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Join the Libertarian Christian Institute as each week they explore, debate, and analyze the issues that are directly relevant to the intersection of Christianity and liberty. Always thoughtful, frequently controversial, and never boring (trust us), it is our hope and prayer that The Libertarian Christian Podcast serve as a valuable resource to the Church for years to come.
If you'd like to reach out to us and ask a question or submit some feedback, you can reach us at podcast@libertarianchristians.com, as well as on Facebook, Twitter, and of course, our website, libertarianchristians.com.
Matt Bellis:
[0:03] Welcome to the show that gets Christians thinking about faith and politics. Get ready to challenge the status quo, expand your imagination, and tackle controversy head-on. Let's stand together at the intersection of faith and freedom. It's time for the Libertarian Christian Podcast.
Cody:
[0:22] Welcome to the Libertarian Christian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute, Institute? I had trouble with that word for some reason, and a member of the Christians for Liberty Network.
Cody:
[0:32] Our guest today is Stephanie Slade, or Slade to her friends, a senior editor at Reason, magazine of free minds and free markets. Her writings also appeared in America Magazine, the New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, and the online Library of Liberty. More relevant for our purposes, she is the author of Fusionism, Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, now available from University of, they say Notre Dame up there, don't they? Notre Dame Press. So let's start with some definitions. First of all, thanks for being here, and then we'll start with some definitions. Thank you for taking time to talk to us. Okay, so fusionism. So when I first heard people talk about fusionism, I thought it was about this kind of mid-century coalition between the right and libertarians against communism. If I'm honest, I actually thought it was when a Chinese restaurant also serves pad thai. So what's your working definition of fusionism in the book?
Stephanie:
[1:23] Yeah, I'm trying to get people out of the habit of using the word fusionism, to talk about a coalitional phenomenon. So bringing different groups together, like the libertarians over here and the conservatives over here, and we're bringing them together and getting them all to vote for Ronald Reagan, for example. Obviously, when you're trying to win a presidential election or any election, you do have to build a coalition. But fusionism, as I'm describing and defending it in this book, is not about bringing different groups of people together and just getting them to like play nicely with each other or vote for the same person. But rather, it's the idea that there is a sort of philosophical, there ought to be a philosophical synthesis between the classical liberal political tradition and the Judeo-Christian moral tradition. And so we need to care about both liberty and virtue. You can't just have people who care about liberty and people who care about virtue and get them to vote for the same person. You need to convince them that actually, if you care about liberty, virtue is a really important requirement for a free society. And if you care about virtue, freedom is a really important requirement for a virtuous society. And a good life requires both those things, liberty and virtue, and that they're mutually reinforcing in this really important way. So that's fusionism. It's much more of a philosophical synthesis than it is a question of putting together an alliance or a coalition.
Cody:
[2:35] Well, and just to be clear, the virtue part of this, you know, there's that famous quote from John Adams where he says something about how, you know, you can't have freedom without virtue, something to that effect. the virtue is not something that we force necessarily through the state, right? But the idea is that if a society kind of loses sight of virtue,
Cody:
[2:53] it probably won't stay free for very long. Is there that kind of idea of mutual reinforcement?
Stephanie:
[2:57] Yes, absolutely. So in almost all the founders, when I was researching an article I had in the July issue of Reason, which was about, you know, obviously it was our America 250 issue of the magazine. And I wanted to write about how the founders were fusionists. And I found that there were just like tons and tons of quotes from all the founders talking about how a free, you know, they're trying to build a free society. They're constructing a governmental structure that will have separation of powers, rule of law, right? Like they're trying to limit this power of the state because that's how you protect individual liberty and rights and liberties. But they recognize that if you don't have sort of certain level of organic virtue in the culture and in the population, then it's not going to work in the long run. That you're not going to be able to retain a free society with separation of powers, with a limited, limited government. That you're going to find that people are going to start demanding, I think rationally, arguably rationally demanding more and more government, a stronger and stronger government, more government interference. If they feel like they can't trust their neighbors, their, you know, the fellow, their fellow market participants to actually be virtuous, to make good on their contracts, to not be constantly outlying, cheating, stealing, trying to take advantage and exploit them.
Stephanie:
[4:04] People will look to government to make people be virtuous if they can't trust people to be naturally virtuous. You know, they'll look to government to make people not exploit them, I should say, not, not, not violate their rights if they don't think that they can trust people to be naturally virtuous. So we want to have a limited government, a free society with limited government, separation of powers with rule of law, and we want that to last, we need to care a lot about whether there's other institutions, that are helping to form people to be virtuous outside of using coercion against them.
Cody:
[4:36] Okay, that's helpful. So some have described fusionism as a three-legged stool. So you talked about virtue on one side and also freedom on the other. And so that three-legged, the third leg, I guess, would be like this kind of aggressive foreign policy, specifically during the Cold War against the Soviet Union. But you sort of argued that that third leg, well, you can find it there historically in fusionism, but it's more optional. And so what's the argument for that being, so this sort of neocon aggressive foreign policy being more optional?
Stephanie:
[5:04] Yeah. I mean, I think that even the people I interviewed who were around during this period, who were defending and sort of articulating the ideas that I call fusionism, that came to be known as fusionism, they were mostly Cold War hawks. They did believe that we, the United States, needed to have a strong posture against this menace of the Soviet Union. But that was a particular policy application that they thought was suited to this time and place, right? They believe the particular circumstances called for America to behave in this particular way. But that's an application of principles to circumstances and leading to a policy that people could disagree with that application. The principles are liberty and virtue. This is what we care about. It's the Judeo-Christian tradition and the classical liberal tradition. Those are the principles. And so that's two strains. There's this sort of idea that you're going to elevate one particular policy position to be on the same par as those bedrock philosophical commitments, I think, is a mistake. And I think that we've seen that in the years since. If you sort of take what they believed to be prudent, we can agree or disagree, but a prudent, you know, strong anti-communist sort of Cold War hawkish position at that time and assume that that means that America needs to be always involving itself in conflicts abroad, that's going to lead you to some pretty bad places.
Cody:
[6:24] So just as a matter of historical fact, I mean, were there those kind of who were part of the coalition who were not hawkish, who were kind of part of that conversation? And how were they treated, I suppose, by those who were?
Stephanie:
[6:38] I would argue philosophically you can be a anti-interventionist, you know, sort of more pacifist. Fusionist you can care i mean i think there are plenty of fusionist libertarians out there who are basically on the side of we want less intervention, you know america to have be less involved in other people's conflicts in the in the world and that that's perfectly consistent with caring about liberty and virtue and in fact i think you could argue even during the cold war years you could say look my commitment to liberty says that we should not have we should not be conscripting you know young men to fight in a foreign war against their will and die on behalf of a cause that they don't believe in. That's part of the classical liberal tradition is protecting basic rights. And so fighting a war that doesn't directly involve us, conscripting, you know, having a draft that forces people to fight in that war against their will, all of the sort of taxing and spending that goes into building up a military apparatus that allows you to have a presence abroad, that these things are all.
