Jack Butler writes for National Review Online about recent changes on the political right.

Phil Klein describes the political coalition ascendant on the right today as “the new fusionism of wanting to blow stuff up.” He elaborates:

Adherents to this new fusionism may have previously come from the far right or the far left, but they share an overriding belief that so-called experts and elite institutions have royally messed things up roughly since the end of the Cold War. As a corollary, they believe that those people need to be driven away from all levers of influence and power. And a good number of them believe that Trump is the vehicle by which to make this happen. …

… A risk for this new fusionism, however, is that it functions only as a political coalition, without a philosophical framework from which to operate. There is much that needs to be blown up, as Phil might put it. But there is also much that needs to be rebuilt. Antipathies toward the centralized state and cultural progressivism are necessary but not sufficient for what the Right must achieve. So far, those who have attempted to articulate a new framework have come up short. But without one, the new fusionism threatens to become merely a ratifier, whether intentional or not, of the status quo.

The fusionism of Frank Meyer now has a reputation for defending that self-same status quo. That reputation is unearned. It has much to offer us today. For example: Rooted in this transcendent worldview, Meyer recognized more than half a century ago that a conservatism which only conserved was inadequate. “Today’s conservatism cannot simply affirm,” he wrote. It must “select and adjudge. It is conservative because in its selection and in its judgment it bases itself upon the accumulated wisdom of mankind over millennia, because it accepts the limits upon the irresponsible play of untrammeled reason which the unchanging values exhibited by that wisdom dictate. But it is, it has to be, not acceptance of what lies before it in the contemporary world, but challenge.“