I want to begin with what any farm boy or plant worker’s daughter could tell you, and what Eugene B. Meyer politely declines to mention in “Fusionism, Properly Understood” this week at National Review: the fusionism Frank Meyer wrote into the American right in 1962 has been the operating philosophy of our governing class for sixty-four years, and the thing it promised to conserve is not here. The thing generations built — a mill, a parish, a hospital, a credit union, a Main Street — was sold this decade for the leverage of a sponsor who will never set foot in the town. The tragedy is that the language used to bless the sale was the language of “freedom,” and the language used to quiet the priest was the language of “virtue.” Meyer restates the formula: freedom is primarily the work of the political order, virtue primarily the work of family, church, and the intermediate institutions between, and the rule of law knits the two. He warns his young readers against abandoning the framework for expedience, against treating “power, determination, and a certain degree of ruthlessness” as a substitute for principle, against letting the left’s own authoritarianism license the right’s mirror version. He is right to warn. He is wrong to console.

Be honest first. There is a real danger in a conservative mood that treats its own virtue as warrant for any lever it once condemned, and Meyer names it correctly. The fear that unearned power concentrated in the state — in the hands of men who do not know your parish or your mill — will favor itself and corrupt itself is the founding insight of the American right, true in 1787 and still true today. Frank Meyer’s In Defense of Freedom was a real instrument against the centralizer’s appetite. A fusionism abandoned for raw force ends by becoming what it hated, and a virtue enforced by the state into the bargain is phony virtue, as Meyer says. None of that is false. The instrument still exists on paper. What does not exist, on the present record, are the people willing to use it.

Because the freedom/virtue formula, in the lived economy of the past forty years, has been allocated strictly: the freedom went to the owners of mobile capital, and the virtue went to those who had nothing left to do but be virtuous in private. The freedom to dissolve a firm is real freedom; the freedom to keep your job is not. The freedom to close a mill and move the production is celebrated as the genius of the system; the freedom of a fifty-three-year-old tool-and-die man to keep his shop open is called sentimental protectionism. The freedom to relocate your charter to Delaware is constitutional; the freedom of a parish to keep its grammar school open is, somehow, reactionary.

Take a single named thing. Carney Hospital in Dorchester, founded in 1863 to tend the wounded of a war the town had lived through, passed into private-equity hands in 2010. By 2024 it was bankrupt, and the doors closed. The operator had been loaded with debt, the real estate sold to a separate landlord, and the building leased back. The mechanic is precise, and I used to trade corn before it was planted, so I can tell you it is not mysterious to anyone who has watched a position get marked: the thing is bought for the cash flow, the cash flow is mortgaged to pay for itself, the mortgage is loaded onto the operator’s books, and the asset is sold out from under the work. The operator keeps the labor, loses the land, and the sponsor exits with the difference. Generations built an institution for a place; a sponsor bought a cash flow. The market is not wicked for this — the mechanism does what mechanisms do. The betrayal is that a politics built to conserve the institution looked the other way, because the language of “freedom” had been borrowed to bless the trade.

This is the part of the fusionist record Meyer declines to summarize. The intermediate institutions — family, church, the small firm, the locally owned bank — were not destroyed by the central planners he never quite names. They were destroyed under the auspices of the very liberty he invokes. The 1962 framework he defends, in the actual hands of the movement it founded, rationalized four decades of merger-and-acquisition logic, two decades of private-equity rollups, and a generation of community banks bought out and closed so their lobbies could be made into branches of a too-big-to-fail conglomerate. The packaging plant outside my hometown consolidated in 2003. The feed store on Main closed in 2009. The Catholic parish down the road, founded in 1884, was shuttered last winter and the school with it. The same pattern at ManorCare. The same pattern at the regional grocery chain. The same pattern at the funeral home across from the cemetery. None of those closures was the work of the bureaucratic state Meyer darkly gestures toward. They were the work of the capital mark he signs every column with. To defend fusionism in 2026 without naming which institution has actually been doing the dissolving is a peculiar kind of conservation.

And the “virtue” half of the formula was treated as personal religious counsel, addressed to individuals whose intermediate institutions had already been liquidated. Pray more. Work harder. Marry younger. Do not, by God, ask for policy. The fusionist virtue was rhetorical, not legislative — the kind of thing one said in a speech rather than the kind of thing one built. The freedom, by contrast, was entirely legislative, and the legislation has had forty years to work. The compound result is the country we are in: a place where the freedom is concentrated and the virtue is privatized, where the rule of law has been read down to the freedom of contract, and the rule of contract has been used against the family farm, the parish, and the Main Street bank with the same cheerful consistency.

Meyer is right that the older generation tends toward fossilization and the younger toward imprudence. He is wrong that either tendency is the diagnosis. The diagnosis is that the coalition which inherited the fusionist banner treated the freedom half as policy and the virtue half as preaching, and the institutions that would have made both real were converted, in the name of the very freedom that was supposed to protect them, into inventory. The test of the synthesis, if it is what Meyer says it is, is precise. Its first application today is to the private-equity sponsor extracting rent from the nursing home that generations built. The other test is the centralized state — a single agency rule that orders the same nursing home how to run. The conservative answer is neither pole. The conservative answer is the third thing. The cooperative that bought the closing plant and kept the wage on the town. The credit union that still lives in the building the bank abandoned. The mutual insurer that stayed in the county. The community-supported farm whose members underwrite the year before the harvest. The land trust that takes the development pressure off the place altogether. The employee-owned firm that cannot be sold out from under its workers, because its workers are its owners. The parish school kept open by tuition credits and the volunteer labor of the families who use it. Each of these fuses the freedom of the people who run them with the virtue the institutions form, and each does so without writing a single sentence into a federal statute. They are subsidiarity made of brick. They are the fusionism Meyer describes, instantiated at the only scale where instantiation has ever worked — the scale where the people who bear the consequences are the people who make the decisions.

Its current heirs have spent a generation mortgaging them. The town is not gone yet; most of it is. What remains can still be built by the people who live in it, on the scale they can run, with the freedom they can answer to and the virtue they can pass on. The framework is sound. The country we made under it is not. We can change either. We cannot keep both. The next generation of stewards — if there is to be a next one — will not sell the town again.