WHEN FOX television host Tucker Carlson recently attacked conservative faith in free market economics, he probably surprised a number of his viewers. For too long, Carlson charged, libertarians and social conservatives have ignored the fundamental part economic structures play in undermining communities. Families are crushed beneath market forces. Disposable goods—fueled by consumer culture—provide little salve for drug addiction and suicide. Markets are a “tool,” Carlson said, not a “religion.” “You’d have to be a fool to worship” them.

Carlson put a primetime spin on an argument that has been brewing for some time on the right. Just as the 2008 economic collapse and the national prominence of Bernie Sanders have begun to shift the Democratic Party’s stance toward socialism, so the long effects of the downturn and Trump’s election have caused a rethinking of conservative commitment to free markets. Time magazine profiled policy entrepreneurs attempting to give heft to a post-market-fundamentalist gop. The Niskanen Center, a redoubt of the #NeverTrump movement, has backed away from libertarianism in favor of “moderation.” And the journal American Affairs is proving a fascinating avenue of contrarian right—and left—thought.

The nominees for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s “Conservative Book of the Year” provide another index of this growing uncertainty about markets. The shortlist of five contained two books by political theorists. The first, Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, argues that the American left and right are both committed to an atomistic liberalism that, through the logic of individual choice and rights, has worked in tandem to uproot communities and enlarge the state. The winner, Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism, is a qualified and semantically-precise defense of nationalism as the best, realistic basis for a global order. Even Suicide of the West by Jonah Goldberg, another award finalist that many saw as opposed to Deneen and Hazony, expressed a greater level of uncertainty about the side effects of free markets than might have been expected from a stalwart contributor to National Review five years ago. Then there is the popularity in some conservative circles of the heterodox socialist historian Christopher Lasch. Lasch’s later career combined criticism of elites, feminism and the concept of progress with a sustained attack on their capitalist foundations. Like Carlson, Lasch connected drug addiction with the consumerist nature of modern economies.

The irony that self-described conservatives are belatedly discovering the disruptive power of free markets is not lost on critics of American conservatism. It is a widely noted paradox that many conservatives have committed themselves to one of the most transformative forces in human history. The earliest self-conscious proponents of conservatism in America were not in fact as committed to free market orthodoxy as their successors. Conservative intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s, including some associated with key movement organs like National Review, were ambivalent about a conservatism based upon capitalism and advanced arguments that anticipated current debates. These market-skeptical conservatives lost a series of political and philosophical battles that led to the absurdity of conserving the process of creative destruction. Now their old arguments are appearing in new garb.

ONCE UPON a time, American politicians desperately evaded the designation “conservative.” The preferred label was liberal. In 1948, New York Times Magazine found that major leaders across the political spectrum—from Republican stalwart Robert Taft through Thomas Dewey, Harry S. Truman and Henry Wallace—called themselves liberals. The Republican Party was conservative, former president Herbert Hoover said, “in the sense of conserving true liberalism.” At most, Taft would call himself a “liberal conservative.” It was widely accepted that the United States was a liberal nation committed to liberal values, the very argument advanced by Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America. But in the early 1950s there was a vogue in “fashionable circles” to, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put it, “dismiss liberalism as naive, ritualistic, sentimental, shallow.” The brief popularity of “conservatism” among certain political thinkers helped to transform American political language.

Three decades of shocks—the Depression, two World Wars, the Holocaust, atomic and hydrogen weapons, fascism, mass politics, secularism, the Cold War—blasted away Victorian pieties. While many intellectuals embraced existentialism or the believing skepticism of the “end of ideology,” a number of Anglophile thinkers contended that what society needed was a healthy dose of tradition, hierarchy, transcendence and orthodox or neo-orthodox religion. Peter Viereck, the poet and historian who first championed what became called “New Conservatism,” began his 1949 conservative treatise by asking “what are the values we can live by in the postwar crisis?” His answer was a “revolt against revolt” and a humane conservatism of the “moral, aesthetic, and intellectual values” that make life worth living. Viereck’s Conservatism Revisited inaugurated numerous books and articles in favor of an American conservatism modeled on the British Conservative Party, or what might be called Toryism with a human face.

