What Ronald Reagan's Fusionist Politics Teach Us About Liberty, Virtue, and Their Limits

"There are so many people and institutions that come to mind for their role in the success we celebrate tonight," President Ronald Reagan said at the 1981 Conservative Political Action Conference, just two months after his inauguration. "Intellectual leaders like Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Ludwig von Mises." And Frank Meyer, who had "fashioned a vigorous new synthesis of traditional and libertarian thought—a synthesis that is today recognized by many as modern conservatism."

Meyer, Reagan said, believed that "a respect for law and an appreciation of tradition" should "motivate us even as we seek a new economic prosperity based on reducing government interference in the marketplace. Our goals complement each other." Though Reagan did not use the word, this was Meyer's philosophy of fusionism to a tee: the idea that virtue and liberty are mutually reinforcing, and that neither is possible in any lasting or meaningful way without the other.

Reagan, famous as a rhetorician, had long blended classical liberalism with Judeo-Christian traditionalism in his speeches. The outcome on one Election Day after another suggested that the message resonated with more than just conservatives. The American electorate overwhelmingly embraced Reagan, rewarding him with a commanding 44-state win in 1980 and a stunning 49-state victory in 1984.

For all his talk of liberty and virtue, Reagan's record on the ground was complicated from a fusionist perspective, let alone a libertarian one. He set out to reduce government but floundered when it came to reining in spending. On the flip side, he cared about traditional morality but angered the Religious Right by often (though not always) adopting a hands-off attitude when it came to legislation.

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Reagan's conservatism was not a hierarchical or even in most cases a gradualist outlook. The celebration of progress—of the wondrous advances, moral and material, of which free human beings are capable—was a recurring theme in his rhetoric. The historian William Inboden has described Reagan as an apostle "for the information age, knowledge economies, open trade, and democracy."

A speech Reagan gave after the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on live television in 1986 is illustrative. "I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America," he said. "I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them." Two years later, during a trip to Moscow, he told an audience of college students that "freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuing revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people. It is the right to follow your dream, or stick to your conscience, even if you're the only one in a sea of doubters."

These sentiments are in keeping with the adventurousness and adaptability that have always defined the American character, even on the political right. On America's shores, the small-c conservative disposition has always been tempered by the instinct to build, innovate, and explore. In this sense, Reagan cannot be thought of as a pure traditionalist. But he can be thought of as a fusionist. He believed that the thing to be conserved was the American founding, with all the baked-in liberalism it entailed. And for Reagan, the principles and institutions of the founding were worth conserving because they were good, not merely because they were there.

On policy questions, Reagan did not always line up with traditionalist conservatives, but his reasoning almost always evinced a fusionist approach to the challenge of fostering virtue in society. Thus, he supported parochial schools' right to make personnel decisions in keeping with their values by declining to hire openly gay faculty. He also opposed a law that would have permitted public schools to discriminate against employees who spoke out in favor of gay rights. Reagan's intuitions served him well in both cases: The first is rightly understood as a matter of free association (protected by the Constitution), the second as a matter of government censorship (limited by the same).

The positions Reagan took on abortion are instructive, in that they show him working through an issue where he initially felt ambivalent. "This is not in my mind a clear-cut issue," he told the press when he was governor of California and an abortion liberalization bill was under debate. Options for cases where the mother's life was threatened were one thing, he thought, but he was uncomfortable with a provision to allow the termination of pregnancies in cases where fetal deformities were suspected. "I cannot justify the taking of an unborn life simply on the supposition that the baby may be born less than a perfect human being," he said.

Reagan did eventually sign the bill. It was a decision he came to regret, and he later supported an (unsuccessful) effort to amend the U.S. Constitution to protect the unborn. Reagan's evolution on this issue is consistent with a pro-life libertarian view grounded in the belief that protecting innocent human life is one of the few legitimate functions of the state.

On the whole, Reagan seemed to share libertarians' aversion to the idea of using the law to impose virtue on society. The Religious Right spent most of his White House tenure complaining bitterly that he was not prioritizing their legislative agenda. He was happy to lend his oratorical prowess to traditionalist causes, but employing the coercive power of the state was a different matter. As first lady Nancy Reagan put it in her memoir, her husband "just doesn't believe that social problems should—or can—be solved by government."