Stephanie:
[7:35] At odds with the classical liberal, you know, commitments.
Stephanie:
[7:38] I think you can totally make that argument. And that's perfectly consistent. Now, in practice, what happened was that there was sort of a schism that opened up between those who identified as conservatives and those who identified as libertarians. And one of the main issues, not the only one, but one of the big ones during this period was where you came down on these questions of war and peace. So it turned out that most of the people who were more on the anti-interventionist side identified as libertarians and sort of pulled away from the conservative movement as such. And most of the people who were more Cold War hawks identified as conservatives. And so we think of that as being the fusionists as being the conservatives and not the libertarians. But I think that that's just more of a of an artifact of the way it happened to play out during this period. But it's not a necessary.
Stephanie:
[8:22] There's nothing about fusionism as a philosophy that requires things to break down in that way.
Cody:
[8:28] Gotcha. Well, so, I mean, I'm like you, I'm a libertarian and I'm also a Christian. So does that mean I'm a fusionist or is there like a secret sauce that I may or may not have?
Stephanie:
[8:37] I mean, I think that that's basically it. I think you're, you're, and I don't even think you necessarily have to be a Christian. I think a sort of high degree of respect for the wisdom that's been passed down through the Judeo-Christian tradition is the really important thing. Are there lessons here about what a good life looks like and how we're supposed to use our freedom in that tradition? So I have many colleagues, for example, who are not, and friends in the libertarian world who are not themselves Christians. Religious, even somebody like Hayek was not really very religious himself, but he really thought that the tradition, including the tradition that was handed down through religion, was crucial to, I mean, this was an example of spontaneous order for him, right? He thinks that like human beings through millennia of trial and error, discover emergent social orders and, lifestyle choices and patterns and norms that allow us to live peacefully with each other and to produce a prosperous, free society at a sort of larger civilizational scale to help us break out of the sort of, warring bands of kin-based tribes and get into a peaceful, you know, trading modern civilization, that there's all these things that are passed down, through tradition, including through religion. So he has a lot of respect for religion, but he's not personally religious. So I think there's space even within fusionism for somebody like that.
Stephanie:
[9:54] But basically, if you are a classical liberal, And you believe that there is wisdom in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition that you think that we need to not be dismissive of, because there certainly are libertarians who are dismissive, of religion, of Christianity, of those moral teachings. And those people I would describe as libertarians, but not fusionist libertarians. Some of my colleagues at Reason fall into that camp. But I think if you are a Christian and a libertarian, that's pretty much, I think you're checking both those boxes. And then there's people who identify not as libertarians, as conservatives, but they're much more libertarian-ish conservatives. They're much more limited government, free market conservatives. They like the word conservative for whatever reason. Maybe they don't like the connotations of the word libertarian, but they're basically fusionists, which means that they are going to be much more on the libertarian side of the conservative movement as well.
Cody:
[10:43] Yeah. I think I've heard Jonah Goldberg argue that to be conservative means if not to be religious, at least to not be hostile toward religion. There's sort of a sense of that there's a value there or something.
Cody:
[10:54] So, you know, effusionism has been a tent, as you mentioned, that's included, you know, both conservatives and libertarians in the past. I think my listeners broadly understand what libertarianism is, but they also probably understand what conservatism is. But I think it also might be useful to define it by its ideological priorities, if that can be done. You know, what is conservatism, you know, sort of qua conservatism, rather than its shifting policy goals. So you note that Russell Kirk, you know, building on the insights of Edmund Burke, saw conservatism as relying on tradition and this word he calls prejudice, which what you define is maybe not how we hear it.
Stephanie:
[11:33] But it's not what we think it means.
Cody:
[11:34] Yeah, it's this idea of you define it more broadly as this belief or he defines it more broadly as this belief that past experience allows us to prejudge new situations that we rely on tradition and and wisdom from the past to kind of help us move forward. And, you know, I know Yuval Levin points out that this conservative outlook is actually kind of paradoxically future facing rather than past facing, because it argues that wisdom and tradition are building towards something. And then he contrasts that with this kind of radical liberalism of someone like Thomas Paine, who's essentially saying, I mean, to be radical, to go back to the root, he says, we need to tear down all the things that we built in the past and go back to this kind of imagined utopian state of what we think, you know, society should be like, you know, what's it like at original creation. And so because of that, conservatives are not inherently opposed to change. But as Kirk said, they're more inclined maybe to prune the dead branches on the tree of society, but not to hack away at the roots. And so, maybe put more cynically, as Michael Malice has quipped, that conservatism is just progressivism driving the speed limit. Is a libertarian someone, in your mind, who wants to chop down that tree of statism no matter the cost? Or can a libertarian be radical in theory, but sort of more pragmatic and conservative in their approach?
Stephanie:
[12:48] Oh, for sure. I think that within libertarianism, there can be differences of approach. And in fact, I remember in one of the many debate issues that Reason has published, where we have people arguing two sides of an intra-libertarian, you know, a question where libertarians disagree with each other. I had one between Catherine Mangue Ward and Nick Gillespie. Catherine identifies as an anarchist, Nick Gillespie does not. And they were arguing this, and I actually forget exactly how the argument played out. But basically the point was, even if you were an anarchist, even if you think that the ideal state would be no government at all, privatization of everything, that doesn't mean that you necessarily want to tear it all down today, that you think that that would be the right prudent choice in the current moment, right? Getting there is a different question. And it Maybe just a sort of directional orientation that you have move slowly in the direction of, you pruning government where you can and enhancing individual liberty where you can. But you don't have to necessarily be a radical in that sense of like burn it all down, tear it all down, do it all today. Now, this can be good and bad. Hayek actually critiqued conservatives famously in his essay, Why I'm Not a Conservative, for basically saying like.
Stephanie:
[13:53] I would paraphrase it as like sometimes there are injustices out there that cry out for immediate redress. This is maybe more my perspective than even hikes, but like sometimes there's not there is something to be said for wanting change now because there are there are problems in society that that require that require change. And to sort of ask people who are being subjected to oppression or injustice that they should wait for this to like gradually and organically of itself, you know, solve itself. That that is a thing that somebody who thinks of himself as a liberal like hayek would potentially critique somebody who thinks of himself as a conservative for being too willing to just let these things happen organically slowly and or trying to slow things down maybe even it maybe inorganically like, change is happening but it's happening in a way that conservatives find to be destabilizing so they're trying to like artificially pump the brakes and slow down that change and Hayek is saying like, no.
