Ep 281: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of Fusionism with Stephanie Slade

In this episode I talk with Stephanie Slade, senior editor at Reason magazine and author of the forthcoming book Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, out September 1, 2026 on University of Notre Dame Press. Slade argues that fusionism is much more than the Cold War coalition between conservatives and libertarians, but is rather a philosophy in which the pursuit of liberty and virtue are bound to one another. Slade explains how a free society is impossible without the cultivation of virtue, and how libertarians and conservatives have often marginalized or even outright rejected the value of virtue in social discourse. Slade explains how fusionism, through the work of F.A. Hayek and Frank Meyer, won out during the Reagan administration but then became a casualty of its own success. She discusses how liberty without virtue leads to cultural degradation and how virtue cannot be properly pursued without liberty, why the right needs to reclaim the mantle of fusionism, and why Christian libertarians should be naturally predisposed to fusionists ideals. 

Media Referenced:

Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right: https://a.co/d/01kUhQx6

Stephanie on X: @sladesr

Stephanie at Reason: https://reason.com/people/stephanie-slade/

Ep. 58 Slade Interview: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ep-58-political-expression-civil-rights-and-catholic-libertarianism-with-stephanie-slade/

Sign up for LCI’s 2026 Conference in Cincinnati, OH on Saturday, October 17! Many LCI content creators, including myself, will be speaking at the event, and it will be an excellent opportunity to connect with likeminded, liberty-loving Christians. Check out the event and sign up here: https://libertarianchristians.com/conference/

The Protestant Libertarian Podcast is a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and a part of the Christians For Liberty Network. The Libertarian Christian Institute can be found at www.libertarianchristians.com.

Questions, comments, suggestions? Please reach out to me at theprotestantlibertarian@gmail.com.  You can also follow the podcast on Twitter: @prolibertypod, and YouTube, @ProLibertyPod, where you will get shorts and other exclusive video content. For more about the show, you can go to theprotestantlibertarianpodcast.com. If you like the show and want to support it, you can! Go to libertarianchristians.com, where you can donate to LCI and buy The Protestant Libertarian Podcast Merch! Also, please consider giving me a star rating and leaving me a review, it really helps expand the show’s profile! Thanks!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Our first conference in almost 10 years will be held in the Cincinnati area on October 17th, 2026, and we want you to be there. The Christians for Liberty 2026 conference will be held at the Village Vineyard Church in South Lebanon, Ohio, which is in the Greater Cincinnati area. This conference will feature guest speakers, interviews, and a panel with authors from our upcoming book, Four Views Reconciling Faith and Freedom. While all of these sessions will be recorded, and that means you'll be participating in live Christians for Liberty Network podcasts. There's stuff at this conference that you simply won't get on a podcast. You'll get to meet some of your favorite thinkers in the Liberty Movement and build relationships with other advocates for faith and freedom. And the earlier you order, the better the deal you'll get on your pass. Get yours now at libertarian Christians.com/slash conference. See you there.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

This is the Protestant Libertarian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christians for Liberty Network. I really hope that you guys enjoy today's show. All right, guys. Welcome to another episode of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast. My guest today is Stephanie Slade. Stephanie is a senior editor at Reason Magazine where she writes about politics, religion, and the American conservative movement. She's the author of the forthcoming book Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, published by the University of Notre Dame Press, in which she explores the history and philosophical significance of fusionism, the synthesis of classical liberalism's defense of individual liberty and the Judeo-Christian tradition's emphasis on moral virtue. She argues that fusionism offers a coherent vision of human flourishing, how the American Right abandoned the project of fusionism, and how it can be recovered today. We will be discussing this book on the show. Stephanie, welcome back to the Process and Libertarian Podcast.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Thanks so much for having me back on.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

So it didn't seem like it was that long ago that you were on the show, but I was running through my archives and it's been like three years. So obviously I have some more listeners now than I did back then. So for people that are listening that don't know you, just go ahead and introduce yourself, your background, and your work.

SPEAKER_02 2:07

Sure. So I work at Reason Magazine. Reason is the sort of flagship national libertarian publication, the magazine of free minds and free markets. We cover politics, policy, and emphasis on policy and culture from a libertarian perspective. And I've been there now almost 13 years, which is hard to believe. And so I started out more as an editor at Reason, but over time I've um come to be, I my primary job now is a little bit of editing, but mostly writing and specifically covering the conservative movement in America and the debates, the sort of intellectual debates on the American right. And I see this divide between, I mean, this is an overarching picture, but you know, a divide divide between sort of people on the right of center in America who still believe in basic classical liberal commitments to limited government, individual liberty, rule of law, free markets, versus a sort of new anti-liberal or illiberal, or you might say statist or authoritarian vision of conservatism that says we need to, you know, um, conservatives need to be willing to embrace state power uh in order to get their way. So I spent a lot of time covering the these debates as they play out and also weighing in on one side of that of that debate in my journalism, in my podcast appearances, in my public speaking, and now with this new book, my first book, that will be coming out in just a little while.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

Yeah, so this is a massive undertaking. You have a ton of sources. The book is very well written. Um, but obviously it takes a lot to write a book like this. And this is very much a topic that I think is kind of at the center of a lot of controversy now. So, given all that, what motivated you to write this book at this time?

SPEAKER_02 3:36

So I got, you know, I started out writing about religious liberty. That was my initial beat 10, 10, 12 years ago at Reason. I was defending religious liberty from what I saw as attacks on individual freedom coming mostly from the left and from the Democratic Party. And this was, I started at Reason during the tail end of the Obama era. And so I saw individual freedom and specifically religious freedom under attack, and most of the mostly the threats were coming from the left. But over time, I've noticed that there had been increasingly, I felt like there were threats to the individual liberty, religious liberty, but all kinds of individual liberty coming from the right as well. And I was trying to figure out what is going on here. Where is this coming from? Where is this nationalist, populist, protectionist, authoritarian, you know, statist impulse on the right coming from? And why does it seem to be taking off and gaining sort of mind share on the right, especially among young people? So I started getting interested in that question. I started reading books that were being put out by people making these arguments, going to conferences, um, you know, reading the blog posts, listening to the podcasts. And um, I just became very interested in trying to understand that. And so that was that was where this all began. And then, but then of course, it's like, okay, well, what's the alternative or what's the affirmative case? If I think that this is a mistake to go in that direction, then somebody needs to be able to be laying out an argument that is a sort of authentically American, and I would say authentically conservative. Now, I'm a libertarian, you're a libertarian, but I think the important thing is that so many people who criticize what's sometimes referred to as the new right or the illiberal right, what I call my book the dissident right, um, these kind of big government conservatives, so many of their critics come from the left. And they essentially say, if you don't, you know, you shouldn't be this way, and instead you should come over and vote for us and be Democrat. And it's like, no, there's actually a within the conservative American conservative tradition, there's a lot of good reasons to not go down this path towards illiberal, big government, authoritarian, you know, embrace of politics as war. Um, but somebody needs to be making that argument from the right, not just from the left. So that's kind of where I think the idea for this book came from.

