“The rise of America's conservative movement was possible because its intellectuals and leaders reconciled the competing principles of traditionalists and libertarians.
This balance, known as fusionism, was the work of Frank S. Meyer. In the 1950s and '60s, Meyer urged conservatives who valued custom and order to acknowledge the virtues of freedom, even as he pressed libertarians to see the danger of spurning tradition.
But fusionism, we learn from Daniel J. Flynn's "The Man Who Invented Conservatism," was Meyer's second attempt to reconcile a movement's competing interests. He made his first attempt as a communist.
Born in Newark, N.J., in 1909, Meyer had a comfortable upbringing. His father was a successful manufacturer who could house his wife and son in a luxury hotel and send Frank to a private school. By high school, he was already intellectually rebellious, and during his brief time at Princeton -- the administration forced him to withdraw in his second year -- he wrote pretentiously provocative essays and poems that foreshadowed his imminent political radicalism. He applied to Cambridge but was rejected; Oxford later accepted him.
In England, Meyer embraced the caviar communism of the educated and well-to-do. He founded a communist club at Oxford. At the London School of Economics, where he studied as a postgraduate, he founded a communist student paper and eventually got himself kicked out of the school and deported from the country. Back in America, he landed a job directing the communist Chicago Workers School. Meyer's romantic entanglements, some with married women, were many. But the last of these was with Elsie Philbrick (nee Bown). The two would marry and remain so for 31 years.
The follies of communism slowly dawned on Meyer. Serving briefly in the Army during World War II, he first encountered working-class Americans and discovered that they weren't what the party said they were. After the war he tried to reconcile communism with America's founding principles. That attempt at fusionism went nowhere, and he left the party. By 1951 he was testifying before the Subversive Activities Control Board. Soon Meyer had moved all the way to the right, and in 1955 he joined William F. Buckley Jr.'s new conservative journal, National Review.
Meyer's foil at National Review was James Burnham. Both had attended Princeton in the 1920s and both had been communists. Yet the narcissism of small differences prevailed at NR. Burnham, a former Trotskyite, was establishmentarian in his attitudes. Meyer, a former Stalinist, supported the ideological gate-crashers Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan in the 1960s. Meyer was also comfortable playing what Mr. Flynn calls the "conservative pope," as is clear from the title of his regular column: "Principles and Heresies." Burnham won most arguments over the journal's direction, in part because Meyer lived on a farm in Woodstock, N.Y., and rarely attended editorial meetings.
But Meyer was much more influential outside of the magazine. His book "In Defense of Freedom" (1962), in which he contended that the traditional role of American institutions was to preserve individual freedom, defined conservatism for a generation. His past life as a communist lent credibility to the book's warnings about collectivism and state power. He also delivered speeches around the country and used the skills he had developed as a communist student-organizer to shape groups like Young Americans for Freedom. And, as Mr. Flynn notes, "he spread fusionism by phone." Meyer was known among his fellow conservative scribblers for late-night, hourslong phone calls about policy and politics. In 1959, Mr. Flynn relates, Meyer paid Ma Bell $3,417, or almost 60% of his income from National Review.
Mr. Flynn speculates that Meyer applied Bolshevistic tactics in his efforts to keep conservatism pure. On the other hand, as editor of National Review's culture pages, he offered a forum for talented writers who didn't espouse conservative views. When he first became the section's editor in the late 1950s, he recruited the academics Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport, despite their more liberal politics. He was among the first to give Joan Didion a shot in print.
Toward the end of his life, Meyer flipped his fusionism by putting greater emphasis on order and institutional stability. By the time Meyer died of cancer in 1972, he'd grown almost despondent over the presidency of Richard Nixon. Eight years later, Ronald Reagan would prove the viability of Meyer's fusionist conservatism.
Much of Mr. Flynn's research is based on 15 boxes of Meyer's papers the author discovered collecting dust in a warehouse. The documents include "tens of thousands of letters" that clarify the growth of American conservatism, plus some randy notes to paramours Meyer would have been better advised to throw away when he got married. Sometimes Mr. Flynn's insights are obscured by his writing style. When he leaps into wordplay and metaphor, he doesn't always stick the landing. Long subordinate clauses abound.
Even so, Mr. Flynn has written a wise book about an important and overlooked American journalist and intellectual. With fusionist conservatism, Meyer didn't permanently resolve the tensions between freedom and order, liberty and tradition. But he identified them and calibrated the appropriate balance for his time. Conservatives have frequently failed to rediscover the right balance, which is the principal reason yesterday's American conservative movement has been subsumed into a broader GOP coalition of the unruly right. Frank Meyer may not have invented conservatism, but Mr. Flynn's book illustrates that he reinvented it -- and shows that it can be reinvented again.
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Mr. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven't Read)."” [1]
1. The Right's Messy Start. Scalia, Christopher J. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 26 Aug 2025: A13.
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