I often think the divide about common good conservatism is mostly about families.
I’m heading for some time off. But I think I have a little more to contribute before I fall silent.
To recap: Dan expressed his doubt that “the common good” is a useful political criterion because people disagree about its meaning.
I responded that people disagree about the content of most of our political vocabulary: what constitutes ordered liberty or democracy or due process. These criteria aren’t rejected because people dispute their content.
Luther and Charlie responded both by repeating the objection that people disagree about what the common good is. I won’t laboriously restate the rebuttal to that as it still stands. Maybe I will suggest Dan, Luther, and Charlie read a book edited by our colleague Yuval Levin, Natural Rights, the Common Good, and the American Revolution.
You don’t like what a given figure proposes as conducing to the common good? Okay, I don’t like Anthony Kennedy or Mark Carney’s definition of freedom. I’m not ready to surrender that word to them. I still can’t comprehend why conservatives would surrender a concept so deeply embedded in classical, medieval, and the Founders’ vocabulary.
Luther bolsters his case by accusing me of promoting some top-down imposition. Where? What? And by characterizing common good conservatives as a group of individuals. As he isn’t terribly specific, I can’t defend them or join him in objecting. Again, I don’t demand he prove the value of democracy by accounting for the Democratic People’s Republics. I’ve met attractive libertarians and others giving off an odor. Maybe interesting as anecdote, but not conclusive on matters of philosophy.
Charlie moves on from theory to practice. What do you want to do? he asks. Again, as I wrote: contesting the meaning of the liberal vocabulary — freedom, rights, ordered liberty, due process — is political life. I was defending the common good as a knowable criterion and object of our aims even if we disagree on the means, at the theoretical level.
But I don’t find his question bothersome. He’s probably right to suspect some people are hiding the ball. I’ve seen other common good advocates start for a return of Sabbatarian laws. I’m fine with those but not particularly attached. The Catholic calendar of important feasts ranges far beyond one day a week. Clearly these laws are constitutional. But I think they’ve been chosen because their advocates particularly like their vandal effect. They believe our movement and country suffers from market fundamentalism and want to degrade what they see as a false cult. Sabbatarian laws are a way of demonstrating that family and religion take priority over commerce.
As for me, I’ve been sharing my political views for years here. I’m not sure they are surprising, but certainly my aim is the common good. Many of them Charlie and I agree on. We supported the overthrow of Roe. We support the vigorous enforcement of our borders and immigration laws. We oppose the growth of the federal apparatus when it usurps the authority of communities and states, particularly resenting the federal government’s growing tendency to insert itself in policing matters. We hate the FBI. We want to reduce rule by experts. I suspect we would both radically abolish or severely cut federal subsidies to major sectors of American life that tend to produce busybodies or institutions that render people noxious.
I’ll name a few where I might disagree with Charlie and maybe others.
(1) I would like to see strategic “rollback” in the culture wars rather than simple containment. I think these legal revisions to the family have mostly undermined the institution and civil society. I’m particularly worried about the general effect caused by the growing intrusion of the market into human conception and legal parentage itself. We are starting to see things like a married couple suing to force a surrogate to abort a child after an adverse prenatal test. Or suing to prevent a surrogate from aborting one half of a set of twins because contracts specified only one child. I don’t believe these arrangements can properly fit under the definitions of “freedom” and “free markets” that are proper to human anthropology and flourishing.
I often think the divide about common good conservatism is mostly about families and can be discovered in one sentence. The sentence is:
“Under communism, women were forced into full-time labor and young children into full-time day care, but under liberal capitalism, we do the same freely.”
If your first read is that is a compliment to liberal capitalism, you’re on one side. If you instantly sense it as a scabrous parody, you’re with me.
(2) I would like conservatives to reject the liberal ideology of free trade, for reasons I went on at length about last summer. But I’ll name two common goods to be achieved: the fairness and integrity of our markets and national independence. (a) In cases where our trading partners are radically unfree or hostilely mercantile, I believe that joining our markets undermines the very virtues Adam Smith identified in free markets, namely that fair competition forces capital to find its most productive use. Instead, as in our trading relations with China, capital can find great returns through simple policy arbitrage — much easier for them, bad for everyone else. (b) Freedom often has two dimensions, the agency to choose among available options, but also the independence to choose without dependency. In Hamilton’s words, to render our country “less dependent on the combinations of foreign policy” for certain goods and skills essential to our superior geopolitical place and ambition to stay in it. Dominic Pino defended free trade by saying it is how we live; I think we all live more like protectionists. I’m a journalist, not a handyman, and yet, for reasons of self-sufficiency, I keep tools on hand to do jobs that might otherwise present a crisis if I depended on specialists who are “foreign” to my house. That “independence” is the common good enjoyed by all, even if the policy also has, as another by-product, winners and losers.
(3) In general, I oppose adding more dependents into a grand security and economic architecture called the American-led world order, or moral crusades to spread democracy and freedom. I agree with James Madison that war is “of all the enemies to public liberty, the most to be dreaded” and that no nation can “preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” War aggrandizes the executive, fills our airwaves with noxious propaganda, and encourages un-republican sentimentalism and passion for foreign causes that turn average citizens into voluntary Creel Committee members. We used to get mad that George W. Bush’s government might look at our library cards. Now we seem to accept that our spy agencies (and many corporations) can learn anything and everything about us through their access to our digital papers.