SPEAKER_01 5:30

Yeah, let's go ahead and define terms too before we start, because you, you're, I mean, obviously the title of your book is fusionism. And as we were talking about a little bit before the show, uh, you know, I've I've been reading your work for a long time and I've had you on the podcast before. We talked at Acton University, but it really wasn't until I sat down and started going through your book that I really kind of came to terms with what the word fusionism actually meant. So define that term and why it's so important today.

SPEAKER_02 5:53

I usually start by saying fusionism is just the idea that both liberty and virtue are necessary for human flourishing. And we need to care about both those things, liberty and virtue. And too much of our politics nowadays, especially on the right of center, are libertarians who are all about liberty but get very uncomfortable when you start talking about virtue. And now you have this, again, this dissident right or this sort of illiberal right. They are they they either don't want to talk about liberty or virtue because they think politics is war and all that matters is seizing power and using it against our enemies. Or some of them, the more sort of theologically inclined folks, illiberal conservatives, would say something like, um, we think liberty is standing in the way of people achieving virtue. We think we need less liberty because we think that too much freedom is allowing people to make bad choices. There's not enough guardrails in society that are helping to nudge people in the direction of virtue. And so we need more government to step in and sort of form people's consciences and shape the society in a way that's oriented to the common good. So they would say liberty is and virtue are in it have this sort of antagonistic relationship where liberty is getting in the way. We need less liberty so that people can be more virtuous. And what fusionists would say is, no, no, these two things are mutually reinforcing. We need to care about both of them. And if you sacrifice one, you're gonna lose both because there's sort of these two pillars that a good society rests on. A good society is both free and virtuous. And if you take one of those pillars away, or if we weaken it, if you allow it to become eroded, the whole thing is gonna collapse. You're not gonna end up with a virtuous society that's not free, or vice versa.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

Yeah, and I think you you do a really good job at the in the earlier chapters of your book of talking about how, like, in in some conceptions of fusion fusionism, people reduce this to basically the coalition between libertarians and conservatives that took place during the Cold War. But you argue that the philosophical synthesis is a lot more important than that. So kind of kind of walk us through that. Where does that understanding come from? Um, and how have like kind of these ideas been misconstrued in the past?

SPEAKER_02 7:39

I think a lot of people nowadays, I hear all the time people will use the word fusionism, but then when they define it, they'll say, Oh, it's the three-legged stool in the Cold War years, you know, the coalition that came together to vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and it was libertarians, economic libertarians who care about liberty, it was um social conservatives or religious traditionalists, and it was the Cold Warhawks. And these three constituencies came together, the three legs of the Reagan, you know, Reagan's three-legged stool, and that was that's fusionism. And I go, uh, okay. Of course, of course, in order to win an election, Ronald Reagan did have to put together a coalition of different groups. Of course, that is true as a historical matter. But the word fusionism was coined 20 years before Reagan was running for president, you know, or at least close to that, in I think it was 1962. Um, and the ideas were even older than that. And this was, again, it was not about bringing different groups together and getting them to play nicely with each other or vote for the same person. But rather, it was the idea: if you care about liberty, you also need to care about virtue. If you care about virtue, you also need to care about liberty. That these traditions, these two traditions, the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the classical liberal political tradition, need each other. And another piece of this also that was articulated by uh this guy named Frank Meyer at National Review Magazine, who's sort of the main the main guy who was writing these ideas in the middle, the middle part of the 20th century, he said the classical liberal political tradition and the Judeo-Christian moral tradition came together in the American founding in a way that was basically unique in history. They both had existed before that, and they had been, you know, present in different ways in different places, but they were really united or fused at the founding. And that's part of what we mean when we talk about American exceptionalism is the way in which we have had those two traditions that came together and really were both considered non-negotiable components of what our founding fathers were thought that they were doing with their project.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

Yeah, and I want to talk to you about that relationship between liberty and virtue in more detail because I do think that from, you know, we're we're we're both Christians. So we obviously believe in the cultivation of virtue. Like that's just something that you do as a Christian. We're called a discipleship, we're called to transform our lives. Like this is a part and parcel of what we do. But we, I think we, you and I have both also, as well as every other Christian libertarian that I know, we have arrived at the conclusion that like liberty is kind of uh like the means by which you can cultivate true virtue. But that's a really difficult concept for a lot of people to grasp. And kind of as you were saying before, uh, on the new right, there are definitely a lot of people that don't really care about the virtue anymore. It's just more about like seizing power. But then there are also a lot of libertarians that balk at the idea that virtue is even really a value that can be associated with libertarianism. So make the argument for us why do liberty and virtue need each other?

