Humility Is Where Conservatives And Libertarians Can Still Find Fusion
Conservatives and libertarians must both check their pride to work toward a new fusionism. Their common ground begins with humility.
By Nathanael Blake
March 26, 2021
While the Libertarian Party may be a political afterthought, libertarian ideology is not. Many Republican voters have assimilated libertarian ideas into their understanding of conservatism, so are irked by much of the American right’s turn away from free-market orthodoxies and toward economic populism. Although I am sympathetic to this shift toward more family-friendly economic populism, I still believe that libertarianism may offer important insights.
If a new synthesis between conservative and libertarian ideas is to develop, however, it will have to begin with humility, which is where conservative and libertarian political philosophy should overlap in shared recognition of human fallibility and finitude.
Last century, right-leaning intellectuals and writers sought to unite American conservatives and libertarians by asserting the interdependence of liberty and virtue. This fusionism urged conservatives to recognize that virtue could only be fully realized under liberty, and it urged libertarians to acknowledge that liberty was unsustainable without virtue.
Of course, there was a problem: whose virtue, which liberty? The old fusionism required a shared, or at least broadly overlapping, understanding of liberty and virtue.
This commonality diminished over the decades, and the collapse of the Soviet Union abroad, as well as cultural changes at home, have left the two camps with fewer common concerns and priorities than before. A renewed fusionism will require conservatives and libertarians to find a common cause, beginning with a shared humility and awareness of human limitation.
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https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/26/humility-is-where-conservatives-and-libertarians-can-still-find-fusion/
