The American experiment in ordered liberty assumes that elections will come and go, but that amid changing circumstances the nation’s fundamental principles will endure – providing continuity, ballast, and guidance – and citizens will persist in exercising their rights and performing their duties reasonably. Yet today’s left and right increasingly fear that the other’s victory in the next election spells doom for the nation. The partisans tend to overlook the role that restoring a shared appreciation of the nation’s founding dedication to blending liberty and virtue would play in sustaining the American republic.
With the 2026 midterms just over three weeks away, liberty and virtue do not much occupy voters’ minds. Worry about grocery, gas, and health care costs is widespread while citizens divide – often sharply – about immigration, border security, and deportation; the threat and promise of artificial intelligence and AI data-center construction; and military operations against Iran. Public opinion polls suggest that Democrats will win control of the House of Representatives by a comfortable margin and have a decent chance to prevail narrowly in the Senate. Yet predictions range from a blue wave to a GOP hold of the small Republican majorities in the House and Senate owing to redistricting, incumbent advantage, and targeted campaigning. More than a few Democrats and Republicans suspect the other party of plotting to cheat its way to victory, or at least to a minimization of losses.
Whatever the outcome of next month’s midterm elections, and with a view to the 2028 presidential race and beyond, the United States needs a conservative movement dedicated to preserving the blend of liberty and virtue that has undergirded the American experiment from the first.
Combining liberty and virtue may seem like mixing water and oil because liberty, which involves doing as you please, frequently conflicts with virtue, or acting as you ought.
Each, though, needs the other to fulfill its promise. Liberty without self-restraint, toleration, civility, generosity, and other moral virtues deteriorates into sloth or decadence; virtue without liberty – particularly from government coercion – turns inward and curdles as arbitrary authority severs virtue’s connection to judgment, choice, and action. Furthermore, it takes responsible citizens to maintain free and democratic institutions, and it takes families and communities that enjoy freedom to nurture the moral virtues that mark responsible citizens.
In his 1796 Farewell Address, President George Washington – the very embodiment of individual liberty and excellence of character in the young republic – could affirm without fear of partisan censure that liberty depends on virtue and virtue is fostered by education and religion. For much of the nation’s history, few would have doubted that American freedom rested on the virtue of American citizens.
Yet the conviction that liberty and virtue represent core and mutually reinforcing elements of the American experiment no longer forms part of an American consensus. Focused on decrying injustices that allegedly permeate the country, progressives give scant attention to the principles of freedom and the cultivation of moral character, let alone to how best to combine them. Meanwhile, the traditional conviction that American constitutional government requires the blending of liberty and virtue no longer even forms part of a right-wing consensus.
While President Trump has displayed remarkable personal tenacity and toughness in the face of a decade’s worth of Democratic schemes to jail him, he has, to say the least, neither urged fellow citizens to practice nor modeled for them the moral virtues central to maintaining a rights-protecting democracy.
Trump’s polices have advanced liberty in several ways. He has enlarged public debate by stating, often crudely, opinions that deserve a public hearing but which most politicians have been loath to say aloud even softly and politely. He has cut taxes, eliminated regulations, and reduced the federal bureaucracy. He has appointed judges who seek to understand and apply the Constitution’s original meaning. And he has fought the diversity, equity, and inclusion industry on campus and in government.
Trump has also impaired liberty. The president has curbed economic freedom by imposing tariffs that, while countering unfair practices by U.S. trading partners, also protect administration-favored domestic industries. He has sent deleterious signals on free speech by excluding reporters from the White House based on their viewpoints (routinely hostile to the president) and by attempting to manage the composition of university faculties (typically one-sidedly progressive) and the content of their curricula (frequently hollow and rudderless). And he has compromised the rule of law on which political freedom rests by pushing the outside of the legal envelope to implement his political agenda at home.
Over the course of the Trump era, a diverse array of intellectuals has championed a “new right” in the United States – and throughout the West – united by nothing so much as a distaste for classical liberalism. Some new-right thinkers want government to uphold Christianity. Some want government to centrally plan the economy to advance the common good. Some would go so far as to replace the American regime with a commanding government that directs citizens to the good life. Most of the new right’s prominent voices want to rein in liberty to bolster virtue.
Hence, the new right tends to disparage “fusionism.” National Review senior editor Frank Meyer adopted the term in the 1960s for his rediscovery and restatement of the American founders’ synthesis of liberty and virtue. The new right views fusionism as fundamentally wrongheaded but as perhaps having served the nation in the early decades of America’s post-World War II conservative movement, which matured during the Cold War and culminated in Ronald Reagan’s presidency. According to much new-right thinking, however, maintaining an overarching commitment to combining liberty and virtue at the present juncture hinders the drastic steps government must take against the depredations wrought over many decades by progressives and acquiesced to by conservatives.
New-right critics charge that supine liberty-loving conservative elites have pandered to resolute progressive elites, accepting the steady leftward movement of politics, culture, and education as settled features of the American inheritance. In contrast, the new right aspires to reverse progressive advances and restore traditional norms and moral order. For the new right, though, where conflict arises between restoration of traditional norms and moral order and preserving America’s traditional principles of freedom, the latter must give way.
With a judiciousness all-the-more admirable for its unfashionableness, Stephanie Slade examines in her recent book, “Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue and the Future of the American Right,” the American experiment’s permanent reliance on liberty and virtue. An editor at Reason magazine, Slade provides in lucid, no-nonsense prose a fresh overview of fusionism’s origins in the clashes of the 1950s between libertarian or liberty-oriented conservatives and traditionalist or virtue-oriented conservatives. She explores the landmark 1962 exchange in National Review in which L. Brent Bozell Jr., also a National Review senior editor, anticipated today’s new-right postliberals by taking Frank Meyer and fusionism to task for subordinating virtue to liberty. She reviews the electorally winning mix of liberty and virtue informing Reagan’s presidency. She discusses three major new-right or “Dissident Right” factions – theocons (who put religion first), natcons (who put “the idea of the nation” first), and neoreactionaries (who put power and authority first) – and deftly exposes their exaggerations, misconceptions, and reckless political prescriptions. In conclusion, Slade restates in light of contemporary controversies the enduring truth that the well-being of rights-protecting democracy in America depends on the nation’s ability to blend liberty and virtue.
Slade rests her case not only on the theoretical interdependence of liberty and virtue but also on the implications of recent conservative reforms and the longstanding character of the American people.
While stressing that new-right ire springs in significant measure from genuine “left-wing excesses,” she observes that the new right’s “cataclysmic vision” of American decline recalls the apocalyptic admonitions Bozell aimed at Meyer. Contrary to Bozell and the new right, however, Slade argues that, among other developments, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the rise of right-wing media, and the homeschooling and classical-Christian school renaissance and the expansion of school-choice programs demonstrate America’s capacity for self-correction.
The new-right belief that America must sacrifice liberty to rescue virtue, Slade maintains, “is a hard sell for a country that has long taken pride in its individualism, its suspicion of centralized authority, and its belief in liberty and justice for all.” Sacrificing liberty to save virtue is also a dubious proposition for citizens who “know, if only at an intuitive level, that hubristic attempts to wield government power like a magic wand often make things worse,” who “learned from the experience of Europe in the twentieth century that anti-liberal regimes are more likely to be dystopias than utopias” (emphasis in original), and who “are aware (even if they sometimes forget) that those who foment hatred toward one’s fellow citizens usually have ulterior motives.”
Thoughtful consideration of the American political tradition and careful examination of contemporary American politics converge in a sobering conclusion: The United States will conserve liberty and virtue together or lose both.