SPEAKER_02 10:20

It goes both ways. And so it depends a little bit who I'm talking to and where their starting point is and what I need to convince them of. So if I'm talking to somebody who is more of a traditional religious conservative and who's making who's you know coming at me with this argument that freedom is getting in the way of uh people being able to live virtuous lives, then I would say things like, well, just as a factual matter, if people aren't free to make choices for themselves, they're not gonna have very much moral credit for the things they do that are right. Right? If you do the right thing, but you do it because it was at the point of a gun, you don't really, you're not really actually exercising virtue. And you're certainly not learning uh the habits that make up a virtuous life, right? You're not learning to weigh the different possibilities that you're that you're faced with and figure out what is the right and what is the wrong um choice to make and why that is. Because you're just told this is the one choice that's available to you. We're taking all the other options off the table. You know, the government has decided what virtue means on your behalf and you have no say in the matter. Um, this is not actually actually conducive to a sort of thick or I would say meaningful understanding of virtue. Again, which is not just doing the right thing as a sort of rote response to uh coercion, but rather weighing an understanding and being formed as somebody who understands what what a good life and what good habits and ver of you know virtue actually requires and means. So there is a certain amount of freedom that is necessary in order for you to be able to even engage in the pursuit of virtue. Um, I think that's the first thing that I would say. And another part of it too is um that there are just things that we've learned through time that if you care about virtue, um a free market and sort of a classically liberal, liberal um uh free society is one that actually produces the conditions that that lead to more virtuous outcomes in a variety of ways. So, for example, um, statistically speaking and empirically speaking, although we have a First Amendment here that prevents there from being an established religion in this country, um, uh we have higher religiosity, right? Higher church attendance, higher proportion of American people who have always said that they believe in God, that they pray regularly, that they believe in the afterlife, um, than we have in many European countries where they have had, in some cases still have, or until recently had, an established church. Because bringing the government in and sort of having a state support for religion doesn't actually do anything to make the people believe that the thing is real. And in fact, in many ways, it um it takes the pressure off of churches to feel like they have to meet the needs, uh the spiritual and other needs of their of their parishioners, of their of their members, um, because they're gonna get this hacked dollars regardless, right? And so what we see is that the sort of bringing coercion and mixing government in with religion doesn't do anything to make the populace more religious or more virtuous. And if anything, statistically speaking, it can actually interfere with that. That's just one of those things we've seen. Um, another thing would be just generally speaking, free markets and free trade and sort of a liberal economic um system is one that produces more wealth and more prosperity, and therefore more resources with which people can then pursue their sort of excellence that is part and parcel of virtue, right? Part of what it means to be to pursue a virtuous life is to try to become the most excellent version of our versions of ourselves. And certainly you can do that if you are in the gulag, and you can do that if you're living in abject poverty. But you have more resources with which to do to live out, you know, to exp to sort of take the gifts that God has given you and do something with them when you are living in a prosperous society. And so that's the thing that that the sort of fruits of a free market enterprise system give us that you don't get in other places. And so I think when I'm talking to somebody again who's starting from the belief that virtue matters and is a little bit unclear about why they should also care so much about liberty, I would make these kinds of arguments. Um and I would also probably make the argument, I I always try to say this. I think liberty is um individual liberty is both an instrumental good, but it brings about these other goods, but it's also a good in and of itself for me. I just think that if you think slavery is bad, it's because the denial of freedom is is is a problem. It's because freedom is itself is a good thing. And and so that's a virtue-based or a moral argument that I would make for freedom as well, just off the bat. Like that like right away, if you're gonna tell me that freedom isn't important uh for the virtuous society that you're trying to build, I'm gonna wonder um what that says about your belief about human dignity, right? And and and that sort of thing. All that was that was all one side, right? I would make I would make a different argument if I was talking to a libertarian who's starting out caring a lot about liberty and is less comfortable with virtue. Um, so when I'm talking to my libertarian friends and colleagues, um, and I've done this many times, I I would, I would make an argument about how, you know, the found the American founders said repeatedly, you read, you read through the fact the writings of the American founding, repeatedly they said things like, this system will not, this system of um divided powers and limited government that we're that we're producing, this constitutional republic, it's not going to survive. And we will not remain free unless the people are virtuous. It virtue is required in order for limited government to have any chance of working. If people are not self-governing, if they don't feel like they can trust their neighbors to do right by them, to make good on a business deal, to step up and help them out in a time of hardship, all the things that virtue that you know go into a virtuous culture and a virtuous society, then they're they're gonna demand more government interference, more government, more big government to come in and solve problems for them because they can't turn to their neighbor, because they can't trust their business partner, so on and so forth. So we need virtue in order to stave off people rationally demanding big government. So you won't get, you won't, you'll just get more concentration of power in the state, in the hands of the state, um, if you don't have a virtuous population. So we need to care about both these things. The founders believed it. I think libertarians today tend to downplay this or to overlook them this. Um, and so and I understand it because there's a sense of like, well, I don't know what's right for you. I don't know how you should live. You you're gonna have to make that decision for yourself. And I don't wanna, I don't wanna have a say in that. But I always, I always come back with, look, I think there are good and bad ways to live your life. I think there are there are better and worse ways. Um, there are choices and life lifestyle choices that do conduce to human flourishing, and there are some that don't. And we're allowed to have opinions about that. Now, if you want to try to use the coercive power of the state to impose what you think is the right way to live on everyone else, then I'm gonna object as a libertarian. But if you're just talking about whether there is wisdom to be found in the tradition that was handed down to us of thousands of years of trial and error, you know, human trial and error. And if you think that there's something wrong with saying that we've learned some lessons about what are the right ways and the wrong ways to live, I think you've really missed the boat there. And I think unfortunately, too many libertarians are too uncomfortable, too, so afraid of seeming like they're judging somebody else or imposing one way of life on everybody else, that they've become a little bit overly morally relativistic. And as a result, young people today do not, the left is also very guilty of this. And so many young people today feel like they have been given no guidance whatsoever about what a good life even looks like or how to begin trying to pursue one. And they're lost and they're alienated and they're going looking for answers. And the only if the only place that they're finding answers are in the sort of dark corners of the of the neoreactionary uh internet, then that's where they're gonna go to find the answers because we're not offering them an alternative. So we have to, we have to care about these deeper questions, deep existential questions about what does a good life look like? What are our obligations to each other? For what were we made? You know, um, we have to, we have to engage with those. We we just cannot be totally neutral the way so many libertarians have historically wanted to be. Um but we can stop, but we can and should stop short of trying to legislate the our answers to those questions.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Right. Yeah. And this is where I think like there are there are too many libertarians that fall into the trap, especially non-religious libertarians that fall into the trap of looking at libertarianism as kind of like a religion in and of itself. And so when libertarianism is the end instead of the means to the end, I think that creates a lot of problems for the liberty movement. Um and it's it's it's repulsive to a lot of people that do look at the world in moral terms. So I want to talk to you about the consequences, or I want you to talk to my audience rather, about the consequences of conservatism minus liberty and libertarianism minus virtue. So when conservatives say that liberty is not a value, and when libertarians say that they're not concerned about virtue, what damage does that do to both the conservative and the liberty movement?

SPEAKER_02 18:44

And I should probably say it's very there are very few people, only on the fringes, are you gonna find somebody on the new right who's actually gonna come out and say, I think liberty is a problem, or I want there to be less freedom, or um, I mean, sometimes they will they will basically they will basically say that, but most of the time they'll couch it in other terms, although, you know, they're not admitting it. This isn't, but I think it's fair to say that that is ultimately what where they're coming down is they're saying I think liberty is getting in the way of people living good lives. Um so um so I I mean illiberalism or authoritarianism on the right is has gotten a lot of attention in recent years. There seems to be a lot of energy behind it. There seems to be a lot of young people, especially young men on the right, who are attracted by these new right ideas, these sort of big government conservatives, conservative ideas, anti-fusionist, forget your liberty, in some cases, forget your virtue too. Again, politics is war, and that's all that matters, is that we need to be willing to acquire state power uh for ourselves and use it to reward our friends and punish our enemies, that sort of approach to politics. Um, there's a lot of attention and seemingly a lot of energy behind these ideas. But in fact, I think what's happening on the right right now is quite analogous to a thing that happened five or 10 years earlier on the left, which is as the sort of extreme fringe woke, you know, most extreme woke posit uh views sort of came to dominate the Democratic Party and the sort of broad left of center politically, um, what you found was actually this is not um a set of beliefs that represented the average, let's you know, forget the average American, even the average like Democratic primary voter was not on board with this crazy extreme identity politics that was being practiced by the party. So you had this like co-opting of the movement by a tiny sliver of the fringe on the far left who convinced everybody that actually what they believe was the future, and therefore you need to get on board or we're gonna, or we're gonna run you out. You know, it's not gonna be a place for you anymore. And that didn't work. It doesn't, it doesn't, I mean, I think a big part of the reason that we got another second Donald Trump uh term in office is because the American people were not going to stand for that. Um, there was a backlash. They they were just deluding themselves. They were so online, they were so in their own echo chamber of thinking everybody thinks what that we that what the same way that we think, that they lost control or they lost sight of what this country actually is, which is essentially like a center right, like broadly classically liberal place where people want to coexist in peace with their neighbors, not to dominate and destroy their neighbors, right? And to run them out of society. So there this this backlash that came for the left, I worry is going to come for the right next. If if the if the Republican Party and the broad sort of political right allows this tiny sliver of neoreactionary, you know, sort of what what we what we used to think of as like the alt-right. These voices are becoming ever more dominant over time. Um and uh but they're not actually representing an ever larger share of the population, right? The average Republican does not believe these things, the average American does not believe these things. And so I think politically speaking, this is actually a bad bet that's being made. It's a mistake, it's a missed based on a mistaken premise that they that a lot of these guys, again, it's a lot of young people, especially young men, they're very online. They're they've Built this echo chamber for themselves where they think that women are the enemy and the problem in society, uh, where they think that non-white, non-European um immigrants should be expelled from the country in some cases, where like there's just this these really radical views that do not reflect the America that's out there celebrating the 250th anniversary of our country or something. Um, and I think that this is a huge mistake that that they're that the the again the sort of Republican Party and the and the political right itself is gonna have to wake up to, or else we're just gonna see the pendulum swing back to the left again. We're just gonna see both sides instead of us sort of it's really ironic that the American people are sort of in a more much more in the center, but what we see is this like what radical swing swings from left to right as they try to say, like, wait, no, not that. I don't want that. Let's try this over here. Um I just I keep saying I I really feel like there's a chance, there's there's an uh a lane for whichever party could just like, for example, nominate in the next presidential election, nominate somebody normal. Nominate somebody normal. That's America is so hungry for that. So that's more of a political operative's answer to what is the cost of this. But I think that that's one of the things that's that's going on here. And that's one of the reasons that there's a battle, there's sort of uh sort of little civil wars playing out on both the left and the right between their extreme factions and then the more moderate factions who say, like, you're driving us off a cliff. Uh, and we and and so they're it's gonna be really interesting again to see on both sides which which faction comes out on top on both of the on both the left and the right going forward.

