The recent ideological migration of the Republican Party towards overtly collectivist “national conservatives” (or “NatCons”) has sparked a crisis over the past year within American conservatism. “Freedom conservatives” (or “FreeCons”) have emerged in opposition to the NatCons. Each side has issued a statement of principles, with ten NatCon principles being countered by ten FreeCon principles. FreeCons are concerned that:
More and more people on the left and right reject the distinctive creed that made America great: that individual liberty is essential to the moral and physical strength of the nation.
FreeCon champion Avik Roy accused NatCons of seeking to overthrow the “Big Tent” conservatism pioneered in the 1950s by William F. Buckley, Jr. and are alienating potential constitutionalist, immigrant, and libertarian allies.
John Fonte of the Hudson Institute answered Roy, claiming that NatCons are reviving “Buckleyite” principles as embodied in The Sharon Statement of 1960, the founding “eternal principles” of Buckley’s Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). Fonte maintains that the original “first wave” of Buckleyite conservatives—a coalition of traditionalists and classical liberals—was based on philosophically-inconsistent “Fusionist” principles that degenerated into a post-Cold War “second wave” conservatism that favored globalization and the interests of progressive corporations over the defense of national identity and culture and the economic interests of American workers.
According to Fonte, NatCons represent a “third wave” revival that intends to restore state-enforced traditionalism to its rightful place in conservative thought (presumably against the corrupting influence of the classical liberal element within the original “Fusionist” mix) in line with the nationalist-populist revolt against globalism led by President-elect Donald Trump. Citing a political fight between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the Disney Corporation over “woke” policies and the divided opinions it generated among conservatives as an example, Fonte explains:
The Disney controversy helps to clarify a core difference between second- and third-wave conservatism. Second wavers argue that civil society and culture generally must be neutral zones free of any governmental or overt political influence. Third wavers see culture as crucial, because they believe it is critical to the struggle for ideological supremacy.
Fonte goes on to urge a new pan-conservative fusionism to bridge the differences:
The conflict today is not simply a normal policy argument between conservatives and progressives. It is over the future of the historic American nation, both its creed and its culture. Therefore, those who affirm the American nation—whether they are NatCons, FreeCons, or patriotic liberals—should be called Americanists. Those who find our inheritance deeply problematic and seek a revolutionary transformation of the American regime should, logically, be called Transformationists. Today’s polarization should be viewed as an existential struggle between Americanists and Transformationists.
In contrast to Fonte’s plea for a united front against progressivism, Austrian economist and classical liberal, Ludwig von Mises, noted in Theory and History that any quest for ideological supremacy and the juxtaposing of one form of collectivism against another form of collectivism offer no escape from totalitarianism:
The collective creed is by necessity exclusive and totalitarian. It craves the whole man and does not want to share him with any other collective. It seeks to establish the exclusive supreme validity of only one system of values.
There is, of course, but one way to make one’s own judgments of value supreme. One must beat into submission all those dissenting. This is what all representatives of the various collectivist doctrines are striving for. They ultimately recommend the use of violence and pitiless annihilation of all those whom they condemn as heretics. Collectivism is a doctrine of war, intolerance, and persecution. If any of the collectivist creeds should succeed in its endeavors, all people but the great dictator would be deprived of their essential human quality. They would become mere soulless pawns in the hands of a monster.
Undoubtedly, many Americans would prefer to live according to their own personal judgements of value instead of every aspect of their lives politicized and dictated to by insufferable culture warriors engaged in a Manichean struggle against each other, whether the victors be partisans of tradition or of change. If contemporary conservatives become just as stubbornly committed to cultural domination and just as heedless of the economic destructionism associated with statism as contemporary progressives have been, they too will suffer a stinging repudiation by a large majority of American voters in the next electoral cycle. A bitter quarrel between rival collectivists offers nothing to FreeCons, let alone non-conservatives.
