This the third and final essay in a symposium on the common good. You can read the first essay by John G. Grove here and the second essay by Rachel Lus essay here.

　　It is curious how “the common good,” when it bubbles into public discourse, always seems to be at the center of bitter controversy. One would expect that everyone would be in favor of “the common good,” or at worst that it would represent the kind of vaguely uplifting language that few find objectionable. Instead, it leads to rancor. That was certainly the case with the recent controversy involving public personalities at theDaily Wire,National Review, and other right-wing outlets.

　　Critics of the New Right suspect that its members are using the phrase “common good” as a sanctimonious smokescreen to avoid serious discussion of their real priorities and purpose. That suspicion, it seems to me, is largely correct. Though the New Right claims the mantle of Aristotle, its adherents rarely trouble to delve with any seriousness into the relevant texts, or to explain the key concepts with clarity.

　　The New Right would like to use state power to achieve certain limited goals to which it is inordinately attached; an ordinary cost-benefit analysis would likely not favor those goals; so it reaches for Aristotelian language to lend them the appearance of a transcendent purpose, one that moves beyond garden-variety policy analysis. It helps that most Americans have limited familiarity with the Aristotelian-Thomist philosophical tradition, and are in no position to argue back. Oddly, though, the New Right’s own arguments draw at the same time on concepts from classical liberalism—a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand. Despite the lofty language, the New Right’s position never transcends the logic of a textbook collective-action problem, dressed up as a civilizational crisis.

　　To see this, one must begin by looking at “the common good” as Aristotle and Aquinas discuss it. It will quickly become clear that the distinctively American common good is very much in tension with the New Right’s goals and ethos.

　　The Classical Tradition

　　The first thing to get clear is that common goods are pedestrian and ubiquitous. Wherever two or more persons are bound together in any way for any length of time, there is a common good among them: two strangers paired for a tee time who agree to a fair match share, for a few hours, a common good; students in a calculus class share, for a semester, the common good of learning calculus; residents on the same street share, more permanently, the common good of a safe and attractive neighborhood. There is nothing mysterious in this. Classically, a good is a goal, and social unities form precisely when persons share goals; a shared goal simply is a common good.

　　Because common goods are ubiquitous, one who invokes them, to avoid confusion, ought to specify the association which is in view—referring to the common good “of the competitors,” “of the calculus class,” “of the neighborhood,” and so on.

　　Both Orestes Brownson and Abraham Lincoln correctly saw that liberty—of associations especially, but of individuals too—is essential to the distinctively American conception of the common good.

　　One may then wonder on what grounds anyone can justifiably speak of “the” common good, as if there were only one. The answer is that, since a good is a goal, a goal that sits at the top of a hierarchy of goals acquires a special status, and so may reasonably be called “the” common good, without qualification. (Aristotle makes the same logical move in Metaphysics I: only the wisdom that sits atop a hierarchy of partial sciences may rightly be called wisdom without qualification.)

　　Classically, only three common goods have been taken to have this special status. First, on the assumption that God is the goal of each thing in the universe, God may be called “the” common good (see Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy). Second, if there is such a thing as a complete society, “political society,” its goal has eminence over the partial, subsidiary goals within it, and may be called “the” common good (see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.1–2). Third, the common good of “the human family”—or, as the Judicious Hooker might put it, of “man relating to man inasmuch as he is man”—likewise enjoys preeminence, since it structurally stipulates the conditions on which any other common good can be successfully pursued. Thus, if law by definition must promote a common good, as Aquinas says, and there is a natural law, then the natural law promotes a common good too—this third one, of humankind. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights may be read as an attempt to articulate it.

　　You probably haven’t noticed it, but we put all three of these common goods together in our Pledge of Allegiance: “one nation … indivisible” (the political common good); “under God” (the theological common good); “with liberty and justice for all” (the natural law common good). The Pledge even orders them classically: the natural law common good frames the political common good while subordinating it to the theological common good. (See St.Thomas Aquinas’s De Regno for the classic statement of this ordering.) If one wants to speak in this way—and traditionally this is how most ordinary Americans have wanted to speak—then one may construe a political community as in this way “under God” only if it recognizes a substantive right to religious liberty; robustly provides conditions for the free exercise of religion; keeps its laws concordant with the natural law; and, in its culture and laws, construes liberty as intended for the attainment of virtue in its citizens (not excluding intellectual virtue)—as in “confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”

　　America’s Common Good

　　Political actors who want to invoke the common good of American society, at least if they regard themselves as “conservatives,” would need to think and speak in something like this way. If they supposed that something else were “the” common good—say, what they took to be the desired outcome of their preferred industrial policy—then they would not be referring to the common good of American society. Recall that that good must sit atop a hierarchy of goods.

　　I say “the common good of American society” because another trait of goods is that they must be distinctive. Classically, Plato and Aristotle held that the good of a thing isidion, specific to that thing (see Republic I and Nic. Eth. I.7). So “the” common good of American society must be something specific to it. In our history and founding there is a distinctive way of conceiving the three common goods just discussed and their relation, and it is the task of a genuine conservative, in American society, to construe what these are, get their ordering right, and see how to restore and strengthen them today.

　　That one has a proper grasp of theidionis essential here, just as it is with those other, ubiquitous and pedestrian common goods. A businessman appointed president of a university, for instance, who tries to run it like a business, will fail, because he does not grasp the specific nature of a university as against a business—he is incompetent to direct it toward its specific common good. Captain Von Trapp was rightly lampooned for taking the common good of his family to be like the common good of a ship. This is why understandings of “the common good” drawn from classical civilization, or the writings of monarchists, or nineteenth-century continental disputes, cannot simply be transposed to an American context and held up as a standard.

