The New Fusionism

Very brief reflections from Washington, DC

I promised you all a new post last week, then was very ill and just couldn’t. But my oh my, how much has happened in between! I write to you from Dulles airport after a couple of days on Capitol Hill and…well, what a week to be in DC.

Not my usual morning run

I’m not here for election-related reasons but I’m around Hill people who were intimately concerned with it. No one here seems quite sure yet what this comprehensive Trump victory means. There’s a kind of stunned hush.

There are crash barriers and extra prevalent Capitol police personnel everywhere, speaking to ambient anxieties about unrest. But no such chaos has been forthcoming. Contra all the noise about democracy being on the ballot, it feels very much business as usual, for those whose business is politics. Far from being on its last legs, America’s particular version of democracy seems, in fact, to be working exactly as it’s supposed to. And here, in what Steve Bannon called “the swamp”, that means a hum of frenzied manoeuvring, as the machine shifts into a different gear and the battles begin over who takes which spot in the administration.

The upshot of all that manoeuvring will decide a great deal, for a great many people, most of which is illegible to anyone except insiders at the moment. But the greatest uncertainty, over those I’ve spoken to since I arrived, is what this campaign’s influx of Big Tech money will mean, in terms of how the administration shifts. Everyone can see that this is Elon Musk’s win as much as Trump’s: what does that mean for the conservative establishment?

Elon is, after all, not your regular social conservative. He wants to colonise Mars. He has something like 12 children, with multiple women, via a mix of surrogacy, IVF and the old-fashioned method. He wants to implant chips in people’s brains. He envisions using technology to become something more than human. And he now owns the world’s town square, and the incoming President of the United States owes him a favour.

At least some of these things will (to put it mildly) place a strain on fundamental social conservative precepts about the family and the human person. But people are going to have to work together. That’s what politics is. I’m the very last person to ask for an insider perspective on what the result will be, but my very early hunch as a reader of tea-leaves is that we’re about to see the real new “fusionism” take concrete form.

The last such “fusionist” settlement, for the American Right, coalesced in the latter half of the twentieth century. It managed to square the circle (after a fashion) between largely-Protestant American conservative Christians, and big finance. There are plenty of extant New Right criticisms of that settlement, now, but it held for some considerable time.

By contrast, the new settlement will, in sensibility at least, need to square the circle between a strongly Catholic-inflected social conservatism on the one hand, and Big Tech on the other: in particular the AI and biotech vanguard. If you think this an unlikely place to look for common ground, well: you’re not alone. And yet here we are. What the result will look like, in concrete policy terms is now in the hands of all those busy backstage operators; but the fact that Catholic convert, former finance guy and noted poaster JD Vance is now the incoming Vice-President may give a flavour of its overall sensibility.

Among those (such as I) who feel strongly that waging war on human nature is a bad idea, there’s plenty in the new political landscape to worry about. But I see cause for optimism, in early indicators that full-bore bio-libertarianism is no longer inevitability, at least not across the board. Trump’s pledge to ban pediatric gender transition across the board speaks to this.

I’ll save the rest of my reflections until I have a bit more distance, but for now that’s my sense of things in the imperial capital. The new fusionism is here. Let’s see how it plays out.