is removed, preventing the ‘substantive due process’ precedent behind every activist ruling. The 14th amendment clarified to basically only mean a ban on Jim Crow, and the 9th amendment, which gives justification to judicial activism, removed completely.
In order for the federal courts to strike down state law, the decision must be unanimous.
The court cannot require the federal or state government to include provisions in the law, but may only strike down laws.
A judicial appointed committee would review federal legislation to ensure it is constitutionally compatible pre-enactment.
The 10th Amendment is re-emphasized, making a large portion of the managerial regime illegal.
Justices serve for staggered non-renewable 18-year terms, with a new justice being appointed every 2 years by a certain deadline. This will take the tension out of court appointments and stop the ghoulish ‘death-watch’, meaning every President is guaranteed to oversee 2 court appointments. If a justice dies, resigns, or is impeached more than half-way through their term (9 years), the replacement justice is entitled to a second term, though if it was less than half-way, they are not.
Nominations to the court would be taken out of the hands of the President, and replaced with a Judicial Appointments Commission, with one-third appointed by the Chief Justice, one-third by the Senate, and one-third by the current President. A majority of all three types must decide on a nominee before a certain deadline. If more than 2 get insufficient votes, the Chief Justice may unilaterally nominate a justice for a Senate vote.
Justices must be approved by a minimum ⅔ Senate majority. If more than 2 nominees have not gotten sufficient votes, the Chief Justice may put through a different nominee unilaterally without the consent of the Senate before the deadline.
Legally codify various Supreme Court decisions through federal law, but only those which can be justified as being in the constitution and respecting the 10th Amendment. For instance, Loving vs Virginia, whilst it was wrong for the court to impose it, the federal government would have been within its rights under the 14th amendment to legalise interracial marriage nationwide. All Disparate Impact, Affirmative Action, Right to Privacy, and ‘One Person, One Vote’ precedent abolished.
The ‘Chief Justice’ will of course be an Originalist of the Robert Bork variety, with ‘de-politicization’ (nothing is truly apolitical, as Carl Schmitt would tell you) meaning the enshrinement of Originalism as the new ‘common sense’ and ‘neutrality’.
Civil Rights Law
Another big thing that would change is the approach to Civil Rights Law. The original National Review writers like William F. Buckley, as well as Barry Goldwater, saw the Civil Rights Movement for what it was, a collectivist and illiberal force that was a threat to constitutional government and traditional American freedoms.
However, the Neoconservatives supported the Civil Rights Movement, including Title II and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and with their leadership of the conservative movement, the civil rights regime continued to grow and mutate, as Christopher Caldwell (3) and Richard Hanania (4) have highlighted.
As Richard Hanania has pointed out, the expansion of Civil Rights Law was not entirely Reagan’s fault. He did try to veto the 1987 Civil Rights Restoration Act, but his veto was overridden not just by Democrats, but a great many Republicans, many still being of the ‘Rockefeller Republican’ variety not too different from our Cameronites today, hence the term RINO (and my Britishism of ‘CINO’). Hanania points out in ‘The Origins of Woke’ (2023) that in this regard, the ‘polarisation’ and ‘partisanship’ much decried by the liberal media is actually a good thing, it means that the ‘consensus’ of ever greater expansion in Civil Rights Law has now ended.
However, if the Postliberal view of Fusionism had actually happened, then the end of free association contained in Title II and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and all of the court-imposed expansion of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s mandate with ‘disparate impact’ and ‘affirmative action’, would have been repealed.
Bear in mind, legal segregation in the South was something different, and it was good that it was brought to an end. Barry Goldwater had the most principled and consistent stance on Civil Rights Law, voting for the 1957 and 1960 Civil Right Acts, as well as the 24th Amendment, but not the 1964 Act because of Title II and Title VII, which he rightly saw as ending freedom of association.
Ending affirmative action and disparate impact would require acceptance from conservatives of black representation in elite institutions sharply declining, though this would be fulfilling its belief in meritocracy.
But if you are called racist anyway, as right-wingers have been ever since the 1960s regardless of whether they were or bent over backwards not to be, there should be nothing stopping you from going the whole way to do what needs to be done. Under this regime, blacks would have the same opportunities as all other groups, and if they underperform, it would be due to either average low IQ or black culture.
