Andrew Averay: The old clash between fusionists and the New Right
It is unlikely that their disagreement will be resolved any time soon.
In Canada and elsewhere, the ‘New Right’ has primarily sought to distinguish itself through a certain scepticism, if not outright hostility, towards the ‘fusionist’ thesis that has animated Anglosphere conservative politics since the end of the Second World War.
According to this thesis, substantively conservative social and cultural positions are best advanced alongside a robust defence of free markets and economic liberty. In more extreme formulations, proponents even suggest that true conservatism is only possible under a minimalist state that ‘gets out of the way’ and allows individuals to live their lives as they see fit.
As against the fusionist thesis, proponents of the New Right point out that the political right’s successive wins on economic issues over the past several decades have not precluded the marginalisation of conservative social and cultural beliefs. The failure to make use of the state to advance these ideas, it is said, has amounted to nothing less than a cultural surrender. To make matters worse, the very economic wins for which fusionist conservatism can be credited have often come at a cost borne primarily by the very same people who hold socially and culturally conservative attitudes, while fusionist conservatism has been neither willing nor able to offer any countervailing response.
The nature of the disagreement between proponents of the New Right and fusionist conservatism suggests that it is primarily one of means, rather than ends. That is, both proponents of the New Right and proponents of fusionist conservatism generally agree on what a substantively ‘conservative’ polity would look like. Most also share a conception of what the ‘good life’ entails, which is to say that they have similar ideas of what counts as individual virtue, ideas that are distinguishable from those that have currency on the political left. Consistent with this outlook, most proponents of fusionism do not, in fact, understand free markets and economic liberty as ends in themselves, but as mere instruments for achieving the good life, just as proponents of the New Right do not think that the good life is tantamount to individual subordination to the state.
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Yet, despite this shared commitment to substantive ends, it would also be a mistake to dismiss the disagreement between proponents of the New Right and proponents of fusionist conservatism as a mere policy difference. Rather, this disagreement over means reflects a profound divergence over the relationship between the coercive power of the state, as given effect most notably through law, and the pursuit of substantive social and cultural ends. For proponents of the New Right, both individual and collective flourishing, understood to mean the achievement of a substantively conservative culture, require the use of politics, and thus the law. Fusionist conservatives may share the same understanding of collective flourishing and individual virtue, but they hold that the use of the law is generally, if not always, contrary to the achievement of this outcome.
To understand the disconnect between these two positions, it is instructive, as it so often is, to begin with Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses the virtue of justice, which he first presents as a ‘master’ or ‘perfect’ virtue that embodies all others. This leads to an account of the relationship between law and virtue — that is, human flourishing — more generally: