Daniel J. Flynn’s biography of Frank S. Meyer (1909–1972), one of American conservatism’s central theoreticians and organizers, is the product of a remarkable discovery. Nearly half a century after Meyer’s death, Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, tracked down hundreds of boxes of Meyer’s notes and correspondence, located in a half-abandoned warehouse owned by the family who had purchased Meyer’s house in Woodstock, New York.
As the conservative movement approached its maturity in the turbulent 1960s, Meyer was treated as a singular authority on what conservatism meant—The Man Who Invented Conservatism, as Flynn’s title has it. Key conservatives in politics, journalism, and academia took phone calls, usually late at night, from a man possessed by his sense of wisdom and conviction. Young conservatives made pilgrimage to Woodstock, eager for the town sage’s counsel. In a speech given to the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) in 1981, the new president Ronald Reagan counted Meyer among the essential thinkers of the American conservative tradition.
Forty-five years after that speech, Meyer has sunk further into obscurity than any of his foes or allies in the early movement. He wrote only two proper books, and—contrary to Flynn’s assertion—his manifesto, In Defense of Freedom (1962), had little effect even in the inner circle of professional Republicans. If there is a single thinker whose legacy commands the popular authority over conservatism Meyer wished for himself, it is his perpetual opponent, Russell Kirk. “Fusionism,” the label Meyer devised for a synthesis of moral traditionalism and political libertarianism, is now invoked most often as an insult. Even among his professed students, Frank Meyer is seldom mentioned and rarely read.
If Meyer is to be rediscovered, could this warehouse treasure trove be the turning point?
***
Maybe not. For all the new material—110 pages of endnotes in The Man Who Invented Conservatism—an offhand observation by science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon provides the best insight: “Now it is obvious that [Meyer] has been looking all his life for a womb to crawl into equipped with a framed glazed set of All the Answers nailed to the warm wall like motel rules.” This image—Meyer as a man in search of All the Answers—is the takeaway from this lengthy study, the thread connecting Meyer as a young Jew intent on the preservation of his people’s Law and culture, then as a Communist apparatchik on his way to earthly utopia, then as the devoted apostle of a new conservative vision, and finally as a deathbed convert to the Catholic Church.
In Flynn’s account, Meyer’s quest for comprehensive clarity (and the political power it could confer) made him an adversary of James Burnham, from their brief overlap at Princeton to the tempestuous early years of National Review. The narrative is tempting. Both men’s irritability (and their ability to irritate others) was the stuff of legends. On the practical questions of politics, the two differed sharply: Burnham the champion of pragmatic alliance, Meyer the ideological purist.
Meyer and Burnham did wrestle for control of National Review’s editorial line, and for purchase with its editor, William F. Buckley, Jr., through whose popular influence either man might sway the movement at large. But in simplifying this struggle as Meyer the true-blue conservative versus Burnham the liberal squish, Flynn does a disservice not just to the legacy of a great conservative intellectual, but to the history of conservatism itself.
A clear preference for one faction colors Flynn’s reading of that history. At one point he describes Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory over Jimmy Carter as “a delayed recount of the 1964 contest” between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson. That quip is in line with the movement’s founding myth, but it distorts more than it reveals. The landslide wins of ’80 and ’84 built far more on Richard Nixon’s victories than on Goldwater’s loss. When Reagan entered the White House, he carried a bit of Meyer’s philosophy with him; but he owed his victory at least as much to the hard-nosed realism of the party’s Burnhamite wing. In fact, Burnham—who lived until 1987 but did so in relative privacy after a stroke in 1978—appears right alongside Meyer in Reagan’s 1981 CPAC catalogue of the conservative canon.
***
Granted, Meyer himself had more realism than his posthumous reputation has allowed. As early as 1960, he warned that “in a revolutionary age, the qualities of natural conservatism by themselves can lead only to the enthronement of the prevailing power of the revolution”—the very complaint a new generation of conservatives levels against the establishment Right. At a 1971 Philadelphia Society meeting, Meyer argued that American conservatism’s theoretical core was:
not…a liberal tradition in the nineteenth century sense or a conservative tradition in the nineteenth century sense. In fact, one can claim for it the oldest heritage of any existing political sentiment of strength in the world. It goes back to the eighteenth century. It was established by our constitutional fathers. The American tradition is not liberal or conservative, it is pre-liberal and pre-conservative. It predates the French Revolution.