In politics, most of this loose group of writers and academics were largely middle-of-the-road Republicans or Democrats, especially admiring of Adlai Stevenson’s learning and bearing. In economics, too, they were moderates. They favored markets and private ownership but defended trade unions and the New Deal as institutions that preserved social cohesion and sustained capitalism through crisis. In Viereck’s breakthrough essay, “But – I’m a Conservative,” he professed agnosticism on the best economic system for a society. What mattered was that it was chosen legitimately and “baptized” in tradition. In a later essay, he indicated a preference for “mixed economy Keynesianism.” Another New Conservative, John Hallowell, a political science professor at Duke, believed in “the necessity for a controlled economy” and the value of “many features of the so-called welfare state.” August Heckscher, opinion editor of the moderate Republican New York Herald-Tribune, criticized the American right’s pejorative use of “welfare-state.” Not only is welfare “a supreme end of the government,” Heckscher wrote in Confluence, a journal edited by a young Henry Kissinger at Harvard, it is constitutional and “basic to every sound conservatism.”

These conservatives cherished social stability against disruption and dehumanization. They drew on the insights of Edmund Burke—then undergoing an academic and cultural reappraisal—and the concept of original sin as reasserted by the prominent theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Although they preferred markets over state ownership, the New Conservatives recognized the power of capitalism to upend society. In The Quest for Community, Robert Nisbet, a sociologist associated with New Conservatism, hoped for a new laissez-faire that took communities into account. The free market was an unnatural economic order, Nisbet argued. It had been brought into existence “by the planned destruction of old customs, associations, villages, and other securities” and yet only functioned because of those same mediating institutions. Raymond English, a professor at Kenyon College, claimed that the basic assumption of “economic conservatism” was fundamentally the same as Marxism: that humans are economic beings, motivated by selfish materialism in a lifelong struggle. In English’s view, Marxists and libertarians both wrongly believed that political interference in economics could never “be for the general welfare,” only privileged classes. “Social reform is not the same as egalitarianism,” Viereck complained. “And why is any merely material and economic system more sacred than the moral duty of compassion for want?”

The New Conservative project faced major difficulties. Not least of all because, despite Republican disavowal of the term “conservative,” in the American context “conservatism” popularly meant old guard Republican opponents of the New Deal and support for “the American enterprise system.” Viereck had intended the “New” Conservatism to mean “non-Republican, non-commercialist, non-conformist.” As early as the 1950s, though, he was regretting the term “conservative” because of its association with anti-New Deal Republicans. Viereck insisted that “any non-moronic conservative must favor” the New Deal because it had done more than anything to “prevent class-radicalism & communism.” Further complicating Viereck’s hope was the fact that the man who became most associated with “conservatism” in the mid-1950s was a Bob Taft Republican from Michigan.

RUSSELL KIRK, author of The Conservative Mind, a winding history of Anglo-American ideas and personalities, did as much as anyone to legitimize the concept of conservatism in America. The eccentric professor turned down Alfred Knopf’s demands for major cuts to his manuscript to publish with a small, right-wing publishing house in Chicago, best known for William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale. Kirk’s tome spoke to the conservative moment of the early 1950s and, spurred by strong and prominent reviews in major publications, became a shock best-seller. Like Viereck and the other New Conservatives, Kirk celebrated tradition, order and transcendent principles. Unlike virtually all the other writers associated with the New Conservatism, his personal politics were down-the-line old guard Republican. The book’s success decisively established the basic language of American conservatism and Kirk’s politics, and indefatigable networking encouraged right-wing Republicans to embrace the term conservative. “We are beginning to succeed,” Kirk wrote to his publisher Henry Regnery, “when we make such people come over and use our terms.”

