REFUSIONISM: So at a wedding over the weekend, I ended up in the perennial right-wing debate: Is fusionism a tactic, a political philosophy, or a scam?

What I say in this post is my interpretation of my experience; other people may have had other experiences, or interpreted them differently, and I’d really like to hear about that. But from my perspective, “trads” aka conservatives seem to interact with libertarians and their arguments in a very different way from the way libertarians interact with trads and trad arguments.

From my perspective, I see trads accepting libertarians as allies on criminal-justice/Fourth Amendment/”Leave Us Alone Coalition”/big govt vs. the “little platoons” issues, whereas libertarians tend to view trads as dinosaurs who don’t believe in dinosaurs. (Keep in mind that I’m only talking about people in both camps who think a lot about their positions and have some degree of philosophical depth. Because I persist in my evidence-free belief that these people’s conversations matter.) Trads seem to me more open to libertarian arguments on police power as state expansion than libertarians are to trad arguments on family and charity as the foundations of a free society. Trads seem to me able to grok libertarian arguments which invoke justice much more than libertarians can grok trad arguments which invoke beauty.

From these perhaps-wrong observations I move to a more general observation, behind which I’ll stand all the way: American political and cultural discourse is devastated by our inability to speak politically about beauty. We let anything trump beauty–even choice. Even equality, for pity’s sake! Thus we’re desperately stupid about sex, about urban policy, about technology, about hierarchy and tradition. (Yes, I promise to cash out some of that list soon, but don’t let that stop you from emailing me!)

And now back to a much more tentative question: We hear a lot about psych studies which purport to show that self-identified conservatives have a much stronger sense of “disgust” than soi-disant liberals. I wonder to what extent that is really true (who is more disgusted by images of physical pain, the devastation of war, torture, or–for one example in which I side with the right-wingers–skinning a rabbit?), but certainly a huge amount of liberal rhetoric is directed toward exalting reason at the expense of disgust. I dislike both of these terms! “Reason” too often becomes a nickname for naivete (rational = what my culture and disposition allow me to understand), when it isn’t a nickname for power-worship (let the clever rule the weak). And “disgust” has all the class-based problems of shame, in which we recoil from the weak because of their weakness, as well as all the problems of good-person talk.

But I still wonder… if liberalism diminishes disgust (which I’m not convinced it does–I suspect liberals simply call their disgust another name, like “compassion”), is that why it also diminishes our ability to stand up for beauty? And does that mean we can’t speak politically about beauty without reviving disgust?

I hope not. But beauty has so often been deployed against weakness (see: Paglia, Camille) that people on my side of the argument need to reckon with the moral passions we seek to unleash.