Frank Meyer, the Ex-Communist Who Married Liberty to Virtue

There is a particular kind of authority that belongs to a man who has read the other side's playbook from the inside. Frank Meyer had been a card-carrying Communist, had trained other people to be one, and then walked away and spent the rest of his life explaining, with the zeal of a convert and the precision of a logician, why the state must never be trusted with a human soul.

His answer to the great question of conservative thought, how a free society can also be a good one, is called fusionism, though he disliked the word. It is worth knowing both because the movement still lives inside it and because its weaknesses are as instructive as its strengths. Let me tell his story, state his argument in numbered premises, give his critics the floor, and then say where I think he was right.

From Newark to the Party

Frank Straus Meyer was born in 1909 in Newark, New Jersey, to a prosperous and assimilated family. He was a brilliant student, and he went abroad to study at Balliol College, Oxford, and later at the London School of Economics. It was the Depression, and London in those years was full of young men who believed that capitalism had failed and that History had a direction. Meyer joined them. He became a Communist, and a serious one, rising to organizational work in Britain and then, after he returned home, in the party in the United States, including work in Chicago in the 1930s and early 1940s.

He was not a casual fellow traveler. He taught in the party's schools and understood its machinery from top to bottom: how it recruited, how it shaped a young man's habits of thought, and how it replaced conscience with discipline. He later wrote The Moulding of Communists (1961), a study of exactly that training.

He left in the mid-1940s. The break came during his Army service in the Second World War, and it was slow and intellectual, not sudden. Reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944) mattered, and so did the conclusion he drew from his own experience: that the party's goal was not the improvement of man but the subordination of the individual to the collective, and that this was evil whatever its stated purpose. He did not drift gently to the right. He changed his mind about what a person is.

National Review and the long argument

After the war Meyer wrote for conservative journals and worked in the anti-Communist literature of the early Cold War. When William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review in 1955, Meyer was among the early senior editors, writing a regular column, "Principles and Heresies," which became a weekly seminar in the first principles of the movement. He lived on a farm in Woodstock, New York, a sort of hermit of Ulster County, and he argued by telephone and by letter with nearly everyone who mattered on the right. He died in 1972.

His major work was In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo, published in 1962. It is a short, dense, demanding book. It is also, for anyone who wants to understand the intellectual shape of American conservatism, close to essential.

The argument, in five premises

Meyer began from a premise that his former comrades had denied, and that he considered the central fact of political life.

1. The individual person is the primary unit of moral and political value. Not the class, not the race, not the state, not the tribe. Persons have a transcendent worth, which is why collectives cannot dispose of them.
2. Virtue is a quality of free choice. A man who does good because he is forced is obedient, not virtuous. An act has moral worth only if the actor could have done otherwise and chose the right. Aristotle taught that moral excellence comes from habit and choice; Meyer pressed the point to its political conclusion.
3. Therefore the state cannot produce virtue. Whatever coercion produces is conformity. The state can punish force and fraud. It cannot make men good, and when it tries, it destroys the freedom in which goodness lives.
4. The state's proper job is to protect the conditions of free choice. It secures life, liberty and property against force and fraud, defends the nation, and otherwise leaves persons alone.
5. Society, not the state, cultivates virtue. Families, churches, schools, communities, traditions, voluntary associations: these are the places where character is formed and where the moral inheritance of Jerusalem and Athens is handed down, freely accepted or freely refused.

The conclusion follows: the conservative should defend both the traditionalist's conviction that there are objective moral truths and the libertarian's conviction that the state must be strictly limited. They are not enemies. Properly understood, each depends on the other. Freedom without a moral order decays into license. A moral order enforced by the state decays into tyranny, or into hypocrisy. The only safe arrangement is a free society in which free persons choose the good.

Meyer insisted that this was the position of the American Founding. And the Founders' words bear him out. The Declaration puts rights first: "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men." Washington, in his Farewell Address of 1796, put virtue and religion beside them: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports." Liberty guarded by the government; virtue cultivated by the people. That is fusion before the word existed.

Meyer versus Kirk

The quarrel that clarified all this was with Russell Kirk, the great traditionalist whose book is the subject of The 1953 Book That Told Americans They Already Had a Conservative Tradition.

Kirk's tradition emphasized custom, hierarchy, and what Burke called prescription. Meyer worried that the language of "order" and "tradition," pressed too far, could excuse almost any authority. Which tradition? Whose order? The tradition of an old European monarchy, or of the Soviet bureaucracy, was also a tradition to those who lived under it. Meyer argued that conservatives who exalted order over liberty had misread the American inheritance, whose essential tradition was a tradition of freedom.

Kirk, for his part, thought Meyer's individualism had no moral core and would dissolve the very institutions his own argument needed. A society of autonomous choosers, he said, would soon have nothing worth choosing.