Stephanie:
[14:47] That is not the right way forward. So there are going to be differences of emphasis. And I should say, I argue in my book that both Hayek and Kirk, although we think of them as being a libertarian on one side and a traditionalist on the other, are in many ways, very fusionist. They actually both care a lot about both pieces of the fusionist equation. So, but there's different differences of emphasis here that I'm drawing that, you know, you can draw out between, even if there's also a lot of overlap. So yes, a libertarian can be a sort of more of a gradualist or more moderate or more concerned with, you know, we can have different disagreements about the right approach and the right way to get there. Another thing I would just add, related to your question about what is conservatism. In the United States,
Stephanie:
[15:29] that word has always meant something different than it would mean in almost any other context. Because in a sort of old world European context, a conservative was like, if you go back to the French Revolution times, the conservatives were the defenders of sort of thrown an altar of monarchy, aristocracy, the established church, the sort of ancient regime, right?
Stephanie:
[15:49] But the United States was founded in order to overthrow the monarchy and all of that, and so the established church. And so what conservatives in this country have almost always said was, we're here not to conserve or defend this ancient regime of the old world. We're here to conserve or defend the principles and institutions of the American founding, which are themselves in many ways liberal, right? They're what in Europe would be called liberal. And so liberalism is in this way, is in a real sense, like baked into the conservative project here because the American founding is at least is liberal. This is again, what my essay in the, in our America 250 issue of the magazine is about, is about how liberalism and religion are actually both there in the founding. And so what it means to be a conservative in this country is it's not pure liberalism, but it's, but it's definitely the liberalism is there. And you kind of, these conservatives who have wanted to totally abandon or reject liberalism entirely in the American context are in many ways at odds with their own country's political tradition.
Cody:
[16:52] Right. Yeah. And there's there's a lot of these words I think are maybe familiar to me in terms that may not all be familiar to the reader. So it might be good to slow down here and there and kind of clarify some things. But I like what you say about, you know, to be conservative in the United States is to be to conserve the liberal project. Right. And liberal project is this thing that we today call classical liberalism, not kind of left wing progressivism. But these ideas that sort of emerge about free markets and free people and, you know, we don't necessarily need to be ruled by kings and those sort of ideas. And so, you know, if conservatism is kind of good old days thinking, America's good old days are different than Europe's good old days. And so what we're conserving is a different, different thing. And so so that being said, you mentioned Kirk, you mentioned Hayek and how there
Cody:
[17:38] are sort of differences in emphasis. Hayek is somebody who my listeners may be more familiar with. Friedrich Hayek, who wrote, well, oh, I forget. Oh, The Road to Serf to Mrs. Big Book. We, of course, also have some great essays on the knowledge problem and stuff like that. And then Kirk is not, you know, Charlie Kirk, the Russell Kirk, who is a major figure at the National Review, little bit more, maybe...
Cody:
[18:00] Leaning towards some of the faith and virtue stuff a little more than maybe Hayek did. But they're still sort of part of this conversation. And so, but there is this argument that happens between Hayek and Kirk, where Hayek, I think, feels that the conservatism, of fusionism, or what we'll call like National Review conservatism or something, is not as principled as Hayek would like it to be. And so Hayek argues that, you know, yeah, you guys talk about the individual, You talk about the value of the market, but you're not really consistent in making those your core values. And there's this quote, he says, the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it's used for what he regards as the right purposes. And so my question is, was Hayek's critique, has it been confirmed in the decades since or would you say it was overly cynical?
Stephanie:
[18:49] Well, I want to push back a little bit because although Hayek does have this critique of conservatives and of conservatism. He's very much talking about a European style conservatives. I mean, he's from Austria originally, and then he spent many years at the London School of Economics. So although he did eventually come to the University of Chicago, and I think he was here when he wrote that essay, he was thinking much more of European conservatives than he was of American conservatives. And in fact, he says that in that very essay. He says, in fact, here in the United States, you're all basically Whigs. You're all drawing, because Whiggism, which, you know, in the UK context would be a sort of proto-liberalism, classical liberalism.
Stephanie:
[19:29] Whiggism is the common tradition that you're all defending here. And so whether you're a Democrat or a Republican or whatever, you're all Whigs basically. And he calls himself an old Whig. So he's not as much training his fire on American conservatives or the National Review style of conservatives as he is thinking about in Europe what would be considered a conservative. So I would say that upfront that and again if you read the essay you realize like oh it sounds like he's being critical of somebody like like, Russell Kirk or Bill Buckley at National Review. But in fact, he's not really thinking about them because he says, you guys are wigs. You guys are good, you know, basically. Now, on the other hand, I think it's definitely the case that we have seen for all the sort of lip service that the conservative movement has offered to limited government and fiscal responsibility and all these things over the years. Republicans in positions of power have not brought about a shrinking of the state. They have not brought about a balancing of the budget, right? There There are many ways, and this is not even to get into the things we've seen that I think are just absolute assaults on the very idea of rule of law in the Trump years.
Stephanie:
[20:36] The point being that conservatives have often said they care about limited government and that they're sort of defenders of free markets and that sort of thing. They haven't necessarily always governed that way. And I think that when faced with the option to use state power to advance a cause that they believe in, whether, a moral cause or a sort of, you know, advantaging a sort of segment of the economy that they support, like, the manufacturing sector or something, conservatives have tended to be more squishy and more willing to go along with using state power in those ways than most libertarians would like. And so this is like a perennial source of frustration among libertarians, at least in my world, conservatives and Republicans talk a big game about limited government, but then they don't seem to actually be nearly as committed as we would like in practice.
Cody:
[21:27] Well, so we mentioned a few names. We've talked about Kirk, we've talked about, Hayek, but maybe the main character of your book is a guy named Frank Meyer. And so what role does he play in the fusionist project? We've defined fusionism that we have sort of a sense of the arguments that are happening. What is he doing in this story?
Stephanie:
[21:45] Frank Meyer, he's one of the founding editors of National Review. So he's there when Bill Buckley founds the conservative magazine in 1955. And he's one of the senior editors. He's also the book's editor. So he writes a lot of essays. He commissions a lot of essays. He writes a book. He's the guy who's articulating this philosophical fusionism that I'm sort of trying to revive in my book. But it's important to know. So he's the one that's talking about liberty and virtue both being necessary for human flourishing and that they may seem to be in tension with each other, but that that's a productive tension that we must, we must we want to, we want to sustain.
