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Why I Refuse Fusionism

Catching up with some responses to my pre-conference blogging, I noticed Philip Klein’s thorough response to my blast against his proposed limited government/activist foreign policy fusionism and Jim Antle’s comments on the same topic.  I appreciate Mr. Klein taking the time to give a more elaborated answer to my criticisms.  I do understand the haste with which blog […]

Catching up with some responses to my pre-conference blogging, I noticed Philip Klein’s thorough response to my blast against his proposed limited government/activist foreign policy fusionism and Jim Antle’s comments on the same topic.  I appreciate Mr. Klein taking the time to give a more elaborated answer to my criticisms.  I do understand the haste with which blog posts are written (something that I think some non-blogging readers tend to forget when they accuse us of making unqualified or exaggerated statements), so I’m glad to revisit the question at some greater length.

Mr. Klein allows that calling this fusionism the “most practical” was probably too strong.  I think we all do agree that providing for the common defense is one of the few legitimate functions of the federal government.  Clearly, we will still disagree sharply about what falls under the rubric of national defense.  Jim has staked out the middle ground on this and he concludes thus:

This observation doesn’t solve all the problems of a neocon/libertarian fusionism. After all, there can still be disagreements about what constitutes a just national defense or vital national interest. Wars grow government, both in terms of foreign entaglements and domestic functions. But a conservatism based on performing government’s vital functions while shedding illegitimate or unsustainable commitments seems a lot more prudent — and thus more conservative — than one that fuses compassion at home with activism abroad.  

Jim is certainly right that this vision is more prudent than Brownbackian moral interventionism and Romneyesque rhetorical overkill.  Indeed, Jim has hit on the nub of the problem: do proponents of an activist foreign policy actually want to start shedding illegitimate and unsustainable commitments (e.g., deployments to Germany, Korea, the continuation and expansion of NATO, bases scattered around the globe, outdated Cold War-era defense treaties), or do they want to increase the number of commitments beyond what we already have?  If the former, a common approach of shrinking the size and scope of the government could be applied to domestic and foreign policy.  If the latter, any alliance between limited government conservatives and these activist foreign policy types would be doomed before it began.   

For my part, I was probably a little too ready to dismiss this fusionism.  This is not just because I am intensely opposed to interventionism, but also because I tend to have an allergy to all kinds of fusionism.  Let me explain why the concept irritates me so much.  In one of its latest iteration, fusionism has been associated with Joseph Bottum’s “new fusionism” of moralistic interventionism combined with social conservatism at home, which is an alliance that has inevitably privileged the interests of the interventionists and has expended little or no effort on social conservative concerns.  As I have somewhat harshly noted, such “new fusionism” in practice seems to mean that conservatives will argue that pro-lifers should back Giuliani because he will make sure that the government kills people in other countries (and, yes, presumably prevent people from other countries from killing Americans here at home).  This strikes me as a rather unsatisfactory arrangement.  A limited government/interventionist deal seems likely to produce similar unsatisfactory compromises.  I don’t insist on some absolute purism that avoids all political compromise, but the compromise has to actually serve the goals of both parties making the deal, and I simply don’t see this happening in the case of Bottum’s fusionism or Mr. Klein’s proposed alliance (about which more in a moment).  The other appeal to a new fusionism has come from Ryan Sager, who has made it his personal mission in life to denigrate social and religious conservatives and blame them for the political woes of the GOP and the confusion of the modern conservative movement.  So the word fusionism automatically conjures in my mind rather insultingly lopsided and exploitative alliances. 

I think most fusionist bargains are set up in such a way as to be profoundly unequal, where one party in the alliance ends up setting the terms and priorities of the alliance such that his would-be allies end up becoming marginal players.  If this were a matter of one party being numerically vastly superior, that would be one thing, but I am very skeptical that dedicated interventionists qua interventionists are actually all that numerous in the movement.  It is my impression that interventionists are disproportionately influential relative to their small numbers, because they tend to hold prominent positions in the journals of opinion and institutions of the movement.  Because of this, they have become accustomed to proposing and have come to expect others in the movement to do the disposing and not engage in much backtalk. 