I think the fair reading is that each saw a danger the other minimized, and that the movement benefited from the collision. A traditionalism with no principle of liberty became, in some places, a defense of whatever the powerful called customary. A libertarianism with no moral order became a defense of whatever the market sold. Meyer's genius was to see that they could be held in tension: that a free republic needs both limited government and a people of character, and that you cannot get the second by abusing the first.

Meyer versus Bozell

The sharper argument was with L. Brent Bozell Jr., Buckley's brother-in-law, a National Review editor, a lawyer and a devout Catholic who had co-authored with Buckley McCarthy and His Enemies (1954) and ghostwritten Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative (1960).

After In Defense of Freedom, Bozell answered in National Review in 1962 with an essay titled "Freedom or Virtue?" His charge was that Meyer had made freedom the supreme political value and demoted virtue to a private matter. Bozell argued that a political order has a duty to the common good, which includes encouraging virtue and discouraging vice by law. The state, in his view, could not be neutral about the good life, and a conservative who pretended otherwise had already conceded the argument to liberalism.

Meyer replied, in effect, with the cost of that proposal: who decides what is virtue, and what happens to the dissenter? A government with the authority to promote virtue also has the authority to define it, and the definitions can change with the next election. The Founders, he said, had seen exactly this danger when they refused to establish a national church and added the First Amendment's guarantee that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Bozell, in time, pressed his own argument far enough that he and Buckley parted ways. That is a story for another day, but it shows how seriously these men took the question. This was not a seminar. They believed the future of the movement was at stake.

The weaknesses his critics found

Meyer's synthesis has been attacked from both sides, and some of the attacks land.

From the traditionalists: Is it true that virtue can only be free? Parents coerce children into good habits long before the children can choose them. Laws against cruelty, fraud and public indecency shape character by shaping expectation. Aristotle himself held that law is a teacher of habit. If the law may legitimately forbid theft, does it not already endorse a moral view? Meyer's line between preventing harm and promoting virtue is blurrier than he wanted it to be.

From the libertarians: If the state may not promote virtue, may it support the institutions that do? If it may not establish religion, may it nevertheless acknowledge it, as the Founders did in countless proclamations and chaplaincies? And if virtue is the product of society, what keeps the state from crowding society out? Meyer worried about that, but his critics found his answer thin.

From practical politics: Fusion was a coalition before it was a philosophy. Hayek, in his essay "Why I Am Not a Conservative," had refused the label, and the argument is treated in Hayek Wrote Why I Am Not a Conservative, and He Had a Point Worth Facing. Meyer's reply was to claim the conservative label for the cause of freedom anyway. Some libertarians still find that annexation presumptuous; some traditionalists find it incomplete.

Those objections are serious, and the movement has never fully resolved them. But notice what none of them shows. None shows that Meyer was wrong about the core: that a person's goodness cannot be commanded, and that the state's power to command must therefore be kept narrow.

Why the ex-Communist saw it so clearly

There is an irony worth pausing over. The man who made the most rigorous case for freedom in the early conservative movement had been trained in a system that treated the individual as raw material. Meyer had watched how a movement that claimed to be building the perfect man produced obedient ones. His argument is, in part, a report from the other side.

That experience is also why he distrusted every program that promised virtue by statute. He had seen what happens when the state decides to produce the right kind of person. For him, no goal, however noble, justified turning a citizen into a subject. The same instinct appears in Tocqueville Saw Soft Despotism Coming, a Power That Never Says No, where Tocqueville describes a gentle power that keeps its people in perpetual childhood.

The marriage still holds

Ronald Reagan's coalition of the 1980s, with its tax cutters, its traditional families and its Cold Warriors, was the fusionist argument put into practice, whether or not its members read Meyer. The tensions within it, libertarians against social conservatives, hawks against restrainers, are the old tensions with new faces. When a conservative argues that government should be small because families and churches do the real work of forming people, he is speaking Meyer's language, whether he knows it or not.

Meyer was received into the Catholic Church shortly before his death in 1972, after a life of intellectual struggle. His critics and his friends agreed on one thing: he took ideas seriously enough to change his life for them. That is a standard worth meeting.

The case in brief

1. Frank Meyer, a former Communist who joined National Review in 1955, argued in In Defense of Freedom (1962) that the person is the primary unit of moral value.
2. Virtue is a quality of free choice; coerced goodness is only obedience. Therefore the state should protect the conditions of freedom, and society should cultivate character.
3. His debates with Russell Kirk and L. Brent Bozell sharpened the question of whether conservatism puts order, virtue or liberty first, and his answer was that the Founders put liberty in the government's keeping and virtue in the people's.
4. His critics rightly noted that law shapes habit and that the line between preventing harm and promoting virtue is blurry, but they did not refute his core claim.
5. The conservative coalition still lives inside this arrangement, and it works best when it remembers both halves.

What you can do: read the First Amendment's religion clauses on our Constitution page, then name one family, church or neighborhood institution in your town that forms character, and give it an hour of your time this month.