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.”
Many of The Heritage Foundation’s erstwhile most promising intellects—Matthew Spalding, David Azerrad, Arthur Milikh, and Ryan T. Anderson among them—have notably departed Conservatism, Inc.’s flagship think tank over the past few years. Kim R. Holmes’s essay provides a clue as to why. Holmes is yesterday’s man, dutifully reciting yesterday’s talking points, in defense of yesterday’s conservatism.
Holmes’s neoliberal-inspired “fusionist” conservatism, forged out of the fires of the early post-war period, was perhaps sufficient at the time President Ronald Reagan surmised “the most terrifying words” in the English language to be, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” But the Right’s preeminent foe is no longer “Big Government” run amok; now, it is the metastasis of woke ideology, practiced on high by an arrogant ruling-class oligarchy champing at the bit to subjugate the “deplorables.” The spread of woke ideology and the ruling-class oligarchy for which that ideology is a conduit, in turn, is abetted by the rise of a new socio-corporate “private”-sector tyranny adept at wielding and weaponizing the most sophisticated communications networks ever known to man.
Common-good originalism in particular merits defense against Holmes’s attacks.
The particular conservatism required as both a necessary short-term counterpunch and a longer-term restorative vehicle, at this late hour of our ailing republic, is a more