SPEAKER_01 23:36

Yeah, I couldn't agree with that analysis more. And what's really interesting is you mentioned is that a lot of the people that are are kind of involved in rejecting these fusionist ideas are doing it on very anti anti-like almost anti-intellectual grounds. Like it's it's a lot of like online trolling, people that just want to be incendiary, that don't have really any social relationships outside of uh the internet, which is why they can make wild claims about other people that never actually met before. But in in your book, as you talk about the development of the philosophy of fusionism, it really focuses on kind of two great intellectuals, Friedrich Hayek and then Frank Meyer. And I want to talk about each of them in turn. And I want to start with Hayek and the role that he plays in your story of fusionism. Now, what's really interesting about Hayek and the Austrian squad figures like Mises and Rothbard is that with respect to religion, they're all kind of like agnostic a little bit. Like it's it's very, like they're not, they're not opposed to Christianity uh in any meaningful way, but they don't necessarily fully endorse it. However, like as I as I read through their works, I just I find a lot of the claims that they make to be deeply compatible with Christianity. So uh let's start with Friedrich Hayek. He's the really the only one in the libertarian tradition that non-libertarians seem to know, right? Like any non-libertarian that talks about libertarian philosophers, Hayek's like the only guy uh that they that they seem to be aware of. So talk about Hayek and his his promotion of libertarian ideals and how he how he contributed to this fusionist project.

SPEAKER_02 24:54

Yeah, so so Hayek is obviously the libertarian economist. He's he founds the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947. And I start my open the book with the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. Even though the Mont Pelerin Society was a sort of European, there were Americans there as well, but it was founded by a European, it was mostly Europeans, it was really reacting to the devastation that Europe had just undergone in the in the Second World War, um, and trying to figure out how do we rebuild out of the rubble, how do we rebuild a free society on this continent that has been ravaged by both fascism and now is being is being that you have a half of it who has been taken over by by a communist system, right? And so these are like it's a sort of a remnant situation where these scholars are defenders, they see themselves as as liberals or quote unquote old Whigs, meaning defenders of a free society against these totalitarian systems. And they feel like they're they're losing, they're on the back foot right now. Like these systems are, these unfree systems are defeating free systems everywhere. And even like in when Hayek writes Road uh The Road to Serfdom, um he's talking about how even in a place like the UK, which was on obviously on the right side of uh fighting against fascism in World War II, but it's already now moving in the direction of more of a planned economy, right? And relinquishing much of that commitment to individual freedom and free markets and a free free government, free society, and that this is a mistake, and how do we push back against this? And it's happening in the US as well, it's happening all over. Um, this is a liberal society that's founded. And I start with that because my point is that what looks like liberalism, what what is what we would refer to as liberalism in a European context, ends up being the model for the American conservative movement that emerges in a that for the conservative movement that emerges in the United States in these years after World War II. So when the Philadelphia Society gets founded by Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review, um, and Ed Fulner, the founder of the Heritage Foundation, the Philadelphia Society is explicitly founded to be an American version of the Montpellier Society. These are conservatives. This is the Heritage Foundation, right? And these are conservative guys, um, but they look to this liberal organization in Europe as the as the organization that they're trying to mimic when they found when they found the Philadelphia Society. So the American conservative movement was always very, very liberal. It always had these sense of we are the defenders of the free society. We are people who love liberty and we are anti-New Deal, we are anti-socialists, we are anti-communicommunist, um, we believe in limited government, we believe in the separation of powers and all of that that was built into the American founding. And that's what sets us aside as conservatives. In the European context, the word conservative would not have been used to describe those commitments, but here it was. And so that isn't really important because I think you can't understand what's going on in the second half of the 20th century in America as this conservative movement comes into being in all these institutions, like the Philadelphia Society, like the Heritage Foundation, like CPAC, like Young Americans for Freedom, all the different institutions that make up the conservative movement in America, you can't understand them without recognizing how liberalism, classical liberalism, was baked in from the very beginning, and how somebody like Friedrich Hayek could be almost the patron saint of the idea of articulating the ideas that they're, that they are now trying to bring over to this country and implement in our politics. That said, Hayek also, I think, some libertarians have a mistaken impression of what Hayek believed and what he advocated for, because he actually, at that same first Montpellerin Society meeting, he gets up and gives a speech in which he says, we are not defenders of laissez faire. Laissez faire is going too far. That means hands off. What we need is a government that is that where the rule we what we care about is rule of law. What we care about is a stability of order. What we care about is facilitating market competition. And there needs to be some government for that. And this is what causes famously Mises to storm out of the room and say you're all a bunch of socialists, because Hayek was actually not willing to go as far as he wanted, um, as he would have wanted to go. Hayek was kind of a uh a moderate libertarian. He he wants rule of law, he cares very much about the idea that we need to have laws that are written down on the books that are clear, understandable, that people can look at, and they can then conform, they can build their lives with a clear understanding of when is state coercion going to be used against me and when will it not. That's what his understanding of rule of law was. And he thought this was crucial to a free society and a good society and a functioning free market was rule of law. Rule of law does not mean anarchism, right? It doesn't. You have to have a law in order to have rule of law. And so this is why I think Hayek works as a sort of patron saint of American conservatism in a way that a Rothbard or Ramesis doesn't, um, because he was somewhere a little bit in between those positions. And he believed and he also was a huge defender of the idea of tradition. He's again not thought of that way by most libertarians. But I think when I was doing my research for this book, I was really struck by how much of a quote unquote traditionalist he was, in the sense that he believes, again, that the wisdom that was learned through trial and error by humankind over the course of centuries and millennia, that that is what tradition is, and we ought to respect it as opposed to trying to wipe it, wipe it away and clear the, clear the um, clear the table and build a new society, a new free society from the ground up from scratch, in a sort of utopian French revolutionary enlightenment way. He was not a defender of that at all. So he was quite traditionalist, actually. So again, that is why he works as such an important figure in the American conservative um uh sort of tradition and and history, while also himself being, again, an old Whig, basically a liberal.

