How Frank Meyer, a campus Communist turned conservative kingmaker, put the ‘social’ in ‘social movement’

Gen Z calls it “rizz.”

Conservative theorist Frank Meyer radiated it.

Rizz is what Donald Trump exudes and Kamala Harris lacks, and this je ne sais quoi quality, at least to all who came before Gen Z brilliantly put a name on it, explains not just one’s success on Hinge but whether a political figure can pull a crowd.

Marble-mouthed mumblers and shoegazers take note: It turns out people follow the very individuals in mass movements they follow around in social situations.

Frank Meyer’s 3D, pops-off-the-page life illustrates this truth.

After the Newark-born Meyer acted as the pied piper of campus Communism in 1930s England, he remarkably became in America during the 1960s, as the title of my new biography puts it, the man who invented conservatism.

British intelligence conducted a black-bag job on his apartment, placed a mail cover on his correspondence and noted the bars he frequented, the tweed he wore and the frequent female company he kept as they tailed him. Nowhere in the 161 pages of the declassified Meyer files do agents memorialize on paper that the revolutionary they followed — described therein as “the founder” of the student Communist movement — dated the big boss’ daughter.

The most Frank Meyer thing Frank Meyer ever did was enter into a relationship with Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s youngest child as he conspicuously called for the violent overthrow of the British government the man led. Che, Lenin and Mao never pulled off such a brash caper.  

“Come here at 7.0 — or if you don’t like the idea of Downing Street — even though I am the sole occupant at the moment — fix any other place you like,” Sheila MacDonald wrote Meyer in one of their letters I discovered in an Altoona, Penn., warehouse during research for “The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer,” out Aug. 19.

Predictably, the British government sought to deport Meyer (and, predictably, Miss MacDonald volunteered to intervene). The same rizz that placed the prime minister’s daughter in his arms brought a phalanx of famous Brits to his defense.

Clement Attlee, future prime minister, pleaded his case in Parliament. A petition signed by philosopher Bertrand Russell, “Howards End” and “A Passage to India” author E.M. Forster and Labour Party leader (and Angela Lansbury’s grandfather) George Lansbury called the deportation “discrimination” prompted by the cause célèbre’s “left-wing politics.” Students marched about London chanting, “Free Frank Meyer!”

Women desired his romantic attention. Rizz meant men wanted his company, too.

In 1930, an unknown Pottstown, Penn., prep-school teacher plaintively petitioned Meyer for more “scintillating conversations” and “provocative” letters. He wished to again drink with Meyer and “to take a Cook’s Tour of this particular part of the world with you.” Without Meyer’s company, he confessed, he inhabited an “intellectual desert.”

The sycophantic missive came from the typewriter of James A. Michener long before he won a Pulitzer Prize for “Tales of the South Pacific.”

By 1949, when Meyer testified against former comrades in the Foley Square trial — the longest, most expensive court case in US history to that point — he had witnessed much evil.

He knew that Prince Mirsky, the force who pushed him to join the Communist Party, had disappeared in a Soviet gulag; his protégé, Charles Darwin’s great-grandson John Cornford, had died fighting in the Spanish Civil War; his boss on “peace” activism, Walter Ulbricht (who later built the Berlin Wall), went about making the lives of East Germans hell; and his American idol, longtime party chief Earl Browder, had transformed overnight in Communist rhetoric from a brilliant, courageous leader into a perfidious enemy of the people.

Slowly, he embraced a very different outlook. Quickly, and characteristically, the conservative convert became conservative pope.

Present at the creation of National Review, the Conservative Party of New York, the Philadelphia Society, the American Conservative Union and Young Americans for Freedom, Meyer helped erect the skeletal structure of the conservative movement.

Going to Woodstock meant something very different for 1960s young conservatives. Those making the obligatory pilgrimage to his farmhouse there included Joan Didion, who credited him as the editor who first published her freelance work, Garry Wills, who said he spent more time with this mentor in the late 1950s and early 1960s than anyone outside his family, and Heritage Foundation founder Ed Feulner.

His philosophy, fusionism, became the default outlook of the American right from Barry Goldwater well through Ronald Reagan, who cheered that Meyer had “fashioned a vigorous new synthesis of traditional and libertarian thought — a synthesis that is today recognized by many as modern conservatism.”

What made conservatives so easily follow a former Communist? Rizz.

Those doubting the power of rizz may wish to apply this test to every presidential election in their lifetimes: Did the winning candidate also win the rizz contest?

Undertaker-face John Kerry lost to George W. Bush in 2004. John McCain, who looked like he walked off the set of a black-and-white television show, lost to Technicolor Barack Obama in 2008. Monotone Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter with his ear-to-ear grin and mellifluous diction in 1976. And a fist-in-the-air, “Fight”-shouting Donald Trump — far from the cranky, complaining COVID case of 2020 — triumphed over word-salad chef Kamala Harris in 2024.

Frank Meyer understood the power of rizz long before Twitch streamer Kai Cenat popularized the term.

They don’t call them social movements for nothing.

Daniel J. Flynn is the author of “The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer” (Encounter/ISI Books), an American Spectator senior editor and Hoover Institution visiting fellow.