With mountains of detail, Flynn traces Meyer’s role back stateside in the Communist Party USA. While he had been something of a radical firebrand in Britain, back home, Meyer found himself becoming more American. In the intra-Communist disputes, Meyer aligned with the faction of Earl Browder, chairman of the CPUSA, who sought to Americanize the party. Most intriguingly, Flynn suggests that Meyer, who later equated his vision of conservatism with the American political tradition, first developed this strategy while finding communism deep in American institutions. “‘A people’s America and a socialist America must be presented all the time—not simply as an occasional article or on the 4th of July—as a natural, integral outgrowth of our whole past history, and presented in terms of our tradition,’ he wrote.” Meyer “wanted a fusion between Communism and the American Founding. He attempted to force Marxism upon the American tradition.” But
this fanatic had grown wiser and more prudent since he had written those articles. He was no longer the hyperventilating, Marx-quoting nutter described in Oxford student newspapers. An honest inquiry into whether actual history meshed with this desire could not help but show that the two clashed.
Meyer broke with the Communist Party over the course of the 1940s. He, his beloved Elsie, and their two sons, John and Eugene, lived a life of bohemian intellectuals on family money. Gradually, Meyer began to think of himself as a libertarian and to find work for right-wing magazines. I hadn’t realized the relative paucity of Meyer’s above-ground intellectual record before the 1950s: He had a lifelong tendency to begin but not complete projects.
Eventually Meyer landed at National Review, where he edited the Books, Arts, and Manners section. Really, though, he just commissioned the reviews, Flynn reveals, and Elsie Meyer did the editing. From this perch, Flynn argues, Meyer built a startlingly impressive “back of the book”—an argument made with less insistence and more nuance elsewhere.
More importantly, Flynn posits Meyer as the “man who invented conservatism”—at least as we know it, the Reaganite “fusion” of tradition, liberty, and strident anti-communism. In the 1950s, the nascent conservative movement was made up primarily of anti-modern traditionalists and anti-statist libertarians (and some ultra-hawks who thought liberal anti-communism was a contradiction in terms). Despite the considerable gulfs in their worldviews, libertarians and traditionalists were united by opposition to the New Deal welfare state. “Fusionism”—a term Meyer never really liked—posited that libertarianism and traditionalism were complementary, actually. Meyer argued that the traditionalist branch of conservatism and the libertarian one had once been a unified, Western tradition that had split sometime in the nineteenth century.