I’ve written often about the need for renewing the conservative- libertarian fusion, why I think this is a natural alliance, and the terms on which I think it should be forged. The actions of an assertive liberal (in the contemporary American sense) government are starting to illustrate this to the most interesting of those writers often termed crunchy cons, who often think of themselves in direct opposition to a hyper-individualized, commercial political culture on the Right. That is, as among the least natural candidates for fusionism imaginable.

The nature of this alliance is simple: crunchy cons want government to be limited to allow space for idiosyncratic local communities. It is a grudging acceptance of limits, rather than a full-throated embrace of large-scale politics. This strikes me as a healthy view of the role of politics. ~Jim Manzi

Manzi is correct that some of the crunchier dissidents (he has linked to Rod and John in this post) are interested in a sort of fusionism in that they, we, remain convinced that moral restraint and limited government, or virtue and liberty (to use old-fashioned fusionist language) rightly understood, are mutually reinforcing, and indeed that one cannot long have any meaningful kind of liberty without both a human-scale way of life and an ethic of restraint. My guess is that Rod and John would tend to agree that decentralist resistance to any large-scale polity, and thus of large-scale politics, is needed to preserve customary and chartered liberties.

The problem I have always had with fusionism in practice as a matter of political alliances is that typically the far more numerous traditionalist or social conservative part of the alliance is compelled to define and express its views through the distorting language of rights, and as a result the ostensible partisans of liberty end up not only dictating priorities for any such alliance but also end up defining what everyone is supposed to mean when referring to liberty. This is inevitably liberty-as-emancipation and not liberty-through-restraint, and partisans of the former are always going to portray liberty-through-restraint as creeping statism/socialism/authoritarianism, despite the fact that they and their understanding of freedom are paving/have paved the way for the very things they accuse us of wanting to impose.

If most libertarians were like John or Dylan Hales, there would be no problem, but a great many libertarians are a lot more like this, for whom idiosyncratic local communities are “islands of moral chauvinism” and the intellectual riches of Christian civilization are meaningless scribble. This is what makes a fusionist alliance with such fiercely anti-patriotic, anti-religious and globalist types so implausible, fruitless and inherently unattractive.