Paul Gottfried's address at the Miami National Conservatism Conference on September 13, 2022 on The Failure of Fusionism.
It is an interesting speech even if only for the fact that while Gottfried greatly admires Meyers, and says so, he rejects fusionism as a passing moment in conservatism, a moment, or movement, to fight the rise of communism, now a fading ideology, by uniting libertarianism with Russel Kirk's then (1950s) new conservatism.
Or you can read the speech here: Frank Meyer’s Fusionism and the Search for Consensus Among Conservatives. Two paragraphs on the nature of conservatism:
Allow me then to make a further point: Sharing slogans or stating similar views at an annual conference—however exhilarating that experience may be—is not the same as struggling to save an inherited way of life. Hungarian-German sociologist Karl Mannheim defined “conservative thought” as precisely that, the fashioning of a worldview related to an existing social situation. Conservative thinkers, like Burke and his continental counterparts, were neither designing slogans for political campaigns nor drawing up unity statements for their colleagues. They were rallying to a way of life that was under attack, an agrarian hierarchical one they intended to preserve.
This articulation of a worldview which results from a defense of a threatened way of life seems to me an essential aspect of conservatism, historically understood. Meyer’s manifesto was designed to unite his fellow intellectuals in a polemical campaign against the Soviet Union. Whatever its merits, this statement of fusionism does not rise to the historic importance of Burke’s Reflections or Maistre’s Considerations on France. Meyer’s book is a document among other documents telling us about the internal disputes besetting the American conservative movement at a particular time. Thus, I would contextualize Meyer’s endeavor as one trying to find common ground for his fellow conservatives even as their movement was attempting to define itself.