Deeply romantic, Kirk celebrated traditional societies and the conservative leaders and thinkers he believed ensured their posterity. He detested “ideologues.” Although he called himself “the most orthodox of thinkers on pure economic theory” and enshrined reverence for private property as a basic conservative canon, he was critical of libertarians and “doctrinaire apologists for free enterprise.” In The Conservative Mind, Kirk tweaked the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises’ claim that “capitalism gave the world what it needed.” It led to a high standard of living, Kirk agreed, but “turned the world inside out,” reducing “personal loyalties” to “financial relationships.” Capitalism produced the bugbear of the New Conservatives—“mass man”—while industrialism “was a harder knock to conservatism than the books of the French equalitarians.” The New Conservatives recognized that the embrace of capitalism and industrialism was especially strong in the United States. One sympathetic observer, Cornell professor Clinton Rossiter, wrote that the “rugged individualism” embraced by the Republican right was “an explosive charge” on society. Rossiter compared the American right with English conservatism. Americans were more optimistic, materialistic and individualistic, he concluded. To build a political movement of imaginative conservatism, as Rossiter, Viereck and Kirk hoped for, or a new laissez-faire, as Nisbet proposed, ran against powerful structural forces and the American psyche.

Critics of the conservative vogue immediately recognized its proponents’ overemphasis on British conservative traditions and the decisive role of business interests in the Republican Party. Schlesinger observed the emergence of intellectual conservatism closely. The “acid test” will be its relationship with the business community and the materialist and secular Republican Party, he remarked. The conservatives would either “combat” or “convert” business or base their politics “squarely on it.” But, he warned, conservatism “founded on money,” is “fickle, selfish, and irresponsible.” Schlesinger also recognized that Kirk was the most intense traditionalist among the conservatives, but a “roaring Manchester liberal” in his opposition to Social Security, school lunches and the United Autoworkers Union. In response to these charges, one conservative, who later became closely associated with Goldwater-Reagan style conservatism, responded that “the leaders of the new conservatism are not now, nor will they be, identified with the American business community.” As he understood it, the foundation of conservatism was adherence to the transcendent principles of revealed religion and natural law.

In retrospect, despite conservatives’ insistence on the importance of religious adherence and the centrality of the evangelical voting bloc to the conservative coalition, Schlesinger’s assessment was prescient. One of the strongest traditions in the United States was and remains a defense of the “free enterprise system.” Business leaders and their intellectual allies promoted an invented tradition of American free enterprise under constant progressive assault. Kimberly Phillips-Fein, Bethany Moreton and Benjamin Waterhouse have charted how organized and deep-pocketed business-leaders committed to free markets have shaped the public discourse around economics in important ways.

KIRK BECAME the figurehead of postwar conservatism in the 1950s. Among the New Conservatives, he was the closest to orthodox Republicanism in his politics and the most opposed to the New Deal. As modern American conservatism came to be equated in the public eye with Kirk’s romantic veneration of Edmund Burke and his Midwestern Republicanism, many centrist New Conservatives—including Hallowell, Viereck and Rossiter—backed away from the concept. Kirk’s right-wing economics, his perceived toleration for Joseph McCarthy and his association with William F. Buckley, Jr. alarmed Viereck.

Kirk and his allies needed to define their relationship with the business community. In 1953, Kirk obtained a grant from the Kansas City-based Volker Fund, a pro-free enterprise foundation, to write on academic freedom and the threat of liberalism on campus. He was encouraged that some businessmen “realize that conservatism is something different from Benthamite and Manchesterian abstractions.” Yet, two years later, Kirk had become convinced the directors of the Volker Fund were financing a campaign against him.

