The “common good” war has erupted again. Americans are increasingly isolated and distrustful, while revolutionary socialism has gained a new political foothold, shining a new light on debates about communal solidarity and individual autonomy.
There’s certainly a tension between a politics prioritizing freedom and one that stresses a sense of communal solidarity. But that doesn’t mean that affinities between the two can’t be found, and the unraveling of the neoliberal era indicates an urgent need for a politics that knits the bonds of community and nation while also defending freedom.
Right-leaning proponents of the common good argue that government can never be truly neutral on key ethical issues—a substantive vision of human flourishing must guide policy. In contrast, those of a more libertarian bent allege that prioritizing the “common good” disregards individual liberties and can even serve as a stalking horse for theological despotism or socialism. To them, the common good best arises not through government planning but through the spontaneous actions of millions of individuals.
The truth is that defending individual freedoms demands giving attention to the common. We enjoy our freedoms only within a bigger framework of social and political institutions. Government must set some of the terms of the market, such as a tax structure or rules for bankruptcy, and the American free market would not be free for very long if we lost our ability to maintain political sovereignty.
Likewise, protections for personal freedoms themselves contribute to the common good. Top-down autocratic controls are anathema to a nation as various and as variously divided as the United States. The Great Awokening ran afoul of the natural pluralism of the American people, and its downfall offered a warning to other ideological efforts attempting to impose absolute change from on high. The American public will push back against any comprehensive and exacting dogma, be it from the Left or the Right.
While drawing contrasts between today’s “New Right” and the conservative consensus of the 1980s is a popular Beltway parlor game, twentieth-century conservatives were not afraid of the language of the common good—or of using state power to promote it. When Ronald Reagan announced his run for the presidency in 1979, he appealed to the concept in discussing regional cooperation within North America: “Let us work toward the goal of using the assets of this continent, its resources, technology and foodstuffs in the most efficient ways possible for the common good of all its people.”
Like many affiliated with movement conservatism, Reagan often favored market-oriented policy approaches, but he and his contemporaries were not market absolutists. Social conservatives insisted that government institutions should promote a certain kind of national character—whether by encouraging certain values in public education or by banning hard drugs. In a 1971 New York Times essay, neoconservative luminary Irving Kristol defended censoring pornography by declaring that “if you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.” Reagan agreed.
During the Cold War, the Right did not simply trust the spontaneous actions of millions of consumers to defeat the Soviet Union. Instead, it embraced a project of full-spectrum economic, military, and technological mobilization in order to defeat the evil empire. Conservatives championed trade barriers against the Soviet Union. Cold Warriors did not leave national security up to private militaries voluntarily organized by patriotic Americans but poured hundreds of billions of dollars each year into building out our national military.
The spending was so vast that defense policy overlapped substantially with economic policy. Fielding high-tech missiles, fighter jets, and communications networks required investments in a broad industrial base. In the late 1980s, for instance, fears that the United States was being eclipsed in microchips prompted the federal government to fund Sematech, an industry consortium for semiconductor research and production.
However, the role of state capacity has eroded in the years since the Berlin Wall fell. To some extent, this is understandable. “Leave us alone” rhetoric and skepticism about government planning have been core components of the American Right for over a century. Without the countervailing pressure of the Soviet Union, it’s easy to see how conservatives might fixate upon Reagan’s 1981 declaration that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Taking that notion to its logical conclusion means that paring back “government” should unleash a utopia of radically free individuals, not just in the United States but across the globe.
Yet Reagan’s actual statement was far more nuanced. He was not ruling out all “government” in all times and all places. In fact, his full statement reads (emphasis added), “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
In our own present crisis, government policy cannot be reduced solely to tax cuts. Today’s effort to reinforce the common good could include the four overlapping areas of sovereignty, capacity, citizenship, and agency. As Reagan said later in the same speech, “All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden.” These areas extend far beyond GDP to address the urgent challenge of our day: protecting a framework for freedom and flourishing.
Many policymakers have awakened from the dogmatic dream that nations are nothing more than vast pools of atomized consumers. Supply chain vulnerabilities and dependence on our strategic competitors for critical materials threaten American sovereignty and the liberty of its people. Rebalancing trade and rebuilding domestic industry will be critical for American sovereignty.
