The Heritage Foundation has just released a paper on conservative “fusionism,” presumably at least implicitly meant as a response to the “conservative crack-up” and “liberaltarian” memes recently circulating. It’s interesting enough as history, but gets weirdly muddled and ethereal when it gets to the final section, a call for a “renewed” fusionism

based on limited government, the free market, individual freedom and responsibility, a balance between liberty and law, and a commitment to moral order and to virtue, both private and public.

Well, that’s lovely. And a good parent should be firm yet fair, but that doesn’t really get us terribly far, does it? Insofar as the pitch here is for “using libertarian means for traditionalist ends,” we’ll be on board because the “means” are what libertarians centrally care about, though there’s something suspicious about the locution, since when the means are genuinely libertarian, the “ends” cease to be a political question. At any rate, an exhortation to pursue this kind of “renewal” doesn’t really offer any guidance when it comes to the actual issues that are fracturing the coalition. Weirdly, the paper suggests that fusionism needs a big enemy along the lines of the Soviet Union to function, but then suggests that the failure of radical Islam to play this role can be put down to “partisanship.” Whereas my recollection had been that a fundamental disagreement about the conduct of the War on Terror had been one of the core causes of the breakdown, party politics quite aside. If fusionism can be repaired, I’m happy to look at the plan, but it’s going to take more than an anodyne “Can’t we all just get along?”