Intellectual history may seem like an unlikely method to make sense of the coming Trump administration. Still, I think there’s value in looking at Samuel T. Francis and Murray Rothbard, whom I consider to be constituent master-thinkers of Trumpism. Keep in mind, that this is necessarily a simplification—perhaps even an oversimplification—a way to reduce to a confusing reality to some manageable set of terms. And it does not consider the role of other parts of the coalition, like pro-Trump neocons and Evangelicals.
“Fusionism” was National Review senior editor Frank Meyer’s term for the philosophical synthesis of the modern Conservative Movement: a combination of libertarian economics and traditionalist social conservatism. Without getting into all the caveats and exceptions, this formed the essential intellectual architecture of American conservatism from the 1950s until Trump’s takeover of the Republican party in 2016. It was not just a theoretical notion but also meant to form the practical basis for a political coalition. There was always an implicit tension between “traditional” morality and unbridled capitalism, as both left and right-wing critics of fusionism often pointed out.
Trump reflects a new fusionism or different set of emphases: between MAGA national populism and “paleolibertarianism.” The MAGA ethos is best summarized through reference to the thought of Sam Francis, in his time a paleoconservative dissident within the conservative movement: a belief in a “Middle American Revolution;” a movement of the “post-bourgeois” lower middle class and working class, championing middle American values and economic interests, against an “alien” cosmopolitan, managerial and globalist liberal élite occupying D.C.. Its nationalist agenda includes restricted immigration, trade protectionism, industrial subsidization, and support, especially for “right-wing” industries like energy, agriculture, and defense, some (limited and theoretical) pro-unionism. It abandons old conservative reliance on "intermediary institutions” like local government, congress, and the courts in favor of an embrace of executive power, a “Caesarist…populist-based presidency able to cut through the present oligarchical establishment.” In foreign policy, it isn’t isolationist but unilateralist, giving less importance to “international stability than to the continued predominance of the United States.”
Unsurprisingly, Francis was not a big fan of libertarians, but, for a time, he had a friendly working relationship with the anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard, who wanted to smash the state into privately-owned fragments. Part of this was because of Rothbard’s theory of politics, which also called for a pragmatic adoption of “right-wing populism:”