Mother-fusioners and their refuseniks attended the Libertarian Party’s convention where Trump attempted to coopt their nomination.
One of the candidates vying for the Libertarian presidential nomination, Michael Rectenwald, declared from the stage before the former president arrived that “none of us are great fans of Donald Trump.” After his speech, Rectenwald and other Libertarian White House hopefuls took the stage to scoff at Trump and his speech.
Those for and against Trump even clashed over seating arrangements. About two hours before the former president's arrival, Libertarian organizers asked Trump supporters in the crowd to vacate the first four rows. They wanted convention delegates — many of whom said they’d traveled from around the country and bought expensive tickets to the proceedings — could sit close enough to hear the speech.
Many of the original seat occupants moved, but organizers eventually brought in more seats to calm things down.
The Libertarian split over Trump was reflected by Peter Goettler, president and chief executive of the libertarian Cato Institute, who suggested in a Washington Post column that the former president’s appearance violated the gathering’s core values and that “the political party pretending to be libertarian has transitioned to a different identity.”
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There is a lot of talk lately about fusionism, the term coined by National Review writer Frank Meyer in the Cold War to describe the alliance between conservatives and libertarians against communists that aligned them with the Republican Party. Some wonder if fusionism is truly dead; I wonder why it lived so long.
The alliance between social conservatives and libertarians didn’t make much sense to begin with, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t have a significant effect on history. The main conservative think-tanks, like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, are known for openly promoting the fusionist mantra — like most of the other leading organizations in the American Right.
The combination of lower taxes, social conservatism, and hawkish foreign policy didn’t make a coherent ideology, but it was effective at winning elections. Reagan was a good example of that. After Reagan, everyone running for president for the Republican nomination wanted to be a clone of him. There were challenges to the consensus like Pat Buchanan in the 1990s, and Ron Paul in the 2000s, but it wasn’t until Trump that the cracks in their coalition were fully opened.
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