In short, our national beginning is less the first moment in a new world than the last moment of an old one. Meyer rejected not just traditionalists’ conflation of American conservatism with European reaction, but libertarians’ conflation of it with classical liberalism.
In other respects, though, Meyer’s insights on American history were less keen.
For half a century or more the idea [the primacy of the person] was clearly and firmly held, and the practice of the American republic closely approximated the idea. But a process of retrogression set in, first slowly, then faster and faster—a process in which the decisive moments were the introduction of mass democratism by Andrew Jackson, the undermining of the sovereignty of the several states by Abraham Lincoln, and the naturalization in the United States of 20th-century collectivist principles and methods by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
How could a serious account of the erosion of self-government in America fault Lincoln but neglect Woodrow Wilson? And if, as Meyer insisted for 20 years, his first and final concern was human freedom, how could he fail to understand Lincoln’s “authoritarianism” in light of a politics devoted to chattel slavery’s ultimate extinction? A spirited exchange on the subject with Harry V. Jaffa in the pages of National Review during 1965-66 did not change Meyer’s mind, though the two emerged from their dispute as friends.
***
A clue to Meyer’s position here may be found in the document which Flynn treats as the key to understanding his subject. In a 1943 letter to Earl Browder, head of the Communist Party USA, Meyer argued that their party must meld the Marxist-Leninist tradition with the American one in order to make it viable on American shores—a sort of trial run of the experiment he would begin on the right less than a decade later. Meyer wrote then:
A people’s America and a socialist America must be presented all the time—not simply as an occasional article or on the 4th of July—as a natural, integral outgrowth of our whole past history, and presented in terms of our tradition. And this will only come about when our leaders from top to bottom are as familiar with the struggles of Jefferson and Jackson and Lincoln, and what we have inherited from those struggles, as they are with 1848, 1902, 1917, and fuse these understandings into one tool.
The Frank Meyer of 1965 may have been less interested in refuting Abraham Lincoln than in refuting the Frank Meyer of 1943. He had once embraced Lincoln as he had embraced Stalin, and he felt compelled to abandon both together.
So much for Meyer’s troubles with the past. What about his troubles with the present? There is, in 2026, a long shadow hanging over any discussion of Frank Meyer’s legacy, or of 20th-century conservatism more broadly: that of Donald Trump.
Flynn credits Meyer with molding “the leaders, talk radio hosts, college professors, activists, congressmen, judges, and journalists who impelled America rightward in the last quarter of the twentieth century.” But America at the end of the 20th century lurched leftward further and faster than any civilization in history not possessed by actual revolution. When a long-delayed course correction to the right did come, it came largely in spite of the Federalist Society (of which Meyer’s son Eugene is an influential past president) and the other great fusionist giants. Surely this must be weighed as we consider Meyer’s legacy. Yes, Meyer helped build the movement that stood athwart the 20th century yelling “Stop!” But if America halted at the brink in 2016, it did so almost wholly independent of that movement and its shouting.
Would Frank Meyer have voted for Donald Trump? Those who claim the fusionist label today would surely insist not. Meyer was a prime mover in the conservative suspension of support for Richard Nixon in 1971. But whether Communist or Republican, Meyer was above all a party man. It’s not hard to imagine that a politician like Trump who replicated Nixon’s electoral successes while making far greater concessions to the party line might have met with Meyer’s approval.
There are other points of substantive agreement. Many readers will be surprised at how closely Meyer’s grand theory of foreign policy—laid out notably in a letter to Henry Kissinger after the 1968 election, and in Meyer’s final National Review column in 1971—tracks with the now fairly well established Trump Doctrine. Though he does not draw the connection, Flynn’s presentation of these details is valuable.
***
It is also worth asking how committed Meyer was to putting his theory into practice. Flynn’s brief examinations of two key issues that historically split libertarians and conservatives are instructive. The first is the legalization of recreational drugs, about which Meyer was apparently ambivalent. But he wrote of the potent hallucinogen LSD, “What is destroyed when under the influence of the drug—and what those who take it seek to destroy—is the intellectual ordering of experience, which is the fruit of millennia of civilization.” Such comments suggest that Meyer prioritized the Western tradition over absolute freedom when the two clashed openly.
The second issue is abortion, which was becoming the heaviest question in American politics during Meyer’s final years. As Flynn writes:
Meyer considered it to be a moral evil. But as a moral question he basically regarded it as outside the sphere of politics. The relevant question pertained not to whether the mother aborted life—she did, he conceded—but to whether the mother aborted a person. Personhood amounted to a metaphysical and theological, and not a scientific, question. As such, the Conservative Party and the state could not answer it definitively and should stay out.