SPEAKER_01 30:25

Right. Yeah. Well, let's let's talk about Frank Meyer, because he is a figure I was not familiar with until I read your book. Uh, and yet, as you, as you claim, he's really, of all of the conservative thinkers of the 20th century, the one most responsible for promoting these fusionist ideas. So, so who is he? Where did he come from? How did he come to the idea of fusionism? Talk to us about Frank Meyer and why he's so central in your analysis of fusionism.

SPEAKER_02 30:50

He's a super interesting guy because he starts out actually as a literal communist. He is a professional recruiter for the Communist Party. Um, he's American, but he goes over to the UK and he's studying at he's studying at Oxford and he's studying at um the London School of Economics and whatnot. But he's actually just studying in order to have a cover, a reason to be over there while he's trying to recruit students to come join his Communist Party cell. So he's literally a Soviet agent in the early part of his life. And he, his wife is also a professional communist, and they get they get married and they're working, they come back to the United States again, they're working for the Communist Party. And at some point, he just starts to have doubts and he starts to have reservations. And he picks up a copy of Of all things, Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom and reads that. And he also picks up some other books that are sort of books in the libertarian canon and starts to read them. And he starts to study American history and he starts to realize that there's no way to reconcile the things that he's uh the sort of communist worldview with the American uh legacy and with these just truisms about human nature and about how economics works. And so he defects from the communist party and he spends his whole rest of his life worried that the communists, like the Soviets, are gonna assassinate him as a deserter, um, which fortunately doesn't happen. Um, but he he leaves he leaves communism, he he leaves that world, um, and he and his wife come with him as well, and they end up becoming true believers in a sort of libertarian-inflected conservatism. He is a big fan of Hayek, he basically argues that there are only three proper roles of government, which is the protect life, liberty, property, right? A very libertarian view. Um, but he's also staunchly anti-communist, which means he's sort of a Cold War hawk, which in that in that era puts him more in the conservative camp than the libertarian camp. The libertarians tend to be more anti-war, um, the conservatives tend to be more Cold War hawk. So he's in the conservative camp because of his because of his experience with communism, makes him makes him see this as an existential threat. We must defeat the Soviets. Um, and so he's in the in the conservative world. He gets hired right off um right immediately when National Review magazine is founded in 1955 by Bill Buckley. Buckley recruits a bunch of sort of um big name conservative writers to come be contributing writers and editors. So he contribu he recruits Frank Meyer to be the book's editor at National Review, and he and Meyer becomes a senior, like one of the senior staff, a small core of senior staffers at National Review from 1955 when it's founded until 1972, when Meyer passes away. He dies of cancer relatively young. Um, but during that period, he was super influential. Now, because he dies in 72, I think most people have never heard of him. You know, he sort of disappears from the conversation, and that's understandable. But during that period where he was writing, where he was running the book section, where he was one of the core leader, you know, editors that was running the magazine, and where he was just an intellectual influence. He was writing articles in which he was defending these idea ideas of fusionism, articles and a book, um, he was like known as being the voice of the conservative movement in America. He was the moral conscience, he was the intellectual sort of uh expositor of the ideas. And he said, What we believe as American conservatives is liberty and virtue. We are, we are defenders of the fusion of these two traditions. And this was not bel this was not accepted by 100% of people in the conservative movement, but it was became a it became the accepted consensus. It became this idea upon which the whole conservative movement was then built, was this idea of this is what we are, this is what we believe, liberty and virtue. You can't just have one or the other. We need to care about both of them.

SPEAKER_01 34:24

Yeah, and you talk about within the context of kind of fusionism, especially in the mid-20th century, that fusionism really emphasizes proper institutions. And these are things that Christians very much care about. Things like having uh strong families, a good education system, churches, voluntary associations. These are all things that are a part of kind of the fusionist project. It's not just, you know, the smear about libertarianism is that we're all a bunch of rugged individualists, which is not true. Like, right, like real liberty uh is in no way contradictory towards having these strong institutions. But talk about the role that these institutions played in the development of fusionism, especially within the conservative movement, like emphasizing the need for strong families, strong churches, things of that nature, and what we lose if we don't have those institutions in place.

SPEAKER_02 35:08

Yeah, there's a quote, I'm owning this exactly right, but I quoted in my book. It's from an article by Virginia Pastrel, who's a former editor in chief of reason, the magazine I work at. And she had this thing where she said, she was talking about capitalism and how you know libertarians and defenders of capitalism are always accused, we're always told like that this is atomizing, that the market is atomizing. And she says, the market is not atomizing except in as much as she said it's liberating, but it's not atomizing, except in as much as atoms have a tendency to form molecules, which in turn have a formed uh have a tendency to form larger structures. In other words, we as human beings naturally come together to build things together. Because you can't do very much on your own in this world, right? You need other people. And we are collaborative and we are social creatures. Um, and so libertarianism and free markets, uh the sort of free enterprise system banks on that. You can't have a market without people to trade with each other, right? You can't have a business without people to collaborate with each other. Um, you can't have a market without competition, which requires multiple actors. So it's not atomizing, is the is the point. Like the institutions that people choose to form, to come together to form of various kinds, are a huge part of what makes the system work and what makes a free society function. That's true in the market. It's also true in the sort of non-market part of civil society. So this is the idea that we, again, going back to the idea that if we're not gonna have government that forces people to live virtuous lives, as however govern the person in power in government defines that, um, if you're not gonna have government that decides what virtue is and imposes it upon people, then we need to have institutions of various kinds, from the family to the church to other various other organs of civil society that are gonna help develop these ideas and pass them on to the next generation, inculcate people with the lessons of how to live a good life. Um, you need institutions, you need organizations, you need ways, uh groups of people and communities that can do that work if government's not gonna do it. And so if we don't want there to be a totalitarian government that impos that lives everyone's life for them, then we need to be, we need to be, we need to recognize the importance of institutions that are gonna do that work and not be hostile to them. And there is a certain form of liberalism that can be a hostile to civil society institutions. John Stuart Mill, uh, in some of his writings, he could fall into this where he basically says, like the church or the family or other sort of other institutions that have nothing to do with government, but they're still they're still constraining people's freedom. They're they're imposing a sort of um uniformity of thought and lifestyle on people, and so we should be against them and we should tear them down in order to liberate people to live how they want to live instead of how the church tells them they should live or whatever. And this is very, very dangerous. This is something that Hayek totally gets, actually. He understands that these institutions are playing a crucial role, and so we should not be just willy-nilly tearing them down or attacking them just because, yeah, in some ways they do constrain your choices. When you're in a family, you have obligations to your family members. You're not gonna be as free as you would be if you just lived alone. Um, but that that doesn't mean that we should bring government in to try to try to uh you know, to try to liberate people from the the constraints of the family or the church or anything else, that we should be respectful of that those institutions actually emerged uh for a reason because they serve a really important purpose in life. Um so that's the the philosophical, like the theoretical case for this. And then just in practice, all these institutions that were founded, I mentioned a few of them earlier, but Young Americans for Freedom and ISI and the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society and the Philadelphia Society and all of these groups, and on the more libertarian side as well, IHS and so on, these organized liberty fund, they're all formed because they these are people who believe in the mission of advancing liberty and advancing a free society and defending and sort of laying the groundwork, like the philosophical foundations of that will be required for a free society to survive. And so they say, we got to do it ourselves. It's our job to like come together and to advance the things we believe in. Uh if we're not gonna, if we don't do it, who will, right? That's that's the that's the fusionist approach to social change. Not reflexively reaching for the government lever, path a law to solve a problem, but rather, okay, how can we build something or join something or create something that can help solve this problem in a non-coercive, non-governmental way and treat government as a last resort instead of the first resort?

