Editors’ note: the below is a response to “The fallacies of the common good” by Kim R. Holmes, the lead essay in “Common-good conservatism: a debate.” Holmes’s reply can be found here.

Kim R. Holmes has written a lively and provocative, if ultimately unconvincing, defense of what he calls “traditional conservatism.” Just how “traditional” this conservatism really is remains open to question. His essay is best understood as a thoughtful and succinct encapsulation of the assumptions and analytic categories underlying mainstream intellectual and political conservatism for the last half century or so. It thus reflects both the real strengths and the considerable weaknesses of the old consensus. Holmes’s challenges to national conservatism and to the conservative case for a politics centered around the common good are not without merit, even if he is too quick to dismiss what is legitimate in both notions. But the political philosophizing underlying Holmes’s analysis is too hurried and facile, and his argument, as a whole, neglects to deal with crucial defects in the old consensus.

Democracy entails both external limits and internal limits that require self-limitation in accord with the moral law and the requirements of the civic common good.

Unlike Holmes, I would begin by insisting that core notions of territorial democracy, humane national loyalty, and citizenship in a national as opposed to a global framework are under systematic assault today, as is our broader civic and civilizational inheritance. Holmes’s defense of the old