As I will discuss in the next part of this double essay, and has been discussed by numerous other writers, it was this fear of unequal group outcomes which gave the conservative movement cold feet about ending affirmative action and disparate impact.
However, a real Fusionism would have:
Amended the 1964 Civil Rights Act to abolish Title II and Title VII, as well as abolishing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) contained within Title VII. Abolishing the EEOC would also include abolishing the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 and Educational Amendments (Title IX) of 1972.
Overturned Griggs vs Duke Power Company (1971), Regents of University of California vs Bakke (1978), and Christiansburg Garments Co. vs EEOC (1978).
Watered down the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to only ban legal discriminatory intent, and allow the rest to expire, not extending protections against unequal group outcomes.
Not made Martin Luther King Jr Day a public holiday in 1983.
Not passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 or Civil Rights Act of 1991.
Because none of these things came close to happening from 1980 - 2008, the Postliberals are again wrong to blame Fusionism for the rise of Woke. There was heavy lobbying by Civil Rights groups and virtually no counter-lobbying, as Neoconservatives accepted the premises of the Civil Rights movement, and by this point they had successfully marginalised the Paleoconservatives in institutions like the Heritage Foundation. William F. Buckley changed his mind and sided with them, and with him National Review and the rest of Conservative Inc.
Immigration
Another frequent gripe various ‘Third New Right’ tendencies have about Fusionism is that it was always ideologically quite relaxed on immigration and demographic change, its ‘social conservatism’ tending to be more religious in character, something Eric Kauffman talks about in ‘Whiteshift’ (2018) (5). Here I am talking more about the National Conservatives, as some Postliberals like Adrian Vermule are pro-immigration so long as it is Catholic.
This is one of the areas where they have a point. Libertarians, specifically of the Beltway and ‘Bleeding Heart’ (Woke) variety are very pro-open borders, and the traditional Christian right tended not to care that much about the issue of immigration.
But whilst they may have a point when it comes to ‘legal’ immigration, even of the low-skilled variety, they do not have much of a point when it comes to illegal immigration. Conservatives in the 1980 - 2008 period did try to crack down on illegal immigration; they just weren’t successful. This was due to a number of factors; Civil Rights Law, refusal to embrace mass deportations and border walls, and the mismatch between political acceptability of legal immigration and employer demands for cheap labour.
Christopher Caldwell talks at length in the ‘Age of Entitlement’ (2020) about how the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 utterly failed at the ‘control’ part. Reagan signed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act in the same year, giving illegal immigrants free medical care. Civil Rights lawyers were able to protect the existence of sanctuary cities and stop any deportation operations like Operation Wetback from happening, where immigration had been pretty successfully controlled from 1924 - 1965. In addition, Proposition 187, which would deny welfare to illegal immigrants, was invalidated by a federal district court, again mentioning the precedent of the Civil Rights Movement.
Neoliberals also liked how illegal immigrants could allow them to circumvent labour law and pay under the minimum wage, corporate support creating this two-track immigration system that made everybody worse off.
Yes, a truly Fusionist immigration arrangement would have been more pro-immigration than many on the Dissident Right would like, due to the need to satisfy the libertarians and the hawks. However, this would be a formalised process, expanding legal immigration whilst cracking down harshly on illegal immigration and stopping lawsuits against deportations, like what Elon Musk has recently advocated.
Another key difference between a true Fusionist America and Neoconservatism is that it would have not presented America as a ‘propositional nation’, but one which, whilst it had absorbed numerous White European ethnic groups, remained at its core a nation rooted in its Anglo-Saxon heritage.
Hispanic immigrants, being from a European, Christian background, would be given greater entry into America than non-White groups. America as a ‘nation of immigrants’ would still be part of the national mythos, but more emphasis would be placed on its European and Christian character, a melting pot of ‘European Christians’.
Americans are lucky that their current immigrants are not so culturally and ethnically distinct as to make assimilation impossible. Hispanics only started being seen as separate from the general White population in statistical gathering in the 1960s, something Richard Hanania noted in ‘The Origins of Woke’ and which contributed to their sense of ‘otherness’. If this hadn’t happened, they would probably instead have followed the trajectory of Italian-Americans.
