Stephanie, as the proponent of liberty, you're up.

Thank you, Henry, and good to see you, Dan.

I'm happy to be here.

So I guess I'm actually a little bit less interested in the question of what is best for uniting various tribes, warring tribes.

I'm much more interested, as my book, I think, focuses on much more what should be the first principles that we believe in.

So I'm going to lean a little bit more in that direction.

Hopefully that'll be okay.

So I'm curious what your own view of how liberty works out with respect to those issues and how conservatives should think about them.

What is the rise of Christian nationalism as you understand it?

Yeah, it's hard to answer that question because that term can be used by a lot of different people in a lot of different ways.

And I think a lot of, you know, if you do a poll of people in the United States, you'll find that most Americans, or at least some large percentage of Americans, do think that we had a Christian founding.

And by the way, I think there's a strong case to be made.

I had an article in Reason Magazine in our July issue, which was our big, you know, America 250, celebrating the Declaration of Independence anniversary, where I say America was founded.

Yeah, it was a lot of fun to research because I got to go back and read the founders.

And there's all these quotes that, as you say, show that the founders were Christians for the most part, or at least even the ones who were not maybe Orthodox believers.

What do you make of this and how is that affecting the conservative movement?

Um, [lip smack] so how much continuity is there kind of below the surface of what to, to some of us seems like kind of a hard break in Republican politics since the sort of the rise of Donald Trump?

Trump?It was always there.

You're totally right.

It was always there.

Um, and in fact, these paleo-conservatives, like a, like a, um, Pat Buchanan, are explicitly saying, tying their ideas to a pre-World War II, you know, sort of right-wing politics in America, where the Republican Party was the party of tariffs, where we were sort of very anti-interventionist in terms of both trade, con-conservatives were, people on the right, in terms of both trade and military intervention abroad, and, uh, hos- you know, much more skeptical of immigration.

Um, but I think it's fair to say that although those, those ideas were always there, um, they really were out-competed by a more fusionist, classically liberal conservatism in the middle part of the 20th century, that the sort of National Review fusionist, um, free market, you know, Reagan-style pro-immi- you know, pro-immigration, inclusive conservatism w- became the dominant consensus position on the right.

And so while there were dissenters always, they were never, they were never really able to, to get much, um, foot-- of a foothold in making their arguments.

Who do you think's, who do you think's running in twenty twenty-eight?

But otherwise, almost every tenet of fusionism is done away with rhetorically.

Yeah, I mean, Trump represents almost the antithesis, right? On both virtue, I think that goes without saying.

And then on the classical liberal side, like he's just a man who does not believe that his power to enact his will through the coercive methods of government should be constrained in any way.

This is the opposite of classical liberalism.

So yeah, so your question is what happens? I'm going to give two answers.

I think one will probably be not so controversial and one maybe.

The first one, I think, is that the movement sort of got complacent after Reagan's successes and then the fall of the Soviet Union.

I

were those principally? Bozell or who were the big dissenters?

Brent Bizzell is the one I focus on most in that chapter.

And he was a National Review senior editor, a friend and actually brother-in-law of William F. Buckley Jr.

And he starts out as like a Goldwater, very libertarian, classically liberal conservative.

But he converts to Catholicism and he becomes ever more sort of dogmatic and militant about it.

And he eventually rejects the American founding, rejects the idea of separation of church and state.

He moves his family to Spain under the Francisco Franco regime because he likes it better, because he likes that there's that Catholicism is infused into the culture there and into the government in all these ways.

And the very structure that that purports to be neutral is actually substantially advancing a left wing worldview.

I've had enough.

This is actually a really hard question.

And I actually I don't think that fusionism by itself kind of gives or classical liberalism gives us a straightforward answer.

And it actually led some of the early fusionists, I think, astray.

So Frank Meyer, for example, he and some of the other the other early fusionists, they were such deep believers in the importance of separation of powers.

This is how the founders thought that you prevent tyranny is you separate powers.