SPEAKER_01 39:30

Yeah, that that's perfect. I also want to talk to you about the role that Christianity plays in the development of fusionism. I think we we can analyze this in kind of two different ways. I want to talk about how Christianity impacted the development of fusionist theory and philosophy. So, in other words, like the for the if for the fusionists like Frank Meyer and even people like his predecessors like Friedrich Hayek, what role did Christianity and Christian values play in their understanding of the need for institutions and the relationship between liberty and virtue? And then on the other side of that, what kind of impact did fusionism have on Christianity in America?

SPEAKER_02 40:03

So the first question is some of these guys were not, like again, Hayek was not particularly religious himself. Frank Meyer was interesting because he was an atheist Jew who then becomes, when he when he sort of leaves communism and becomes a conservative, he became a sort of unaffiliated Christian. Um, and then on his deathbed, he converts to Catholicism. So his was truly a lifelong journey. Um, but um the point there is that whether or not an individual person, like Russell Kirk or a lot of the figures that I mentioned in the in the book, were themselves, had themselves a lot of the American founders too, had sort of unorthodox or um complicated relationships with organized religion. Uh so I want to acknowledge that up front that they were not all perfectly living out the sort of Christian lifestyle in um in any in by any means. But what they recognized, and what is I think true, is that religion, Christian, the sort of Judeo-Christian tradition and Christianity in particular, gives us the moral vocabulary that we then can use to explain why a free society matters and why individual liberty matters, right? So whenever I talk about why I'm a libertarian, I start with the fact that I'm I'm Catholic. But anyway, so I believe that every human person was created in the image of God and therefore has this dignity that that it that it therefore makes it wrong for one person or one set of people to trample on the freedom of another set of other people to make choices for themselves. What could possibly give you the right to do that to another human being that was created in the image of God? Right. So Christianity gives me the vocabulary to defend liberty. Um, and the the there's been a lot of great books and work done by by theologians who are way smarter and more knowledgeable than me, but about how you really don't even get the idea of a, of a, of an individual, the idea of an individual person with rights, individual rights, really only can exist in a Christian, in a Christian cosmos, right? Like you, you, you just in before Christianity, you had a world in which um you were part of a society where you had no freedom or rights to yourself. You were a cog in the wheel, you were you were a place in the great chain of being, you you know, you you occupied a place in the great chain of being. The person at the top told you how to live and you had no choice in the matter. And really it was Christianity that that sort of broke open the idea of the individual being something with moral value all in and you know, all into himself. And so I think there are a lot of ways in which religion and Christianity and and that that religious tradition um made it possible for us to have liberal, a liberal society like the one we live in in the United States. That that this is, again, when I talk about the founders, the American founding being fusionist, which I have an article in the July issue of Reason, we had a big, you know, America 250 issue of the magazine, uh, as so many people did. And my my contribution to that was an essay about how the founding was fusionist. The founders were both religious. They believed very deeply that we needed moral virtue in order to have a free society. Um, and they were also liberal, but they were not liberal in that sort of rationalistic way that wants to tear down civil society institutions. That they were not rationalistic in that way that treats the church or religion or organized religion as a threat to freedom. They realized that these two, that these two things need to coexist. And that was when Tocqueville came in the 1830s, he said that that was the thing that struck him the most, was that in Europe, we said this the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty marching in opposite directions. But in the US, the spirit of religion and the spirit of religion of uh liberty march together. You know, that we somehow manage to combine these two things in our society and in our culture in a way that feels very natural to us and seems very weird to other people. So I think that that that that's a big part of this story as well. Whether or not today's you know, liberty movement is mostly secular, I would say probably statistically, it probably is mostly secular, but libertarians need to recognize the way, the ways in which we are carrying on, like we owe a lot, we're standing on the shoulders of many Christian giants, really, with our philosophy, because it was it was such an important part of. Creating the ideas that we take for granted, I think.

SPEAKER_01 44:05

Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. And, you know, I was able to attend your session at Acton University, and I think I mentioned something to you about this at the end of your session where I'm involved in the Libertarian Party of Kentucky, and a lot of our new members are all Christians, and they are kind of coming to a lot of these same conclusions. And what's been really interesting is that many of the, many of the people that are like that are Christians within the Libertarian Party of Kentucky were not Christians, or they were like nominally Christian. And then as they became more libertarian, they became more interested in Christianity, which I thought, I think that's a really interesting dynamic at play here. But I kind of want to go back to the historical analysis that we've been we've been outlining. So you argue in the book that fusionism reaches its apex in the Reagan administration. So it was obviously very successful. Ronald Reagan ran two of the most successful national campaigns in American history. But you argue that the demise of fusionism was based on its success. Because it was so successful in the 1980s, that sowed the seeds for its eventual failing. So talk to us about that dynamic. How did fusionism reach its apex at intellectually? And then how did that contribute to its long-term decline?

