Alex MacDonald: In doubt of fusionism
The gatekeepers of the right who shun social and cultural conservatives betray Harper's legacy, writes Guest Contributor Alex MacDonald.
Alex MacDonald is a veteran of both provincial and federal politics.
In a 2003 address to Civitas, Stephen Harper, then leader of the Canadian Alliance, called for a shift in the “balance between the economic and social conservative sides” of the conservative coalition to “rediscover the virtues of Burkean conservatism.”
At the time, Harper justified this call for rebalancing by asserting that the defining issues of the day had shifted from economic issues to questions of social values, and thus conservatives had to mirror this shift.
Importantly, Harper did not frame this coalitional balancing in zero-sum terms, but rather implicitly in the language and dynamic of fusionism as popularised by Frank Meyer, understood to be a mutually beneficial and reinforcing alliance between Enlightenment liberalism and Burkean conservatism, or, in more practical terms, economic libertarians and social conservatives.
It is striking to read Harper’s remarks with the benefit of hindsight and in light of the political dynamics now defining the Conservative Party of Canada. One naturally asks whether Harper’s call was heeded, whether he personally governed with this rebalancing in mind, and whether the economic libertarian tends to be socially conservative, and vice versa.
While Harper was clearly convinced of the philosophical integrity of fusionism and arguably benefited from its functioning in the formation of the Conservative Party of Canada and its subsequent electoral success, it is nonetheless doubtful that fusionism is being actualised today.
Twenty-two years after Harper’s address, and the calls for rebalancing have not ceased, while the animus of economic libertarians to anyone on the right who questions their orthodoxies is beginning to boil over.
To doubt fusionism is not to question whether economic libertarians and social conservatives tend to vote in concert for the Conservative Party of Canada. They do, and this ongoing reality can be empirically verified. Rather, it is to question whether the relationship goes beyond a mere electoral bargain.
The strident and good faith contention of an avowed fusionist is that fusionism is more than a marriage of convenience aimed toward electoral success, but rather a marriage founded on a “mutuality of ideas and values,” those being freedom and virtue, respectively. Part of the intellectual elegance of fusionism is that it implicitly guards against the temptation to put economic and social concerns in a strict binary tension. Managing this tension in practice has proved difficult.
The question, then, is whether fusionism has actually functioned in practice, taken root, and borne fruit, has the supposed marriage of mutual values succeeded in fusing the economic libertarian and social conservatives into one flesh?
At best, it seems doubtful.
On almost all social value issues of the past few decades, conservatives in general, and social conservatives in particular, have utterly lost the battle. That is, they have failed to conserve our cultural and social inheritance by failing to erect a principled defence of our previously shared norms, traditions, and moral ethics.
There is a litany of issues to which social conservatives could point as having not just lost ground on, but lost entirely, abortion, euthanasia, gender and sexual ideology, administrative racism through DEI practices, drug legalisation and decriminalisation, and intrusions on the rights of parents. There have been no incremental gains on these fronts, it has been a slaughterhouse for what social traditionalists hold dear and believe to be true and good.
Some may argue that the Conservatives, especially under Pierre Poilievre, have been openly anti-woke and that that should be enough. However, opposing liberal excesses is nothing more than an anti-ideology, it is not the articulation of a positive vision for society or of the person. Depressingly, Conservatives have co-opted themselves into merely slowing the rate of liberal progress rather than taking up the noble call to stand athwart history.
This is not to say that the interests of economic libertarians have fared much better, but they are certainly more dominant, mainstream, and used as the tip of the spear by the Conservative Party of Canada in its communications, policy agendas, and electoral tactics.
While the fusionist project in Canada promised to wed the supposed mutual values of economic libertarians and social traditionalists into an intellectually coherent and principled conservative coalition to be electorally viable, we have instead witnessed the social conservatives become the concubine of the economic libertarians.
Part of the issue with fusionism as it has actually been practised in the conservative coalition is that the libertarian mindset has gained purchase in far more than just economic questions. That is, conservatives have become sceptical of the state in general, not just as it interfaces with the economy. The state, we are told, ought to be neutral. Any calls for the state to wield its power in defence of traditional values is tantamount to the woke-progressive co-opting of the state, and therefore must be despised.
This hints at a more fundamental issue with the philosophical conception of fusionism, that man can compartmentalise himself and govern the different spheres of his life according to different political philosophies, while somehow holding it all together in a comprehensive and fruitful manner.
The emerging debates within the Canadian right seem to be proving this point. Ideological gatekeepers of the conservative coalition derisively frame so-called “culture wars” as grievance politics and slander calls for common civic identity as “blood and soil nationalism.” This is not the ecumenical conservatism promised by fusionism.
If the economic libertarian and social conservative were ever one person in this coalition, they are now unbraiding themselves, or at best struggling with a personality disorder.
While the electoral bargain of fusionism promises to endure, the conservative coalition is, at an existential level, struggling to manage its ideological tensions. Harper’s call for rebalancing in the coalition remains a wise reminder worth revisiting and interrogating.
Alex MacDonald works for Counsel Public Affairs. He formerly worked in the United Nations, the Government of Alberta, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa and in private industry.
