The Trouble with Fusionism

A couple of months back, I criticized Robert Miller’s defense of “pragmatic [classical] liberalism” against the indictment of liberalism brought by Patrick Deneen, among others. At the end of that post, I promised to write a follow-up pursuing further the question of how far a formally liberal political sphere—which, for the sake of ease, we may define as one that is neutral between competing theories of the good—is compatible with or prejudicial to the traditional moral values that conservatives cherish. Thanks to my indolence, that second post never saw the light of day; and at this point, it would probably be tedious to double back and pick up the thread of that discussion right where I left it.

But my friend and co-blogger Danielle Charette’s recent post on fusionism gives me an opportunity to explore some of the same themes, albeit from a different angle. Commenting on a Cato Institute web symposium on the topic, Danielle walks us through the nuances of the conservative-libertarian love-hate relationship, ending by calling on Rightists of all stripes to “revive a principled interest and commitment to fusionism.” Now, I’ve written about fusionism here before, but Danielle’s piece prompts me to embark on a fuller discussion.

I’d like to begin by attempting to dispel a remarkably durable misconception about fusionism: namely, that the term refers to the political alliance between two distinct camps on the Right, i.e. libertarians and conservatives. Danielle seems to hint at this when she reference “the tug and pull between moderate, Hayekian libertarianism and moderate conservatism, of the Russell Kirk variety” that she finds “healthy for the movement.” And one of the libertarian writers at Cato, Jeremy Colassa, complains that “fusionism” has been a bum deal for libertarians, since it’s always been the conservative wing of the movement that’s held the limelight, with libertarians playing a supporting role.

But, strictly speaking, neither of these remarks can refer to Frank Meyer’s fusionism. Contrary to popular belief, fusionism is not “big-tent conservatism,” but the very opposite. Whereas the “big-tent” impulse is to band together in spite of intractable ideological differences, fusionism is an attempt to do away with philosophical differences on the Right by “fusing” the respective dogmata of traditionalists and libertarians into a coherent and mostly homogeneous whole. What Meyer aimed at in formulating fusionism was not a constructive give-and-take between two competing camps, but the smooth and seamless integration of doctrinaire libertarianism and moral absolutism. The resultant ideology, far from being supple and dynamic, is as rigid and unyielding as the most doctrinaire Marxism—and it is wrong to boot.

Fusionism begins with two premises: that “traditionalist conservatives” are right in asserting that the end of human life is virtue, while “libertarians” are right in insisting that freedom is the highest political aim. Meyer’s brilliant contribution (so he thought) was to uncover the hidden connection: freedom being a precondition of virtue, the traditionalist is logically just as committed as the libertarian to maximizing freedom. If he tried to use the state’s coercive power to encourage virtue, he would defeat his own purpose by making true, i.e. freely chosen, virtue impossible. All governmental activities whose aim is to promote virtue are therefore illegitimate, and the true functions of government may be reduced to three: the common defense, the maintenance of order, and the administration of justice. Thus, as Brent Bozell was quick to point out, the political consequences of fusionism are quite indistinguishable from those of plain old libertarianism or even minarchism. All that fusionism is, at bottom, is radical libertarianism with a Burkean face: a shabby rhetorical attempt to get conservatives to give up their political aims in return for lip service to their moral philosophy.

That the attempt is in fact shabby, I will now endeavor to prove. The fusionist says to the conservative, “You want virtue, virtue demands freedom, but the state acts by coercion; therefore the state can only diminish the opportunities for virtue.” The argument is too glib. Let us clarify our terms. What is meant by “freedom,” and what is meant by “coercion”? Presumably, the freedom that is needed for morally meritorious action is none other than freedom of the will. I accrue moral merit by doing the right thing when I could have done otherwise, and I accrue moral blame by doing the wrong thing when I could have done otherwise. If, however, I find myself in some extraordinary circumstance wherein I have no control over my actions—say I have been involuntarily hypnotized, or am sleepwalking—then I can hardly be credited or blamed for anything I do while in that unconscious and non-volitional state. (As Aquinas would say, such acts are acti hominis merely, not acti humani.)