Stephanie:
[22:18] It's important to recognize that he's not the inventor, or he doesn't see himself as like coming up with some novel idea called fusionism. First of all, he hates the word fusionism. That's one of his, one of intellectual sort of enemies gives it that name and he, and it just sticks and Meyer doesn't like it. But also, again, he really thinks that he's just describing what is the organic political tradition of America. He thinks the founders were fusionists, that they were influenced by both classical liberalism, such as it was at that time, the ideas that would come to be known eventually as classical liberalism, and also that they were influenced by the Judeo-Christian moral tradition. And again, if you read the founders, you see all these examples of them saying liberty and virtue are mutually reinforcing. We need to care about both of them. So Meyer basically says, look, our tradition is liberal. He wouldn't have used that word because at the time, the National Review types only ever used the word liberal to describe the left. But, you know, we care about individual liberty. He basically said what it means to be a conservative is to care about limited government, separation of powers, rule of law, these sorts of things, free markets.
Stephanie:
[23:23] And but also we recognize the importance of the moral tradition and making sure and, you know, knowing that we need to have a sort of virtuous moral culture if our society is going to flourish. So he's articulating these ideas but he doesn't think that he's inventing them or he's the first one who has come up with them he thinks he's just describing what is the sort of, the sort of default position of most conservatives as, you know, in, in, in America.
Cody:
[23:48] One is, and as you argue, you know, fusionism is kind of a term that we could use to describe the founding, you know, it's, it's, it's these ideas of both virtue and, and freedom that are coming together. So yeah, it's, it, you know, there, there's a historical term for it that, but it goes back further, at least in, in, um, And its application. So there's another colorful character in your story. And I mean, that's sort of literally, I suppose, L. Brent Bozell, Jr. So in that, I think I'm pronouncing his name correctly. Is it Bozell or Bozell?
Stephanie:
[24:19] Bozell, yeah.
Cody:
[24:19] Bozell. So who is Bozell? What's he doing in this story? What are his critiques of fusionism? What does he contribute to this debate?
Stephanie:
[24:27] Yeah, he's the main critic of fusionism from that period. There were many dissenters, but he is the one that I focus on in the book as a sort of illustration of the people who were not buying this fusionist argument that Frank Meyer was making. So Bozell is also a senior editor at National Review in those early years. He's also a friend and brother-in-law of Bill Buckley, William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review. So Bozell marries one of Buckley's sisters. And he starts out as a very fusionist, libertarian-leaning conservative. He was Barry Goldwater's ghostwriter. If you've ever read Goldwater's Confidence of a Conservative, which is a very libertarian text, although it has the word conservative, it's quite libertarian. And it was written, ghostwritten, by Brent Bozell. So he starts out as a libertarian-ish, you know, fusionist, classically liberal leaning guy.
Cody:
[25:15] I want to interrupt you, but there's a great little anecdote in there because as you said, I mean, Goldwater is this major thinker in this kind of libertarian-ish conservative, you know, our history or whatever. And as you point out, his book is written by this guy who ends up being a critic of liberalism. And when Goldwater talks about the book, he says, you know, talks about Bozell writing it. He says yeah you know Bozell wrote it and you know the contribution I had was that I read it and I even agreed with some of it.
Stephanie:
[25:42] Yeah right it turns out yeah, the book maybe reflects Bozell in his early years more than it even does Goldwater at that time, although Goldwater was happy to run you know run for president with that as sort of the the overview summary of his platform but okay so as you allude to Bozell, has this interesting evolution over the course of his career where he converts to Catholicism and then he embraces an ever over time and ever more sort of dogmatic and illiberal Catholicism and politics that goes with it. So he becomes what I described at one point as sort of proto-integralist. So the Catholic integralists are those who want, instead of having separation of church and state, they want to integrate church and state, right? They think that the government should be taking orders from the Vatican, from the Pope, for example, in the Catholic context. So Bozell comes to think that liberalism, classical liberalism, a focus on individual liberty and separation of powers and all of that, limited government, is actually at odds with people living good, virtuous, moral lives. And so we actually need to be, he would say, conservatives need to be willing to use the power of the state in order to put up guardrails to help people make virtuous choices.
Stephanie:
[26:50] And we need to be doing a lot more, including using, again, the coercive power of the state where, where appropriate to, orient society to the common good, to, towards, you know, making us be a virtuous society that worships God sort of collectively, not just you individually can worship, however you like, or not at all in your, in your, in, in your own private time and private space, but rather we collectively as a society need to be in the business of, of, you know, through the government as.
Stephanie:
[27:23] As well as at the individual level of, of worshiping God. I mean, this is really the way he thinks, that part of what makes, the American, the fact that the American founding is liberal, that it does have this sort of separation of church and state, this protection of religious liberty, that this actually makes it kind of blasphemous because we prioritize individual rights over the importance of, you know, orienting society to doing God's will. So he becomes increasingly dogmatic and extreme in his views. He eventually leaves National Review and founds his own rival magazine called Triumph, which is just a radical Catholic magazine that's sort of making these arguments. It becomes increasingly anti-American. It becomes increasingly anti-capitalist, anti-free market. You know, becomes more theocratic. And it only lasts about 10 years, in part because I think there just wasn't an audience for these extreme views. There's a very small audience for it, but not enough to sustain a magazine.
Stephanie:
[28:22] But he basically is arguing the counter case to the Frank Marr fusionist argument. Instead of saying liberty and virtue are mutually reinforcing, he's arguing and he's a very smart guy. So he's doing this in a intellectually sophisticated way. He's saying, no, in fact, too much liberty can stand in the way of people living virtuous lives. And so we can't prioritize liberty over virtue. We must put virtue first. If that means using state power in ways that, you know, might infringe on people's freedom, so be it.
Cody:
[28:54] Yeah, well, there's this kind of, I think, assumption that statists often make that if something is important, then it should be required by law. Anything that's important should be mandated.
Cody:
[29:05] Well, so I want to talk a little bit more about the ideas before we jump back into some of the kind of historical fallout around fusionism. So, you know, we're both Christians, of course, but part of what appeals to me about the freedom of the marketplace is that it delivers good outcomes even when people are not highly virtuous. Right. This is kind of Adam Smith's insight. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker can all be totally self-interested, but they're nevertheless going to produce a better world through that self-interest. Even if they're not particularly virtuous, they end up creating a better society that the people sort of actually are more virtuous in a way. And so they create this better world through self-interest. So you argue, though, that for a society to really flourish, it's not enough that we just sort of get government out of the way and let people look after their self-interest. We actually do need cultural virtue. So can you explain why that is necessary? What is it that Adam Smith maybe perhaps is missing?