I believe we have seen similar bad bargains before, and it has not generally advanced a limited government vision or socially conservative policies.  From the traditional conservative perspective, the original so-called fusionist bargain during the Cold War didn’t accomplish many specifically traditionalist goals, but rather overwhelmingly served the interests of the “libertarians” in economic policy and those who were primarily anticommunists in a relatively activist foreign policy.  (Of course, to some degree, all conservatives were some mix of these three, but those who placed the primary emphasis on anticommunism wound up becoming the dominant voices, especially after 1981.)  The fusionist hope was that all of these goals were complementary and mutually supportive, but I am skeptical that this was ever really true for the traditionalists.  The experience of the Cold War shows us that reducing government was practically very low on the list of priorities of all Republican administrations, even those brought to power on rather more explicitly conservative platforms, and the building up of the national security state (in both temporarily necessary and sometimes undesirable ways) not only took precedence but actively worked against the impulse for smaller and more constitutional government.  From the limited government conservative perspective, the overall fusionist bargain was slightly better because of some antitax successes in the ’80s, but the priorities of the internationalist, national security state folks always seemed to involve trading off pursuing shrinking government at home in exchange for getting support for expenditures on defense and containment. 

During the ’90s, interventionists tended to be proponents of reforming the current system rather than radically shrinking the state.  When the moment for a real rollback of the state in all areas came, those most associated with interventionism were fairly uninterested in doing that.  Many of the most interventionist people had no real beef with the extent or nature of the welfare state itself, but simply wanted to make it run more efficiently.  It is not clear to me how reducing the size of government would take greater precedence in any future alliance with interventionists than it did in the past.  It may have been the case that 9/11 created a moment when shifting resources from the welfare state to the warfare state could have been attempted, but it seems to me that the overall power and size of government would not have been reduced at all (here I am voicing the criticism Mr. Klein has already anticipated) but simply shifted to another part of the government, albeit one that does at least have some constitutional warrant at its core.  This might satisfy many limited government conservatives, but I don’t think it should.  In any case, that particular moment is gone, as I think Mr. Klein and I agree. 

Without some hint of “warfare reform,” if you like, where interventionists accept the cutting out of unneccessary, wasteful or redundant commitments to countries that can defend themselves right now, I am skeptical that the public would ever accept the linking of entitlement reform or the elimination of certain entitlements to the needs of national security.  Even if the savings from closing down redundant bases and ending deployments in Europe and Asia were not comparable with savings from changes to entitlements, it would be symbolically and politically important to show that the wastefulness or excess of the “warfare state” was being trimmed at the same time.  Beyond eliminating current ongoing costs, ending these deployments or dismantling NATO or any number of other changes in how Washington runs foreign and military policy would cut down on a host of extremely costly potential future conflicts, thus setting certain limits on what future spending on the military might be.  These are the sorts of changes I doubt most interventionists would be willing to make, since they do not believe that NATO or the deployment of American soldiers in South Korea are really optional and unnecessary.  That brings us back to what I expect will be more fundamental disagreements about what commitments really are in the national interest and what the real threats to our national security are. 

Mr. Klein ends his post with this:

However, I believe that such animosity was amplified by the fact that on top of being for military intervention, neocons acquiesced to the Bush administration’s spending spree. If neocons were committed to fighting spending, I don’t think the gulf between the groups would have become as wide as it has today.

I agree that neoconservative support for “big government conservatism” aggravated the rift, but I would point out that they didn’t merely “acquiesce” in this but, especially in the case of The Weekly Standard, became leading proponents of a big government view and defended the administration’s new entitlement program as part of the new Republican politics of the future.  This wasn’t just a case of neoconservatives failing to speak up against a policy that they didn’t really support–they actively endorsed and promoted the kind of government expansion it represented, and I assume they did this because most of them are not and have never been interested in shrinking government, eliminating entitlements or returning the federal government to its constitutional limits.  It isn’t just that they don’t think it is politically possible, but it seems that most of them don’t even think that it is desirable in principle. 

There is also still the question of electoral viability, and here I am beginning to be convinced that a straight-up Club for Growth-style limited government appeal is not going to win over many supporters, at least not in the present environment.  As a matter of contemporary politics, more populism of some kind and less (or at least smarter) interventionism seem to be the winning combination, rather than less government and more interventionism.  I would love it if Americans wanted both much less government and much less interventionism, but strangely enough that position seems to win relatively little support.

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