Before we applaud FreeCons too uncritically, we need to recall why invocations of William F. Buckley, Jr. as the patron saint of contemporary conservatism are rather dubious. The Fusionist “first wave” view that individual liberty is necessary for virtue is actually the least problematic part of Buckley’s platform. While liberty does leave impetuous youth free to deviate from the traditions of their forefathers, it also makes them bear the consequences of their folly whenever those traditions happen to be grounded in the facts of human nature or happen to facilitate social cooperation by assimilating one to the common language and norms of one’s community. Free, responsible individuals are incentivized to adhere to genuinely useful cultural norms; politicians can only get in the way of a healthy evolution of the culture when they defend traditions with coercion.
To be sure, traditionalists might worry that some of their most cherished traditions are not persuasive enough on their own merits and can’t withstand free competition. Some traditions originally might have gained traction because vested interests gained power and wealth by widely propagating them and suppressing contrary views among the public, while other traditions might have gained traction because they directly motivate their own spontaneous propagation and/or suppression of contrary beliefs. It is perhaps inevitable that some traditions can only continue to prosper with the aid of authoritarianism, conformism, and coercion.
However, such insecurities about the competitive viability of particular traditions doesn’t invalidate the importance of individual liberty in keeping culture and personal morals grounded in the facts of human nature and social life. Traditions cease being relevant to the needs of mankind and become mere subjective constructs serving the powerful as a culture is politicized and liberty curtailed. “First wave” Fusionism is still defensible as a basis for conservatism on these grounds—to have to defend a body of traditions with lies, trickery, and force is to concede the progressivist contention that changes to those traditions would likely better serve the cause of human happiness than the traditions themselves do.
A much more substantial contradiction within Buckleyite conservatism was first called out by a student of Mises and one of the founders of the modern libertarian movement—Murray Rothbard—in a 1952 newsletter article. At this early stage of his political career, Buckley had just left the employment of the Central Intelligence Agency (where he reported to the notorious Mexico City station chief, E. Howard Hunt) and was trying to pass himself off among conservatives as a radical, pro-liberty individualist. However, Buckley inconsistently argued that the struggle against the Soviet Union would require acceptance of “Big Government” and a “totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores” for the duration of the Cold War, which, Rothbard protested, overtly affirmed a de facto totalitarian socialism.
Buckley’s subsequent embrace of Fusionism was meant to soft-peddle his corporatist economics while enticing both libertarians and traditionalists into joining an anti-Soviet war-mongering; one of the YAF founding principles being that America should achieve victory over “international Communism” and not its mere containment. At the time, many militant cold warriors believed America could win World War III with a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union (brilliantly satirized by Stanley Kubrik in his classic 1964 dark comedy Dr. Strangelove). Rothbard responded to Buckley’s criticisms of libertarians in a 1963 article by condemning nuclear annihilation as an existential threat to civilization and defending a strict, anti-war principle on libertarian grounds:
In short, the objective of the libertarian is to confine any existing State to as small a degree of invasion of person and property as possible. And this means the total avoidance of war. The people under each State should pressure “their” respective States not to attack one another, and, if a conflict should break out, to negotiate a peace or declare a cease-fire as quickly as physically possible.
By 1965, Rothbard had also pointed out that the inherent economic chaos of socialism would, in any event, cause a collapse of the Soviet system without war, a bold prediction that was fulfilled in 1991.
When viewing the NatCon/FreeCon debate through the lens of Rothbard’s critique of Buckley, we see that the NatCon embrace of corporatism and militarism for the sake of anti-Communist war-mongering is more in tune with Buckley’s collectivist dark side than the FreeCons are, but the FreeCons are closer to the original Fusionism in seeing liberty as a necessity for realizing the benefits of tradition. Buckley was never consistent in his political philosophy; the unstable remnants of Buckleyite conservatism today are rapidly disintegrating into irreconcilable fascist and libertarian camps.