A Fusionist immigration policy may have involved the following:
More low-skill immigration explicitly made legal, with the understanding that these immigrants are temporary guest workers.
Family reunification is much more restricted, to give temporary legal immigrants incentive to return home.
Anti-commmunist refugees from countries like Cuba and anti-Islamist Iranians continue to receive asylum.
US leaves 1951 Refugee Convention, granting it the ability to choose which groups it gives asylum to.
Culturally European and Christian immigrants receiving more relaxed immigration laws.
The demographic category of ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’ is not created, allowing this group to assimilate into the White population like the Italians did.
1990 Immigration Act not passed.
End to birthright citizenship, and greater restrictions on dual citizenship, repealing Afroyim v. Rusk.
English made the official language of the United States.
A militarised border-wall.
Federal ban on Sanctuary Cities or giving welfare to illegal immigrants.
Mass deportations of illegal immigrants like Operation Wetback, without ‘civil rights’ appeals.
Mandatory E-Verify for all employers as soon as such a system becomes technologically feasible (early 2000s).
Abolish federal and state-level labour law and minimum wages, and delegate that power to the states, so businesses have no incentive to use illegal immigrant labour.
Religion
Religion would continue to be important in this imaginary Fusionism, like it was to the Religious Right and the Postliberal Integralists in America today. I myself am personally not religious, but after seeing what the Christian Right was holding back with Wokeism, they are by far the lesser evil, particularly for America. I do hope that in Britain, with our different traditions, we can transcend that in favour of a more Vitalist approach, however this is mostly focused on America and I will get to the lessons for Britain in the next section.
Here is what would pass:
There would be a constitutional amendment enshrining that the United States is built on a ‘Christian Heritage’, and whilst there is freedom of religion, Christianity shall be favoured over other religions in the public realm and when it comes to taxpayer funding. No Satan-worship in public spaces.
A Religious Freedom Act would pass through Congress, giving parents the right to educate their child in their religion, and prohibiting all lawsuits against individuals or businesses that religiously object to certain actions, aka abortion and homosexuality, on the federal level. LGBT employment anti-discrimination laws, even if passed on the state level, would be effectively invalidated by this Act.
Education
One of the big reasons why Fusionism wasn’t really tried, and why it is unfair to say the paradigm failed to stop Wokeism, is because Woke ideology was paid for through tax dollars by the federal government. The 1965 Higher Education Act continued to provide federal underwriting of student loans, vastly overinflating the number of graduates and creating ‘elite overproduction’ and the associated political radicalism and instability. Universities continued to get public funding despite the ideological poison they promoted, it is why Angela Davis was able to get tenure at the University of California, Santa Cruz (6).
When it comes to education, a real Fusionist approach would effectively be a copy and paste from Chris Rufo’s current proposals. Whilst there were efforts back in the 1980s and 1990s to rollback the educational-industrial complex, they were thwarted by lack of political will and an underestimation of how deep the rot went, as the cancer of the 60s counterculture continued to malignantly spread.
On a general level:
Abolish the Department of Education, which has been part of the Republican platform since 1980, but thwarted by the managerial state, an example of how little true Fusionist ideology has penetrated the workings of the government.
‘No Child Left Behind’, a textbook example of Neoconservative domestic policy and a bipartisan enterprise, is never passed.
Allow parents to opt-out of the K12 public school system and receive school vouchers to go to private school. This is currently being rolled out in many Red States, and it would be a state-level policy.
Allow private schools to develop their own accreditation systems without needing to rely on the university system (state level policy).
Require K-12 public schools to stop teaching LGBT ideology and Critical Race Theory, and must teach about the ‘Victims of Communism’, like Florida and other Red States are doing today. This still is following the Fusionist paradigm, because it is taxpayer money that is funding these schools.
End all degree requirements for jobs inside federal and state governments unless the employer can prove, in front of a court, that the degree is necessary for the job.
Things that should have been done decades ago, Chris Rufo’s specific proposals for higher education are:
Privatise the student loan market and make colleges responsible for student defaults.
