Frank Meyer was a man of great paradoxes. He began his adult life in the shadow of the Great Depression, a card-carrying Communist, but would die in 1972 a passionate anti-Communist and conservative intellectual. Meyer’s biographer, Daniel J. Flynn, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, describes him as a “study in contradictions and an exploder of stereotypes.”
The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank Meyer tells a miraculous story about how a young Communist would end up becoming one of the forgotten godfathers of the American conservative movement. The young student of Karl Marx would eventually provide foreign policy advice to Henry Kissinger and spar with Russell Kirk on the meaning of conservatism. Meyer’s story was largely untold and, even worse, virtually lost.
That is, until Flynn received a tip in passing about an abandoned soda warehouse in Altoona, Pennsylvania—a town that had no connection to Meyer—that potentially housed Meyer’s lost papers. Without the hours of rummaging painstakingly through a dusty warehouse, Frank Meyer would still be largely lost to history.
Meyer was born in 1909 to a well-to-do Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey. His father, Jack, was a successful businessman. From an early age, Frank sought a deeper form of wealth: ideas. This led him first to Princeton, where he was originally denied admission because he, as Flynn discovers, was not a “clean cut Christian American.” He quickly floundered academically.
Meyer failed upward and transferred to Balliol College at Oxford University. While in England, Flynn describes Meyer as a “Communist organizer posing as an anthropology student,” briefly attending the London School of Economics as a graduate student, attracting the romantic eye of the youngest daughter of then-prime minister Ramsay MacDonald—and also of MI-5 British intelligence, who ordered his deportation back to the United States after a prompt investigation over his Communist ties.
Flynn recounts Meyer’s return to the United States as the beginning of his slow but steady shift to the right. Continuing in the Communist party, “[h]e imagined a meshing of Marxism with the American tradition,” a daunting, even naïve attempt, that only a mind like Meyer’s would entertain. The party was Meyer’s entire life. He was devoted more than almost anybody. Flynn estimates he donated twice his salary back to the party.
Seeds of doubt began to sprout when he read texts like Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences and F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Hayek, the Austrian-born economist who taught at LSE during Meyer’s pre-deportation time in London, “one-punched the former LSE student into an intellectual daze,” writes Flynn.
Meyer ceased writing for the Communist magazine New Masses and began writing for The Freeman, an established libertarian publication. He joined William F. Buckley Jr. at National Review at its inception in 1955, serving as an editor and author of his “Principles & Heresies” column until his death 17 years later.
Meyer’s early writing had a unique philosophical bent. He mulled over the nature of liberal education and railed against a widespread naïveté toward the Soviet Union’s expansionist ambitions. Meyer soon began to write about what conservatives ought actually to conserve, while also exhibiting clarity in confronting the forces threatening American institutions.
Meyer’s conservatism, or “fusionism,” is best encapsulated in his 1962 collection of essays, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo. Meyer implored conservatives not to try and solve the great contradictions of Western political tradition—specifically, the tension between freedom and virtue—as Marxists and utopians of all stripes foolishly attempted to do. Rather, they should relish in and sustain the great tension between these two political ends. Such a synthesis attracted traditionalists and libertarians under the banner of “conservative.”
Meyer wrote about Greek philosophy and Judaic prophets one week, and the implications of a court case the next. He flirted with formal politics, working closely with Barry Goldwater’s team in 1964, before becoming an early supporter of a charismatic former actor and union president. Ronald Reagan, once a Democrat, also credited The Road to Serfdom—along with National Review—as a formative text that turned him away from central planning and toward free markets. Perhaps it was their shared path away from the left that attracted Meyer to Reagan, and Reagan to Meyer.
Upon Goldwater’s routing in 1964, Meyer became an early supporter of the young, soon-to-be governor of California, to seek the White House. Flynn describes both Meyer’s ambitious hopes and a realistic view of politics, understanding that a conservative candidate would have to succeed in a party still populated with Northeastern moderates like Nelson Rockefeller. Reagan struck this balance perfectly by taking “principle policy positions” and possessing a “proven ability as a campaigner.”
Meyer did not live to see the Reagan Revolution march through the White House. But his fusionist conservatism did. Centered on the sanctity of the individual, an ever-present tension between freedom and virtue, and an opposition to collectivism of all stripes, fusionism garnered support from both libertarian and traditionalist factions of the American right.
Meyer rejected the term “fusionism,” opting for what he called, the “conservative consensus,” that, although it had not been articulated sufficiently up to that point, “accepts the existence of an objective moral and spiritual order, which places as man’s end the pursuit of virtue, and the freedom of the individual person as a decisive necessity for a good political order.”
This tension was the essence of conservatism and was the key to unifying warring factions—it was a unifying idea. “Conservatism, therefore, unites the ‘traditionalist’ emphasis upon virtue and the ‘libertarian’ emphasis upon freedom. The denial of the claims of virtue leads not to conservatism, but to spiritual aridity and social anarchy; the denial of the claims of freedom leads not to conservatism, but to authoritarianism and theocracy.”
Such an idea did not come without pushback. In referencing Meyer’s former life as a Communist, traditionalist Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, called Meyer “an ideologue of liberty” and echoed a remark about him, saying, “Meyer wants to supplant Marx by Meyer.” Flynn recounts other intellectual scuffles between fellow conservatives, such as L. Brent Bozell Jr.—who came up with the term fusionism—that sharpened, as iron does with iron, Meyer’s synthesis. Nonetheless, Meyer had the ear of Reagan.
“It was Frank Meyer who reminded us that the robust individualism of the American experience was part of the deeper current of Western learning and culture,” Reagan recalled as the keynote speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1981, just weeks after his inauguration. “He pointed out that a respect for law, an appreciation for tradition, and regard for the social consensus that gives stability to our public and private institutions, these civilized ideas must still motivate us even as we seek a new economic prosperity based on reducing government interference in the marketplace.”
High-minded conservatives have been mulling over Meyer’s intellectual legacy of fusionism ever since. It’s likely to continue to be a polarizing topic, especially with the rise of a “New Right” looking to reinvestigate and relitigate core beliefs of the American right.
After reading this biography, it’s hard not to determine that Meyer’s brilliance stemmed from, not in spite of, his early life on the left. The charm he used to recruit young Communists in England later helped to enlist the foot soldiers for the eventual Reagan Revolution.
He discredited the roots of American communism which, for decades, he had nurtured. Ultimately, he made conservatism formidable, both politically and intellectually, by giving a burgeoning movement of anti-Communists, libertarians, and traditionalists the confidence to define for themselves what they sought to preserve, on their own terms, rather than those of the left.
The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer
by Daniel J. Flynn
Encounter Books, 440 pp., $41.99
Tanner Nau is a Public Interest Fellow and former intern at the Washington Free Beacon.
Read the full article here
