Where Have All The Conservatives Gone?
Authored by Nikolai G. Wenzel via The Daily Economy,
Fusionism, a new book by Stephanie Slade, a Senior Editor at Reason, attempts to make sense of the seemingly incoherent New Right. Although Slade proposes a renewal of fusionism as a remedy to conservatism's drift and the challenges facing a divided Republic, the book's greatest strength lies in its analysis of the trends to date.
The Republican Party, for all its faults, was supposed to understand (instinctively, if not always intellectually) limited government, rule of law, and the basics of economics. From its elected leaders, though, we have gotten tariffs, increased public debt, dodgy respect for habeas corpus in immigration enforcement, and the Saturday Night Live tragicomedy of DOGE (a virtue-signaling, clumsy, and cruel flash in the pan destined to die on the vine when it removed entitlements from the chopping block). The coalition that constitutes the New Right has abandoned conservatism, and instead sells its own form of populist interventionism.
Slade starts by painting a rather glum sketch of the contemporary scene. Within the convoluted and heterogeneous mess she labels "the Dissident Right," she identifies three ...
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