The Communist Who Invented Modern Conservatism

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You may not have ever heard the name of a man who was among the most profound intellectuals of the modern conservative movement in America.

Frank S. Meyer was the man who came up with the idea of fusionism, an alliance between traditionalists and libertarians that underpinned the anti-communist bloc that composed the American Right for the latter half of the 20th century. Ironically enough, Meyer first came up with the idea of fusionism when he was an out-and-proud Communist, though he initially used the term as a unification of the American Founding and communist ideas a la Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” 

Daniel Flynn, a Hoover Institute fellow and senior editor of The American Spectator, has spent the last few years writing a new biography of Meyer called “The Man Who Invented Conservatism.” His book brings to light new documents and information about Meyer’s life previously unknown, and he joined “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss the man-turned-missing link in the conservative movement.

“I think most people may think of Frank Meyer as an ideologue, as not even a person, but a personification of an idea that Frank Meyer was fusionism,” Flynn told The Daily Signal. Flynn himself was not exempt from this misconception, either. “I think prior to this book, I was apprehensive because, well, this guy is just an idea guy and most idea guys that I know, when I look at the conservative movement, there’s a lot of black and white TV people [while] the people that are just grayish to me, they’re not that interesting.”

But over several years of research, including uncovering hundreds of original documents from Meyer’s personal archives not previously known to the public, Flynn came to realize Meyer lived “in technicolor.”

Part of the reason why there were missing chapters in Meyer’s life up until now was because the Communist Party actively wrote Meyer out of its history when Meyer became a conservative. “Frank operated in 3D, and I came to find that through research,” Flynn told The Daily Signal. “Most of the research was hidden… the Communist Party deliberately silenced him. They muted him. They censored him. And we know this because British intelligence were tapping their calls.”

“And when Frank finally broke with the Communists, and he testified against them in America, here they are on tape, the British Communists, saying, ‘Well, what are we gonna do?’ ‘We need to rewrite the history.’ ‘I’m already on it.’ ‘We need to rewrite the history of the student movement,’” Flynn said.

“And the reason they said this is because Frank is really the founder of the Communist student movement in Great Britain,” Flynn explained.

Meyer’s conversion from card-carrying Communist to conservative luminary sounds something out of a Tom Clancy novel. And perhaps that is why few on the American Right remember his name but know his ideas.

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