The classic history of the conservative intellectual movement holds that traditionalists like Kirk found a sort of ecumenism of the trenches with libertarians and anti-communists as they opposed progressives domestically and communism abroad. This process and its semi-theoretical formulation as “fusionism”—essentially championing virtue under complete political and economic freedom—was successful tactically and rhetorically. But it was not immediately obvious to the intellectual founders of the “conservative movement.” Fusionism also masked the bitterness involved in forging the movement and the incoherence of the formulation. Many, although not all, traditionalist conservatives came to embrace the fusionist framework. Their successors in the conservative movement have blithely maintained that a conservative ethos and dedication to free market economics coincide naturally. In the meantime, conservative intellectuals, politicians and pundits have lived on the rhetorical capital of the traditionalist critique of liberalism while promoting economically disruptive policies.

The mid-1950s right-wing written media landscape was scanty, though Nicole Hemmer has ably depicted the fledgling efforts of conservatives to create a counter-establishment media in her book Messengers on the Right. There was Human Events, a Washington-based newsletter, and two monthly magazines, The American Mercury, a controversialist journal that came under the ownership of an open anti-Semite, and The Freeman, a libertarian magazine edited by Frank Chodorov. Chodorov busily promoted “individualism” as a political identity in the early 1950s. In his career-making attack on Yale University, Buckley referred to himself as an individualist. In 1953, Chodorov founded the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), and appointed Buckley its first president. Despite his esteem for Chodorov and Buckley, Kirk perceived “a great gulf” between himself and individualists. “I wish you people hadn’t clutched that dreary ideology to your bosom,” he wrote to Buckley’s successor at ISI. “Politically, it ends in anarchy; spiritually, it is a hideous solitude.” In private he denounced the “anarchists of the Freeman” as “Freemaniacs.”

Kirk still believed in market economics. He favored the work of Wilhelm Röpke, an influential German economist whose theorizing of a “constructive” market economics—or “economic humanism”—informed the postwar German miracle that was shepherded by the brilliantly talented finance minister Ludwig Erhard. Röpke took communities, rather than individuals, as the basic economic unit. He proposed policies to foster communities and promote the dignity of work through state support of agriculture, artisans and industry. Kirk admired Röpke and the feeling was mutual. He, too, hoped for a blending of humane market economics and religiously oriented cultural conservatism.

The relationship between Kirk and Röpke suggests a road not taken in American conservatism, an avenue defeated by proponents of orthodox laissez-faire. Kirk came to believe it was his promotion of Röpke’s work in the United States that led the Volker Fund to blackball him. Kirk thought Röpke’s realism, as opposed to “American optimism,” made it essential his work be publicized in the United States. The Fund’s director, Herb Cornuelle, considered Röpke a dangerous radical. This quarrel between critics of the New Deal went public in an article in The Freeman attacking Kirk as “collectivism rebaptized” in the habiliments of the right.

The anti-Kirk essay was written by Frank Meyer, a former communist who became the chief architect of the fusionist synthesis. Legend has it that Meyer suggested a critical essay on Kirk to a tipsy member of the Volker Fund who immediately wrote him a grant. When aggrieved conservatives complained to Chodorov, the editor of The Freeman, he claimed it was his idea and that the real target was Rossiter. In the essay, published in 1955, Meyer argued that Kirk, Rossiter and Viereck were philosophically indistinguishable from the Democratic leader Adlai Stevenson. Conservatism lacked principles, Meyer said. Kirk constantly referred to “authority,” “order,” “community,” “duty” and “obedience.” But rarely “freedom.” Meyer argued the American right must be based on the principle that “all value resides in the individual” and its corollary that economics “must remain free of political control.” Buckley agreed. He told an associate he was “very glad” someone had “unambiguously stated what needs to be stated”: that “the conservative position is rooted in certain inflexible principles,” not “prescription.”

Kirk was furious. He complained that “two radical Jewish atheists,” one an anarchist and the other a former Marxist, presented themselves as “infallible authorities on One Hundred Percent Americanism.” He believed his lack of deference to “American industrialists” had provoked the criticism, an accusation that underestimated the extent to which Chodorov and Meyer valued doctrinal clarity. Kirk feared the “insane conjunction” of Viereck on his left and Chodorov on his right would “sink” conservatism forever. Several of his chums—including Frederick Wilhelmsen, Richard Weaver, T.S. Eliot and Röpke—wrote to him, pleased that pro-market libertarians had established significant intellectual distance from conservatism.