Stephanie:
[30:01] I mean, of course, I agree with Adam Smith. I always think of Jada McCloskey, like, crossing herself every time she says Adam Smith's name, because, like, he's sort of the godfather of everything we believe as classical liberals, as libertarians in many ways. He's totally right. I mean, the impersonal market mechanisms allow even imperfect people to contribute to the common good and to the prosperity of the whole society. And this is an amazing accomplishment, of course. But there's two things that I think somebody like Frank Meyer would point out, that sort of two fusionists additions, I would say, you know, additions to this.
Stephanie:
[30:36] One is a thing I was kind of mentioning earlier, which is that if you have a society that is just incredibly unvirtuous, where people are constantly trying to cheat each other, lie, cheat, steal, violate each other's rights, murder each other, you know, do violence against each other, then you're going to naturally, the population is going to naturally demand more government. To protect them from these sort of marauding risks of their fellow, their fellow, their neighbors and fellow citizens. If they feel like I can't trust you to make good on your contract, they're going to want to make sure that they can take you to court and get a judgment. If they feel like they can't walk down the street safely without somebody trying to steal from them or harm them, they're going to want more police on that street. They're going to ask for that rationally. And so we need, it's very hard to sustain a limited government, sort of night watchman's date or whatever your ideal might be, if you don't have a certain level of self-governance going on where people have been formed, morally formed to make good choices and to not be constantly seeking how to get theirs at the expense of everyone else. If we don't think that we have moral obligations to those around us, if we don't think that we're constrained in some way by some moral code outside of just our.
Stephanie:
[31:46] Personal preferences or self-interest, then we're going to behave in a different way than we would if we do have those things, and that that's going to necessitate or naturally tend to lead to more government, bigger government, more government interference. So it's hard to sustain limited government if people are constantly trying to do harm to each other, I guess, is the first insight to keep in mind. And of course, we know that the butcher and the baker are able to serve our needs while pursuing their own self-interest.
Stephanie:
[32:18] Not out of just the charity of their heart, but by pursuing their own self-interest, but only because we have a basic system of rule of law that ensures that they can't just cheat us, steal from us, make a promise to do one thing and then not do it or whatever.
Stephanie:
[32:32] We have the basic structures in place that mean that they kind of can't get away with that. so, so there has to be some, something, in addition to just the,
Stephanie:
[32:46] a free market that, that, allows this, these good outcomes to happen. the second thing, and I became more, convinced that this is very important as I was researching my book, because I was trying to understand, maybe we'll get to this, I was trying to understand why today are so many young people being seduced by what I consider to be very dangerous, illiberal, authoritarian ideas. And what I realized is, so here's the other thing that you need that maybe isn't captured as much by that particular formulation from Adam Smith. People need some guidance on what to do with their freedom and what to do with their wealth. So we have a free market society that's producing prosperity. We have much more wealth. Now you would be all seen the hockey stick graph where we're just much richer as a, as a civilization as a species than we once were. We all have this incredible wealth and, and, you know, thank you to free market capitalism for that. And we also have the freedoms that come from having a sort of constitutional system of government that separates powers and all that.
Stephanie:
[33:46] Once we're free and once we have our basic needs met, how do we, we as human beings desire more than that. We yearn for some sort of greater fulfillment and purpose in life, meaning and belonging. We need to know what to do with our freedom. We need to know what to do with the resources that we have, the time and the monetary resources and everything else. How to live a meaningful life. What does a good life look like? We need some guidance. We need some sense of knowing where to go from here in order to be happy and flourishing people. if you don't have that, you will feel very much lost and adrift. And you maybe will go looking for answers in some bad places, right? Because at least communism or fascism or whatever is offering you a sense of belonging in something larger than yourself. So.
Stephanie:
[34:33] We need to engage with these questions of... What does a good life look like? How do you pursue it? How do you build it? And we need to care about those questions a lot. And that's sort of what the, when infusionism, when we're talking about virtue, what we're talking about is these habits and choices and lessons that allow people to make good choices to flourish, to live good, meaningful, fulfilling lives. These things are tied up with each other. So we need to care a lot about answering those questions, which means we need to be engaged with the virtue piece. Freedom is great. It's a great first start, but it's not enough to have a flourishing life, I think.
Cody:
[35:12] It's necessary but not sufficient for virtue. Well, and anybody who's listening who's a big Adam Smith fan who thinks maybe we've been a little too hard on Adam Smith, obviously he also writes on the theory of moral sentiments, and he has some thoughts there. So I don't want to be too reductionistic about Smith. But what would you say to the person, maybe perhaps on the left, who says, well, you know, if we fix poverty, we won't have crime, that really these moral problems are actually socioeconomic problems. And all you have to do is get rid of these sort of social conditions or economic conditions that create crime. And then everybody is just going to kind of get along.
Stephanie:
[35:50] Yeah. I mean, we're so vastly much more wealthy now than we were 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago. we wouldn't still be seeing crime if that were actually true, right? So I think that it may be that there's some ties between these things. In fact, it almost certainly is the case that there are ties between these things. You see more crime in more impoverished places often. But you're never going to get rid of all poverty and you're never going to get rid of all crime. So I think you have to recognize that this is a multifaceted problem.
Cody:
[36:22] Yeah. And I mean, there's I think there's something to it in that, you know, when I find myself in, you know, areas where there's a lot of poverty, I tend to be a little more worried about my safety than when I'm going through, you know, the suburbs or whatever. But but yeah, you're right. There are moral components to this. And also, you know, I think when I say moral components and we talk about virtue, I mean, oftentimes we're thinking about individual virtue, you know, those choices that we make to be a good person. But there is sometimes like what am I trying to say? Like kind of a reflexive virtue that just sort of comes from being in a culture that everybody thinks this way. And chances are, you're going to kind of approach it the same way. So even if it's not necessarily something that you've, you know, sort of sat down and reasoned it out, you know, you know what it is to, you know, to be a good person and live the good life or whatever. When you're part of a culture that has certain values that ultimately ends up, affecting you. Well, So you write that, you know, we need freedom in order to be virtuous and we need virtue in order to be happy. So there's this connection. We start with freedom because we can't have virtue without that. But virtue is actually what makes us happy, not necessarily freedom.
Cody:
[37:29] And when our basic needs are met, we become fixated, I think, on self-actualization, right? So we live in a fairly rich society. We have a lot of these, you know, we're not necessarily super worried about where our next meal is coming from, most of us. And so a lot of these basic things are dealt with. And then, so now we're like, okay, so what does it mean now to find fulfillment? And then when we start looking to answer that question and we don't have good answers, I think, you know, we become depressed or angry. We start looking for scapegoats to blame for our unhappiness. You know, it's foreigners or whatever, Democrats or whatever. I don't So is our big problem in the West at this point a virtue deficit rather than a deficit of freedom or prosperity? And I guess moreover, is this virtue deficit fueling a distrust in liberty? Are we starting to scapegoat liberty because we have struggled to actually find something, that fulfills us, virtue that fulfills us, I guess?
