Our individual liberties thrive precisely when they stand on a rich surfeit of common goods.
I confess I had to read Dan’s post “What Exactly Is ‘the Common Good’?” twice before I could believe he wrote it. Was he really suggesting that the prime criterion through which political discourse has been conducted from Aristotle through the Founding Fathers was either empty pettifoggery or, worse, a ruse? Perhaps Dan suffers very acutely from an undue fear of Adrian Vermeule and JD Vance. How else to explain a conservative (!) in National Review (!) recommending a form of prescribed amnesia that would render the political vocabulary of our Founding Fathers into a foreign language? Along with basically all classical political philosophy.
Dan points out, in several ways, that the meaning of “the common good” is contested, and he tries to demonstrate its uselessness by noting that while the Founders said they wanted to “establish Justice” and promote “the general Welfare” when describing the goals of government, they “avoided these terms when describing the powers of government.”
Uh, so? That isn’t an admission that the common good cannot be defined; it is just political architecture. Dan is reading the enumeration of powers as a repudiation of the preamble rather than its implementation.
The deeper problem is his taxonomy. He takes five modern categories: legal moralism, utilitarianism, moral uplift, economic public goods, and Catholic political reflection, and treats the failure of “the common good” to instantly collapse into any one of them as proof of the term’s “vagueness.” That classical vocabulary feels “lossy” when translated into the file formats of post-1960s political idiom is not proof of meaninglessness. The Aristotelian-Thomistic definition is reasonably precise: The common good is the ensemble of conditions under which persons and communities attain their flourishing. That is definitionally not utilitarianism because a person’s good is constitutive of the common good, not fungible against an aggregate.
The vagueness objection is catastrophically too broad. We use the term “democracy” all the time, even though it means something different in the context of Mao’s “democratic revolution,” or the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The founders also didn’t write the word “democracy” into Article 1. The word “liberty” would satisfy none of Dan’s tests for the common good: Its invokers don’t share one definition, it restates moral judgments, it’s easier to invoke than define. This is true of “equality.” Or, Dan being a lawyer, “due process,” which the Court has spent 150 years defining and reshaping. If contested application disqualifies a concept from political reasons, the entire liberal vocabulary goes down as well. Justice, liberty, democracy, the common good — the argument over their application is political life. Dan’s standard, applied consistently, would leave us able to legislate only about things like speed limits.
What Dan pins as “the common good’s” vagueness is not its emptiness, but its depth. Democracy is just such a word. Does it mean government of, by, or for the people? Or all three? How? Dan and every liberal operate with concepts whose contestability they’ve stopped noticing because their side won the battle to frame it. Classical philosophers think practical reason works this way of necessity, that we only seek as much precision as the subject admits. Ethics and politics deal in things that are true “for the most part” — and prudence is the virtue that bridges general ends to the particular case. It is ideology that demands strict, exhaustive, final adherence. Which is why conservatives from Burke to Kirk to Scruton and Oakeshott tend to define conservatism not as an ideology, but as anti-ideology.
But let’s think about how words work in another way, to help explain both why the phrase “common good” is falling out of favor with some and why it is being asserted vigorously by others.
Confucius held that when words lose their proper meaning, obligations go unmet and disorder flows from language into practice. Orwell tried to demonstrate this with his Newspeak concept in 1984. When a society stops being able to say a word without scare quotes around it, it’s not because philosophers finally exposed the word’s incoherence, it’s because the obligations the word named have become inconvenient. We pretend we’re doing epistemic hygiene, but functionally we’re passing the buck.
Consider. If Marty McFly came back to you from the future and said that in the next 30 years there was a sharp decline in the use of the phrase “due process,” that our future public intellectuals felt it was vague, that they routinely conflated the term that had heretofore referred to a process aimed at justice with the unscrupulous and manipulative practices of certain firms or institutions trying to bury people in paperwork to deny them their due. You would probably surmise that some miscarriage of justice was happening. If “due process” is hopelessly indeterminate, then whatever is denied to people can’t really be a violation of it.
The Founders, in their writing, were dwelling a great deal on what constituted a true republican form of goverment. Madison, who defined our enumerated powers, said they existed for the common good. “The aim of every political constitution is or ought to be first to obtain for rulers, men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society.” Benjamin Rush probably puts it too strongly, but I would still not disclaim him because this was mainstream republican thought: “Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property.”
John Adams worried that Americans may have too much “Venality and Corruption” for republican government. He wrote:
There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty: and this public Passion must be Superiour to all private Passions.
“The common good” became suspect during exactly the decades when the duties it names — the subordination of private advantage to shared flourishing, the idea that markets and rights operate inside a moral ecology rather than constituting one — fell out of elite practice. The vagueness charge arrived after the neglect, as its justification. Nobody audits the coherence of a virtue they are still living out.