SHORTLY AFTER the Freeman controversy, however, a cohort of intellectual impresarios led by Buckley began a united front approach to the American right centered around National Review (NR). They took “conservatism” as a unifying concept. According to the “convictions” listed in NR’s investor prospectus, the magazine was “without reservations, on the libertarian side” against “centralized government.” In the struggle between “Social Engineers” and “Truth,” they were “without reservations, on the conservative side.” The magazine would oppose liberalism, communism and labor unions in defense of “the competitive price system” that is “indispensable to liberty and material progress.” Buckley broached Kirk about writing a regular column on education. Kirk assented. This new association provoked an amused response from Kirk’s publisher: “until fairly recently [Buckley] called himself a ‘libertarian,’” and “Meyer was equating conservatism with collectivism.” Now all three have “joined forces.”

Despite Kirk’s willingness to write regularly for National Review, his relationship with Buckley and the libertarians associated with the magazine was tense. He refused to be listed on the masthead of a magazine that would publish work by “the Supreme Soviet of Libertarianism,” Meyer and Chodorov. Kirk took Meyer’s criticisms extremely personally, believing him part of a campaign against him. Buckley had to repeatedly insist such a conspiracy was imaginary.

The editorial line at NR was committed to classical free market economics. Yet even within the circle around the magazine, key contributors and conservative icons expressed ambivalence about capitalism. In addition to Kirk, senior editor James Burnham, who shaped the magazine’s tone and direction, called himself the magazine’s left-wing, telling an interviewer that on social and economic issues he was a “moderate.” He favored “the market in economics,” but did not “regard this presumption as an absolute.” Contributor Ernest van den Haag criticized an article about J. M. Keynes and called the economist “a conservative, as I would understand the word.” Similarly, other figures of the conservative movement’s pantheon—Richard Weaver, L. Brent Bozell and Willmoore Kendall—were either not committed to free market economics or broke with it. The patron saint of modern conservatism, Whittaker Chambers, believed in the incompatibility of capitalism and conservatism. Chambers abjured the designation “conservative.” He called himself a “man of the Right” because he supported “capitalism in its American version.” But, he added, “capitalism is not, and by its essential nature cannot conceivably be, conservative.” There was in the history of American industrial capitalism, “not one single touch of conservatism.”

Röpke was enthusiastic about NR. He hoped it would promote a market-based economics governed by a communitarian ethos. Röpke was a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, a trans-Atlantic organization dedicated to rehabilitating free market economics following the Great Depression and the Keynesian revolution. One of the society’s leading members was Friedrich Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom and professor of economics at the University of Chicago where his salary was paid by the Volker Fund. Hayek was sanguine about the compatibility of market economics and organic communities. He had initially been somewhat sympathetic to Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind and broadly agreed with Röpke’s communitarian market economics. By 1957, however, Hayek repudiated Kirk and Röpke. At the ten-year anniversary meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Switzerland, Hayek addressed the membership as to why he was not a conservative. Today, movement conservatives claim Hayek was distinguishing himself from European-style conservatism rather than American small-government conservatism. In a sense this is true, but in part because Hayek, despite keeping his distance from movement conservatives and National Review, influenced the direction of American conservatism. In context, Hayek was very clearly addressing Kirk and Röpke in a discursive struggle over the direction of the Mont Pelerin Society and market economics in general. Kirk disliked Hayek. He suggested that the dividing line in the Mont Pelerin Society was largely between Christians and “Secularized Jews” who were hostile to religion.