So you have power separated across the levels of government, across the branches of government.

So walk us through what happened.

So do you think liberalism, classical liberalism is morally neutral?

No.

I think that it does say that we will get along better and thrive more as a society and be able to coexist in peace if we treat the government as a sort of fair referee that calls balls and strikes and treats everybody...

And this is the whole idea of equal treatment under law, right, is that everybody gets treated the same.

And instead, and the law applies to everybody whether you're on the same team as the guy in the White House or not, whether you're of the same skin color, same religion, same political party.

Um, whether you're a person in government or outside of government, the law applies to everybody equally.

And in fact, I, I would emphasize it's actually even more important that the law applies to the person in the position of power.

Okay, so what, so the problem is, like, where do you, so where do you come down, like, on drag queen story hour?

But there's also this other kind of viewpoint, right? This story reads as kind of brave or at least, you know, there's a willingness here to be honest about the failures of her own choices and even about the failures of the public education system that she says that she wants to save.

Yeah, it's a first step towards a reckoning, I would say.

I mean, I totally agree with everything Matt just said, because defenders of sort of educational choice policies, the critique we have against the policies that people like Nicole Hannah-Jones have been advocating is that they basically sacrifice individuals, you know, students who have potential and ability and could really excel if given the right supports and sort of taken out of these dysfunctional environments and put into a gifted and talented program or put into a higher, more elite high school or something like that.

It says we want to sacrifice them for the good of the many, right? Sacrifice the few for the good of the many.

And this is a very collectivist thing that's very offensive to those of us.

You're going to hold back these individuals.

You're going to hold them back and say that we're going to be opposed to any sort of meritocratic advancement.

But is it rather that we're entering an era where post-liberalism is just more attractive or more on the ground everywhere, including outside of the United States, and that it just takes a specific form on the right and the left, but the underlying impulse is the same? And then where is the political coalition that pushes back against that?

Where am I wrong on this? Am I wrong? Is Trump wrong? Is this a top-down problem? I mean, how do you, how do you square this pick?

Okay, so I mean, I totally agree, and I would say as I've been sort of traveling around the country promoting my book and going on podcasts and doing events and, um, uh, media, media appearances, I'm hearing this a lot.

I was just on a, a radio show in West Virginia where the guy said, "Look, people around here were huge fans of Donald Trump, and we feel like on everything that we voted, that everything we liked about him, he's betrayed us in the second term." Um, and so I, I guess I, I do see, uh, just for observing the, the political reality that during the first Trump term it really seemed like this idea that there was nothing that he could do that would get the base to be mad at him.

You know, he famously said that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and they would still stand with him, and that really seemed to be true during that first term.

But it, the, the, the choices he's making in the second term really seem to be causing a widespread sense of betrayal among people who were once fans of his.

So that's just an, been a really interesting development to watch unfold.

And certainly it's true that there were many things that he campaigned on, like no war, you know, no, uh, you know, endless wars, and he's now starting new wars, uh, uh, wars of choice, uh, uh, as you mentioned, unconstitutional, um, unconstitutionally and whatnot.

It's simple.

Where am I wrong on this? Am I wrong? Is Trump wrong? Is this a top-down problem? I mean, how do you square this peg?

OK, so I mean, I totally agree.

And I would say as I've been sort of traveling around the country promoting my book and going on podcasts and doing events and media media appearance, I'm hearing this a lot.

I was just on a radio show in West Virginia where the guy said, look, people around here were huge fans of Donald Trump.

And we feel like on everything that we voted that everything we liked about him, he's betrayed us in the second term.

And so I guess I do see it just observing the political reality that during the first Trump term, it really seemed like this idea that there was nothing that he could do that would get the base to be mad at him.

You know, he famously said that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and they would still stand with him.

It's simple.

Is a libertarian someone in your mind who wants to chop down that tree of statism no matter the cost, or can a libertarian be radical in theory, but sort of more pragmatic and conservative in their approach?