Now, there is a sense of the word “coercion” in which coerced actions lack moral standing in just this way. If someone much stronger than myself wraps my hand around a gun and forces my finger to squeeze the trigger, then I have been coerced, in the strongest sense of the word, into shooting the gun, and my own will in the matter is perfectly irrelevant. It follows that I can neither be praised nor blamed for discharging the weapon, nor held responsible for where the bullet ends up. Just as if I was sleepwalking, it is almost truer to say that “I” did not shoot the gun at all. Somebody else did, using my body as an instrument. This kind of coercion, then, does indeed eliminate moral responsibility.

But it should be obvious that this is not the kind of “coercion” that states undertake when they codify laws and threaten punishments for their trespassers. The law against murder does not make it physically impossible to commit murder; the legislature, by ratifying it, does not seize control of the body of every potential murderer and render him innocuous. Quite the contrary. The potential killer retains the moral freedom to enact or refrain from enacting his dark designs. All that the law does is add a certain weight to the side of the deliberative scales that tilts toward not murdering. That the weight is finite is proven from the fact that there are murderers, even with laws that “coerce” against murdering. And, as with murdering, so with any other immoral action. The state, then, that legislates against some given immoral behavior, far from taking away its inhabitants’ choice whether to do or to forbear, does little more than to incentivize forbearance. In other words, it simply eases the choice of virtue.

Here the fusionist would surely object that the picture is too naive. “Virtue,” he might say, “consists not only in choosing the right external action, but in choosing it for the right internal reasons. Virtue is a state of the will, and anyone who refrains from doing wrong only because of a threatened punishment is no more virtuous than if he had actually done wrong.” The objection is correct as far as it goes, but it does not nearly as far as one might think. For one thing, even the person just described, who is deterred only from the outward execution of his action, is at least saved from whatever habit-forming influence he might suffer from having actually committed the wrong. Furthermore, and more importantly, law influences moral reasoning at a deeper level than the consequential cost-benefit analysis. As Robert George has expressed the point on several occasions, the law serves a morally pedagogic function. On some level, people (especially the majority who do not preoccupy themselves with moral or legal philosophy) take their moral cues from the law: if something is legally proscribed, it is assumed to be immoral; if it is legally permitted, it is assumed to be permissible. The case of abortion affords a good example of this phenomenon. I have heard no small number of supporters of abortion rights justify their support on the grounds that “it’s a woman’s choice.” By which they simply mean that the present-day laws of the country treat abortion as a woman’s (private) choice, from which they infer that its moral status must be the same. Civic law and moral law are inseparable; human beings instinctively feel that the one mirrors and bodies forth the other. When it fails to do so to the full extent that is practical—when civil law is but an artificially truncated image of moral law—a truncated conception of moral law is the result. So by criminalizing some given immoral behavior, the state not only assists its inhabitants in refraining from the actual performance of that behavior; it assists them in the deeper and more vital task of recognizing it as immoral in the first place.

So far I have been speaking as though the only relationship worth considering was that between the legislative state and the coerced individual. I have tried to show that, even on that assumption, the real believer in objective morality has no reason to find the fusionist’s last objection persuasive. But there is a still stronger response to the objection once we remember that communities possess a kind of moral ecology, and that the outward actions of one member of a community can affect the moral life of another, can lay temptations to immorality in another’s path. The temptation can be explicit, as when one person openly tries to persuade another to join him in doing wrong. Or it can be implicit, in which the mere fact of one’s doing wrong openly makes it harder for another to resist the same malefaction. (This is the whole concept of “scandal” in Christian moral theology.) It is true that there is something mysterious about the way in which we are drawn to emulate the deeds of our neighbors, be they good or bad; a liberal friend of mine has ridiculed the idea by calling it a “monkey see, monkey do” principle. (An ironic rejoinder, in my opinion, for it is supposed to be liberals who are better at remembering that man is a primate.)