For instance, de-risking supply chains from the People’s Republic of China, including through the use of tariffs, can help ensure that the Chinese Communist Party will not enjoy a chokehold over the American economy. Artificial intelligence innovations will make it even more imperative that the United States produces semiconductors and other cutting-edge technologies at home. Likewise, rumored shortages of munitions are a 150-decibel klaxon warning about our future.
To protect its interests and uphold commitments abroad, the United States needs bigger munitions reserves and an enhanced ability to produce defense material. The same logic holds for medical goods and rare earths.
None of this means a complete rejection of trade. But it does demand recognizing that the nuts and bolts of raw industrial capacity are critical for national sovereignty as well as economic vitality. Stock market averages are not enough to protect a nation’s market.
Common Good Citizenship
Strengthening the bonds of citizenship will counter the twin civic solvents of the neoliberal era: atomized consumerism that leave us as isolated blips, and collectivist identity politics that subsume individuals into blocs of race, gender, or sexuality. Here, too, public policy is crucial. Mass illegal immigration and government-backed identity preferences in employment and other areas have helped fracture the body politic.
Strong border controls can eliminate the shadow economy of illegal labor, and immigration policy should prioritize integration by welcoming new arrivals as future equal participants in the American experiment rather than as fungible units of labor. Government policy can stop incentivizing an ethnic spoils system that pits Americans against each other.
Curtailing illegal immigration could also enhance economic opportunity for American workers, which connects to agency. We face new economic challenges today. In part because of technological innovation and the growth of global trade, the cost of many consumer goods has dropped. This is a major economic success in many respects. Televisions, clothes, and computers are much less expensive than they were a generation ago.
But there are affordability challenges beyond consumer goods: rising costs for housing, education, and health care make it harder for Americans to build a life of their own. This augurs ill over the long term, especially for defenders of market-oriented economics. As Vice President JD Vance recently noted, economic frustration has helped fuel interest in socialism.
To deliver for frustrated Americans, policymakers might prioritize an economics not just of consumption but of agency—to make it easier for young Americans to buy a home, start a family, and begin a productive life. There are multiple ways to enhance this agency, many of which are entirely compatible with free-market economics. Expanding vocational education and weeding overgrown educational bureaucracies could help expand educational pathways while cutting costs. Funding and allowing for more medical residencies could help increase the number of new doctors every year, and policymakers could explore other vehicles for streamlining medical training, especially for primary-care physicians.
Maintaining agency and sovereignty will be particularly important at the digital frontier. Far from emancipating us, the constant provocations of digitized commerce often undermine our agency. Incessant notifications degrade our attention, and the brave new world of online gambling puts new pressures on family finances.
A recent study in the Journal of Financial Economics found that the legalization of online sports betting did not displace other forms of gambling but instead ate into family savings and investments, especially among “frequent bettors and low-savings households.” Brad Wilcox and James Lynch have recently argued that the “vice economy” of digital gambling and pornography offers the illusion of freedom while dragging users—especially young men—down in an undertow of speculation, titillation, and isolation.
Policymakers are proving that we can address some of these challenges. More and more states are banning student cell phones in public schools, for instance, and many states have also passed age-verification laws for pornography. Regulating the digital more broadly may prove more controversial. But debates about online gambling themselves reveal the way that our understanding of freedom is never morally neutral. Prior to a 2018 Supreme Court ruling, a federal statute banned online sports gambling, which remains illegal in some states today. Yet most people would have described the pre-2018 United States as a free society.
Does Utah’s prohibition on sports gambling make it radically less free than New Jersey? Regulating sports betting seems a question of prudence rather than one of fundamental liberties. The opportunity to bet on your favorite NBA team is qualitatively different from freedom of religion, due-process protections, or free speech.
Reinforcing sovereignty, capacity, citizenship, and agency will help sustain the frameworks that make our freedoms possible. Distinguishing between liberty and license, the founding generation of the United States also reconciled freedom and the common good. The 1780 Massachusetts constitution declared that “government is instituted for the common good,” and it also affirmed that “all men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights,” setting the stage for the end of slavery in the commonwealth. Freedom and the common good marched in tandem then, and the realignment today must find its own harmony between those principles.
Something new is coming. Hard to say exactly what but it will change assumptions about political and economic arrangements. I think the country is too divided to make it easy.