Trump's Neo-Fusionism

Using Rothbard vs. Francis to Understand the Administration

Intellectual history may seem like an unlikely method to make sense of the coming Trump administration. Still, I think there’s value in looking at Samuel T. Francis and Murray Rothbard, whom I consider to be constituent master-thinkers of Trumpism. Keep in mind, that this is necessarily a simplification—perhaps even an oversimplification—a way to reduce to a confusing reality to some manageable set of terms. And it does not consider the role of other parts of the coalition, like pro-Trump neocons and Evangelicals.

“Fusionism” was National Review senior editor Frank Meyer’s term for the philosophical synthesis of the modern Conservative Movement: a combination of libertarian economics and traditionalist social conservatism. Without getting into all the caveats and exceptions, this formed the essential intellectual architecture of American conservatism from the 1950s until Trump’s takeover of the Republican party in 2016. It was not just a theoretical notion but also meant to form the practical basis for a political coalition. There was always an implicit tension between “traditional” morality and unbridled capitalism, as both left and right-wing critics of fusionism often pointed out.

Trump reflects a new fusionism or different set of emphases: between MAGA national populism and “paleolibertarianism.” The MAGA ethos is best summarized through reference to the thought of Sam Francis, in his time a paleoconservative dissident within the conservative movement: a belief in a “Middle American Revolution;” a movement of the “post-bourgeois” lower middle class and working class, championing middle American values and economic interests, against an “alien” cosmopolitan, managerial and globalist liberal élite occupying D.C.. Its nationalist agenda includes restricted immigration, trade protectionism, industrial subsidization, and support, especially for “right-wing” industries like energy, agriculture, and defense, some (limited and theoretical) pro-unionism. It abandons old conservative reliance on "intermediary institutions” like local government, congress, and the courts in favor of an embrace of executive power, a “Caesarist…populist-based presidency able to cut through the present oligarchical establishment.” In foreign policy, it isn’t isolationist but unilateralist, giving less importance to “international stability than to the continued predominance of the United States.”

Unsurprisingly, Francis was not a big fan of libertarians, but, for a time, he had a friendly working relationship with the anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard, who wanted to smash the state into privately-owned fragments. Part of this was because of Rothbard’s theory of politics, which also called for a pragmatic adoption of “right-wing populism:”

The reality of the current system is that it constitutes an unholy alliance of "corporate liberal" Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulkof the middle and working classes in America. Therefore, the 'proper strategy of libertarians and paleos is is strategy of "right-wing populism," that is: to expose and denounce this unholy alliance, and to call for getting this preppie-underclass-liberal media alliance off the backs of the rest of us: the middle and working classes.

This required a demagogue to menace the elite, go around the media, and speak directly to the “masses.” But then in power, the program would be a bit different than national populism: slash taxes, abolish the Fed, and begin to destroy the administrative state. Probably the leader in the contemporary world who most purely resembles Rothbard’s populist-libertarianism is Argentina’s Javier Milei, who owns a dog named “Murray.” The tech-libertarian side of Trump’s coalition, including Musk and Ramaswamy’s ‘DOGE’, is obviously more amenable to this pro-business, anti-regulation politics. Many of them have read Rothbard: Thiel’s crony Curtis Yarvin is a big fan.

With the caveat that I have no sociological data to back this up, one might even extend this notion outwards from Trump’s coterie to the electorate at large: the MAGA-populism stuff is for the working class and the libertarian stuff is for the Trumpian middle, and upper bourgeoisie.

Obviously, as with the old fusionism, there is a big, glaring theoretical contradiction between a strong state and bureaucracy required to do the “Caesarist,” national-populist agenda and the aggressive dissolution of state functions that the tech-libertarians call for. And in practice, there will be contradictions between the needs of free trade and those of protectionist industry and anti-trust and pro-monopoly business. But perhaps it’s worth reviewing works that theorize authoritarian regimes as not typified by centralization but by fragmentation and incoherence, for instance, Franz Neumann’s Behemoth, which portrayed the Nazi “state” as made up of arbitrary, competing power centers. The metaphor of his title may be more apt for the contemporary United States: not Hobbes’s Leviathan, representing an overawing sovereign, but Hobbes’s Behemoth, representing a regression to the state of nature. In any case, the proper names Rothbard and Francis may help to make sense of the fractures.