Even so, the phenomenon itself is so clear, in my opinion, that no one who makes a serious study of human nature can fail to notice it; only the mechanism is mysterious, not the fact. I was once eating lunch in a college dining hall with three of my friends, when I decided to go and get myself an ice cream cone. One by one, the other three got up and came back with their own ice cream cones. Maybe this emulative tendency comes from our desire for social approbation. Maybe it’s a device meant to streamline decision-making; we intuitively recognize that other people are similar to us, and so we think that they what they judge good for them has a fair chance of being good for us as well. Maybe it’s just that when we see others enjoying the benefits of a certain choice, the benefits are brought home to mind so much more vividly than they were when the choice existed merely in thought, especially if the downsides of the choice are not likewise immediately salient. Or perhaps, what is most probable, a combination of these and other factors is what makes man the mimetic animal that Aristotle observed him to be.

All else being equal, then, the moral, and not merely the physical, welfare of a community is improved when some one of its members refrains from some given immorality, even if the only reason he does so is to avoid punishment from the state and from the community. Hypocrisy has been described as the homage that vice pays to virtue. It might be better to say that hypocrisy is the protection of virtue extorted from vice, and, for that reason, is less obnoxious than flagrant vice—if not for the hypocrite himself, then for the moral welfare of those around him.

At this point, it seems to me, the only path left to the fusionist is to double back and take umbrage at the state’s doing anything to make the virtuous life easier for its citizens. The objection may be framed as a plea for heroism: “We want virtuous souls that can stand on their own two feet, not ones that need to be propped up by extrinsic supports.” But this objection is untrue to the traditional view of man and morality to which the fusionist claims to be loyal; it is particularly untrue to the Christian element in that view. For the traditional view, especially in its Christian element, knows that evil comes easier to man than does good. The rigor of discipline, of self-denial, of subordinating self-will to a higher law, is deeply uncongenial to human nature. Not infrequently it is only with as much external help as can be come by that the effort can be even moderately successful. It is not insulting to a weak man to give him an arm to lean on, and if the traditionalist view is right, we are all weak men. What’s more—and this also is a Christian insight—the nature of things is such that there will always be opportunities for the individual to go above and beyond what society demands of him: to take steps toward the asymptote of moral perfection that are truly personal, truly his own. And so heroism turns out to be quite as safe from the encroachments of a paternalistic state as moral freedom and moral responsibility.

It does not in the slightest follow from these arguments that the state should mandate every moral action and punish every immoral one. Even if such a thing were possible, there would remain the dictates of prudence, which say that the legislator should act in the moral realm, as in all other realms, when the good to be gained is proportionate to the effort that must be expended and when no greater evil is likely to result as a consequence. If properly adhered to, I think, these guidelines would be found in practice to leave huge swathes of social life unregulated by governmental paternalism. Nonetheless, the very fact that the true criteria of intervention are prudential and not ideological is fatal to fusionism—which, as I stressed above, rests on a principled objection to all moralistic designs of all governments and is thus practically indistinguishable from the most hardened libertarianism.

I should like to end by invoking the same caveat I always invoke when arguing against the philosophical marriage of conservatism and libertarianism, and that is that nothing I have said implies that a practical alliance is not useful or necessary. On the contrary, I think it obvious that conservatives and libertarians alike have a stake in combating the growth of the federal government, which undermines local communities and traditional foci of authority just as much as it curtails individual freedom, if not more. I am happy to join my libertarian friends in combating the leviathanic—not to mention economically portentous, and frequently unconstitutional—overreaches of Congress and the Washington-centered bureaucracy. But I can fight next to a comrade-in-arms without becoming him. This is the lesson we conservatives need to learn and remember in our dealings with libertarians; and to do that, we must bury forever the specious allure of “fusionism.”