Stephanie:
[38:28] I think that's right. I think that, again, that's a thing that I came to the conclusion through the course of researching and writing and reporting the book. I didn't necessarily start out thinking in these terms, but why are young people being seduced by these dangerous ideas, these illiberal ideas on both the left, far left and the far right? And I think part of it is that they feel like they have no sense of meaning and purpose and belonging in their life. You know, we have become a much less religious society over time. We've become a much more morally relativistic in at least some ways. That is to say, we often feel reluctant to even say, well, you do you, whatever works for you. I'm not passing judgment here. You know, you're going to have to figure that out for yourself. I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. Should you get married? Should you have kids? That's your, that's a question for you. I have no say in that. And, you know, we, we don't want to be judgy that our culture is one that this, you know, really, errors on the side of not passing judgment. that's almost the worst thing you can do is to be judgy. Um, but so young people, I think they feel like very much adrift. They feel very much like I've been given no guidance about where to, where to, where to go from here, how to, and they're like, so then when libertarians or conservative free market policy wonks are talking about or focusing on how like, you know.
Stephanie:
[39:42] This tax policy or this economic policy is actually going to reduce economic efficiency in these ways or whatever. They're like, who cares about a few percentage points of GDP growth on the margin? I care about like, am I going to live a happy and fulfilling life? Am I ever going to be able to find love and meaning and belonging in this world? That's what I care about. And if you're not even engaging with me on those questions, then I'm going to go looking elsewhere for answers because I'm because we as human beings are hungry for that and so that is it is a virtue deficit again to the extent that we think of virtue as being those, habits that produce human flourishing we're not teaching those habits we're reluctant to or you know I'm not saying nobody is but we're not doing a very good job of passing those habits along of teaching people what virtue means and what it requires of them and why it's important, you know, why that it is actually the key to happiness and life. And so they're looking for answers and they're going to go find answers somewhere. And there are often going to be answers that are pretty, it turns out, I think what we've seen in our politics in the last decade or so, pretty disturbing places, pretty disturbing and incorrect answers. And so, but if those are the only answers that they can find, or they seem to be the ones that are being offered in the most compelling way to them, then that's where they're going to listen to. Yeah.
Cody:
[41:03] Yes, it's like freedom and virtue end up shining the light on these questions of meaning and our spiritual lack and post-liberals blame the light. So there's a key insight of fusionism is, as Meyer wrote, virtue cannot be enforced or brought about by political means. In other words, you can legislate morality, but you can't legislate virtue. But as you point out, even laws which seem to do the right thing or acquire the right behavior have unintended negative consequences. And so I think one example we go to a lot is that increased welfare spending has not necessarily done what people on the left would tell us it would do. You know, once you take care of everybody's economic needs, they're just going to, you know, everybody's going to be a wonderful person. Crime's going to go down. They're going to stop. You know, nobody's going to sell drugs. Nobody's going to, none of that stuff's going to happen. No gang crime. But in fact, it's had some pretty negative effects in some cases on recipients and not just on the recipients, but on the larger communities in which they live. And so could you talk a little bit about these unintended consequences when we try to, I think, you know, legislate virtue in some way?
Stephanie:
[42:11] Yeah, I just think government, we often say government is a blunt instrument. It doesn't often do the thing you're trying to accomplish very well. And so in this case, some of the post-liberals, people on the other side of the debate from me, they like to cite Thomas Aquinas, St. Thomas Aquinas, and they'll say, the law is a teacher. In other words, we need to ban these things that are bad, like pornography, prostitution, drugs, whatever, whatever your vice of choice is. We need to ban these things because the very fact that we as a society chose to make it illegal will teach people that it's bad, so they won't want it. And okay, that can sometimes work, maybe. But I think what we've seen through experience is through the experience of many, many, many black markets, right, for things that we've attempted to ban, while there's still demand for them, that people will find a way, the markets will find a way to provide the thing, it will do it in a much more dangerous way that empowers organized crime. And, and that puts people at, at, at risk, because the thing that they're paying for might not end up being the thing that they think they're getting, because it's all happening in, in the dark, under the table and whatnot.
Stephanie:
[43:15] That you can't necessarily pass a law and expect the outcome to be the thing that you think that you're passing it to do, especially when you're trying to change, use this blunt instrument of the law to form somebody's conscience, which is part of what we're talking about when we're talking about virtue. So when it comes to sort of the welfare state. I think this is a good example because we have trained ourselves through the existing, once upon a time, we had civil society institutions that would step up when somebody was in need. When you had a widow or an orphan or a person who couldn't work because they were injured or whatever, their community and the institutions that they were a member of would step in to help that person. And that was the expectation. And over time, we've crowded out those institutions because we have a sort of across the board you know government welfare state that's going to step in and do those things and so we've.
Stephanie:
[44:08] Unsurprisingly, the institutions have atrophied and disappeared, the civil society institutions that once did that. But what does that do for us as members of communities, as people who were once members of those institutions? Well, it trains us to be less virtuous, to be less likely to think, it's my job to step up and help my neighbor in need. Instead, I think, well, I paid my taxes. That program exists to help that person. It's somebody else's job to help him, not my job. I've done my part. The government exists. I paid my taxes. That's it. So I'm no longer thinking of myself as being responsible for helping those around me and for making a difference in my community on the ground and for trying to think.
Stephanie:
[44:47] Creatively about ways to solve problems in the world that are bothering me because it's like, well, that's government's job. And how could I possibly, I'm one person, how could I possibly compete with this massive institution, well-funded, taxpayer-funded institution and the massive bureaucracy that exists to solve this problem? If they can't solve it, then surely I can't solve it either. So it just trains us to not think of ourselves as being responsible or as having agency. And that is, I think, a really huge thing. And also by eroding, was just reading some Robert Nisbet. He's a conservative sociologist from that same mid-century period. And he talks a lot about how actually if an institution doesn't have a purpose, if it's not people coming together to solve a problem together because they feel like, well, this problem is somebody else's to solve, then they will no longer feel like they're a part of that community. The institution will disappear and but the people will be actually left feeling more alone and less embedded in a community like we need that belonging and that embeddedness in communities in order to to thrive as human beings but we have a lot less of that because we assume that the government is going to do things and so we don't need to have this rich sort of overlapping patchwork of of civil society institutions that we're a part of anymore and we're we're much more lonely as a result of this, but it's also, you know, so we're just, we're just like, if, if, if virtue is about making people flourish, we are flourishing less as a result of this.
Cody:
[46:11] Yeah. Yeah. I think there's something to be said for finding fulfillment and helping people.