Abolish DEI bureaucracies.
End taxpayer funding for all activist pseudo-disciplines.
Reform faculty hiring to restore ideological balance.
Punish universities that discriminate against Whites.
Tie funding to upholding standards of civil discourse and debate.
Break the accreditation cartel.
Turn a limited number of state universities into classical liberal arts academies.
Set up recruiting pipelines and employment opportunities for classically-minded scholars.
Eliminate the requirement to have a master's in education for teaching in K-12 public schools, which will gut the state graduate schools of education.
Require state universities to sign the Kalven Statement and refrain from taking political positions as a corporate entity.
Enforce standards of civil discourse so that physical violence, intimidation, vandalism, and heckler's vetoes earn immediate suspension or expulsion.
Reduce funding for scientific and social-scientific fields that consistently fail to replicate.
Legalise intelligence tests for admissions and hiring (overturn Griggs vs Duke Power Company).
Provide high-prestige test-out options for individuals to demonstrate domain knowledge without having to earn a bachelor's degree.
Work with employers to screen for capacity, not degrees (an expensive substitute).
Reduce the overall number of placements at four-year universities—which should cater to the top 10% of the most academically gifted—and shift resources to lower-cost trade programs, community colleges, and professional training that provide a better ROI for society.
Abolish the repressive Title IX bureaucracy.
Significantly reduce the number of administrators and pseudo-therapeutic bureaucracies on campus.
Reward colleges financially for a low admin-to-faculty ratio.
Give tenured faculty raises as the number of admins is reduced.
Allow universities that have been relying on unlimited state loan subsidies (and predatory marketing to high school students) to go bankrupt and then restructure or shut down.
Submit the entire sector to greater market discipline.
Persuade alumni donors to stop giving.
This would all very much fit into a Fusionist ideology. It is purely around how taxpayer money is spent, and does not regulate the free market. With the Department of Education abolished, it would also fall entirely onto the states, allowing for subsidiarity. Many of these states would follow American Compass’ proposals of banning unnecessary degree requirements in the private sector, though this would not be entirely keeping within Fusionist parameters.
If all of this had been done in the 1980s, Wokeness would have been critically weakened. Unfortunately, the level of influence Woke has now would make these policies much welcome… but not of themselves sufficient. I will discuss in Part 2 whether Fusionism is still viable today, due to the fact it wasn’t implemented to the necessary extent back then.
Healthcare
The spiralling of healthcare costs since the early 1990s has been as a result of parasitic pharmaceutical companies bribing politicians, generally ideologically ‘moderate’ Democrats and Republicans who value ‘bipartisanship’, to allow them to continue to exploit evergreening and not allow the speedier approval of drugs. It is the perfect example of how big government and big business co-operate to inflate prices, and contrary to the likes of Sohrab Ahmari, not an example of neoliberalism.
A Fusionist paradigm would of course oppose universal healthcare on the federal level, but it would not allow the shameless profiteering over patent law, would reform the FDA approval process to make it quicker, and would absolutely not have implemented the Obamacare subsidies.
The Bush and Obama administrations personified the ‘worst of all worlds’ when it came to healthcare. Bush Jr, the textbook Neoconservative President, passed Medicare Part D, which created a new prescription drug scheme through Medicare but expressly prohibited the negotiation of drug prices, leading to the state subsidising parasitic profiteers. Obamacare led to profiteering insurance companies and big pharma being subsidised by the taxpayer, allowing them to jack up prices even more. Neoconservatives have generally supported Obamacare-style policies of taxpayer subsidies for private insurance and pharma; in fact the Heritage Foundation endorsed the idea of the individual mandate in the early 1990s.
Healthcare would be a matter for the states to decide, and the federal government should stay out of it. However, the drug patent and approval process should be radically reformed, in a policy most grassroots libertarians would support. American healthcare could then go back to being how it was before the 1990s, a voluntary system of co-ops and mutual aid that provided a good quality of service.
Here are the policies a true Fusionist consensus would have passed:
Completely abolish the practice of Evergreening (the artificial extension of patents through minor ingredient changes), and make medical patents last an absolute maximum of 20 years.