Oh, for sure.

I think that within libertarianism, there can be differences of approach.

And in fact, I remember in one of the many debate issues that Reason has published, where we have people arguing two sides of an intra-libertarian, you know, a question where libertarians disagree with each other.

I had one between Katharine Mangu-Ward and Nick Gillespie.

Katharine identifies as an anarchist, Nick Gillespie does not.

And they were arguing this, and I actually forget exactly how the argument played out.

So can you explain why that is necessary? What is it that Adam Smith maybe perhaps is missing?

So why should we care? Make the case about why liberty is so important.

There's a whole series of reasons.

And I think that these would have been so obvious old hat to so many, anybody on the right, whether libertarian or conservative 20 years ago, would have not needed to even have this litany recounted.

But now we have a generation of young conservatives who really don't, they're not familiar with these arguments.

So yes, let's lay them out.

So they would say things like, A, virtuous action that's not freely taken, that's not freely chosen, is not really virtuous.

You don't get credit for doing something simply because the government forced you to or took the alternative option off the table.

So what happened?

So where are the fusionists, you as the founding member maybe of libertarian fusionism, where are you guys on abortion rights, on homosexuality, and all the cultural third rails in 2020 America?

There can be room for disagreement, I would say, among people who identify as fusionist.

So it's not like there is a particular platform that everybody has signed on to because it is a philosophical synthesis.

And so you can start with first principles and different people can come to different conclusions about the right policy that follows from those principles.

But I would say generally speaking, fusionists are going to be fairly socially conservative.

They're going to probably take many positions that you would think of as being socially conservative on social issues.

However, this is very important.

Yeah, well, I

What, what, I mean, I'm not trying to put you on the spot, but like, but what does that mean? Does that mean that you get up early and you brush your teeth and you work? Yeah, I mean, that's going to be part of

it, right? It's sort of, if we think about it also being tied to the pursuit of excellence, like, you know, again, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, you're created by God and there's a sort of the best version of the self that God created you to be.

And you're supposed to be striving to live that out, to pursue this excellence.

Moral excellence, but also excellence in a variety of ways, like taking the gifts that God has given you and trying to do something, you know, constructive with them.

And so this is just the idea that there is a sort of transcendent that we came from somewhere where we were created by someone.

We were created for a purpose.

We were created in a certain way.

Where do you see green shoots in that kind of world? Like what are some promising?

And then we can follow up, what does that look like maybe today?

It was first and foremost, I think, a battle of ideas.

It was mostly intellectuals, some of whom were professors, you know, with PhDs in academia.

Some of them were journalists, but very learned, you know, journalists who were writing about policy and ideas and philosophy.

And so they mostly thought that ideas matter really a lot for shaping the political environment.

And in this, I argue in the book, they were taking a page out of, they were sort of following Friedrich Hayek.

Hayek, when he finds the Mont Pelerin Society in Europe about 15, 20 years earlier than all of this, he argues, I'm bringing together a bunch of scholars, economists, historians, mostly economists, but also historians and others, who believe in liberalism in the European sense, meaning classical liberalism, and who want to defend liberalism.

So I'm kind of curious, how would you weight those things in terms of why fusionism has receded in many ways from the kind of current, you know, Republican political climate?

Is that is that really the cause of or the beginning of the decline of fusionism?

It seems that way to me.

There's this period, this 11 year period from 1980 to 1991, when you have Reagan winning two landslide elections, a second one even bigger than the first.

You have the fall of the Berlin Wall and then you have the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

And it was like I think it was just naturally and understandably a sense that like our ideas are so obviously vindicated.

How could anybody possibly doubt us anymore that these fusionist ideas of a free society over an unfree system of government and unfree economy and of the sort of American, which is, they would say, you know, innately fusionist.

Our founders were fusionists.

Do you agree with that? I mean, is the case for freedom better carried by the humanities than by economics?