There were exceptions, of which the most glaring was Reagan's handling of the war on drugs. His eight years in the White House saw a dramatic intensification of both interdiction and prosecution efforts, to include the introduction of mandatory minimum sentences and the notorious 100–1 disparity between prison terms for crack vs. powder cocaine. This was a win for the culture-war right and a source of disappointment to libertarians, who object on principle to the criminalization of victimless behaviors, and who lament the expensive and intrusive government required to enforce such prohibitions. As Eric Marti put it in Reason in 1986, "No enforcement efforts short of erecting a massive police state will curtail either use or supply of easily concealable and privately consumed substances that are in popular demand."

Reagan was nonetheless willing to give it a go. The result was a vast increase in incarceration levels, with the United States now standing as a global leader in per-capita prison population.

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The free market orientation for which Reagan now tends to be remembered came relatively late in life. After spending his Hollywood years as a New Deal Democrat in (mostly) good standing, Reagan's time as General Electric's goodwill ambassador, during which he researched, wrote, and delivered speeches celebrating individual freedom, proved transformative.

There were early hints that Reagan was someone who put a premium on freedom. His first run-in with the Hollywood left came when he questioned whether communism was compatible with democracy. But when the House Committee on Un-American Activities called him to testify in Washington about the problem of reds in the movie industry, he expressed discomfort with the idea of interference by the government. "As a citizen I would hesitate, or not like to see, any political party outlawed on the basis of its ideology," he said. "We have spent 170 years in this country on the basis that democracy is strong enough to stand up and fight against the inroads of any ideology."

Reagan's intuitive libertarianism was evident throughout his political career. "I question this whole business of the draft," he said during his first term as governor. "I don't want the uniform to become a symbol of servitude." (On the other hand, he opted not to do away with Selective Service registration once he became president, despite having campaigned promising to do so.)

"The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to forever put our right to control our own destiny beyond the reach of majority rule," he contended on another occasion. "In a lynch mob you have majority rule, and it doesn't make them right."

Then there were his views on political economy, which could be downright Hayekian. Shortly before the 1964 election*, he described the core issue of the election as "whether we believe in our capacity for self-government, or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves." Reagan knew where he came down: "A government can't control the economy without controlling people," he said.

As governor, Reagan quoted President Franklin Roosevelt (of all people) that "continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit." As president, he supported a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution and negotiated large federal tax cuts. The latter issue was one that cried out for reform at the time: The top marginal rate—set at just 7 percent when the federal income tax was introduced in 1913—had undergone a tenfold increase by 1980. Reagan helped bring it down from 70 percent to 50 percent and later to 28 percent, changes that represented genuine gains for individual freedom, as American families regained control over how large sums of their own money would be spent. Before long the economy, which had been beset by stagflation during Jimmy Carter's presidency, entered a period of recovery.

But there is another important piece of the picture. Reagan's tax cuts were meant to be paired with robust cuts to government spending. Despite his exertions, those cuts mostly did not materialize. The result was a national debt that ballooned to staggering proportions on Reagan's watch. The inability to meaningfully bring down government spending was a source of anguish to Reagan—especially when many of his own executive agency heads, loath to accept cuts to their spending and the prestige that accompanied it, seemed to be working against him.

Many conservatives in the Reagan years sincerely (if naively) believed that cutting taxes would force the government to learn to get by with less. Reagan was himself a proponent of this "starve the beast" approach. "There were always those who told us that taxes couldn't be cut until spending was reduced," he said on the campaign trail. "Well, you know, we can lecture our children about extravagance until we run out of voice and breath. Or we can cure their extravagance by simply reducing their allowance."

This was a watershed moment for the GOP. "By putting tax cuts ahead of spending cuts," writes the historian H.W. Brands, Reagan "proposed to lead America across an economic Rubicon. Republicans and conservatives had hitherto made balanced budgets the touchstone of their fiscal philosophy. They sought to cut taxes, but not at the cost of increasing debt. They knew that cutting taxes is politically easy, because it makes constituents happy. Cutting spending is the hard part, for it causes constituents pain. Reagan proposed doing the easy part first." Unfortunately, the federal government, unlike Reagan's proverbial teenager, can replace a docked allowance with nearly limitless credit in the form of U.S. Treasury bonds—hence the near-tripling of the national debt during Reagan's presidency.

Part of the problem can be attributed to a misunderstanding among some in Reagan's inner circle about what came to be known as "supply-side economics." The gist of supply-side theory is that rolling back taxes and regulations can unleash the private sector, stimulating economic growth and generating broad-based prosperity. A corollary of the theory, associated with the economist Arthur Laffer, says that decreasing tax rates can counterintuitively increase tax revenues, since a growing economy means a larger tax base. (A 10 percent tax on $100,000 yields $10,000, for example, while a 15 percent tax on $50,000 yields just $7,500.)