Speed up FDA approvals for alternative drugs to allow more innovation and competition.
The Affordable Care Act and Medicare Part D are never passed.
Medicare and Medicaid should be abolished federally and made a state matter, with each state deciding whether to spend their tax money on it. Some states may do a public option or Medicare for All, if that is what they want.
Singaporean-style ‘Health Savings Accounts’ should be established on the state level for those that don’t choose the socialized route. The reform of patent laws and the FDA would allow a much greater level of competition for drug prices.
Give state-level tax incentives for insurance mutuals, but only if they provide basic plans at a fixed cost and do community premiums and cross-subsidisation. Insurance mutuals are allowed to charge differently based on lifestyle.
Economics
Dick Cheney famously said ‘deficits don’t matter’, and Ronald Reagan vastly increased the federal debt. Neoconservatism has always been more comfortable increasing the debt than cutting spending, particularly military spending, hence why Reagan and Bush Jr vastly increased the budget deficit.
Taxes have likewise remained extremely complicated in America. It is in the interests of lobbyists to keep the tax code complex, as Americans spending ages filing their taxes benefits tax filing companies. Increasing complexity of the tax code was pushed heavily by Neocons with things like ‘child tax credits but only tied to work’. Progressive taxation is also inherently leftist, as it is based on an essential idea of redistributing income.
Instead, all federal taxes should have been replaced with one single tax, with ultra-simple electronic filing. The best tax would have been a marginal flat income tax.
Here would be the changes a Fusionist policy would make:
A balanced budget amendment. This was one Senate vote from passing Congress in 1995, at the height of Newt Gingrich’s ‘Republican Revolution’. Whether it would have gotten state ratification is another matter, and probably unlikely as an absolute balanced budget at all times is difficult to manage. However, a more flexible amendment akin to the German debt brake, except with a supermajority requirement for the declaration of an ‘emergency’, could easily have gotten passed and ratified, and been very effective at keeping long-term debt levels down. If this had happened, the vast government overreach one saw with the War on Terror and Covid lockdowns would have been seriously constrained.
All federal taxes are replaced with a single marginal flat income tax (flat tax after personal allowance), with no deductions or loopholes, easily fillable electronically. This would vastly improve the ease of doing business and economic productivity.
The federal government will only spend on things that cannot be done on the state level, keeping in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity.
Abolish state sales taxes, as they are complicated to collect and regressive, and replace them with a marginal flat state income tax (with breaks for certain activities) and a high Land Value Tax (LVT), which would also reduce the cost of housing and disincentivise property speculation.
The US would return to the gold standard, with the federal reserve reduced to only being the ‘lender of last resort’ and a federal deposit insurance scheme. It would not engage in open market operations like it did throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Fiat currency and the federal reserve are both technically not allowed under the constitution, so even a limited federal reserve should have a constitutional amendment explicitly authorising it.
Gramm-Leach Bliley Act of 1999 still happens, even though I am against it. However, the Community Reinvestment Act of 1992 never happens and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are abolished, making the Great Recession less severe.
Foreign Policy
As we have previously established, there is a difference between Neoconservatism and Hawkishness. Neoconservatives genuinely believe in the idea of ‘spreading democracy around the world’ and not just an assertion of US interests and intervening. It is clear that throughout the 90s and 00s, America’s foreign policy was Neoconservative, which after the defeat of communism invented a new role of being a world policeman and global promoter of democracy and ‘human rights’, hence the intervention in Kosovo, the eastward expansion of NATO, and repurposing NATO to be a humanitarian enterprise.
This is most clearly seen with the US’s attitude towards China. China was clearly emerging as a rival power to the United States in the early 1990s, and was the other communist power that was still intact. America should not have allowed foreign investment into China and prohibited Chinese ownership and investment into the United States, and should have kept it out of the WTO. This was not done because of a ‘globalist mindset’ that didn’t want to ‘keep China poor’, as well as the arrogance that with economic development, China would just ‘inevitably’ become democratic.