Yeah

...

it is mainstream in a, in a, in a certain way.

Um, so yeah.

So, uh, the, the, I guess you had the, the fusionist sort of, um, fu- the fusion is between the classical liberal political tradition that might be represented by certain libertarians like, uh, Friedrich Hayek as the sort of, um, avatar for that view that I use in the book, and then traditionalists, religious traditionalists, um, who were very concerned with a more Judeo-Christian sense of, of virtue, um, like Russell Kirk.

And I argue in the book that both Hayek and Kirk, although, you know, Hayek is more libertarian and Kirk is more traditionalist, that in many ways both men were fusionists.

They both believed that both things were important and, and necessary for human flourishing.

Um, is some of this more bark than bite?

Yeah.

The sort of three different constituencies that Reagan brought together and helped him get elected, and this would be the sort of economic libertarians, the social conservatives or religious traditionalists, and the Cold War hawks.

And this is a s- a co- story that most people, you know, remember or at least have been, have learned, and people, I think, mistakenly use that as a synonym for, for fusionism.

What I'm arguing is that actually this is a word that is not referring to a coalition of different groups or getting different constituencies with different commitments and priorities to play nicely together or vote for the same person.

Of course, that is a part of politics.

That did have to happen.

But the word fusionism was coined, like, 20 years before Reagan even ran for president, um, and it was supposed to be the idea of a philosophical synthesis between the classical liberal political tradition and the Judeo-Christian moral tradition.

Mm

Um, it might be true that you can be virtuous in a free society, but couldn't you be virtuous in an unfree society? In fact, isn't there, in some sort of an ultimate sense, isn't that precisely when, let's say, Christianity shined the most is under persecution? Why, what, what if, uh, a lack of liberty is literally what engen- engenders virtue?"

Yeah.

He makes that argument.

He also makes what I think is almost the flip side of the argument, which is he basically says, "Being virtuous is really hard, and people need all the help they can get, and so we should not be so squeamish about passing laws and using the coercive power of the state to help people make virtuous choices." That's the thing that Meyer is objecting to, I think.

Um, this idea that we can coerce, that it's a good idea or it's possible, um, those are sort of two slightly different arguments, but, um, that it's, uh, e-either a good idea or even possible to use government to make people or make the culture be virtuous.

And Bozell seems to just have, over the c- you know, as he's, as he's evolving, 'cause he starts out as quite a libertarian, um, and he, and he, he then, he converts to Catholicism, and he, he eventually embraces an ever more sort of radical traditionalist but also, uh, statist, authoritarian Catholicism.

And so he, uh, over time, he comes, becomes convinced that we should be using the state in this way, and he seems to think that we can, um, and that there's no, there's no good reason not to, basically.

Right.

Right

...

the conservative movement comes into being in the years after World War II, and it's very self-consciously trying to define what it is that they believe in as American conservatives.

Conservatism, that word in a European context would have totally different connotations, right? Sort of throne and altar, defending the monarchy, the aristocracy, the old way of doing things.

But in America, that doesn't make sense.

So in America, the conservatives are trying to conserve the principles and institutions of the American founding.

That's kind of what they saw themselves as doing, and that meant a commitment within the conservative movement to this sort of classical liberalism, separation of powers, rule of law, limited government, free markets.

Mm.

[typewriter]

"Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by the great many of those of the well-fed right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity." [bell dinging] National Review, November 1955.

And the, the scholars and writers, and again, people associated with National Review magazine being sort of the center of this, all recognized that they were sort of building a movement from scratch.Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain operative, and the medium of such exchange is the printed word.

A vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion is, dare we say it, as necessary to better living as chemistry.

They didn't think the ideas were new.

Um, they thought if, if anything, they thought that they were just trying to preserve the principles and institutions of the American founding so that these were things that, you know, had been around for centuries.

But, um, but they believed that the movement itself was sort of being constructed from the ground up.

Is Fishback telling us what the future establishment could look like?