In many ways, though, liberty and the common good can be allied. Civil and economic freedom can contribute to the common good, and attention to the common good (while noble in its own right) can also be instrumental to the preservation of our liberties.You can read the rest here.*
Though some sectors of the post-liberal Right and Left have soured on the idea of “capitalism,” much could be said on behalf of this system for contributing to the common good. It has slashed poverty across the globe, and, as Benedict XVI has suggested in Caritas in Veritate, the diversity of employment opportunities provided in a market economy helps open up the realization of individual gifts. For all the faults of the high neoliberal era (and there are many), it has also helped lift hundreds of millions out of crushing poverty. One needn’t be a radical utilitarian to think that this is a considerable accomplishment. The birth of the industrialized, modern market has helped nurture a modern middle class, one of the bulwarks of stable democratic governance.
Toward the end of the piece, I outline various reforms that could speak to the common good and provide more opportunity for an integrated body politic: immigration reform to tighten the labor market, efforts to cut medical costs, an infrastructure program, and so forth. We live in a time where people like to lean into polarization, where relatively minor differences are extrapolated into gaping canyons. But it seems to me that many elements of "common good" reforms would be quite compatible with the mainstream of policy norms--including on the right.
Contrary to some public mythologies, it's not socialism to offer policy corrections in order to help strengthen the hands of workers. (I mean, Calvin Coolidge specifically called for policy efforts on trade and other areas to drive up the wages of American workers, and I don't think most people would call him a socialist.) And anyone who wants to call Reagan a political success would have to acknowledge his own agenda of policy interventions in the economy (from buttressing Social Security to import quotas on foreign vehicles). Some folks seem to suggest that the GOP needs to jettison Reaganite policies in order to succeed in the 21st century, but it seems to me that many aspects of the Gipper's actual record could offer some inspiration to proponents of more populist or "common good" reforms.
In the latest print issue of NR, Ramesh Ponnuru makes a similar point in thinking about the issue of "common good" capitalism:
As the examples of the Presidents Bush suggest, though, there is by now a long history of Republicans’ attempting to create a governing majority for conservatism, or just to win elections, by softening its devotion to limited government and markets. Running in 1980, Ronald Reagan took care not to present himself as Barry Goldwater redux: He was not a threat to Social Security or Medicare, and his tax cuts would generate enough growth to avoid a painful retrenchment of the welfare state.I don't mean to obscure some of the important theoretical divisions here, and I think that coping with the disruptions of globalization will likely require a wide range of reforms. But I also think it's worth remembering that some of these reforms have a longer lineage--and that making some of these reforms might be a way of averting more radical changes.
Later came Pat Buchanan’s “conservatism of the heart” — complete with frequent invocations of Franklin Roosevelt’s line about the occasional faults of a benevolent government paling beside the constant ones of “a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference” — and Bush’s compassionate conservatism.
As unusual as he is in many respects, as much of a jolt as he has given to the political system, Trump fits this pattern. He did not change a comma of Republican orthodoxy on social issues. But he ran as a Republican who would protect the elderly from entitlement cuts and manufacturing workers from imports.
(*In this Twitter thread, I link some other pieces discussing "common good" controversies.)
