The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future.

• Author: Shapiro, Ilya
• Position: Book review

The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

Charles C.W. Cooke

New York: Crown Forum, 2015, 231 pp.

It's altogether fitting that a book throwing down the gauntlet for a libertarian-conservative fusion in the 2010s has emerged from an author linked to the same magazine as the progenitor of the original fusionism of a half-century earlier. I only recently met Charlie Cooke--though we've exchanged many tweets--and never had the chance to meet Frank Meyer--though I'm heavily involved with the Federalist Society, which his son Eugene has long led--but I have no doubt that the two would get on swimmingly.

And it comes as no surprise that both cut their writing chops at National Review, which many assume is a stodgy journal of urtraditionalist redoubt when in fact it has produced some of the most innovative reformist ideas in the conservative movement. Or, should I say, that it has featured ideas from the full range of center-right thought, along with various manifestations of entertainingly untraditional personal style.

But enough about NR, which is only relevant for having the good sense to employ someone keen on relaunching the noble quest for that elusive synthesis of conservatives and libertarians--the chimera best equipped to do battle with the New New Left.

Although the term Cooke settled on to describe this mythical beast's resurrection is ungainly, it does have the virtue of quite literally putting into one word a concept that otherwise needs explanation to too many ("classical liberal") or is exactly the same tiling but two words ("libertarian conservative"). So fine, "conservatarian"--but why?

Well, as Cooke puts it, "both libertarianism and conservatism are seductive to the man who is motivated by a desire for ordered liberty." Of course, these ideologies aren't the same--and are often bitterly opposed--or else we wouldn't need to "fuse" them. But they do both have weaknesses, especially in practice, and Cooke's description of them is perhaps my favorite part of his whole project.

Libertarians' blind spot is that they can become "unmoored from reality" and "behave like Jacobins,"

disrespectful of tradition, convinced that logic-on-paper can answer all the important questions about the human experience, dismissive of history and cultural norms, possessed of a purifying instinct, and all too ready to pull down institutions that they fail to recognize are vital to the integrity of the...