As political divisions widen across the American right on topics ranging from the proper conduct of economic policy to the United States’ relationship with the rest of the world, considerable attention has been given to the ensemble of ideas given the label “fusionism.” It has never been the case that those Americans who oppose modern liberalism and the American left have always been on the same philosophical and political page. Fusionism is generally regarded as an outlook that brought together groups ranging from traditionalists to hard-core libertarians—and everyone in between—in a manner that sufficiently unified these groups, thereby enabling them to more effectively combat the American left from the 1960s onward.
The question that always comes up in any discussion of fusionism is whether it primarily operated as a way of forging practical alliances against a common enemy, or whether it represented a coherent and genuine philosophical position. Even today, that debate remains unresolved. At some point, the same discussion invariably touches upon the thought and life of one of the mid-20th-century American right’s most influential figures: the intellectual and perpetual political activist Frank S. Meyer.
Meyer’s significance for the emergence of movement conservatism is difficult to understate. Meyer started his political life as a man of the left who rapidly moved toward becoming an out-and-out communist and even an advocate of free love. Meyer later transformed himself into a conservative activist and a devoted family man. He also converted to Catholicism in literally the last hours of his life. But one commonality that marked Meyer’s entire life, whether as a committed communist cadre or a conservative movement activist, was the sheer energy of the man and the way in which that energy would inject life into the disorganized and dispirited groups that made up the postwar American right.
Meyer’s energy also permeates a new biography, written by The American Spectator’s senior editor Daniel J. Flynn. In The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, Flynn shows how Meyer worked for years to persuade the American right that it was not enough simply to be against the economically stultifying effects of the New Deal, the cultural corruption of libertinism, and the menace of communism. Meyer taught the American right that it needed to be united around a set of beliefs and to bring those beliefs squarely into the political arena. There is no understanding postwar American conservatism without understanding Frank Meyer, and the achievement of Flynn’s book is that he comprehensively proves why this is the case.
While The Man Who Invented Conservatism is very much a biography of Meyer, it is also the story of the initiation and growth of movement conservatism read through the medium of Meyer’s life. One of the book’s most significant features is that it has been informed by Flynn’s access to hitherto unseen and uncatalogued materials that open up new vistas on Meyer’s life and our understanding of the history of American conservatism. These materials include tens of thousands of letters penned by Meyer and others such as William F. Buckley and Senator Barry Goldwater who played major roles in the rise of modern American conservatism. This correspondence reveals endless clashes between these and other individuals over ideas. But they also show the degree to which some of these conflicts were driven by disagreement about strategy and tactics as well as underlying battles of some colossally large egos. This is a good reminder that movement politics is never immune from the influence of and disputes between strong personalities, few of whom are inclined to embrace the virtues of humility and moderation.
Everyone is complicated, but Meyer was an especially complex individual. Like many people who have gone through a significant conversion experience (whether cultural, economic, political, or religious), Meyer’s 62 years were marked by more than its fair shares of ups-and-downs. That said, several consistencies that spanned Meyer’s life emerge. One is the extent to which Meyer was an organization man. He played a key role in the establishment of groups like Young Americans for Freedom, the American Conservative Union (which eventually gave birth to the Conservative Political Action Conference), and the more cerebral Philadelphia Society in which figures ranging from Harry Jaffa to Irving Kristol duked out what it meant to be a conservative and, specifically, an American conservative. That organizational emphasis on Meyer’s part surely owed something to the fact that, for the first half of his life, Meyer was a member of the Communist Party. Communist parties of the 1920s and 1930s prided themselves on their organizational ability and internal discipline. They also exemplified how a small but nevertheless focused group can drive political change—for better or worse.
Meyer’s journey into communism was not unusual for a young middle-class secular Jewish-American of his generation. That trajectory was probably accelerated by the fact, Flynn shows, that Meyer was subject to the casual anti-Semitism that marked much of the WASP America of his youth. That included Meyer’s time at Princeton, where he went from being a middling student to a dropout. During this transition, Meyer started railing, to his parents’ horror, against capitalism. By the time he attended Balliol College, Oxford, Meyer was well on his way to becoming a communist: so much so that Meyer played a major role in establishing Oxford’s first outright Marxist organization in the early 1930s. It was closely linked to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which in turn was a tool of Stalin’s Soviet Union. That, in addition to Meyer’s role as secretary of the CPGB’s student bureau, underscores how immersed he was in a movement he later came to regard as a source of evil.
