Bold fusion
Bold fusion
FreeCons champion a movement rooted in both liberty and virtue
When conservatives leaders from across the United States released the Freedom Conservatism Statement of Principles last summer, we warned that “authoritarianism is on the rise both at home and abroad.”
“More and more people on the left and right reject the distinctive creed that made America great,” we stated, “that individual liberty is essential to the moral and physical strength of the nation.”
That’s why we call ourselves Freedom Conservatives.
Still, the second word in our name is just as important as the first. FreeCons seek to conserve America’s constitutional traditions, to be sure, including limited government, the rule of law, the separation of powers, and freedom of conscience.
But the more than 250 signatories to the FreeCon statement also affirmed the importance of family formation, safe communities, and the rights of parents “to raise and educate their children according to their values.”
How do we reconcile the politics of freedom with a commitment to traditional values and social order? Here are examples of FreeCon signatories and allies exploring these challenging topics.
Marriage of values
Stephanie Slade is a senior editor at Reason, a fellow in liberal studies at the Acton Institute; and a media fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at Catholic University of America. Her writing has appeared in such publications as The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, and the Online Library of Liberty.
Slade covered the release of the FreeCon statement last July. In a new piece in the American Institute for Economic Research’s magazine FUSION, she rejected the popular understanding of American conservatism’s origin story as a tactical accommodation between economic libertarians and religious traditionalists.
The kind of fusionism that National Review’s Frank Meyer and his allies developed in the 1950s and 1960s — and that continues to guide and inspire most Freedom Conservatives today — is “a marriage of two value sets or intellectual lineages, not merely an alliance between two political factions,” Slade wrote.
Observing that “a coalition is a construct fit for a particular time and place, while philosophies have pretensions to perennial importance and even eternal truth,” she argued that “liberty and virtue are not at odds,” that “when government protects the former, it creates the space in which citizens can pursue the latter.”
But the arrows point in both directions. “Limited government is far easier to sustain when the population is virtuous than when it is not,” Slade wrote.
“Without a strong, healthy culture, and a set of robust non-state institutions to support that culture, efforts to scale back or eliminate public programs will be met with suspicion by many. Where avarice abounds and individuals are reluctant to voluntarily help those who fall on hard times, people will expect the state to step in. Honesty, integrity, and a shared sense that we have moral obligations to one another contribute to the broad social trust that makes a free society possible.”
Govern less, govern local
Alexander William Salter is the Georgie G. Snyder Associate Professor of Economics in the Jerry S. Rawls College of Business Administration at Texas Tech University.
A FreeCon signatory, he’s written numerous articles for academic journals such as Public Choice and the Southern Economics Journal as well as media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and The Hill.
In a Philadelphia Society address recently adapted for publication in FUSION, Salter also rejected the notion that American fusionism was nothing more than a fleeting confluence of political interests.
“There is no necessary opposition between being free and being good,” he wrote. “In fact, the American experiment itself is predicated on an institutional resolution to the implied tension. Federalism and subsidiarity — governing less, governing locally — are essential components of that institutional architecture.”
Salter described decentralization as a practical tool, not just an abstract principle.
“Through the long (and often messy) trial-and-error process of history,” he wrote, “we have learned to promote freedom and virtue by orienting distant political institutions to the former and nearby political institutions to the latter.
“There will never be a complete and total separation: Washington will always have some legitimate concern with cultivating virtuous citizens, and City Hall will always be on the lookout for threats to our freedom. But by and large, we recognize that the closer our politics is to hearth and home, the safer and more beneficial it is for citizens to act in concert to preserve shared values.”
Just as FreeCons champion federalism and local governance in our Statement of Principles, NatCons and other populists tend to “believe the politics of liberty is, in practice, the politics of capitulation” and that “only the strong hand of Washington can guide the citizenry back to virtue.”
Salter devotes much of his piece to rebutting this claim.
“The power of Big Tech, for example, primarily comes from implicit and explicit collusion with government to silence citizens. We do not need to expand an unaccountable regulatory apparatus — one that will soon fall into the hands of the enemies of ordered liberty — to deal with this problem. We need only to punish the colluders.”
Free to pursue virtue
Joshua Ray is an undergraduate at Ave Maria University, where he studies politics. He has previously worked as a canvasser for the Susan B. Anthony List.
In a recent essay for the Freemen News-Letter, Ray contrasted the idea of Catholic integralism with traditional American conceptions of ordered liberty.
Integralism fares poorly in the comparison. He quoted the late Pope John Paul II’s warning that “no plan of society will ever be able to establish the Kingdom of God, that is, eschatological perfection, on this earth.”
“Philosopher kings simply do not exist,” Ray wrote. “A fundamental tenet of all Christian traditions is that all men share the same fallen nature. Any form of government, no matter how moral, will nonetheless be tainted and unable to guide men to their ultimate end because of the inherent limitations of political activity.”
Coercion isn’t the right way to cultivate virtue, he concluded, because “the proper end of government is not to transform the individual soul en masse.”
“The end of government is to provide the conditions so that man may pursue his final end with the sincerity of heart necessary for true virtue. The safety, security, freedom, and well-being necessary for the salvific endeavor are the temporal conditions the government ought to be primarily concerned with and rightly attempts to bring about.”