But China was, unlike nations like South Korea and Taiwan, still a communist state, and not well disposed towards reform, particularly after the experience of Gorbachev’s failed reforms of the USSR and the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Many political figures said this at the time, but they were not listened to due to Neoconservative globalist arrogance. A non-neoconservative hawkish foreign policy would have seen China as a number one rival, and would have done everything in its power to stunt its growth.
Free trade would be embraced under Fusionism, but only among allies, and not with countries like China. This is a difference between Fusionism and the Third New Right, and would likely still see domestic manufacturing outsourced to the Third World and a subsequent decline in real wages. However, there is no proof that this was what created Wokeism, as I will discuss in more detail further down and in the next part.
Here is a comprehensive list of a foreign policy a truly Fusionist, non-Neoconservative America would have done.
Cut off ties with China and subjected it to sanctions, prohibiting American investment into China and Chinese investment into the United States. Also do not allow it into the WTO.
Continue supporting Israel and intervene in the 1990 Gulf War. But don’t go into Iraq in 2003, which was built more on a desire to ‘spread democracy’ than legitimate US interests.
If 9/11 still happens, the War in Afghanistan focuses specifically on destroying Al-Qaeda and assassinating Osama Bin Laden, not bothering with the ‘nation-building’ project which was a Neoconservative aim.
Disband NATO after the end of the Cold War. Seek to facilitate an ‘Intermarium’ military and economic alliance between the nations of the former Warsaw Pact to guarantee their security against future Russian aggression, including a joint nuclear weapons programme (like John Mearsheimer suggested for Ukraine in 1993), but the Intermarium alliance must fund this defence spending themselves, and they would have free trade agreements with both the United States and Russia.
A treaty is signed with Russia against aggression towards the Warsaw Pact countries and making the Baltics a ‘demilitarised zone’. In exchange, the US and Western Europe allow referendums in Eastern Ukraine to determine reunion with Russia, and class the former USSR as ‘Russia’s Sphere of Influence’. Neoconservatives were against this in favour of ‘self-determination’, which ended up aggravating Russia.
The Western Hemisphere, aka the Americas, will be seen as the ‘American Sphere of Influence’. In this region, the US would be more interventionist post-Cold War than it has been. It would have been far more active at seeking to depose Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in the early 2000s. The lack of focus on democracy and human rights would have made US policy much more openly imperialistic. Free trade and dollarisation across the Americas would be heavily promoted, a process which would make average Latin Americans much better off.
LGBT
This issue is largely a tragedy, because back in the 1990s virtually all of the GOP, and a lot of Democrats, DID try to stop this. They passed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 which, on the surface, would have seemed sufficient to kill same-sex marriage for good. However, they underestimated the manipulative social signalling tactics of the LGBT activists, being frogs in boiling water, making the failure to enshrine the Defense of Marriage Act as a constitutional amendment one of the greatest mistakes in American history, something I have talked about at length.
Conservatives sold out and gave up, allowing LGBT activists the right to feel insufferably smug at how their enemies would always fold.
But who was behind the GOP abandoning the fight gay marriage?
It was fifth columnist ‘gay billionaires’ on the one hand, but also Neoconservatives like Dick Cheney. Liz Cheney’s (daughter of Dick Cheney) conversion (capitulation) to the cause of gay marriage came from her sister’s shaming of ‘this isn’t just an issue where we disagree - your just wrong, and on the wrong side of history’ a line which just encapsulates the entire attitude of the most repugnant LGBT activists. Indeed, Andrew Sullivan himself was a prominent Neocon.
George W. Bush did not fight for a federal marriage amendment like he promised to do in the 2004 election, though by that point it may have already been too late unless major concessions were given to the LGBT activists (aka, civil unions).
Virtually every person in Congress that voted for the ‘Dis-Respect for Marriage Act’ could be described as either a RINO or a Neoconservative.
Transgenderism is simply an outgrowth of the gay rights movement, the ‘slippery slope’ being vindicated. However, it is not accurate to blame libertarians. Whilst people like Ron Paul sought to ‘get the government out of the marriage business’, this was something very different to the ‘Equal Marriage, No Debate’ thuggery of the LGBT activists. The group most persuaded by the ‘equality’ arguments were always Neoconservatives like the Cheney Family, who were at their core leftists who believed in a left-wing interpretation of the American founding.