Cody:
[46:16] And it's not quite the same to say, well, I helped my neighbor because I voted for something.
Cody:
[46:20] so getting back to the history a little bit, so fusionism seems to be kind of, Well, I don't know what was the word I'm looking for. Not justified, vindicated, I guess, by the Reagan era. You had the fall of the Soviet Union. Everybody seems to be doing pretty well economically. And there's sort of a sense like, we did it. Like, this worked out. This was a good idea. You know, we'll set aside some of the problems. But, you know, overall, you know, things are looking pretty good. And then so the Soviet Union falls. And so fusionists kind of take their victory lap. And then what happens to fusionism? How does that fall affect? How does their success affect what happens to the project?
Stephanie:
[47:03] Well, I think what we've found is that fusionist ideas, at least for a long while, sort of disappeared from the conversation. And there's a whole generation of young conservatives now who have never encountered these debates. And they've never had to wrestle with the arguments and the reasons why. Conservatives 50 years ago were so convinced of the dual importance of liberty and virtue. And so they think that actually maybe these things are negotiable and we can trade one of them away or both of them away in order to get what we want, which is to win an election, to defeat the left, to reward our friends, to punish our enemies. So we have a whole generation of young conservatives, who are no longer committed to fusionism, fusionist ideas, who in some cases explicitly reject them or who in other cases are just sort of implicitly have grown up in a world where this was not a part of what they thought it meant to be a conservative. And so I was trying to understand how this happened or what was going on here. And I do think part of it was that you have this moment of sort of triumph or vindication, as you say, between Reagan running as a fusionist and winning two landslide elections and then the fall of the Soviet Union. There was just this feeling that like, who could possibly doubt our ideas now? Like, surely we don't have to spend any time or effort, grappling with them, teaching them, persuading people of them.
Stephanie:
[48:23] Everybody can look around and just see that obviously a free society is a good society and better than an unfree society. Obviously, this sort of dual commitment to liberty and virtue is how you end up with mourning in America. Like, who could doubt it now? But it turns out over time, those commitments will erode. I think of it, I have this image in my head that I use, which is that they felt like, Well, we laid the intellectual foundations by spending a lot of time debating and discussing these ideas. We laid the intellectual foundations and now we can go to the next step, which is building a political apparatus on top of that foundation to win elections and whatnot. But what happens is if you're only focusing on tending to and building the political apparatus, the intellectual foundations will erode out from underneath it. And you'll have, you know, generations who have never encountered these ideas or the arguments behind them.
Stephanie:
[49:14] They think the whole point of politics is just to win elections for the sake of winning elections, just to defeat the left for the sake of defeating the left. And so you have to be constantly tending to that intellectual groundwork, it turns out. So I think that that's at least a part of the ways in which the sort of victories of fusionism or fusionism's wins sort of also paved the way for it to... Disappear over time. I think this is probably natural. It's probably, this probably just happens when an idea seems so self-evidently true, you stop thinking about the importance of defending it. But it's now, it's now we're past the point where we can sort of have the luxury to assume that people will just get it on their own. Like it's going to have to be defended. It's going to have to be argued for. We're going to have to, this is, you know, what I'm trying to do in my work is to sort of reinsert these ideas into the conversation and remind people or teach them for the first time when it comes to young people, of why liberty and virtue are so important.
Cody:
[50:07] Well, I grew up kind of during the Bush era. And I mean, I sort of felt like I heard some of these ideas, usually as slogans in campaign commercials, talking about why, you know, the danger of, you know, Muslims or Democrats or whatever that wanted to take away our freedom and, you know, hated Jesus or whatever. But yeah, I think you're right that there was not really a sense of, you know what what are the ideas like what are the arguments that we're making what are the real ideas here versus kind of what are the slogans and I think what happens when you just have slogans is over time you're kind of in this place where you can you know support a candidate who, doesn't believe in faith doesn't believe in freedom but you still have the slogans, and and you'll sort of say well you know he's more on our side maybe than the other side is you know he believes in freedom more than the other side does or faith more than the other side does or whatever he's our champion. Well, so there's a lot of other figures you discuss in the book, but we kind of have a limited time, so we can't get to all of them. But obviously, people will need to buy the book and should buy the book. It's a really good book. But I do want to skip ahead a little bit.
Cody:
[51:12] To the paleocons, people like Pat Buchanan, who I'm told from some right libertarians that he's somebody that we need to emulate, somebody who sort of got it and understood it.
Cody:
[51:24] And so how did the paleocon movement depart from traditional conservatism and was the anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard right to see in the paleocons a legitimate ideological partner for libertarians to move the country toward freedom?
Stephanie:
[51:41] Yeah, I don't think that that was a smart bet by Rothbard. So the main ways in which the paleocons depart from the sort of fusionist conservatives that come before, they're looking back to a pre-World War II American right, which is more isolationist. That is to say, both anti-interventionist militarily, we should not get involved in World War II, we should not get involved in other people's business. And, This is the thing that's going to strike you. I think people as, oh, yeah, this is a big departure.
Stephanie:
[52:14] Anti-globalist, anti-free trade, anti the idea that we should have, you know, oftentimes libertarians will say like, well, we don't want to go and get involved in other places militarily, but we're not isolationist because we want to trade. We want to be, we want to have all kinds of, you know, we want travel, we want trade, we want a free exchange of goods and ideas and people. This is not isolationism. the teleocons are quite isolationist. They're much more like bring it all home. Bring the troops home. Bring the money home. We should do it here at home. We should be willing to use taxpayer dollars to prop up the American economy and to protect our workers and our industries from competition abroad. So it's much more anti-cosmopolitan, anti-globalist in a sort of comprehensive sense. And then also very anti-immigration. So I would say it's socially conservative, strongly anti-immigration, anti-trade, and anti-war or anti-military involvement abroad. So you can see that at least on the sort of foreign policy piece, there is going to be some overlap with most libertarians who are also going to be more skeptical of using American military might abroad. And so if you wanted to form a narrow alliance to push that one issue, then I would say, sure, OK, I'm willing to work with anybody who agrees with me on a particular issue. I'm not going to fault you for that. But I think the other three things are very much at odds with classical liberalism.
Stephanie:
[53:38] And so they represent a pretty massive departure from the... From the fusionist understanding of what a good society looks like. And there's also, I guess, at a rhetorical level, maybe, there's also tends to be within the paleocon camp. And then also, we see this in many of the folks on the sort of anti-liberal right today, a tendency to treat politics as war. It is a war in which, you know, all this philosophizing about liberty and virtue is kind of irrelevant. What matters is acquiring power and using it against our enemies before they use it against us. That approach to politics is very anti-liberal because liberalism is the sort of supposed to be the way that we find a way to live peacefully with people, even if we disagree with them, you know, by putting down the weapons. is much more of an approach of pick up the weapons. They're going to use them against us, so we must use them against them first. This approach to politics as war, I think, is a thing that the paleocons are more comfortable with and that we see a lot of in our politics today.
