From Stalinism To Reaganism: Daniel Flynn On Frank Meyer And “Fusion” Conservatism

From Stalinism To Reaganism: Daniel Flynn On Frank Meyer And “Fusion” Conservatism

How does one man whose formative years are largely defined by five “s’s” – sex, satanism, suicide, secret agents, and Stalinism – somehow wind up as a defining intellectual behind the rise of America’s conservative movement?

The Ex-Communist Who Invented Modern Conservatism

Daniel Flynn’s recent biography, The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, sheds an interesting light on the origins of American conservatism. It also provides an account of the unlikely life of a communist organizer turned architect of a conservative political movement.  Flynn found boxes of hitherto unknown correspondence and files that highlight particularly colorful and revealing conversations and relationships …