Finding common ground on the common good continues to be elusive.
Finding common ground on the common good continues to be elusive. Allow me to add a few more words in reply to Michael Brendan Dougherty. If you are late to this debate, which has been roiling the right before we turned to it at National Review, on Friday, I kicked it off here alongside a critique from John Puri, prompting a lengthy and salty response from Michael. The Friday episode of The Editors also featured a vigorous debate on the issue among Michael, Rich Lowry, Andrew Stuttaford, and Noah Rothman. On Saturday, Luther and Charlie weighed in with distinct critiques of Michael’s approach. Monday morning, Michael replied in two parts and David Bahnsen added his own wise and skeptical note.
This is, historically, what National Review exists for. This may have been a little asynchronous; yet, because of the miracle of the internet, you can still read all of this in much shorter order than was possible for fortnightly readers of the magazine back when Frank Meyer was debating Brent Bozell.
Indeed, the modern conservative “fusionism” that came out of those debates and that period of NR history — a fusion that was new in taxonomy but deeply rooted in our American heritage — was all about recognizing that the good society and the good life consist of vital elements that the government doesn’t create, and that are often strangled when the government tries to run them. It is neither incidental nor accidental that the current vogue for the term “common good” emanates mainly from people who criticize that insight, scorn fusionist philosophy, and seek to reject the conservatism whose fruits they inherited. As Erick Erickson put it, “every serious political tradition, the American one included, cares about the good we hold in common. But that is not why it is suddenly everywhere. It is everywhere because the Vice President and the online army that defends him have decided individualism has gone too far and that we all need to dissolve ourselves into the collective, which they have taken to calling the common good.”
One of my premises as a conservative is that those who propose to tear down the long labors of those who came before them — which in the case of critics of the American Founding such as Patrick Deneen means reconsidering the premises of centuries of our national life — bear the burden of stating and supporting what exactly it is that they propose in place of what they wish to destroy. The air of revolution around Michael’s question — “they wonder why some are looking for an American political vocabulary to reverse these trends?” — only makes me more skeptical. So does Michael’s straw-man invocation of Anthony Kennedy, as if an Earl Warren protégé is the dashboard saint of pro-life originalists and of National Review for social experiments that had even John Roberts sounding like Russell Kirk. When I am told in CAPITAL LETTERS that there is no time for the old verities of patriots and constitutionalists, or that we should condone things done for their “vandal effect,” I worry for the future of the republic I love.
As to appeals to the superior wisdom of disaffected youth or the need to bend truth to fashion, I think it preferable to stand for what we already know and instead seek to pass it on. One of the things I find mystifying, in reading the proponents of these ideas, is the alternative history in which the decades between 1913 and 1979 were somehow the Long March of libertarianism and small government through American society, in comparison with the expansive bureaucracy and social welfare states of the 1790s. Another is the idea that, say, the education and homeownership sectors have been tragically bereft of government involvement over the past several decades. That’s not an America I recognize. To Michael’s charge that markets have replaced private civil society, I am inclined to think that in most cases markets have stepped in only to sell things people previously didn’t need to buy. Wet streets do not cause rain.
So yes, when asking what this crowd means when they invoke the “common good” as a slogan for organizing an agenda, it does not do simply to hand-wave in the general direction of various broad philosophical traditions, some of which (Aristotle, the Catholic tradition, the Confucian tradition, etc.) have framed it quite differently from one another.
Michael complains that no words are capable of precise meaning, at least not those contested in politics. What is truth, after all? But those terms that are most useful in political discourse are those that most easily serve the purposes of words: to be the clothes that ideas wear in public. Liberty and democracy, for example, are both directional. You don’t need to have a perfect definition of what either looks like in order to recognize that most public policy choices can fairly easily be classified as taking us toward more or less individual freedom, and more or less popular control of government. Of course, those words are abused (such as when progressives use “Our Democracy” to mean its opposite, a system of unaccountable bureaucracy and elite restraint of what the people may choose). Also, like any good, liberty and democracy sometimes need to give way to others (including each other). There are liberties no democracy may rightly take away. Nor is liberty limitless: the liberty to kill or rape or rob, for example, must give way to the rights of others. But that does not make “liberty” any less clear as a concept.
Indeed, that is even true of a notoriously contested topic such as “due process”: we all understand directionally that more due process means more tools, processes, and mechanisms to allow a person accused of something to present testimony and evidence and challenge the basis of the accusation. Due process is not costless, but once it is invoked, we can decide how much of it should be due. Even conservatism itself, however contested it may be, instantly conjures in the common mind a preference (in Lincoln’s words) for “adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried.”
The common man, presented with these terms in long American usage, can easily discern what their public servants — and potential masters — are talking about when they invoke these values. But the common good? That is more often the conclusory description of the desired end state than a direction, rather like “justice” (the “Justice Democrats” want crimes to go unpunished). The common good can mean more liberty, or less. It can mean more democracy, or less. It can mean more government, or less. It can mean more religion, or less. It can mean more technological advancement, or more individualism, industrialization, urbanization, or material wealth — or less. This has been my long-standing objection to “American national interest” as the first principle of our foreign policy:
Some would say our first principle is the pursuit of the American national interest, which is not a bad answer in the abstract, but it is far too vague to form any kind of organizing principle that helps guide our decisions. Saying that our foreign policy is designed to advance our national interests is sort of like saying a baseball player should try to be good at baseball. . . . American national interest may be our predominant goal, but it’s not really an organizing principle that helps us make choices and select priorities.
Michael thinks it a good thing, because of the philosophical freight it carries, that the “common good” can mean so many different things to different people and in different contexts, to the point where the anti-fusionists can deploy so many different definitions of what it portends. I find it at worst obfuscatory, and at best so diffuse that one can’t even attempt to wrestle it to the ground so that the ordinary citizen might understand what we’re signing on for, or how to know whether or not we’ve got it.
Harriet Beecher Stowe complained after watching Stephen Douglas speak in 1856 that his speeches, “instead of being like an arrow sent at a mark, resemble rather a bomb which hits nothing in particular, but bursts and sends red-hot nails in every direction.” I think I can be excused for feeling the same way.
The lack of directional clarity is precisely why Charlie cuts to the chase of asking what policies these slogans conceal. It is why the vagueness of terms serves well the politicians who recoil at any principle so concrete they can ever be called to the carpet for departing from it. The fog of euphemism is especially useful if, like Adrian Vermeule, you propose to use power mainly through the Deep State of the bureaucracy. If the common good becomes a screen for vaccine mandates and lockdowns, who could say that this is a surprise? Don’t you owe a diminution of your rights to your neighbor, if his good is a common one? Don’t you like things that are good, not bad? Against what standard could a man making such appeals be judged by an ordinary voter to have violated his own principles? I submit that “go read Aristotle” is not an adequate answer to that question.