The Trickle-Down Morality of a Free-Market Girl: Stephanie Slade on Libertarian Fusionism

“We all kinda secretly at some level wanna use power against our enemies.” — Stephanie Slade

 

Earlier this week, Silicon Valley heretic Paulina Borsook railed against libertarianism. Today, the libertarians get their turn. Stephanie Slade is a senior editor at Reason and the author of Fusionism in which she lays out a contemporary path for American conservatism.

 

For Slade, libertarianism is captured by that New York City intersection where Church Street meets Liberty Street. “Fusionism” = Hayek + Aquinas. It marries the classical liberal defense of individual freedom to the Judeo-Christian tradition of moral virtue. And it’s a polemic against what she calls “will-to-power” conservatism of America-first statists like JD Vance and Tucker Carlson. These are Slade’s enemies. The real threat to the future of American conservatism.

 

Slade might be politically homeless but is hardly a moderate. She is radically committed to limited government, a pro-life Catholic and, in her words, a “free market girl.” Ronald Reagan championed trickle-down economics. Stephanie Slade fuses that with trickle-down morality. Sladeian rather than Borsookian.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Church & Liberty Street. Fusionism, defined: the marriage of the classical liberal political tradition — individual rights, limited government, rule of law — with the Judeo-Christian understanding of virtue as the habits that let human beings flourish within an objective moral order, a lineage running from Aristotle through Aquinas. It is not sectarian: the irreligious Hayek counts as a fusionist for his respect for the tradition’s inherited wisdom, and virtue is not partisan either — Hayek and Keynes became close friends at wartime Cambridge, and “Keynes could be a virtuous person.” Slade herself is a practicing Catholic in a famously secular, even atheistic movement — a minority within a minority, which is where the whole fusionist project began. As for William Buckley: conservatism’s founding father, not libertarianism’s — and, against Andrew’s Vidal-flavored skepticism, she defends him as a man who evolved, renounced his early racial views, and declared in the eighties that “America needs a black president” — “imperfect and flawed the way we all are.”

•       Economic Liberty Is Individual Liberty. Libertarianism spans freedoms coded right (markets, trade) and left (drug legalization, the bedroom) — and Slade’s core claim is that the economic ones are not a separate category: the right to make a living, dispose of your property, and trade across borders is individual freedom, full stop. Crony capitalism — government picking winners — gets no defense. On the culture wars, the fusionist rule is coercion-last: preach from pulpits, persuade, change the culture, and reach for law only when someone’s basic rights are violated — which is why she finds abortion restrictions consistent with a hands-off philosophy (two lives in the equation, on her view) while rejecting laws against how others live. Against Mill, via the scholar Jacob Levy: hers is pluralist rather than rationalist liberalism — defending the right of internally illiberal associations, the Catholic Church included, to exist free of the state. And popes get free speech too: she has disagreed with them in print.

•       Will-to-Power Conservatism. The book’s target, named: a rising creed — especially among the young right — that says “politics is war, and the only question is who’s gonna acquire and wield state power against their enemies.” Trump practices it without theory (“not a philosop