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Fusion or Fissure? Conservatism’s Identity Crisis in 1960

By Walter Donway

January 8, 2026

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This is Part II of a three-part article on traditionalism, ideology, and political reaction.

 

Rand pronounced it [conservatism] dead [in 1960].

But first, a closer look at the conservatism of the 1960s. Rand pronounced it dead at a pivotal moment because 1960 saw a new birth on the American conservative right. Even as Rand was delivering her jeremiad, young conservatives had gathered at Buckley’s home in Sharon, Connecticut, to draft what became known as the Sharon Statement—a manifesto of principles for the new Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). Released in September of that year, the Statement would become a cornerstone of modern American conservatism. Notably, its contents suggest a movement trying to define itself in positive terms, addressing the very ideological void that Rand decried. The Statement defined the doctrinal superstructure of contemporary conservatism: the sanctity of the individual’s God-given free will, the indivisibility of political and economic freedom, the necessity of limiting government to its proper constitutional role, the superiority of the free-market system for meeting human needs, and the need to defeat—not merely “contain”—communism. The young conservatives declared, in essence, that individual liberty was their paramount value, grounded in divine endowment, sustained by faith, and that free enterprise, protected by a constitutionally restrained state, was the only economic system compatible with liberty. They asserted an uncompromising anti-communism at the height of the Cold War.

The Sharon Statement seems to mirror Rand’s ideology, but with two notable differences, one fundamental, one symbolic.

On first reading, the Sharon Statement seems to mirror Rand’s ideology, but with two notable differences, one fundamental, one symbolic: the invocation of God and a preference for the term “free market.” The apparent convergence was not accidental. The Statement reflected an effort led by National Review thinkers like Frank Meyer to fuse the traditionalist and libertarian strains within conservatism. He and his colleagues believed that American values could unite religious traditionalists and free-market individualists against their common foes (communism and liberal big government). In practice, fusionism meant asserting that faith, personal morality, and social order (cherished by traditionalists) were not at odds with economic and political freedom under limited government (cherished by classical liberals) but complementary.

The contrast with Rand was stark. She categorically rejected fusion of faith and political liberty as a fatal compromise. She rejected faith as a valid epistemology, rejected the Christian ideal of sacrifice, and damned as obscene the implication that capitalism must be defended on faith—implying that reason was on the side of collectivism and statism (as routinely claimed by Marxist advocates of “scientific socialism” and a “planned economy”). A capitalist society must be defended by reason, not appeals to God or tradition. In 1960, then, American conservatism stood at a crossroads: Would it evolve into a more philosophically principled “pro-capitalist” movement (as Rand urged), or maintain its alliance with religion and cautious pragmatism (as Buckley’s and Meyer’s fusionism attempted)?

Rand’s response to the Statement was (as always) to double-down. For all Sharon’s endorsement of free markets, it still flinched from embracing the reasoned, secular defense of capitalism as a moral imperative. “Free markets” and anti-communism were fine as far as they went, but unless conservatives renounced altruism, they would inevitably sabotage their cause. History, she believed, favored the causes with consistent ideas. (In her essay “The Anatomy of Compromise,” she observed that in any conflict between two sides sharing mixed premises, the more consistent side wins—a warning to conservatives.) In “The Pillars of Modern American Conservatism,” an article in the 2012 Intercollegiate Review, ISI board member Henry Regnery prioritized the religious element of the Sharon Statement: “Belief in God means adherence to the broad concepts of religious faith—such things as justice, virtue, fairness, charity, community, and duty. These are the concepts on which conservatives base their philosophy…. Conservative belief is tethered to…an allegiance to God that transcends politics and that sets a standard for politics. For conservatives, there must be an authority greater than man, greater than any ruler, king, or government….” Turning to origins of conservatism, he wrote that “the Old Testament taught that God made a covenant or compact with His people; He decreed laws by which they should live…. The idea of a compact forms the very basis of our modern political order.” The Greeks? “The Greek philosophers…added nothing to the argument for liberty….” So much for secularism.

Rand soon turned on another rising faction on the right: the libertarian movement.

Rand soon turned on another rising faction on the right: the libertarian movement. By the 1970s, libertarian think tanks and a political party were carrying the banner of free markets with less emphasis on social conservatism. The naive might have expected Rand to welcome libertarians as belated converts to her cause (many Objectivists initially did); instead, she famously denounced the libertarian movement as harshly as she had conservatism. Libertarians advocated freedom as a self-evident good appealing regardless of one’s philosophical foundations. They championed capitalism as efficient or pragmatic but felt no necessity to ground it in a morality of rational egoism—or any morality. Their “floating” defense of freedom, divorced from deeper principles, was anathema to Rand. Consequently, she declared them “hippies of the right” and forbade Objectivists to ally with them. Anything short of a full philosophical commitment to reason, egoism, and individual rights betrayed the ideal of liberty. (The breakaway Institute of Objectivist Studies, now The Atlas Society, founded by David Kelley, reached out to the libertarian Cato Institute and its founder, Ed Crane, who in time declared that Objectivism was the “philosophical foundation” of Cato’s libertarianism.)

The conservative coalition obviously survived and adapted. Far from dying in 1960, it grew in political influence over ensuing decades—albeit in ways that Rand often deplored. By 1980, Ronald Reagan (an avid reader of Atlas Shrugged, but also an open admirer of God-and-country conservatism) won the presidency on a sort of fusionist platform: free-market economics, aggressive anti-communism, and appeals to traditional values. The libertarian strain contributed vital ideas about deregulation and shrinking the state, while the traditionalist strain contributed the moral fervor and popular appeal of Christian evangelicals. Rand’s Objectivism, meanwhile, remained a smaller philosophical school, though not without impact. It inspired dedicated followers and influenced figures in economics, academia, and even the judiciary—Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, for instance, was an early Rand associate, but scarcely became a political force. Among others today are Ron Johnson, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Clarence Thomas, and Ted Cruz.

A wave of reactionary, populist, anti-establishment conservatism propelled Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016.

By the 2010s, a new phenomenon emerged: a wave of reactionary, populist, anti-establishment conservatism that propelled Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016. This “right” was distinctly not ideological; it was (and is) driven by reaction, above all, by resentment of “cultural elites,” the media, and “anti-PC, anti-woke” rage. The “progressives” in the 1960s had demanded color-blindless in race, balancing economic prosperity with cleaning up our air and water, and tolerating the lifestyle of homosexuals. By the 2010s, these had mutated into widespread racial admissions and hiring quotas, opposition to economic growth in the name of “climate change,” and same-sex marriage and righteous insistence that biology had nothing to do with “gender” and to resolve conflicts required “transgender surgery.” The movement that twice bore Trump into the White House against the fierce, united opposition of academia, public intellectuals, and the media was pure reaction: visceral reactionary politics not only in the U.S. but in parts of Europe and elsewhere that suggests that a substantial portion of “conservative” energy today is untethered from philosophy, whether traditionalist or ideological. This fulfills neither Rand’s hopes nor fusionism’s. It hearkens back to an older pattern: the politics that swept away the French Revolution, ushered in Napoleon, restored the monarchy, and incidentally provoked the conservatism of Edmund Burke. And gave birth to the political denotation of the word “reaction.”

Surveying the scene in 2023, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts reported that in conservatism today “veritable chasms have emerged, ever widening as political currents erode the bedrock on which generations of agreement, or at least detente, have rested…. It’s now fashionable to carve out one’s ideological niche and verbally assail other conservatives, as some sort of dystopian competition on the American Right…. Many of its leading contemporary thinkers explicitly reject much of its intellectual foundation….”

 

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