The Next American Right

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, author Thomas Kuhn argued that science progresses through long periods of stability within a shared paradigm, punctuated by revolutions when that paradigm breaks down. Kuhn devised his theory to explain scientific revolutions, but it explains Republican politics just as well. Fifty years ago, Ronald Reagan’s paradigm rested on a three-legged stool: free-market economics, social conservatism, and muscular foreign policy. For decades, Republicans practiced Kuhn’s "normal science," operating within Reagan’s framework. But as anomalies accumulated, the Reagan paradigm fractured. Traditionalism lost ground to progressivism. Fiscal conservatism yielded to bigger government, epitomized by the 2008 bank bailouts. Foreign intervention produced endless wars with diminishing returns. Through George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and Jeb Bush, the Republican establishment kept applying old rules to new realities. Then came Trump. His rise in 2016 was Kuhn’s "extraordinary science"—a ferocious response to the crisis of the old order. For a decade, Trump fought an entrenched establishment, challenging orthodoxies on culture, trade, foreign intervention, and immigration. Today, the insurgency has won. What remains is not a bold, dramatic second act, but the far more familiar (and mundane) work of routine governance. We have entered the revolution’s mopping-up phase. Yesterday’s iconoclasts are giving way to a new generation of technicians—the lawyers, administrators, and policy specialists tasked with translating revolt into governance. These new puzzle-solvers face many questions: How can tariffs protect domestic industry without fueling inflation? How can the administrative state be redirected toward national priorities? How can borders be enforced at scale while managing labor-market disruptions? Their new fusion will not restore Reaganism or preserve perpetual insurgency. Instead, it will emerge gradually as technicians translate populist instincts into governing principles. To understand where such a synthesis is possible, I spoke with journalist Stephanie Slade about her book, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right (University of Notre Dame Press, 2026). What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation. Before we can understand the rise of populism, we need to understand the worldview it displaced. What was fusionism, and why did so many conservatives believe it offered an answer to the tensions within the American right? Fusionism is a commitment to classical liberalism alongside a traditional understanding of Judeo-Christian moral teachings and the wisdom they offer on how to live a good life. The essential insight is that individual liberty and virtue are both necessary for human flourishing, and we cannot care about just one or the other. Libertarians sometimes want to focus only on liberty. On the other hand, you have conservatives who want only traditionalism or virtue, and they are willing to impose it at the point of a gun, if you will. But if different factions are only playing nice together to get what they want, they will inevitably end up squabbling and fighting. That is very different from a shared philosophical synthesis, one that everyone in the fusionist world can stand behind while still debating specific policy positions. Ideas are one thing. Political power is another. How did fusionism move from the pages of conservative magazines into the White House? Fusionism achieved its major political triumph with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Reagan had read leading conservative intellectuals like Frank Meyer, Russell Kirk, and Friedrich Hayek, and he wanted to implement their ideas: limited government, the rule of law, and getting the government out of the way so people can pursue a good life as they understand it. Reagan believed in moral virtue, too, but by and large he didn’t believe that using state power was an appropriate way to cultivate it. Did fusionism accomplish what it set out to achieve once it was forced to govern in the real world? Real-world politics are messy, and you don’t always get what you want. For example, Reagan cut taxes. He also wanted to eliminate the Department of Education and cut spending, but on those he was unsuccessful, and it led to a ballooning of the national debt. While Reagan believed in free trade and opposed protectionism in principle, he felt the only way to stop Congress from passing massive tariffs was to strike a deal restricting Japanese car imports as part of the “Voluntary Export Restraint” program, which was negotiated in the first year of his presidency. So, practical politics don’t always match your vision for how to govern. What's striking is that fusionism did not collapse after Reagan. If anything, it appeared triumphant. So how does a movement go from apparent victory to losing its grip on the next generation? A couple of factors explain this shift. First, following Reagan's overwhelming political victories and the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a sense that fusionist ideas had been fully vindicated. The feeling was, "We were right, so now we can pivot away from philosophy and focus on building the political apparatus to form coalitions and defeat the left." But when you shift your focus away from intellectual foundations toward practical politics and winning elections, you stop educating young people on the underlying principles. There was too much emphasis on an electoral project rather than transmitting ideas to the next generation. And as a result, you have a whole generation of young conservatives who think the point of politics is to acquire power, without having thought very hard about the challenges around treating government as a blunt instrument. Second, there has been a strong backlash against genuine illiberal overreach on the left; specifically, militant identity politics that go far beyond reasonable concerns about social justice. Huge swaths of the country feel that cultural institutions have been captured and made hostile to Christians, middle-class Americans, and most people who hold traditional moral values. It shouldn’t surprise us that people would feel resentful about that and begin to lose faith in the idea of procedural neutrality. Was Donald Trump the cause of that revolt against the culture, or was he the first politician to recognize that it was already happening? You don’t get Donald Trump unless people feel the pre-existing conservative movement failed to meet the challenges they faced. But I think that’s often because the conservative movement drifted away from its commitment to classical liberal principles, not because it was too strident in its liberalism. Consider the bank bailouts after the 2008 financial crisis. Reason magazine and free-market advocates opposed the bailout because it was (and is) wrong to insulate private institutions from their own mistakes at taxpayer expense. George W. Bush stated he was convinced by advisors that he had to do it to save the economy. But looking back, he acknowledged that much of the modern surge in populist sentiment stems from that decision. The average person thought, "If I cannot pay my mortgage, the government will not bail me out, so why is a massive financial institution getting a lifeline?" People were not necessarily yearning for more government intervention; rather, they saw a fighter in Trump's temperament, whereas the fusionist-leaning candidates on stage in 2016 seemed out of touch with that frustration. Is today's populist right an evolution of fusionism, or does it rest on a fundamentally different set of beliefs? It’s fundamentally different. There are two paths for conservatism: one is fusionist, and the other is the "dissident right," or those dissenting from the old consensus. The dissident right believes we need a strong ruler to orient the country toward what is right and good, as they define it. That is a fundamentally different kind of conservatism. It has been receiving most of the attention lately and seems particularly attractive to young conservatives, but that does not mean that old-school classically liberal conservatism is dead. There’s a live fight happening right now for the future of the movement. When you look five or 10 years into the future, are we witnessing the replacement of fusionism, or the beginning of its return in a new form? Many Americans are fusionists, even if they do not use the term explicitly. They believe in free markets, limited government, and the rule of law, while also believing in moral virtue. They are Republican voters, advocates pushing for deregulation, and champions of school choice. They work in advocacy organizations across the country, and they are not willing to abandon free-market conservative principles. Reaganism as an exact model is not coming back because the specific conditions of 1979 no longer exist today. The Cold War was a central pillar of Reagan's coalition, but global affairs are entirely different today than 50 years ago. However, that doesn’t mean we should throw away our fundamental commitment to liberty and moral virtue, which is precisely what many on the dissident right want to do. Ultimately, “dissident right” figures like "Bronze Age Pervert" or even Adrian Vermeule represent a fringe ideology—most people are not on board with them. Polling consistently suggests that the vast majority of Americans remain classically liberal at heart and simply want to coexist peacefully with their neighbors. The left misunderstood that, and they paid the price in 2024. I’m hopeful we’ll see a course correction on the right as well. John J. Waters is author of the postwar novel River City One (Knox Press, 2023).