SPEAKER_02 45:08

Yeah, Reagan read National Review. He was a fan of Hayek and Meyer and all these guys. He really was, in many ways, a philosophical fusionist. And when he ran, he he found a way to popularize those ideas in a way that didn't sound so philosophical, but he really was articulating liberty and virtue in so many ways. And when he, I talk in the book about how after he was elected in 1980, he gave a speech at CPAC in which he um he called back to Frank Meyer. Meyer had died eight uh eight years earlier in 1972, so he wasn't around to see Reagan, Reagan's uh political success. But and most people by then probably had already forgotten about Frank Meyer. He was not, you know, the most famous person in the world, but but Reagan remembered him and sort of um gave him credit for articulating the ideas that made what laid the foundation for the Reagan campaign. Uh, this idea of, again, caring about limited government, of free markets, of getting government out of the way so people can flourish, um, about caring a lot about virtue, but not being really, really reluctant to want to use the power of the state to enforce virtue, right? All of that is present in the Reagan years. Now, he's not a perfect embodiment, he's a politician, he makes compromises. Um, it may and I have a whole article, a whole chapter in the book, and also a whole article in reason from a couple of years ago, in which I went through the ways in which he was and wasn't. Um, he did he did and didn't govern as a fusionist, but certainly in terms of his rhetoric and his beliefs, he he maybe couldn't always live up to the fusionist standards, but he wanted to. Like his heart was in the right place. Um, so what happens after that, though, I think, I think you have this sort of series of things. You have Reagan's incredible political set success in terms of landslide victories in 1980 and 1984. 1989, you have the fall of the Berlin Wall, 1991, you have the Soviet Union collapse. And this created this sense of incredible momentum that, like, the the few the gen, not that they were necessarily using the word fusionism, but the sort of general idea of an American-style conservative free market, capital, liberal democratic capitalist society has now established itself as the victor on the world stage. There, how could anybody possibly doubt after these this 11-year stretch that this is the future and that these ideas are right and those those older ideas are wrong? Um, I think a lot of conservatives felt like, okay, we no longer have to do the hard work of spending a lot of time explaining and exploring and defending why freedom and liberty are, you know, liberty and virtue are good. And we can pivot to just trying to win elections and get good policies enacted. Tax reform, you know, whatever. We want to, we want to win back the House of Representatives in 1994. We want so that so that we can, you know, for the Republican Party so that they can do good policy. Um, it became much more a movement about winning concrete electoral and political battles, and much less a movement focused on exploring uh ideas and passing on those that sort of philosophical foundation to the next generation. Uh, I think that's understandable why that happened and why they made that calculation, because they felt like obviously our ideas have won. Who could doubt it? Um, but what I think we see in practice is if you don't do the hard work of continuing to engage with ideas and inculcate the next generation with those ideas, then they will dry up. They will disappear from the bloodstream. Or, like, I think I uh another analogy I really like is the idea that they sort of they felt like, okay, we built the philosophical foundation first, that's done. Now we can build the political structure on top of it. But what happens is if you're not like tending to the f to the foundation all the time, then it erodes underneath the f underneath the political structure structure. And so now we have this political structure, the Republican Party and all of the uh advocacy organizations and everything that they don't, and they're staffed by people who don't, especially the younger generations, who don't know what they believe. They don't know what it means to be a conservative, they don't know why these ideas matter. And in fact, in many cases, they've abandoned them and they've embraced this illiberal conservatism. It's not really conservative, that um, and that and what matters to them is winning elections and sort of uh owning the left, right? It's not about principles anymore because because the foundation has eroded. And that's a huge problem. That's a huge problem that I think a lot of a lot of older conservatives and and people in the movement um just they they didn't realize how how dangerous it could be if they if they didn't do the work of passing on these ideas. And so now we have this hard, this hard challenge ahead of us where we are trying to rebuild the foundation and shore up the foundation underneath a structure that already exists. So that's I think the analogy that I have for where we are, sort of the right of center, broadly speaking, the political right in America right now. But I think it can be done and it has to be done. I mean, we have no choice but to try to do that work of rebuilding the foundation. That's my book is uh just a first, my my a first stab at trying to solve this problem is to bring people back to thinking about the history of these ideas and why they matter, what conservatives in America once claimed to believe, why they thought those things were true, and therefore why those things were not just they were not just um uh expediencies that made sense during the Cold War context but are no longer relevant today. No, if liberty and virtue are both necessary for human flourishing, that's true regardless of whether the Soviet Union exists or not. And so abandoning, abandoning that commitment um is going to be a huge mistake now as well as then.

SPEAKER_01 50:11

Yeah, and and you're you're absolutely right. And it is, it's been kind of wild to see how the conservative movement has changed over the last 15 or 20 years, because I was, I I I grew up in a fairly conservative church. And in the late 90s and early 2000s, conservatism was being pro-family and having traditional sexual values and um being very much aligned with Christianity. Like these were the things that conservatives really cared about. And if you look at the younger generation of conservative influencers today, none of them care about any of that stuff at all. And it's kind of shocking to see how their behavior really kind of emulates a lot of the libertine behavior of the left from 20 years ago. So there has been that shift. And so I think it would be easy to be cynical and think, well, the conservative movement is more or less lost, and we we shouldn't, we shouldn't worry about even trying to build a coalition with conservatives, but that's not necessarily true. And as you argue in your book, there is a path forward. So I want to get your perspective on that as we begin to to to wrap up today. What would a renewed fusionism look like today? Like how do we reclaim these fusionist ideas and help get both the conservative and the liberty movement back on the right track?

SPEAKER_02 51:20

I spent a lot of time thinking about this because you have a chicken and egg problem. You have, which I, which I don't want to downplay the how big of a challenge this is, where you have a thing where government has grown so large and intrusive into so many parts of our lives that it has crowded out civil society institutions. A lot of those institutions have atrophied or disappeared because they because their whole purpose for being is now being is now being taken care of by some government program, um, welfare program or whatever. And so you have this like very anemic or uh atrophied civil society. Um, people are not in the habit of forming, in this sort of chokevillian sense, you know, famously he wrote about how Americans would just come together to form a to form an ad hoc committee to solve a problem. When they saw a problem, they tried to solve it. They didn't expect Washington to do it, they would solve it themselves. We've gotten out of the habit of that because government has grown so big and so involved in so many aspects of our lives that people no longer think of themselves personally as being on the front lines of it's my job to solve a problem in my community. They're like, well, I pay my taxes, it's somebody else's job, right? So once you have government that grows in that way and you have civil society that atrophies in that way, then when we say we want less government, end that program, cut that spending, whatever, then everybody understandably says, well, then who's gonna step in and do it? Because there's nobody, right? There's, you know, we're not in the habit of having people think of themselves as being the ones who are supposed to solve their own problems. Who's gonna help somebody who's in need? Are they just gonna be die? Is the the widow and the orphan gonna be dying on the street, starving on the streets like they don't want that? And so we have this thing where like, we can't, we can't actually rebuild civil society until we cut government, but we can't cut government because there's no civil society to do the job that the government's currently doing. This is a really big problem that we've gotten ourselves into, a political problem. And just, you know, I I worry about it a lot. I think we saw actually with with Doge that um it sounds great to take a take a sledgehammer to government programs, but in fact, people die if you don't have somebody ready to step in and help those people. Um so I think we we as libertarians should should think really long and hard about the lessons from that experience actually going forward, just in terms of creating, crafting better public policy about how to accomplish the things we wanna we want to accomplish. Um but so so I I came down when I thought I thought a lot about it and I decided ultimately I think obviously we should still continu we continue to care about shrinking government and constraining government and rolling back intrusive government policies and all of that. That matters. But I actually think the bigger thing is rebuilding civil society first. And if if I were gonna give advice to the movement as a whole, I would say we should redirect some of our energy and attention towards thinking about how we can try to start solving problems without government and demonstrating then to everybody that it can be done in a non-coercive, non-state way, solving social problems, trying to train people to think again in terms of them, it being their own responsibility to step up and help their neighbors and um make change in their communities. Um, and that that that that that that piece probably needs to happen first. Because if you do it well, you can route around government, yeah, government's government being there is gonna make it harder. And it's gonna be in the getting in the way and it's gonna be annoying. But like markets are really amazing, and human ingenuity is really amazing. And so we should be able to find a way to outcompete. We should be trying to find ways to outcompete the state and to find better ways. Government is so bad at everything it does. We should be able to do it better. And yeah, it's gonna be harder because government's gonna be getting in the way, but we should be fighting that battle, and I think we should be thinking a lot in terms of how to rebuild civil society. So that's one piece. Another thing I came to the conclusion of during the course of researching this book, and I didn't start out thinking that this was gonna be my conclusion, but I was trying to answer the question of why are all these young people, especially young men on the right, being seduced by these ideas. And again, I alluded to this earlier. I think a big part of it is that they feel very, very lost. They feel like they're giving, they've been, they have been born into a world that's so morally relativistic that they where there is absolutely no one in their life who's willing to give them a roadmap for how to, what does a good life look like and how should I pursue flourishing in this life? And and so they're going and looking for answers. And libertarians and even conservatives have tended to be so much like, well, that's for the church to answer you, or like, that's not our job to have an answer to those questions. Um, I don't think we can afford to do that anymore. I think there is, there is a, again, I don't want to use public policy to tell people how to live. I don't want to legislate this. But I do think we need to be thinking about young people are hungry for help answering existential questions about how to live. And literature and philosophy and theology have those answers. And those are all things that are in our toolkit as fusionists, at least for me as a fusionist. I say, uh, the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and all again, everything that comes with it, that's part of my toolkit. That's part of what I'm defending as a fusionist. And so we shouldn't be afraid to use those resources and to bring that. I consider it like opening the the treasure chest and saying, like, this is part of what I have to offer you, is all this wisdom about how to live a good life. Um, and I don't want to, I don't want to use, I wanna keep this separate from government policy. I'm not trying to legislate this stuff. I'm just trying to say these resources are here, and you don't have to go watch Andrew Tate videos or something in order to get answers about what what your life should look like and how to find fulfillment. Like we have so much more to offer than we are currently offering young people. So that is another conclusion I came to in the course of writing, writing this. So I've been telling my friends who I'm lucky enough to be in DC and I have connections in all kinds of different institutions in the Liberty Movement. And I've been saying, like, listen, it's great to have um, you know, a fellowship where you teach public policy, like an economics 101 boot camp or whatever, that's great. But like maybe consider also doing a reading group for the Odyssey and the Iliad. People are hungry for the engaging at that level of, you know, what does history have to teach me about how to live a good life, also? And if you jump straight to, if you're if we're only ever talking about good public policy, young people are going like, yeah, I don't care about how to get squeeze another one or two percent of increase of economic productivity out of the economy if I feel like I'm never gonna be able to get married and find love and meeting and belonging in my life. Like that's irrelevant. These other questions are irrelevant to me unless I can answer these, these deeper foundational questions first. So that's that's part of my advice as well.

