This is the Cato 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

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 DC conservative libertarian activist public

intellectual bubble. The story that you often heard 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 you know militantly so and so you had this 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.

But that in, and again, this is the sort of conventional

...