,
17 tweets,
5 min read
Read on Twitter
Now that I've inspired @rr_reno to throw down the gauntlet (again?), it's time for a thread about the resilience of fusionism.
firstthings.com/web-exclusives…
firstthings.com/web-exclusives…
First, my own priors: I have a lot of respect for libertarian policy analysis and insight, but (as anyone who reads me knows) I share the @firstthingsmag desire for a right that's more economically interventionist to social-conservative ends.
(And to the extent that this alternative to fusionism extends to a more realist/less-hawkish foreign policy - which is debatable but plausible - I share that vision as well.)
I think this post-fusionist conservatism has a lot of potential political appeal, obviously depending on the form it takes. I also think it has a race problem, as I noted in my column this week. But the old fusionism is hardly a spent force.
Two threads to get at that point. First, @blsandford on the resilient mass-market appeal of George Will and the Intellectual Dark Web, both pitching forms of right-wing classical liberalism that are basically fusionist in function:
Second, @lymanstoneky making the point that lots of religious conservatives are instinctively fusionist, not just making a bargain with other factions on the right:
One way to think about this is that there are lots of somewhat apolitical right-leaning voters who fall into the culturally conservative/economically populist zone on this chart. But ... 
... high-information conservatives are still much more likely to be fusionists. And so are the people they're most likely to read and invite to speak, from @benshapiro to @charliekirk11, whose respective audiences are vaster than most post-fusionists.
Most, but not all. It's notable that Fox's 8 PM primetime host is a post-fusionist. It's notable that figures like Josh Hawley are trying to make political names for themselves in that space.
But the combination of high-info normie conservatives being fusionist and DONORS being either fusionist or just pure libertarian gives fusionism a lot more resilience than you might think just following intellectual-conservative trends and fights.
(thread suspended for dinner; will resume)
Right, so while my thread on the resilience of fusionism was in abeyance for dinner/bedtime, this happened:
But let's just plow on. Basically, socon populism has a plausible constituency but weak donor/high-info conservative support. So its most plausible political path is through presidential politics, where low-info voters pay more attention and party control increasingly looks weak.
In other words, the Trump model: Use a heterodox message to rally support for a semi-hostile takeover. Q is how much of Trump's ascent is reducible to his celebrity + birther-type norm-breaking, rather than his heterodoxy.
Could Trump have a socon/populist successor who follows his path with a more theorized, less race-baiting message? I think so. There's more thinking + infrastructure for such a run than when Huckabee or Santorum tried it. However ...
... you can very easily see how the GOP + conservatism just returns to fusionist normal, with a Dem president uniting the factions in opposition and then someone like Nikki Haley running on a very generic campaign and beating Josh Hawley or Tucker Carlson or whomever.
Fusionism struggles to govern effectively because its small-government vision can't be fulfilled and so it lapses into pro-business pork-barrelism. But can it remain (or return to being) the ideology of the anti-liberal blocking coalition after Trump? Yes, it very plausibly can.