While that can be true under the right circumstances, the Reagan years showed that it should not be treated as a universal axiom. Slashing the top marginal rate from 70 percent undoubtedly sparked economic growth, but the tax revenues derived from that growth were nowhere near enough to offset the rate reduction, especially when paired with the Pentagon spending hikes that Reagan also demanded.

Entitlement reform was another area where Reagan moderated his free market stance in response to political realities. At times—especially before he began running for high office—he seemed opposed in principle to the idea that it's the government's job to care for people in their old age. But "as he advanced in politics and discovered the popularity of the program," writes Brands, "he shifted his objection from philosophical grounds to tactical ones, and he spoke of saving Social Security rather than eliminating it," even if that meant raising payroll taxes. Likewise, one of his most famous lines from the 1980 campaign was a direct rebuttal of Carter's accusation that Reagan had campaigned against Medicare. "There you go again," Reagan replied. "When I opposed Medicare, there was another piece of legislation meeting the same problem before the Congress. I happened to favor the other piece of legislation and thought that it would be better for the senior citizens and provide better care than the one that was finally passed. I was not opposing the principle of providing care for them."

Little wonder his bid to reduce federal spending failed. "The Reagan Revolution turned out to be a paper tiger," lamented the libertarian scholar David Boaz in 1988.

In Getting Right with Reagan, the historian Marcus Witcher persuasively argues that conservatives invented the myth of Reagan as a stalwart free marketeer largely in contradiction to his actual governing record. "To be a 'Reagan conservative' meant being principled and pursuing conservative policies in their pure form without compromising," Witcher explains. "As early as 1983, conservatives were beginning to differentiate between Reagan the man and Reagan the ideal, and the president was having problems fulfilling the expectations" that accompanied his reputation. The 40th president was a pragmatist more than an ideologue, one who was even willing to pursue trade protectionism when he thought it was in the interests of American industry.

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On foreign policy as on economics, the myth of Reagan as an uncompromising hardliner is tough to square with reality. It's true that he was a fairly fierce Cold Warrior, at least in rhetorical terms, before becoming president. But by the time he arrived in Washington in 1980, Reagan's views on negotiation with the Soviet Union had matured.

His eagerness to sit down with his Soviet counterparts drove some of his former backers nearly into a frenzy. Critics accused him of appeasing the Evil Empire: Conservative Caucus founder Howard Phillips called him a "useful idiot for Soviet propaganda," while the right-wing direct mail guru Richard Viguerie said he was "Teddy Roosevelt in reverse: He speaks loudly but carries a small twig." Yet Reagan, convinced he possessed a unique opportunity to move the world toward peace, would not be deterred. He repeatedly sought tête-à-têtes with Soviet leadership, finally succeeding in his second term, after Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power in Moscow.

Reagan was practically a peacenik when it came to the use of nuclear weapons. He had long opposed the "nuclear freeze" movement, which called for an end to the development of nukes. Most conservatives wrongly assumed, in Witcher's words, that this "meant that he was for nuclear buildup. In reality, Reagan shared conservatives' concern over the nuclear gap"—the recognition that the USSR possessed more nuclear firepower at the time than the U.S. did—"but he also opposed a freeze because he wanted something much more radical: the eradication of all nuclear weapons." It was the desire to make nuclear weaponry obsolete that caused Reagan to push so hard for the Strategic Defense Initiative, an anti–ballistic missile program that he hoped would allow the U.S. to intercept and neutralize a nuclear attack.

None of this meant that Reagan was a dove—or that his judgment in foreign policy matters was always beyond reproach. Because he thought it crucial to stop the Soviet Union from expanding its sphere of influence, he allied the United States with brutal right-wing dictatorships and funded violent anti-communist rebel groups. Reagan's legacy thus shamefully "includes the carnage and suffering wrought by many authoritarian regimes and insurgencies supported by the Reagan White House," Inboden writes. "Reagan, reluctant to admit unpleasant truths, often evaded acknowledging this by denying to himself and others that certain dictators or insurgents—such as Marcos in the Philippines, Pinochet in Chile, the Nicaraguan Contras, and the Afghan mujahideen—engaged in odious abuses."

The essayist Joan Didion ridiculed the president's tendency to invent false-flag stories to explain away inconvenient facts, as when he suggested during a 1986 radio address that communist operatives had begun to "dress in freedom fighter uniforms, go into the countryside, and murder and mutilate ordinary Nicaraguans" in order to discredit the anti-communist cause in Latin America. Occam and his razor would probably have liked a word.