This is the same compartmentalizing that left slavery almost entirely out of Meyer’s account of American liberty. But given more time, his thinking might have evolved. Meyer died in April 1972, nine months before Roe v. Wade invented a constitutional right to abortion. It was only after Roe—in some cases long after—that most conservatives began to take the issue seriously. Buckley began to Meyer’s left on the subject, suggesting in a 1966 column that not just the state but even the Church should butt out of the business of unborn children as a matter of political prudence. The unfolding of history and the urging of friends turned Buckley over time into a dedicated pro-lifer, and it may have done the same to his comrade-in-arms.
***
Underlying these debates is the question of whether fusionism differs, fundamentally, from libertarianism. This was the basis of Meyer’s most lasting piece of work, an exchange in N.R. with fellow senior editor L. Brent Bozell, Jr.—another friend-cum-sparring partner. In January 1962, Meyer argued that the founders’ “political concern was the establishment of freedom and its preservation, but they understood that freedom is meaningless unless founded upon ‘the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.’” He sought to distinguish the fusionist position from the base libertarian one: “a freedom unfounded on the deep nature of man and the constitution of being.”
Bozell, a fervent Catholic convert who had recently become enamored with Franco’s Spain, responded eight months later with a sprawling, 7,000-word essay, “Freedom or Virtue?” “[I]f freedom is the ‘first principle’ in politics,” Bozell wrote, “virtue is, at best, the second one; and the programmatic aspects of the movement that affirms that hierarchy will be determined accordingly.” Such a framework was a far cry, Bozell argued, from the spirit of the American Founders, “the only group of men in modern history to have set their minds to the task of constructing a commonwealth on the basis of prudence, and therefore free from ideology.” Between freedom and virtue, freedom and justice, freedom and the common good—however the division might be labeled—only freedom, in the libertarian sense in which Meyer used it, made a totalizing claim.
***
There is evidence that Meyer understood the danger Bozell identified. In a 1968 Modern Age essay Meyer defined the central feature of Western civilization as “willingness to live life on this earth at high tension, a tension of men conscious simultaneously of their imperfection and of their freedom and their duty to move towards perfection.” Meyer—a Jew who had considered Catholicism briefly before plunging into Communist atheism, and now professed a vague and unaffiliated Christianity—believed clearly in a source of law and purpose outside and above man while retaining a libertarian, nearly amoral, view of man’s relation to that transcendent order.
At the time, Meyer considered only two sources of authority in the political realm: the “subjective spirit of men” epitomized in the Greek polis, and the “iron cosmic fatality” that ruled the empires of the East, beginning with ancient Egypt. The Jewish exodus from Egypt, in Meyer’s telling, was the beginning of man’s life at high tension; but that it came between plagues, a pillar of smoke, and He Who Is in a burning bush—these were uncomfortable details. Or, to take another obvious example, that the principles of the founding which Meyer claimed explicitly as his lodestar might have some grounding in reality beyond democratic consensus or cosmological tyranny was not even considered—even if Meyer seemed to feel it in his gut.
He had struggled with the transcendent all his life. Even as his comrades in the movement turned one by one to the Catholic Church, Meyer resisted the call he first had felt as an Oxford undergraduate. Diagnosed with lung cancer at 62, Meyer found his time cut short. After personal pleas from Buckley, Bozell, and other faithful friends, only six hours from death on Holy Saturday 1972, Meyer finally submitted and received the sacraments. (James Burnham, his old nemesis, who was raised Catholic but spent his life away from the Church, likewise returned only in his final moments.)
That struggle is not incidental to Meyer’s politics. It was precisely religion’s ability to bind the conscience—his particular hang-up was the morality of suicide—that Meyer resisted until the last moments of his life. Flynn’s account of Meyer’s wrestling with God in his dying hours is beautifully crafted, but one wonders to what extent these five pages negate the rest of the book. To remember Meyer by his second-to-last creed is a bit like eulogizing Constantine as the last great pagan emperor.
Meyer’s last transformation was more complete than a move from Communism to the Republican Party. Is fusionism the solution, the skeleton key to human experience, to political strife, to the tension of civilization from the Egyptians until now? Or is there something greater on which man must hang his fate? Frank Meyer’s final answer either repudiated or consummated his life’s work.
