The movement that promised to restore the family and the small town sold both, and called the sale liberty. Mark Miller’s It’s Not Just the Economics, Stupid over at National Review, reviewing Stephanie Slade’s new book on fusionism, makes the central fault as plain as anyone on the right has made it in years: the heirs of Reagan kept the movement’s economic claims and lost the moral purposes those claims were supposed to serve. Miller is right that an economic argument is not complete until it explains what economic freedom allows human beings to build. He is wrong to think the failure was rhetorical. The vocabulary stayed; the towns went.
He is honest enough to cite the steelman. He points to Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” commercial — employment up, inflation down, and so the room for a young couple to marry, buy a home, and begin a life. That has to be granted, because Reagan understood it. The thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage enlarged the practical freedom to form a family. The thirty-year fixed also enabled the second mortgage, the cash-out refi, the levered-up household whose net worth was a portfolio whose risk the family did not understand. The marriage got the room. The marriage did not get the wage the room was supposed to anchor. The plant moved. The savings account became indistinguishable from the credit-card balance. The marriage was free to dissolve, and it did.
I worked a Chicago commodities desk in the years after that ad aired, and I will say what the desk knew that a National Review essay does not: when a hedger holds a position, he is not making a marriage — he is making a bet that someone else will need what he has. The fusionist synthesis assigned virtue to the family and the parish, and economics to the market, and the market got the microphone. The “free-market” half of Meyer and Buckley’s bargain consumed the “virtue” half in broad daylight, and the result is the country we now inhabit: a casino in every man’s pocket, every Main Street owned by a fund in another state, the family farm a memory, the parish a tax-exempt property holding. The marriage rate is what it is. The opioid rate is what it is.
This was not an accident, and it was not stopped by the institutions fusionism had assigned the work of virtue to, because those institutions had been stripped of their economic footing first. The same cheap money that priced Reagan’s “Morning in America” priced the farm bankruptcies of the late eighties, the S&L collapse, the farm crisis that put a foreclosure sign on a million homesteads between the Mississippi and the Rockies. Miller concedes, in a sentence that should have been his lede, that fusionism’s latter-day heirs “stopped too soon” — they explained why regulation was bad, but they did not explain what freedom was for. Exactly. The liberty half did what liberty does when virtue has no institutional purchase. It consolidated. The hedge fund bought the nursing home. The private-equity letter bought the hospital. The chain bought the motel, the funeral home, the diner, the grain elevator. The family farm became a row-crop operation owned by an absentee landlord whose address is a mailbox in a county without a courthouse. You cannot preach family values into a county that has lost its mill, its bank, and its hospital. The parish cannot form the soul of a town that has been sold for the quarter.
The asset strippers are the heirs of the fusionists, not the renegades. They read the movement’s literature. They took it at its word. The carried interest, the dividend recapitalization, the leveraged buyout of the nursing home that three generations built — these are not betrayals of free-market economics. They are free-market economics, applied to the very things the conservative movement claimed to conserve. What was built was a financial system that would dissolve every rooted thing and call the dissolution choice.
I will grant this to Miller too: the dissident right offers no rescue. The post-liberals who reach for the administrative state to enforce virtue are reaching for the wrong tool. Bozell himself saw the trap. The state that closes the divorce court on Sunday is the state that runs the rest of your life, and that road runs through the Missouri Compromise and out the other side, and what comes out the other side is not a parish. The post-liberals know this in their economics; they forget it in their anthropology. A nation cannot be Christian; only a person can, and only with difficulty. To rebuild the parish by presidential proclamation is to admit the parish is dead.
What is left is what the fusionists would have called, in their better moments, subsidiarity — and what the Catholic social teaching has been calling it since 1931. The credit union is the institution. The cooperative grain elevator is the institution. The mutual insurance company is the institution. The cooperative that bought out a shuttered feed mill. The credit union on the square that still knows its borrowers by name. The employee-owned foundry that took the contract when its leveraged competitor could not. The hospital owned by the parish and the diocese, not the hospital owned by the system and the letter. The worker cooperative that runs the nursing home, where the aide on the night shift has a vote on the wage and a name the owner has to learn. These are not sentimental restorations. They are the only structures that hold capital accountable to a place, because they make capital answerable to the people who live there.
I used to trade the corn before it was planted. The price discovery I sat beside was the price discovery of a global commodity, indifferent to the field, indifferent to the farmer, indifferent to the county. That indifference is the grammar of fusionism’s “free-market” half — a grammar I know from the inside. The opposite of that indifference is not the state. The opposite of that indifference is a cooperative, a mutual, a parish, a town that owns what it depends on. The carried interest subsidized the stripper. The cooperative is what the carried interest, routed through the community, would have bought. The fusionist synthesis sold the parish for the portfolio. The way back is to buy the parish back, at a price the parish can afford, with capital that has to live where it is invested. The last shift at the last foundry was not a defeat of rhetoric. It was the rhetoric, doing what it said.