In contrast, in the United States theory-minded conservatives and libertarians sought a basis of agreement. In 1960, fourteen right-leaning professors and writers met at the Morrison Hotel in Chicago for a weekend-long discussion. Key fusionists like Frank Meyer and M. Stanton Evans were present, traditionalists were overrepresented, and Hayek stood in for the libertarian wing. The meeting was a great success for “fusionism.” One traditionalist, Gerhart Niemeyer, a political scientist at Notre Dame and a belligerent anti-communist, reported “surprising” levels of agreement. He felt there was no longer any disagreement over the issue of “laissez-faire” versus a positive view of state power. Encouragingly, all agreed upon the importance of “the good life” and that virtue presupposed freedom. All were concerned about “uncoerced individualism” and agreed that industrialism was “not a technological and institutional but ultimately a moral problem, and that it can be controlled by a morally well-ordered society.” Even Hayek, Niemeyer marveled, admitted the existence of natural law, broadly understood, and the importance of a transcendent—even Christian—order.

At the Chicago meeting, and in the many subsequent formulations of the fusionist credo that came to define American conservatism, the traditionalists effectively accepted the economic and political premises of libertarianism and the free market. They concluded that theirs was a cultural critique to be made on an individual, moral level. In exchange for professions of faith in virtue and transcendent order by Hayek and other libertarians, traditionalist conservatives discarded their potent critique of the operation of the market under the logic that virtue must in every instance be uncoerced. In the fusionist bargain, traditionalists—and later evangelicals and other social conservatives—were to wage cultural wars against “liberalism” while accepting on faith the compatibility of free market capitalism with their vision of the good.

YET JUST six months after the meeting of good feelings, Niemeyer realized the limits of the fusionist framework. In September 1960, ninety right-wing college students, including Niemeyer’s son, met at Buckley’s family home in Sharon, Connecticut to form the organization Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). Several of the those present ultimately became important conservative activists. One of the elder statesmen at Sharon was M. Stanton Evans. Evans attended the Chicago meeting and was drafted to write a statement of principles for YAF. The brief statement paid obeisance to the libertarian, traditionalist, anti-communist and patriotic traditions of the right. It held that “foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will,” that “liberty is indivisible,” and that political freedom is linked existentially to economic freedom. Now widely recognized as a formative document for a generation of conservatives who worked for Barry Goldwater and then Ronald Reagan, Evans intended to synthesize the insights of Kirk, Chambers and Hayek. Both Human Events and National Review published the statement as a “tough-as-nails” summary of conservative principles. Pleasingly for Buckley, the Sharon Statement showed that “conservatism” was “accepted both by Russell Kirk and Frank Meyer as designating their distinct but complementary, even symbiotic positions.”

Niemeyer was distressed. The document drew his differences with libertarians so sharply that he could not associate himself with the group. In response, Niemeyer wrote a long open letter to “young conservatives.” He repudiated the notion that free will is a transcendent value. Like Tucker Carlson, he asked whether there was anything transcendent about drug dealers exercising free will. Niemeyer wedded classical ideas about virtue with his strong Christian faith. He perceived the Sharon Statement’s emphasis on economic freedom as materialist in the extreme and linked it to the Marxist claim that political rights are meaningless without economic rights. Niemeyer questioned the very concept of economic freedom. Philosophically, “freedom, the power of uncompelled decision, is not really at home in the realm of economic activities, which is a realm of necessity.” It is, he argued, a political concept that is muddied when it is brought into the economic sphere.

At bottom, Niemeyer concluded the fusionist conservatism articulated in the Sharon Statement was another incarnation of the liberalism he opposed. Anticipating the critique Deneen makes in Why Liberalism Failed, Niemeyer held that by elevating individual rights, the Sharon Statement deracinated “lesser collectivities.” The Statement led to “the condition of utter unfreedom: the individual standing alone before the state, powerless before the sole possessor of power, normless before the sole creator of norms.” Conservatism needed to be purified of residual liberalism. Niemeyer proposed more theorizing and fewer statements. Burnham agreed that Niemeyer demonstrated the incoherence of the Sharon Statement, but William Buckley and Frank Meyer decided the Statement was a manifesto, not high theory, and declined to publish the letter.