Under a true Fusionist America, gay marriage would have been nowhere close to happening across the United States. Not only would it have been constitutionally banned in 1996 (or perhaps slightly later if a few more concessions were made and the GOP remained absolutely united, not having any Neocon infiltrators), but if liberals managed to similarly manipulate them, they would never have pathetically given in after 2015. They would have seen Obergefell vs Hodges for what it was, an outrageous attack on democracy and states rights, and relentlessly sought to overturn it, with no amount of demoralising taunts deterring them.
Article V Convention
Here is the part where I get a bit creative. I try to hypothesise what a Fusionist constitution would have looked like, based on documents like the ‘Conservative Constitution’ at the Constitution Center and the proposed Article V convention, with some of my own proposals which would be keeping with Fusionist ideology.
The Supreme Court reforms mentioned previously.
Reform the Senate to abolish direct election, and have only one Senator per state rather than two, to increase connection and accountability towards one’s state. The Governor would appoint a Senator with the consent of the state legislature, to serve up until they are dismissed, with them being immediately recallable by the Governor, though their replacement must also be confirmed by the Senate. This will make the Senate a lot more based on the interests of the states, and would limit the willingness to expand the size of the federal government, due to Senators being directly answerable and subordinate to state governors.
Term limits on members of Congress, a key libertarian demand that, whilst I personally do not favour, would likely be included in a Fusionist paradigm.
As Democrat votes would be required in this, the Supreme Court and Senate reforms should be in exchange for Democrats getting to abolish the electoral college. With the federal government government constitutionally limited and the court free from the plague of the ‘Living Constitution’, electing the President through popular vote would assuage somewhat legitimate Democrat claims of unfairness, in return for a much more substantive protection of state’s rights and the rule of law for conservative Republicans. The modern Democratic Party would never agree to this, though the 2000s one might.
Powers delegated to the federal government, like the right to raise an income tax, would be reviewed every 20 years, like what Thomas Jefferson proposed and what Switzerland continues to do. All amendments expanding the size of the federal government are only temporary.
Other Policies
Again being hypothetical, here are some other policies I would think fit well into a Fusionist ideology.
No ‘War on Drugs’, instead drug legalisation at the state level. The War on Drugs was a bipartisan and Neoconservative-led project and William F. Buckley was critical of it.
Either all upper chambers of state legislatures abolished, or the ‘mini-federal’ model restored after overturning Reynolds vs Sims (1964), as current State Senate’s are redundant entities. Large states should have the mini-federal model, whereas small states should have a unicameral legislature.
Fixed electoral districts that elect a set number of legislators at the state and local level according to population, instead of all being single-member, ending both partisan gerrymandering and the added bureaucracy that creating independent redistricting commissions would require.
An improvement in the quality of state flag design, particularly the ‘seal on bedsheet’ blue background designs, to create a stronger sense of state pride and identity.
Would Wokeness Still Be Dominant?
So the big question is, if conservatives had done all of these things successfully from the period of 1980 - 2008, would Wokeness still have emerged, as the Postliberals would have us believe? Was Wokeness really a response to economic neoliberalism and lack of focus on the ‘common good’?
Yes, there would be some elites that would continue to be well disposed towards Wokeness and would fund it through various foundations, and the state would not be attacking them directly, like what Ron DeSantis has started to do in Florida. However, with the university credentialist system greatly diminished due to lack of public support, and with employers increasingly training employees themselves in-house, campus culture would penetrate the workplace to a much lesser degree.
Civil rights law would not exist federally, stopping the great risk of financial legal sanctions and litigation that Richard Hanania talks about in ‘The Origins of Woke’. Whilst some progressive states may have their own equivalent of civil rights law, Red States would be free of them. Disruptive Woke employees would be able to be fired on the spot. Therefore, if Woke does gain hold, it will be limited to specific regions.
