Frank Meyer

But that doesn't mean there isn't a better way to live and that we can't try to help to persuade people and encourage people and support people to make those better choices instead of those worse choices.

Your book really focuses on the post-war conservative slash libertarian movement, and Frank Meyer plays a very important role.

You discuss him a lot.

Tell us a bit about Frank Meyer, because we may have mentioned him here on the show at points, but we don't focus on him very much.

Yeah, absolutely.

He sort of disappeared from the conversation, which is true because he was a hugely influential figure during this period, basically from the founding of National Review magazine, which is the flagship conservative magazine in the United States.

It was founded in 1955.

And for 17 years, Frank Meyer was one of the senior editors.

Um, a state that enforces virtue is not a small state at all, and a state that is small will not have the capability to enforce it, nor, nor should it choose to do so.

The man who solved this problem was Frank Meyer, and his biography comes into focus.

Meyer had been a Communist Party organizer recruited at the London School of Economics, and he spent 14 years inside the party apparatus before he left it.

He came to the National Review as a senior editor, having already lived through one total system of thought.

But what does, what, what does that mean? Because, you know, I-- So I had Stephanie Slade on recently.

Um, the, what I thought was conservatism is kind of the Frank Meyer fusionism, we're, we are for individual liberty, um, and we wanna shrink government, but then we also believe in personal virtue as the necessary complement of individual liberty.

But there's other strains-

I mean, that's my conservatism, but-

It was not a thing that was invented by by National Review.

Frank Meyer at National Review is usually called the godfather.

He's the person who noticed and articulated it and defended it in writing for many years.

But he wasn't inventing it.

I'm not talking about laws against theft or murder, but if it's laws against prostitution or drug use or something in that zone, it's much better to be working for.

for cultural change and maybe the laws will get changed down the line to reflect a new consensus but the idea that you can pass the law first i say people they tend to i feel like they treat the law as a magic wand you just wave the magic wand you pass a lot you solve the problem but you haven't actually solved the problem if you haven't changed hearts and minds if you haven't changed the culture if you haven't done that hard work and that's hard time consuming work that can't happen overnight but that's the right way to go about this it's a more sustainable way um and i think that like there just are so many from a prudential perspective, so many arguments against trying to use the state as a shortcut in that way that whether or not it's legitimate for the state to do these other things, I personally don't don't don't love the idea.

I think the best sort of society is one in which this is actually what Frank Meyer, the sort of godfather of fusionism, argued too, is that we want a state that's very small, that does a very small number of things.

Basically, you know, three tasks.

yes it's going to be like nikki

haley as like the far right vanguard like that's probably what we're looking at the barrel of yeah that's coming that's coming from a place of fear though and and to some extent you want young people to be like no you're get out of the way old man like we we have to be radical we have to be uncompromising that that is the purpose of having a young movement it's extremely frustrating that people on the right don't seem to understand that but this this leads me to the next point yeah and this this gets to the core of conservative ideology i think more than anything when you have a movement that was basically philosophically cobbled together with the cold war with what uh francis frank meyer called fusionism where you kind of like lump social traditionalists and libertarians into this coalition that doesn't actually make any sense but you're just trying to get everybody opposed to the soviet union it's communism

yeah

what ends up happening is you you end up with a movement where people say well what we need to oppose at all costs is the use of state power and the highest good is looking after your individual economic self-interest and if you do that everything will be fine that's like well the problem is if that's what you're advocating how are you not going to end up with a movement of sellouts How are you? And also, like, why should anybody get involved in politics? Shouldn't you just go out there and make money? Or even worse, wouldn't you get involved in politics just as a way to make money? I mean, God knows we've seen plenty of that, right? Oh, of course.

And then a group of writers and intellectuals set out to build a common foundation.

Ronald Reagan would eventually give it a political voice, but before that could happen, it needed Frank Meyer, a name you're going to hear a lot in this conversation.

Meyer supplied one of the movement's central ideas, which is that conservatives didn't have to choose between liberty and virtue.

They needed both.

All right, Stephanie, welcome to the show and congratulations on the new book.

Thank you so much.

So let's just start with the thinker at the center of fusionism, Frank Meyer, who helped shape American conservatism in the postwar era.

Today, Meyer's obviously a lot less familiar than the movement he helped shape.