If I can make one admission to soften this, I can see why it chafes. Some of the people loudly clamoring for “the common good” to return as our political criterion were partisans of Trump and oversold Trump in those terms. One such friend wrote in 2019:
[Trump’s] instinct has been to shift the cultural and political mix, ever so slightly, away from autonomy-above-all toward order, continuity, and social cohesion. He believes that the political community — and not just the church, family, and individual — has its own legitimate scope for action.
Such projections were always going to come to grief. Among the largest problems of the Trump years is the plunder of the public good for private gain. In response at the time, I wrote, “Trump is a product of the culture’s obsession with personal autonomy that [my friend] decries.” The faction that champions “the common good” today chose Trump for transactional reasons. He promised to appoint judges to overturn Roe, etc. I tried to frame my own 2024 vote for Trump in far more practical, humble, and clear-eyed terms of transactionalism.
A younger faction is asserting itself for a politics of the common good, precisely because they feel that something has been robbed from the commons. They feel that the previous generation was blessed with certain items that were the free, non-exhaustible cream of a functional high-trust civil society, and that generation did not preserve this treasury for us.
Johann Kurtz expressed it well in his essay on X:
I think that Millennials and Zoomers are not doing fine. In fact, I think there have been structural changes to our economy and society which clearly explain why these cohorts are failing to move through the five pillars of a stable middle-class existence: education, stable employment, marriage, homeownership, children. . . .
In short, what has happened is that previous generations were able to take advantage of highly valuable and productive social capital as well as their exploding financial capital to move through each of these life stages in a fiscally efficient manner. (Don’t worry: I will define what I mean by social capital and back my argument with data).
Our current young, lacking access to this social capital, must engage in enormous outlays of purely financial capital in order to achieve the same levels of stability and accomplishment — capital that they do not have.
I might add other items about a public culture that isn’t crude and pornified. I wrote about how I had to pay for expensive dance classes and travel baseball to discover the high-trust community of parents that, in my childhood, was simply produced and that presented itself to me as my neighbors, not a paid-for selected curation of them. Similarly, in my childhood, the Catholic Church’s healthy religious life for women in the mid-20th century produced a Catholic school education that cost $2,300 annually in 2026 dollars, because not every enterprise is profit-maximizing. The equivalent Catholic education in my neighborhood costs $22,000 today. Politicians in tune with this younger resentment, like JD Vance, talk up housing affordability. Since 2017, average earnings are up about 43 percent, while home sale prices are up 81 percent and rents 54 percent. Older politicians linked to the Boomers, like Donald Trump, say they want housing prices to go up — to increase the private paper wealth the Boomers are creating at everyone else’s expense.
That’s a discreet policy difference, but I think JD’s side of it is certainly one more aimed at the public’s happiness (another term the Founders used). Sociologists are detecting a large and general “happiness” crash among young adults.
America is in the midst of a “happiness crash.” Reports of unhappiness have more than *doubled since 2000*. Young adults—ages 18 to 35—have been hit hardest:
✔️11% of young adults reported being “not too happy” in 2000
✔️ It’s 26% todaySource: @FamStudies pic.twitter.com/2k8xE3J4ir
— Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) July 31, 2026
And of course this isn’t just about the private pleasures of the American dream. An older generation is still far more attached to the policy consensus of the 1990s that enriched them, transferred high-end industrial skill, intellectual property, real wealth-making ability, and military production prowess to China, put our workers into “competition” with legal serfs, all while they neglected our military-industrial supply chain, overcommitted our military to the point that they exhausted public trust in our intelligence, and started breaking the culture of military service itself in the American caste most committed to it. Their right to invest and buy from China, their vain attempt to democratize foreign cultures that don’t even have the fundaments of a civil society — a policy that ended in paying child-raping Afghan warlords to call themselves a national government — all of it defended as the priorities of rights and liberalism over and against any claims of a common good for us and our posterity. And they wonder why some are looking for an American political vocabulary to reverse these trends?
Our individual liberties thrive precisely when they stand on a rich surfeit of common goods. As for statism, the corruption of power, and the proper ends of government, the liberal demand to assert, in Anthony Kennedy’s phrase, “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” invites the state to grow and intrude even deeper into our lives. That’s why as soon as men decided to define their own existence as “women,” lawyers got to work making sure the law vindicated their right by recognizing them as women. When individual liberties have degenerated so badly into such costly lunatic license, I’m not surprised that a young generation of conservatives is rising up, like Jack Aubrey in the film Master and Commander, speaking of duties, responding to deflections about who gets to define common goods or the corruption of power, to shout “WE DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR YOUR DAMNED HOBBIES, SIR!”