The lack of gay marriage, and the fact that a large amount of Civil Rights law would have been repealed, would make cultural leftists nowhere near as confident in their success as they are in our own timeline. Gay marriage might exist in a few states like Massachusetts, and perhaps in the late 2010s purple states have more referendums on the subject which come out in favour. But they will be treading on egg-shells, understanding that public support for gays is conditional, and would distance themselves from the LGBT project. Gay marriage remains totally illegal in the red states, and due to the lack of Lawrence vs Texas, homosexuality is only legalised in these states in the 2010s, and on the condition of hard constitutional guarantees against gay marriage (I think homosexuality should be legal, but the court had no right to impose it).
Hollywood would continue to be quite liberal, though probably less so as there would be less accreditation from the universities and the studios would have more power to train their personnel. There would be too much public risk of being too Woke, without the ever-expanding leviathan of Civil Rights Law pushing in the other direction, so movies would probably retain the feel of the 80s, 90s, and 00s.
Whilst abortion is no longer a federal ‘right’, people vote for it in ballot initiatives in various states, whilst some states keep heavy restrictions on the practice.
State laws would vary very widely from state to state, with states having different political cultures. This would be a good thing, as Americans of all stripes can move to a community that suits their political views, like what Curtis Yarvin describes ‘patchwork’ as being.
Due to the lack of the Iraq War (if 9/11 even happens, excessive interference in the Middle East by Clinton and Neocons and various accidental security missteps caused it) Obama probably never becomes President.
Sure, it wouldn’t be Catholic Integralism. For right-wingers who believe in state legislated morality, abortion legal in some states would irk them. In addition, this world would have similar problems that our own timeline did with wage stagnation, and the Great Recession likely still happens, though reduced in severity due to the lack of Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and the 1992 Community Reinvestment Act. For some of the ‘Postliberals’ like Sohrab Ahmari and American Affairs, this is the key thing they care about, so this world wouldn’t suit them.
But I think in general, this world, a world where true ‘Fusionism’ was applied, would be a much better one.
There would be no DEI workshops or pronoun declarations of any kind, in the public or private sector. Pride flags would not litter the streets. Transgenderism would be seen correctly as a severe mental illness. Gays would exist in private but would not be publicly celebrated or ‘open’, and certainly not smug. Unapologetic celebration of White civilization would be commonplace, and Black pride and White pride would be seen as equal in the eyes of the law and majority public opinion. The charge of 'being ‘racist’ would mostly be responded with ‘so what'?’ Men would continue being able to enjoy the presence of attractive women and not be terrified of being accused of ‘sexual harassment’ for pursuing. Being a feminist would be a ‘man repellent’ for women, and social activists laughed at and seen as ‘low status’ losers. American patriotism would be non-negotiable in the public sphere. ‘Gone With the Wind’ would still be held in high regard as a staple of American cinema. The military would remain strong and masculine, like Lt Surge in Pokemon (a good indicator of how America was perceived in Japan during the 90s), tough and chauvinistic.
Wokeness in its current form would have failed completely, and various constitutional entrenchments would have meant the vibe of the Reagan years and the 90s likely continued into the 2020s. The balanced budget amendment, vast downsizing of the federal government, and return to the gold standard would also mean no national lockdowns, and serve as a key limiter of the government’s power.
Wokeness would face very steep barriers for ever coming to power. The complete lack of federal government interest in promoting equality would stop the wrong types of people from gaining necessary credentials, with the 10% of young people getting degrees being overwhelmingly conservative. Race Realism would be common sense for explaining racial disparities, and the Civil Rights era and 60s counterculture would be viewed as ‘the exception’, a fleeting moment, just like Reconstruction.
In the next part of this two-part essay, I will discuss why the Neoconservative tendency was so attractive in this period, making what I have suggested not happen. What a New Fusionism in the US could look like. And also lessons Britain could learn from these American experiences.
Bibliography
Deneen, Patrick J. Why Liberalism Failed. Yale University Press, 2019.
Ryn, C. G. Failure of American Conservatism and the Road Not Taken. Republic Book Publishers, 2023.
Caldwell, C. The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. Simon & Schuster, 2020.
Hanania, R. The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics. Broadside E-Books, 2023.
Kaufmann, E. Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. Penguin, 2018.F
Rufo, C. F. America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Broadside Books. 2023.
Interesting on the distinctions between neoconservatism and fusionism