In May of 1780, John Adams wrote his wife Abigail from Paris. The splendor of the city got him thinking about what all his labors were for. “I must study Politicks and War,” he told her, “that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.”
It is a beautiful vision of liberty as a generational project: each generation securing for the next the freedom to pursue higher things. But the vision contains a hidden assumption. It works only if each generation actually hands down what it has learned, if the children who study poetry still understand why their grandfathers studied war. When the transmission fails, the inheritance is squandered.
The failure of transmission is the subject of the latest episode of Acton Line. I had a wonderful conversation with Stephanie Slade, senior editor at Reason and fellow in Liberal Studies at the Acton Institute, to discuss her new book, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right.
Fusionism was the postwar synthesis, articulated in the early American conservative movement by Frank Meyer, that joined the classical liberal defense of individual freedom to the Christian tradition of moral virtue. Its central insight was that these two commitments are not rivals but mutually dependent: virtue that is coerced is no virtue at all, for the good must be freely chosen; and a free society cannot long endure among a people without moral character. This synthesis became the philosophical foundation of the American conservative movement and carried it to its greatest political triumphs.
Slade observes how those triumphs bred complacency. After Reagan, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, fusionism’s heirs no longer failed to explain and defend their first principles. The movement grew adept at winning elections and negligent in forming minds. A generation inherited the institutions of conservatism without inheriting its convictions.
Into that vacuum has rushed a new generation of intellectual entrepreneurs and hucksters who argue that liberty itself is the obstacle to virtue, that the freedom fusionism prized is precisely what hollowed out the moral order it hoped to preserve. Their remedy is to seize the levers of state power and impose from above what persuasion failed to secure. Slade calls these folks the dissident right, “will to power conservatives.”
Slade warns that abandoning classical liberal institutions, the rule of law chief among them, in pursuit of top-down moral renewal does not produce virtue. It produces unworkable and authoritarian extremes, and it destroys the very moral character it claims to defend. Compliance compelled forms no souls. Lord Acton understood this: liberty is not a means to a higher political end but the highest political end itself, required “for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life.”
Where, then, is the way forward? Slade’s answer is that young people drifting toward illiberal alternatives are not, at bottom, seeking technocratic policy or economic efficiency. They are starving for answers to the oldest questions: What is a good life? What is it for? A conservatism that offers them only marginal tax rates has nothing to say to their deepest hunger.
The remedy is a re-engagement with philosophy, theology, and the humanities. A return to the moral and intellectual formation that the movement neglected in its decades of electoral success. A return to the work of transmission.
Which brings us back to Adams in Paris. His generational sequence doesn’t run in one direction only, as though politics could be studied once and then forgotten. Every generation must take up the study anew, must learn again why liberty is worth securing and what it is for. The liberty to study philosophy is earned, in every age, by those willing to make the argument for liberty itself. Both liberty and virtue are non-negotiable and both must be handed down, or they will not be held at all.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube:
Thanks, Dan. I really love the book. Am now carefully reading it for the third time for a Law and Liberty review.