Cody:
[54:41] Yeah, not belligerent to those overseas, but to everyone else. Yeah, there is a sense, I think, in which it's the Paleo-Con, you know, kind of Mesos caucus thing is a bit like sort of saying, well, you know, Bernie Sanders doesn't like Israel. We don't like Israel. So Bernie Sanders is the way forward for libertarianism. What?
Cody:
[55:00] So we're kind of running out of time here. So I just want to be one more question. To what extent did fusionism win the day in guiding the conservative movement in ways that can still be felt today? And also what sense has its lessons just sort of disappeared leading up to the Trump era and into the Trump era, which seems to kind of jettison both freedom and virtue as not necessarily being required?
Stephanie:
[55:24] It was enormously successful in the second half of the 20th century. I think it became the consensus position. This dual commitment to liberty and virtue became the consensus position on the American right, especially in sort of the intellectual and institutional world. So all of the think tanks, publications, advocacy organizations, the Young Americans for Freedom, the American Conservative Union, Philadelphia Society, the Federalist Society, all these institutions that form to try to, among conservatives in America or on the right in the United States, to advance their commitments, their mission statements are all basically very fusionist. They're all about liberty and virtue, order, liberty, you know, personal responsibility, limited government, free markets. It's very recognizably fusionist. And so I think it was basically a consensus position. There were dissenters, people like Brent Bozell, but they were always on the fringes. They were always making their arguments from the outside. And they were always on a minority view, I would say. I think that has changed in the last 10 years or so, where what went from being a consensus position that most of the conservative movement was basically on board with is now very much a contested position. That doesn't mean that fusionism is dead. For a while, I was hearing this everywhere. Fusionism is dead. It's not coming back. Like, you're wasting your time writing this book about it, you know?
Stephanie:
[56:44] I don't believe that at all. I think right now what we see is a very much a segment of the American right that is still very deeply committed to fusionist principles. And you see a segment of the American right that has abandoned them. And there's a live debate going on. There's a sort of ideological civil war happening between these two camps about the future of the movement. And I don't think it's obvious at this moment which one is going to come out on top. I think that the sort of anti-fusionist, anti-liberal right has definitely... Carried the day more often in the last 10 years. Trump is no fusionist. J.D. Vance is very much not a fusionist. He is, I think, one of the most actually effective and prominent defenders of this sort of anti-liberal, anti-fusionist conservatism that we've had in recent years. So the folks who are sort of manning the Trump administration are, for the most part, not fusionists, conservatives or fusionists. But there are plenty of fusionists still out there. I think most American voters and even Republican voters deep down have some pretty deep commitments to these ideas of liberty and virtue. And they maybe have been willing to.
Stephanie:
[57:51] Drift away from them in the last few years in order because they feel like, winning this election is more important and defeating the left is more important in this moment, at this moment where the sort of left has become so militantly hostile to people like me that I'm willing to vote for whoever is going to, I think, is going to defend me against the left. I think that's more what's been going on in recent years. I don't think it's actually that most American voters, most of the American public has abandoned, these fusionist commitments, the belief in liberty and virtue, because I agree with Frank Meyer at the end of the day that this is actually really quite woven into the fabric of the sort of American experiment in a way. And so although it's being tested and it's fraying in many ways at this time, it's no longer the sort of universal consensus position that it once looked like. It's still there. And there's still, I think, hope for it to find its way back. Sort of. I would say, if nothing else, the reception that my book has had so far has been so encouraging because there have been so many people who have been reaching out to me like, oh my gosh, I thought I was the only one. I'm so glad to hear that I'm not the only one that still believes in these things. So there's lots of people out there still on the fusionist side. And yeah, we're going to have to live through these debates to see how they turn out.
Cody:
[59:06] Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, there's that undercurrent still there. It's just, I think people have to care enough about the ideas to, I think, really commit to them. There's so much, I think, short-term thinking, as you mentioned. I remember listening to something on NPR back before it was the kind of critical race theory channel all the time. And it was, I think, during the 2016 election, someone was talking about, someone who was kind of on the left was talking about a friend of theirs who was a conservative, who was highly involved in his church, had adopted all these children. He said, one of the best guys you could ever meet. And he was voting for Trump. And he said, how could you do that? How could you vote for Trump? And he says, well, you know, when Trump goes into office, he's going to bring, I'm sure, a lot of really smart and wonderful guys who are going to help direct him and move the country in the right direction. But all the people that Hillary is going to bring in hate me personally.
Cody:
[59:54] And there was this sort of sense of, I think, you know, not that he should have voted for Hillary, but there's a sort of sense of like, you know, we're going to play this short term game and we're going to set aside everything else we care about. And it's like, if you're going to make that sort of commit, you'll say, I'm going to, I'm going to make that, that, that, I don't know, that trade off or that bet, I'm going to vote for Trump. But then you don't then say, okay, we can't ever have to make this choice again. And like that, I think, is sort of respectable to sort of say, well, we're just going to go along with this as long as we need to write it out because we're just we hate the left so much. It doesn't really matter what the right does. It doesn't matter. Faith doesn't matter. Freedom doesn't matter. Virtue doesn't matter. It's a it's kind of a wild bet to make. But sorry for ranting. OK, so Stephanie Slade, her book is called Fusionism, Liberty, Virtue and the Future of the American Right. It is out now. And Stephanie, thank you for taking time to talk with us.
Stephanie:
[1:00:46] Thank you so much for having me on this was fun.
Cody:
[1:00:48] It was fun for me too i was i was really excited to be able to get you on here and also to meet you in person at acton which i hope to hope to meet you again there sometime it was a wonderful time all right thank you so much.
Norman Horn:
[1:01:00] Thank you for listening to another episode of the Libertarian Christian Podcast. If you liked today's episode, we encourage you to rate us on Apple Podcasts to help expand our audience. If you want to reach out to us, email us at podcast@libertarianchristians.com. You can also reach us @Lciofficial on Twitter. And of course we are on Facebook and have an active group you are welcome to join. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.
Katherine Williams:
[1:01:25] The Libertarian Christian Podcast is a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute, a registered 501(c)3 non-profit. If you'd like to find out more about LCI, visit us on the web, at LibertarianChristians.com. The voiceovers are by Matt Bellis and Katherine Williams. As of Episode 115, our audio production is provided by Podsworth Media. Check them out at Podsworth.com.