　　Likewise, someone who denied that there was a distinctively American common good at all, on the grounds that the Founding was vitiated by a noxious and irredeemable individualism, would be incompetent to direct Americans toward one.

　　Orestes Brownson, inThe American Republic, held that the distinctive American good—what he called America’s “vocation”—was to exhibit how freedom and order may fittingly be harmonized, which he considered a vocation baked into the very structure of our nation, given its origin in separate but united colonies. The Federalist system, he thought, was part of the “organic constitution” of our people even before the Constitutional Convention formalized it. Abraham Lincoln pithily expressed the same vision: “a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

　　Both Brownson and Lincoln correctly saw that liberty—of associations especially, but of individuals too—is essential to the distinctively American conception of the common good. It took a century for us to get clear that liberty did not include the freedom to buy and sell slaves, and another century to get clear that it did not include the freedom, in public life, not to associate with races one regarded as second-class. But that we were getting clear about the nature of a free society, with equal opportunity for all—this was incontestable. It was how we all spoke: “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

　　It follows that if a putative conservative says something like, “It’s foolish to emphasize freedom today,” he is saying that it is foolish to emphasize the distinctively American common good today. His view may be that, practically and strategically, it is necessary to emphasize something else today, so that we might attain genuine freedom, or the conditions of freedom—and he might be correct about that. But whatever he’s up to, if he has forsworn talk of freedom, then he must also be regarded as having forsworn reference to the common good, in our context. Talk of “the common good” is no longer available to him. Our common good is indeed complex, and includes such things as a strong defense, a productive economy, the beauty of our land, and our natural resources, just as with other nations. But for us it includes freedom essentially.

　　The New Right’s “Common Good” Nostalgia

　　From this classical and American point of view, the post-liberal New Right should be understood as a coalition that has precisely abandoned the common good of American society. Its members either have not grasped it, do not believe it ever existed, have become disillusioned with it, have lost faith in it, or regard it as “libertarian ideology,” mere “superstructure,” obscuring the workings of economic interests.

　　How, then, do they invoke this term, “the common good”? The meaning of a term is in its function; its meaning for them must be construed from the circumstances in which they use it.

　　Talk of “the common good” today rightly elicits suspicion, because those most eager to invoke it are not talking about the distinctive American common good at all; what they call “the common good” are various partial goods, dressed up to look whole.

　　The members of this coalition can look conservative because they are nostalgic, and nostalgia looks like piety for the past. They pick out some state of the country in the past—the early years of the New Deal, or the “golden decades” (which were not actually very golden) following World War II—or, more precisely, they selectively pick out some good aspect of the country then: “government and labor worked together,” “we bought things made in America,” “men could support their families on one income from a stable factory job.” This good aspect they deem “the common good.” They stir up passions of anger and envy by pointing out that these “common goods” have vanished. They devise conspiracy stories about how malign actors (“the laptop class,” “the coastal elites”) have wreaked this damage through the selfish pursuit of their own interests. And then, since they have no effective policies for restoring these good things from the past, and since, as political actors, they lack the prudence to effect any lasting changes, they are constrained to make loyalty to themselves a proxy for “the common good”—since, after all, only they even speak about “the common good.” A strong dose of Schmittianism helps here too, because these people must be your friends if those others are your enemies.

　　Note that they invoke “the common good” only for those good things in the past capable of winning votes. Surely past decades of a balanced federal budget or minimal national debt were “golden decades,” but no one will vote for a candidate who proposes that government take the steps necessary to balance the budget. Likewise, the GOP’s historic pro-life plank was quickly tossed overboard with barely a murmur from “common good” conservatives.

　　But the question lingers—why do they call these good aspects from the past “the common good”? Why not leave it at “golden decades,” or simply “good aspects” or “things we long for”? Because they rely, implicitly, on a stereotyped diagnosis of social ills, modeled on the structure of a collective action problem—the very structure that, in ordinary policy debate, is understood to justify state intervention in defense of some shared good.

　　A collective action problem, after all, must begin with a common good: the village green, the fishing shoals—for an example here, take it to be home-based manufacturing. Next, individuals acting on their own self-interest do things that incrementally detract from this common good—take it to be outsourcing. The effect is small in each case, but cumulatively the common good is depleted (see the trend line over the past century of manufacturing as a percentage of GDP). What to do, then? Informal agreements never coalesced; and there is no recourse to privatization; therefore, a strong government—tariffs, industrial policy—must intervene to restore the common good. As some on the New Right are reputed to say, “the most appropriate limit on the government is no limit.”

　　The rhetorical trick lies in what this borrowed structure allows the New Right to skip. In an ordinary policy conversation about a collective action problem, one still has to ask what the shared asset is actually worth, and whether the proposed intervention’s costs are justified by its benefits—the same questions we would ask about a village green or a fishing shoal. But once the asset in question is baptized “the common good,” those questions no longer need asking, because no cost could be weighed against something bearing that name. (Remember: “the” common good is at the top of a hierarchy of goods.) Even granting, for argument’s sake, that mid-century domestic manufacturing employment presented a genuine collective action problem, rather than simply a state of the market at one time, it hardly follows that restoring it is the common good, in the sense in which classical and American political thought have used that phrase. It is one policy goal among many, and a contestable one. Dressing it in Aristotelian language does not make it “the” common good; it only exempts it from the ordinary discipline of asking whether it is worth what it costs.

　　Talk of “the common good” today rightly elicits suspicion, because those most eager to invoke it are not talking about the distinctive American common good at all; what they call “the common good” are various partial goods, dressed up to look whole. The dressing-up is not incidental—it is the entire point. Once a partial good is baptized “the common good,” government intervention on its behalf no longer needs to be argued for; it only needs to be announced. And since they alone speak this language, they alone decide what qualifies.