The Great Divorce

Americans are not ungovernable, but politicians, intellectuals, and administrators of all types have regularly dashed themselves on the rocks trying to get Americans to conform, to obey, to fill out their forms in triplicate, or to seek permission. In fact, this quality about the American people is so deep and so multifarious that the category of “libertarian” is inadequate to describe or contain the entirety of the impulse. Although they are today held out as antagonists and opponents, libertarians share this rebellious attitude toward authority with populists. But adding even that term still doesn’t cover the whole of it. There are also entrepreneurial and prophetic energies in American life, again as often opposed to each other as conjoined with one another. These also contribute to an anarchic, churning, irrepressible quality to American political life. Although the specter of “integralism” or political Catholicism haunts the minds of certain liberty-minded people who fear a handful of academics and Twitter accounts, the fact is that traditionalist Catholicism, as a religious movement, flourishes in the United States not because it is motored by an authoritarian in power, but because it’s a rebellious bottom-up movement, an entrepreneurial one, even if the enterprise is spiritual. Catholics telling their bishops to Make the Latin Mass Great Again aren’t all that different from cornpone prophets demanding that senators and their courting lawyers follow the Constitution.

The above is my own idiosyncratic formula for understanding the phenomenon of “fusionism” — the actual living combinations of virtue and liberty that Americans tend to produce the way carbonated drinks produce fizz. That phenomenon is, to my mind, very different from the theory of fusionism produced by Frank Meyer in the early years of National Review and roundly rejected by L. Brent Bozell in opposing essays also in National Review. And Meyer’s own theory is a different thing from the actual political allegiances, marriages of convenience, and occasional intellectual incest between political conservatives and classical liberals or libertarians.

About the Author

Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

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Americans are not ungovernable, but politicians, intellectuals, and administrators of all types have regularly dashed themselves on the rocks trying to get Americans to conform, to obey, to fill out their forms in triplicate, or to seek permission. In fact, this quality about the American people is so deep and so multifarious that the category of “libertarian” is inadequate to describe or contain the entirety of the impulse. Although they are today held out as antagonists and opponents, libertarians share this rebellious attitude toward authority with populists. But adding even that term still doesn’t cover the whole of it. There are also entrepreneurial and prophetic energies in American life, again as often opposed to each other as conjoined with one another. These also contribute to an anarchic, churning, irrepressible quality to American political life. Although the specter of “integralism” or political Catholicism haunts the minds of certain liberty-minded people who fear a handful of academics and Twitter accounts, the fact is that traditionalist Catholicism, as a religious movement, flourishes in the United States not because it is motored by an authoritarian in power, but because it’s a rebellious bottom-up movement, an entrepreneurial one, even if the enterprise is spiritual. Catholics telling their bishops to Make the Latin Mass Great Again aren’t all that different from cornpone prophets demanding that senators and their courting lawyers follow the Constitution.

The above is my own idiosyncratic formula for understanding the phenomenon of “fusionism” — the actual living combinations of virtue and liberty that Americans tend to produce the way carbonated drinks produce fizz. That phenomenon is, to my mind, very different from the theory of fusionism produced by Frank Meyer in the early years of National Review and roundly rejected by L. Brent Bozell in opposing essays also in National Review. And Meyer’s own theory is a different thing from the actual political allegiances, marriages of convenience, and occasional intellectual incest between political conservatives and classical liberals or libertarians.