Meyer’s devotion to the pursuit of the workers’ paradise continued when he returned to the United States. But his enforced separation from the communist milieu during his time in the U.S. Army in 1942–43 (before being invalided out on medical grounds) provided Meyer with a “time-out” from Marxism. It also marked the beginning of Meyer’s questioning of communist methods and, eventually, its ends. In 1943, Meyer started speculating about the possibility of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) effectively fusing Marxism into the American Founding. Here, Flynn observes, we see Meyer’s mind moving along “fusionist” lines long before his name “became synonymous with the fusion of libertarianism with the American tradition into conservatism.” That reorientation of Meyer’s thinking away from orthodox Marxism was further spurred by his reading of F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom: the argument of which Meyer, even while still a Marxist, understood perfectly and came eventually to agree with.
Not long after this, Meyer formally broke with Marxism and the CPUSA and began a rapid shift to the political right. In addition to testifying against former CPUSA comrades during their trials in the late-1940s, Meyer started writing for free market and conservative publications (not plentiful in those days). Meyer immediately noticed the gaps between, for example, people like Russell Kirk (whose The Conservative Mind received a respectful but quite critical review from Meyer) and the free marketers who wrote for The Freeman. Like William F. Buckley, Meyer came to regard the publications of the right of his time as lacking the literary, philosophical, and formative power that Buckley and Meyer judged necessary for the times.
Flynn notes that neither Meyer nor Kirk ranked high on the list of names Buckley put together as potential regular writers for the nascent National Review. It was Meyer, however, who would become a powerhouse at the magazine. Flynn also shows that Meyer was an integral part of the behind-the-scenes internal intellectual and organizational disputes that marked National Review all through the 1950s and 1960s. For then as now, many on the right invested as much energy in fighting each other as they did in combating the left.
Therein lies much of the background for what would be Meyer’s attempt to “invent” modern American conservatism in the form of his short book In Defense of Freedom. Flynn stresses that leading figures on America’s intellectual right at the beginning of the 1960s were at each other’s throats as different individuals sought to dominate what it meant to be a conservative. Meyer’s book should be read in the context of that debate, especially his effort to put freedom, individual rights, and a government focused on securing these things (often understood as classical liberal emphases) at the core of what it means to be an American conservative.
Part of the challenge faced by Meyer, Flynn points out, was that some American conservatives believed it was necessary to import conservatism into America from European sources. Meyer disagreed, and that disagreement drove his development of the idea of fusionism as a project that involved making American conservatism an enterprise of restoring something unique to America. Meyer’s fusionism was not about, Flynn emphasizes, taking a piece of traditionalism here and an element of libertarianism there, then melding them with a touch of national security hawkery. Nor was it concerned with creating the three-legged stool of social conservatism, strong national defense, and limited government and free markets. Fusionism, Flynn maintains, “to Meyer simply meant conserving the American tradition. That tradition—from the Declaration of Independence through Washington’s Farewell Address—derived from the broader Western tradition and developed into ordered liberty.”
As successive chapters illustrate, Meyer’s book, which soon turned into a classic, did not resolve disagreements on the American right or even within National Review itself. Internal fights about ideas continued and, if anything, magnified. But In Defense of Freedom, Flynn suggests, effectively established Meyer as someone who successfully grounded modern American conservatism on seven principles: 1) a belief in an objective moral order; 2) an emphasis on the rights and duties of individuals over the collective; 3) the rejection of utopian heaven-on-earth delusions; 4) promoting limited government over top-down planning; 5) strong advocacy of free markets; 6) endorsing the U.S. Constitution’s articulation of federalism, the division of powers and protection of liberties; and 7) defending the West against communism.
To varying degrees, these seven principles would constitute the substance of modern American conservatism for the next 40 years. Meyer’s powerful articulation and defense of these principles effectively made, Flynn maintains, the one-time “Communist commissar” the “conservative pope.” The Meyer pontificate, however, lasted only 10 years and was terminated by Meyer’s death at the sadly early age of 62.
One of the tragedies of Meyer’s life was that he died a mere eight years before the election of Ronald Reagan—the man whose positions, of all America’s presidents, came the closest to reflecting fusionist ideas, and 18 years before the fall of communism and the disappearance of the Soviet Union that Meyer had once served so faithfully. Meyer consequently never saw the political fruits of his efforts to get the perpetually feuding groups on the right to sign up to a common political agenda.
Rather than concluding by reflecting on the state of American conservatism today and the place of fusionism in it, Flynn ends The Man Who Invented Conservatism by pointing out how Meyer turned out to be right about some important topics. One was his confidence that, despite its apparent dominance in the 1960s, modern American liberalism was headed into stormy seas. Another was Meyer’s belief that America could and would defeat the Soviet threat without having to resort to an all-out hot war. Meyer was ahead of the curve in predicting these things, and at the core of Meyer’s insights into the unfolding of history was his confidence, going back to his communist days, that ideas ultimately change the world. Elections and the daily political struggle certainly matter, but Meyer’s life is a testimony to the fact that ideas are as important as these things. The American right would be wise to remember this in our own tumultuous times.
