Editors’ note: the below is a reply to the other essays in “Common-good conservatism: a debate,” written by Ryan T. Anderson, Josh Hammer, Charles R. Kesler, Daniel J. Mahoney, James Piereson, Robert R. Reilly, and R. R. Reno. Those essays responded to Holmes’s original essay, “The fallacies of the common good.”
I knew when I submitted my essay that I was poking a hornet’s nest. From my perch as an executive at The Heritage Foundation, I had watched a revolt unfolding among a small number of activists against the conservative principles of William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan, and countless other conservatives. Traditional conservatives were called “Reagan zombies.” Mostly younger conservatives targeted liberty and the idea of limited government, the same ideas that for well over a century socialists and progressives had made enemy number one in their philosophies and politics. I was surprised that they did not see the danger of flirting with philosophies and tactics embraced by both the Left and the far Right.
The nationalists and common-good ideologists are still a minority, mostly composed of intellectuals and activists.
But I should not have been surprised. As anyone can see from some of the responses to my essay, these new self-styled conservatives are not content merely to update conservatism to make it more relevant to the times. Rather, they are trying to overturn the actual principles and philosophies of traditional American conservatism. We used to worry at The
