# Against the Dead Consensus A short manifesto published in [[First Things]] on March 21, 2019, signed by a group of religious and national conservatives — among them [[Sohrab Ahmari]] and editor [[R. R. Reno]] — formally declaring the end of the fusionist conservative settlement. Where the Tier 1–2 documents in this folder are manifestos *of* the historic right, this is a manifesto *against a faction of it*: the post-liberal [[New Right]] firing on the fusionist consensus ([[Fusionism]]) that had governed American conservatism since the 1960s. ## What it argued The "dead consensus" named in the title is fusionism — the Cold War-era fusion of free-market libertarianism, social traditionalism, and hawkish anti-communism associated with [[Frank Meyer]] and *National Review*. The signatories pronounced it exhausted and complicit: - It had subordinated the common good and the family to "individual autonomy, magical marketplace nostrums, and democratic abstractions" - It was too deferential to a [[David French]]-style proceduralism that, in their telling, kept losing the culture war while congratulating itself on its principles - It had no answer to Trump-era realignment, mass immigration, or the dominance of "woke capital" and Big Tech - It defined a positive program around the common good, national solidarity, strong families, and a willingness to *use* state power rather than merely restrain it The manifesto appeared the same season as Ahmari's [[Against David French-ism]], and the two together opened the public "French–Ahmari debate" that became the defining intramural fight of the post-2016 right. ## Lineage and influence The document is a hinge in the vault's map of the contemporary right's intellectual realignment. Backward, it draws on [[Patrick Deneen]]'s *[[Why Liberalism Failed]]* (2018) and the integralist revival around [[Adrian Vermeule]] ([[Catholic Post-Liberalism]], [[Integralism]]). Forward, it feeds directly into [[National Conservatism]] — the NatCon conferences began the same year — and supplies the intellectual permission structure for a politics willing to wield administrative and legislative power against cultural enemies, a posture that runs into the Trump-second-term governing style and the [[Project 2025]] sensibility. It also pairs with [[Against David French-ism]] as the constructive (collective, programmatic) companion to that essay's destructive (polemical, personal) demolition. ## Why it matters for the KB It is the cleanest dated marker for the death of fusionism as the right's governing self-understanding and the birth of the openly post-liberal [[New Right]]. For the manifesto cluster specifically, it shows the genre turned inward — used not to announce a movement against outsiders but to stage a succession fight within a coalition, replacing one orthodoxy with another. The "dead consensus" framing itself became a durable rhetorical weapon, invoked whenever the newer right wants to retire an older conservative commitment. ## Key passage > "We oppose the soulless society of individual affluence... We want a country that works for workers and families, not one that abandons them to the god of the market or the priests of identity politics." [[Manifestos and Founding Documents Hub]]