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’s essay on current fissures in conservative thought is well worth the attention The New Criterion has given it in this symposium. Holmes addresses an important controversy among conservatives, and he does so in a way that accurately describes the contending points of view.
In regard to his essay, and the issues and ideas addressed in it, herewith a few observations.
Holmes is on target with two large propositions: first, that the path forward for the United States, if there is a path forward, lies through the traditional conservative ideals of personal liberty, limited government under the Constitution, and free and flexible markets, mixed with a measure of American exceptionalism and nationalism; and second, that the distempers and disorders the country is now experiencing arise not from adherence to Lockean or classical liberal ideals but from departures from those ideals in the form of Marxist, postmodern, and New Left doctrines embraced by leftists and progressives in journalism, government, and the academy.
Holmes identifies two intellectual challenges to the traditional understanding of conservatism: first, national conservatism as advanced by Josh Hammer and Yoram Hazony, which rejects the natural-rights doctrine of John Locke as the basis of the Constitution and recasts the founding as a Burkean enterprise directed to
