Joseph Bottum, editor of First Things, enthuses about the "new fusionism", which has all the effectiveness of a vinaigrette. Combine oil and vinegar, two very different substances, and you get a tasty, popular salad dressing. Combine rabid pro-life positions with a bomb-the-world-for-democracy foreign policy and you get Bottum's new fusionism.
Bottum wants to understand what binds conservatives in the present age. Back in the age of Frank Meyer's fusionism, conservatives and libertarians shared a belief in the positive results of free markets and free societies (granted, the conservatives preferred their free societies governed by a "natural elite"). So what fuses conservatives and libertarians today? Bottum's answer:
Those who believe the murderousness of abortion to be the fundamental moral issue of our times and those who see the forceful defeat of global, anti-Western Islamicism as the most pressing political concern we facepro-life social conservatives and the foreign-policy neoconservatives, in other words—seem to be increasingly voting together, meeting together, and thinking together. If you want to advance the pro-life cause, you will quickly find yourself seated beside those who support an activist, interventionist, and moralist foreign policy for the United States. And, conversely, if you are serious about the war on terror, you will soon discover that you are mingling with those fighting against abortion.
On Bottum's view, this self-defeating coalition of interests in no mere accident:
The opponents of abortion and euthanasia insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in domestic politics. The opponents of Islamofascism and rule by terror insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in international politics. Why shouldn’t they grow toward each other? The desire to find intellectual and moral seriousness in one realm can breed the desire to find intellectual and moral seriousness in another.
How can we restore this moral soundness to policy? Bottum is not without his opinions:
More, at the level of political theory, there’s a reasonable connection between what we do at home and what we do abroad—or, at least, between the attitudes that cause us to enact certain domestic agendas and the attitudes that drive our foreign policy. A nation that cannot summon the political will to ban even one particularly gruesome form of abortion is unlikely to persevere in the grueling work of building international democracy simply because it seems the moral thing to do. And a nation that cannot bring itself to believe its founding ideals are true for others will probably prove unable to hold those ideals for itself.
And now for the chilling part:
In the new fusionism of the pro-life social conservatives and the foreign-policy neoconservatives, a number of traditional issues seem, if not to have disappeared, then at least to have gotten muted along the way. Where exactly is tax reform and social security and the balanced budget in all this? Where is much concern for economics, which once defined the root of American conservatism?
Perhaps they are missing because, however important, they do not bear hard on the immediate question of social defeatism—on the deep changes that might reawaken and remoralize the nation. The one thing both the social conservatives and the neoconservatives know is that this project comes first.
The angry isolationist paleoconservatives are probably right—this isn’t conservatism, in several older senses of the word. But so what? Call it the new moralism, if you like. Call it a masked liberalism or a kind of radicalism that has bizarrely seized the American scene. Mutter darkly, if you want, about the shotgun marriage of ex-socialists and modern puritans, the cynical political joining of imperial adventurers with reactionary Catholics and backwoods Evangelicals. These facts still remain: The sense of national purpose regained by forceful response to the attacks of September 11 could help summon the will to halt the slaughter of a million unborn children a year. And the energy of the pro-life fight—the fundamental moral cause of our time—may revitalize belief in the great American experiment.
"The new moralism"? Perhaps that is a more accurate description, since "fusionism" formerly designated a mixed libertarian-conservative position. And there is absolutely nothing libertarian about a bomb-for-freedom foreign policy or a strict regulation of reproductive behavior. Bottum concedes the unfusionism of his fusionism when he admits that tax reform, social security, and balanced budgets are concerns of the past. The new fight for the fused folk is to preserve the lives of unborn children at home while desecrating the lives of women, children, and innocent civilians abroad. As Bottum concedes, it is no longer libertarians and conservatives who are fused-- it is neoconservatives and Evangelical Christians.
