Towards A New Fusionism

Note: Originally written May 2012

Greetings, my name is Andrew Struttmann. I am the Vice Chairman of the Colorado Federation of College Republicans, as well as a student here at the University of Denver. It is an honour to be here amongst so many other proud members of the Republican party.

There remains so much that I could discuss with you in terms of how my generation will be affected by these upcoming elections. So much so that I would be doing it a profound injustice in this short time. I could tell all of you how this President and his party have mired us in the morass of crushing debt, and that would be true. I could rouse you with denunciations of this President and his party as diluting our freedoms, our liberties, and drowning us in the murky depths of social democracy. This too would be true.

But those are lines overused to a fault. I wish a moment of your time to engage in a conversation that I feel the Republican party must have if we are to remain successful.

In darker days for the Republican party, a time when the threat of Communism convinced Whittaker Chambers that he had indeed switched to the losing side by abandoning Communism, Frank Meyer, an conservative intellectual and writer for National Review, developed the idea of fusionism. Fusionism, in short, is a marriage of traditionalist conservatism and libertarian individualism, two ideologies that in warred as often in Meyer's time as they do today. Under this new masthead, the Right and the Republican party was unified against the threat of Communism, and fusionism was instrumental in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. In time, the neoconservatives as well conglomerated into our consensus.

Meyer rightly understood that seeking to minimize the gulf between libertarians and conservatives would allow for the intellectual Right to reinvigorate the Republican Party. With the fall of Communism in the early 90s, the bonds forged by fusionism were broken Since that time, our party has been fraught with squabbles amongst these two ideologies.

It is my contention that it is time for the GOP to move towards a new fusionism on the ashes of the old. If we are to defeat Barack Obama and his party this fall, we must embrace it.

Among us there are some who are caught in a perpetual contest of out-conservativing each other. Others in our party seek to exploit our differences on social issues and tear us apart from within. These are damaging, and their excesses must be eclipsed by our new-found unity. We must continue to celebrate, not denigrate, our differences, and know that the Republican party is a place for us to channel our ideas into good governance. If we continue to allow radicalism for its own sake, I fear that any hopes of unity will be frayed. We must avail ourselves to some standard on this issue.

So I challenge all of you, including myself, to look towards a a new spirit of principled unity for our party. But fusionism does not end with our party. It continues in our conversations with other Republicans, it is sharpened by our differences, and reinforced by our overarching similarities. If we are to defeat this President, if we are to make this party the par exemplar of the American Right, then we must move forward in singular purpose. Thank you.