The classical liberal tradition's procedures are concrete expressions of profound moral commitments.
One of the distinguishing features of the New Right in its early twenty first century iteration has been leveling a certain charge against the conservative establishment. Classical-liberalism-inflected conservatism, argued traditionalists, common-good constitutionalists, and others, had become too fixated on neutrality and proceduralism.
The right-liberals were too satisfied with constitutional mechanics and insufficiently concerned with substantive moral goods. The Zombie Reaganites had allegedly stripped conservatism of its capacity to make moral judgments, becoming too libertarian in economics and eventually too insistent on freedom as the essential political principle – freedom, equally and neutrally afforded to conservative Christians and progressive libertines. If speech were free and procedures were followed, everything would be permissible. For that reason, fusionism – the idea that liberty and order are in enduring tension in a properly functioning free republic – was derided by Gladden Pappin as “rote cultural conservatism overridden by libertarian economics.”
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Tal Fortgang is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He was a 2023 Sapir Fellow
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