By 1962 Viereck, the first popularizer of postwar conservatism, despaired about the future of the movement. In his view, the New Conservatism had “halfway degenerated into a façade for either plutocratic profiteering or fascist-style thought control nationalism.” Economically, conservatism was totally identified with opposition to labor, the New Deal and regulation, especially following the emergence of Senator Barry Goldwater as its standard bearer.

There are many reasons American conservatism became so strongly pro-market. The pre-existing institutional strength was largely pro-business. The Republican Party, committed to Main Street and Wall Street, had little interest in emulating Toryism (except, perhaps, for Richard Nixon). By contrast, the New Conservatives most critical of capitalism were academics, unenthusiastic about movement building or ideological turf wars and without the resources to wage them. Meanwhile, right-leaning foundations like the Volker Fund were far more interested in financing free market economists than traditionalist historians or political philosophers. This funding ultimately built up pro-market think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation.

Individual personalities also shaped the direction of intellectual conservatism. After the 1950s, Russell Kirk’s star fell dramatically as a spokesman of conservatism while Buckley’s and Goldwater’s rose. Goldwater’s 1960 Conscience of a Conservative and 1964 presidential campaign solidified the association between conservatism and the Republican right. Angus Burgin suggests a similar trajectory within the Mont Pelerin Society, which Röpke exited in 1962.

Subsequently, the Society, which had attempted to transcend classical liberal economics, became increasingly committed to unequivocal free markets. Burgin argues this bullish restatement of neoliberalism was led by second generation of economists exemplified by Milton Friedman—a University of Chicago economist, inveterate committee-joiner and advisor to Goldwater. The Cold War overwhelmingly encouraged the conservative commitment to free market economics. The contrast of communist regimes made the connection between capitalism, freedom and democracy (as well as religion) seem natural to these intellectuals. The Soviet Union loomed large at the end of the slippery slope of regulation and welfarism.

THE DOCTRINES proposed by men like Viereck, Kirk and Niemeyer were themselves open to being put in service of market economics, as fusionism’s longevity shows. The New Conservatives and traditionalists universally insisted on the centrality of property and the Lockean relationship between property and liberty. It was the fourth of Kirk’s canons of conservatism. Viereck called private property a “bulwark” against chaos; Hallowell claimed it was rooted “in the religious and moral nature of man.” Fusionists like Meyer were able to use this basic commitment to individual freedom and private property to slice through objections and make individual choice the basis of fusionist conservatism.

Other aspects of conservatism were also amenable as theoretical tools for promoting capitalism. Conservatives justified hierarchy—a defense of privilege that was easily transformed into a justification of economic elites, CEOs and entrepreneurs rather than European aristocrats. Similarly, conservatives insisted they were realistic rather than utopian observers of the world. This conceit led them to accept inequalities and disruptions caused by free market economics as natural. For all their talk of transcendent order, on economic issues, conservative intellectuals conflated “is” with “ought.” Above all, conservatives shifted morality out of the economic sphere, ignoring structural factors. By treating virtue as a cultural problem, they made it incumbent on individual actors to maintain sober habits while promoting an economic order that relied on constant spending and consumption.

What traditionalists brought to fusionism was the claim that the “left” embodied a materialistic outlook divorced from God or transcendent order. Conservatives excoriated liberals as morally void. They convinced themselves that deviation from market orthodoxy was flirting with materialism, assuming their own—supposedly natural—economic principles were beyond question. In his tract God and Man at Yale, Buckley had claimed “the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world.” He added that “the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.” This equation of moral transcendence and free markets became, in the context of the Cold War, a potent rhetorical edifice and in turn a dogma for generations of conservative activists, politicians and voters. Perhaps now it is beginning to crack.

Joshua Tait is a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina.

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