How Conservatism Lost Its Way

Yeah, that's great.

I have I have lots of questions and thoughts here.

So let's go this route.

So you talk about fusionism as the sort of philosophical undergirding of the conservative movement mid to late 20th century.

And I think that's right.

So if you study the history of ideas, you think about like Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, National Review, Bill Buckley in the 1940s and 50s.

conservatism was not really a clear kind of philosophy set of ideas.

You had different kinds of conservatives.

You had Republicans who are kind of we think of as kind of conservatives today or so, but maybe not as much then.

So I guess one thing, the first question for you that maybe would be good for listeners is when we think about U.S. history.

I think it's easy to think about presidents and presidential administrations in terms of Republican Democrats.

So you think Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush, they're all Republicans.

Maybe you could comment a little bit on how different some of those administrations can be and how just having the political label of Republican hasn't meant the same thing over the century and a half that we just kind of covered there.

Yeah, back there was a time when there were liberal Republicans, there were conservative Democrats.

And so the words that we now tend to associate, you know, liberal or progressive with the Democratic Party and conservative with the Republican Party, it wasn't always that way.

And in fact, what we had was a time when there were a lot of moderate and liberal Republicans and a lot of the presidents were what we would now consider to be sort of somewhat progressive or moderate, at least.

And that goes for Eisenhower, for example.

And so the conservative movement that emerges in the post-World War II years, National Review is founded in 1955, for example, so in that era, in that period.

What you have is this conservative movement that essentially says, we are actual conservatives.

We do not like that the Republican Party has all these moderates and liberals in it, including Eisenhower, including Nixon.

And so we want to try to really band together and be very strategic and intentional about trying to pull the party, pressure it and persuade it to be genuinely conservative.

And by that, it basically meant committed to liberty and virtue.

I mean, that's how I would talk about it at a philosophical level.

And more practical policy-wise, it's limited government.

It's, you know, free markets.