SPEAKER_01 57:34

Yeah. Well, final question I want to put to you today has to do with the church. And I think that in my experience, you know, I was in ministry for a long time and I'm I still very much have been involved in leadership in my church. Um, I when it comes to talking to Christians about politics, I feel like there's there's not a lot of philosophical reflection. Christians tend to either gravitate towards the left or the right. Uh, and when they do so, it's kind of a very surface level. Well, I think the people that are on the other side are bad, and I want to be good, and so I'm going to pick the side that I think is is good. But we we need to be able to get beyond that as a church. And I do think that fusionism is the right way forward for believers. So, how would you, if you had to take this idea of fusionism and market it to Christians, what would be your kind of inroads there? Given the fact that the church is very divided among the left-right spectrum, how do we go about the process of convincing believers that fusionism is the correct path forward politically?

SPEAKER_02 58:27

Man, that's a hard question. That's a tough question, yeah. Um part of it, I think, is I this is not even specifically specifically relevant to the church context, to be honest. I think this is just in general a thing that Americans are hungry for, because most Americans want to live in peace with their neighbors. And they don't want to live in a world where they feel like every single bat uh political battle is an existential battle, where um with life or death death stakes, where if if their side loses the next election, they they're gonna be thrown in the gulags, which I'm hearing people say all the time. Most Americans don't want to live that way, right? They don't want a civil war. They don't want to expel the other side from society or or not whatnot. And so talking about, I think, what liberalism gives us is a way of thinking about politics that's not politics as war. It's politics as a set of mechanisms and institutions that allow a pluralistic, diverse set of people who don't all agree with each other on the deepest questions and deepest values to nevertheless coexist peacefully with each other by choosing not to impose one way of life on everyone, by allowing for that diversity to flourish and for us to agree to disagree and for us to try to convert each other and persuade each other, but not reaching for the, you know, taking off the table the option of using state coercion to force to impose one way of one one lifestyle on everyone. This is the route to harmonious, peaceful coexistence, which is ultimately what I think most people want. And and so I think that that's probably the strongest. Now, there's a lot of people out there who are like on the fringes who are saying, like, forget that. Like that is weak, that's weak weakness, and what we want is domination. But I think that they're wrong about whether that their view reflects how most Americans, how most people actually want to live. And so I think we actually have the upper hand here in saying we have the ability to give you what you want, which is a healthy, harmonious, peaceful way of living with those who disagree with you. Um, and and that preserves the freedom for you to try to go out there and convert them and reach their hearts and bring them over to your side on the things that matter most to you. Um, and where you don't have to worry about being coercively prevented from living out your values or from having the freedom to do that work. We're offering a lot to them through the liberal, through the liberal framework. Um, and I think that would just be, I think we just need to remind people of of that, of what, of what you're actually sacrificing when you go all in on politics as war, enmity, and domination. I I think we have a lot to offer here within the church context and really in society at large.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:05

Yeah, I I totally agree with that. Well, Stephanie Slade, I really appreciate your time today. The book is Fusionism, Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, which will be out uh like in a month or two, I think. I don't know the exact release date. But before I let you go, tell people where they can find this book. Um, and then you again you write for a reason. You have a lot of uh content out there. Where can people find your work?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:25

Yeah, so the book will be out September 1st. It's currently available for presale. You can get it on Amazon, you can get it from the University of Notre Dame Press website directly. You can probably get it other places if you Google. Um, it's available for presale. So if you if you order it now, then it will show up on your doorstep on September 1st, or you can wait and go to a bookstore after September 1st. Um, I write at Reason, we're at reason.com. We also have a monthly print magazine that's very, very affordable and uh quite beautiful, if I may say so myself. So if you're interested for like 25 bucks a year, you can get 10 issues of the magazine delivered to your house and then you can hold the actual magazine in your hands. But if you don't want to, obviously everything goes up on our website at reason.com as well. And I'm on X at Slade SR. And um, yeah, I mean, I think that's that that's pretty much it. Sometimes I write for other places as well, and I always try to share that stuff on my X account.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:13

Perfect. Well, Stephanie, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:16

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:17

Thank you for listening to another episode of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to me at the Protestant Libertarian at gmail.com. You can also find me on Twitter. You can follow me at the handle at Pro Liberty Pod. Again, that is at Pro Liberty Pod. And you can also visit me at the Protestant Libertarian Podcast dot com. At the Protestant Libertarian Podcast.com, you can also support the Christians for Liberty Network and the Libertarian Christian Institute. Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode, and we will see you next Tuesday.