This is longtime Cato Daily podcast host, Caleb Brown.

I've moved on to head the Kentucky's Bluegrass Institute,

but I wanted to leave listeners with some favorite episodes over the last nearly 18 years of my hosting tenure.

I tried to pick episodes that are relevant to our current moment.

Thank you for listening.

This is the Cater Daily podcast for Wednesday, February 10th, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown.

Fusionism is in part the notion that libertarian ideas and conservative ideas needn't be at odds,

but getting along might require a clearer understanding of our private and public spheres.

Stephanie Slade at Reason Magazine argues that our understanding of fusionism has changed and, in a sense, degraded over time.

She argues that fusionism, even without the existential threat of communism, has important lessons for us about tolerance and the proper role of government today.

I have to admit that I did not know what fusionism was before about the middle of 2007 when I moved to Washington, D.C.

and learned that there were people who believed in this idea of an alliance, if you will,

between conservatives and libertarians, but before we get too much into the future of fusionism,

let's talk about its past. What was fusionism initially, and how has it come to be misunderstood?

Yeah, I think it's actually pretty widely misunderstood, even among people who are sort of within the D.C., conservative, libertarian, activist, public intellectual bubble.

The story that you often hear here told is one in which fusionism emerged

as an alliance between libertarians and sort of religious traditionalists during the Cold War,

because the Soviet Union was this existential threat, and it was both anti-capitalist and

atheistic and sort of milit you know, militantly so.

And so you had this common foe that brought, again, libertarians and religious traditionalists

together into one tent. And they, you know, they allied with each other and they over the course

of decades, eventually successfully helped to defeat the threat of communism.

...