It’s a Key Part of the American Political Tradition
The common good is back in public discourse—and the back and forth is predictably causing more heat than light.
Kicked off by Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, the latest spat over the common good is part of a larger debate over the future of the Republican Party after Trump leaves office. Will it return to the pre-Trump status quo? Or will it keep reforming under Trump’s heir apparent, Vice President JD Vance?
Thiessen represents the former wing, as he supports a muscular, hawkish foreign policy and spouts Cold War-era political rhetoric and framing. As part of his campaign against the ascendent Vance wing of the GOP, he retweeted a video in which Vance gives his thoughts on the thesis of Regime Change, a book written by his friend, Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen.
Thiessen then commented,
The “post liberal right” believes that the classical liberal principles of our founders and the Declaration have failed and need to be replaced with a new order that elevates the “common good” above individual liberty. That should be disqualifying for anyone hoping to lead this country.
In the clip, Vance clearly uses the “post-liberal” term interchangeably with the “New Right,” a far broader term that encompasses a large portion of the coalition that voted for Trump beginning in 2016. The post-liberals are a far smaller subset of academics and writers who are mostly recent converts to the Roman Catholic Church. Many in this group are personal friends with the current vice president.
They are critical of liberalism, which they see as a comprehensive philosophical system created hundreds of years ago that promotes autonomy, individual liberty, rights, neutrality, and procedure. Liberalism is in crisis in their view because it has eaten away at the pre-liberal social capital—the family, local communities, the church—on which liberalism depends but cannot itself sustain. As Deneen wrote in a pithy statement in his bestselling book Why Liberalism Failed, “Liberalism has failed, not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded.”
The answer to this problem is necessarily vague, because it is difficult: reorienting our current failing order toward the permanent goods of nature.
Beyond ignoring the vice president’s own expansive use of the term, Thiessen provides no evidence that he believes every argument each post-liberal has made. This does include some controversial views, such as the civil authority recognizing the Catholic Church as the one true church and using the administrative state for conservative ends. But the burden of proof rests on Thiessen to draw out these connections, not on Vance or his supporters to prove a negative.
The message of the post-liberals—and the New Right as a whole—is popular because it clearly has purchase with younger generations on the Right, especially among those who see the intellectual poverty of old-guard conservatives like Thiessen.
Let’s turn to Thiessen’s invocation of classical liberalism. While that wasn’t a term that passed the founders’ lips—its first documented use came in an 1856 issue of the Illustrated Times—it has been used to describe the political thought of the Declaration of Independence and the founders’ philosophical milieu more broadly.
The problem is that most free-market economists and libertarians who use that term today typically reject a good portion of the founding generation’s way of life, seeing it as “illiberal.” This includes the founders’ use of tariffs, the bright-line distinction they drew between liberty and license, their general support for a thick public Christianity in the states, and their overwhelming rejection of free speech absolutism.
And in a decisive blow against Thiessen’s claim, the founders and their heirs liberally used the dreaded term “common good” in describing the core of American political life.
In the opening Federalist paper, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good.” Though the “public good” is a bit more circumscribed than “common good,” it still falls within the same genus.
Hamilton’s co-author, James Madison, agreed that the public, or common, good is the final cause of political life. “The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be,” he wrote in Federalist 57, “that first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society.”
Were the founders post-liberals or New Rightists because they saw promoting the common good as the end of politics? If yes, that’s bad news for Thiessen, as it shows how far outside of the millennia-old political and philosophical traditions he and his coalition are.
Talk of the common good harkens back to the broad themes of classical political philosophy. “The goal of the general is victory,” Leo Strauss wrote, “whereas the goal of the statesman is the common good.” It is not simply the aggregate goods of individuals but an overarching good that can be secured only by the political community as a whole. As the Claremont Institute’s Matthew Peterson defines it, the common good “refers to a good that is shared, participated in, or possessed by many as opposed to a good that is proper only to an individual or a specific part.”
Understood in this way, the Preamble to the Constitution roots its argument in securing goods that are held in common: establishing justice, ensuring “domestic Tranquility,” providing “for the common defence,” and promoting “the general Welfare.” According to the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, lawmakers must use prudence to secure the “protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people”—things which it categorizes as falling under the “common good.” The document then contrasts the common good with seeking “the profit, honor, or private interests of any one man, family, or class of men.”
Disputes over the common good exist, Strauss argues, because of its “comprehensive character.” Yet he cautioned against yielding to “the temptation…to evade” that problem. We are “human beings,” endowed with reason, and therefore politics is, in Aristotle’s language, the architectonic science. Its comprehensiveness is not totalitarian. Rather, it recognizes the full scope of the human condition and what a life ordered to happiness requires—pointing ultimately to life in eternity.
In a break with more libertarian-tinged rhetoric still found in some corners of the Right, the founders saw government not as an enemy to be defeated but as a necessary means to secure the blessings of liberty. Men cannot be trusted to govern themselves in peace and concord without a common authority over them. They cannot reach the summit of civil life that God ordained without a concept of the common good.
Fortunately, the Right has moved far beyond the stale consensus of the late 20th century, in which politics was reduced to an endless contest about who adhered more closely to a caricatured version of Ronald Reagan. The Right has grown in immeasurable ways over the past 10 years, and the group that’s doing its best to hold on to the old orthodoxies is dwindling. Mike Pence’s vision of America is on the losing side of the ledger. To speak about the common good is not falling for the siren song of socialism or Marxism, as the old-guard conservatives would have it.
Instead, a politics that seeks to preserve the most essential elements of public life—borders, sovereignty, citizenship, and the common good—has become the new center of gravity on the Right.
No longer will the Left get to appeal to justice without pushback. The Right has rediscovered deep truths that had been encased in concrete—but it is getting the chisel out and doing the necessary work to restore politics to its rightful place in American life.