The biggest scandal of the Reagan years was a direct result of these beliefs. The Iran-Contra affair, in which American arms were secretly sold to Iran and the proceeds secretly used to finance the Nicaraguan Contras, was more than foolish; it betrayed a genuine lack of respect for the rule of law and separation of powers. Although most evidence suggests the president was kept in the dark about the second half of the arrangement, Reagan bears responsibility for having urged his people to continue looking for ways to assist the Contras even after Congress passed legislation decisively prohibiting such efforts. A hands-off management style—Reagan famously preferred to focus on the big picture and leave his staff to work out the details—and that willingness to dream up implausible exculpatory explanations for the behavior of his allies were also on display.

Still, a survey of Reagan's foreign policy record reveals a president who was far more thoughtful than many people expected at the time of his election. The left had feared Reagan would be a loose cannon on the world stage, a trigger-happy cowboy modeled, perchance, on one of his Western film roles. Instead, Inboden notes, "Reagan only ordered ground forces to fight once, in the relatively small-scale Grenada invasion."

If you're accustomed to interpreting "fusionism" to mean the three-legged stool of libertarians, traditionalists, and Cold War hawks who made up the Reagan coalition, this fairly restrained foreign policy record might seem to call into question his fusionist bona fides. But fusionism is best understood as a philosophical synthesis of libertarianism and traditional religion. Applying that synthesis to the vagaries of politics and public affairs is a task requiring prudential judgment, and prudent policy applications will inevitably change as circumstances do, even if the underlying principles are enduring. A tactic that made sense in 1956 may no longer be wise in 1986.

When Neal Freeman, a long-serving member of National Review's board, came out against the Iraq War in 2003, many at the magazine were perplexed and indignant. But Freeman understood that the aggressive foreign policy stance taken by conservatives in the mid–20th century was conditional. Recognizing that a given foreign policy is not a core component of philosophical fusionism allows us to interrogate calls for military interventions calmly, working forward from the dual commitment to liberty and virtue rather than backward from a compulsion to defend the chosen strategy of our tribe.

Reagan's willingness to buck the hawks and cultivate a friendship with Gorbachev illustrated that point. In the end, Reagan was right and his conservative critics were wrong: Gorbachev turned out to be a liberalizer—or at least a realist—who pulled his troops from Afghanistan and finally oversaw the demise of communism in Eastern Europe.

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Even if he did not manage, when confronted by the exigencies of messy real-world politics, to govern as the perfect fulfillment of Frank Meyer's dreams, Reagan represented an obvious moral and rhetorical commitment to fusionist principles. In 1975 he told Reason that libertarianism is "the heart and soul of conservatism" and said that he did not "believe in a government that protects us from ourselves." At the same time, he was clearly a man who believed himself bound by a moral law and wanted to live in a traditionally virtuous society.

Elements of both classical liberalism and religious traditionalism are evident in one of Reagan's most salient character traits: his civility toward those with whom he disagreed. "Remember, we have no enemies, only opponents," he told his staff, according to former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who worked in Reagan's White House. A consummate cheerful warrior, Reagan was willing to work across the aisle (often to the irritation of his more intransigent Republican allies) and liked to say that "there is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit."

On the New Right today, it's not uncommon to hear that politics is "war and enmity" and must be treated as such. Since the left has no compunction about using the state to impose its views on society, the argument goes, conservatives who "know what time it is" should be willing to use public power to attack their foes. In this view, a principled commitment to rule of law and individual liberty amounts to unilateral disarmament or even suicide.

One feels sure that Reagan would not have been persuaded by these arguments—that he would have recognized this militant approach to politics as flatly at odds with authentic Christian virtue. Reagan's refusal to treat his fellow Americans as enemies to be destroyed was in keeping with the eminently traditionalist view that says it's better to endure an injustice than to commit one.

It was also, of course, eminently liberal. Arguably the paramount attribute of classical liberalism is a commitment to the idea that peace and prosperity are fostered through mutual forbearance: As long as fundamental, widely-agreed-upon rights are not at stake, all sides forgo using the government to force the others to live a certain way. The goal is coexistence rather than conformity. Social change is sought via persuasion, not coercion—changing hearts and minds, not subjugating enemies (or, worse, eliminating them) through state power.

That leaves space for a whole variety of overlapping social institutions to flourish, competing and collaborating to support people in their pursuit of virtue. As Reagan put it in his 1981 CPAC address, "We hold out this exciting prospect of an orderly, compassionate, pluralistic society—an archipelago of prospering communities and divergent institutions—a place where a free and energetic people can work out their own destiny under God."

*CORRECTION: This article originally misstated the setting of one of Reagan's speeches.