GOVERNMENT IS THE INSTITUTION THAT HAS A MONOPOLY ON VIOLENCE.

That monopoly ought have limited and enumerated powers, particularly when people who probably never read Critique of Pure Tolerance have the same sorts of repressive ideas.  "By virtue of representing the correct vision of the good, these conservatives say, they have every right to use the coercive power of the state to interfere with others' choices."  Sorry, no, forbidding something might be the hardest way to change minds.  Let people foul their own nests and limit the coercion to protecting people who don't want their nests fouled.

In the last few years, a major fault line has opened up on the American political right: Call it the Great Liberalism Schism. On one side are those of us who remain committed to classical liberal norms and values such as due process, free trade, and religious freedom. On the other side is an increasingly restless group of writers and thinkers at places like First Things and the Claremont Institute who say America has tried classical liberalism—and it failed us.

These "post-liberals" believe it's time for a conservative politics that stops worrying about protecting individual liberty and starts worrying about attaining the common good. Generally speaking, that means embracing "strong rule" by a government tasked, among other things, with "enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources," as the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule put it in a March essay for The Atlantic.

There's nothing wrong with caring about the common good. It's just that the self-named Common-Good Conservatives don't have a monopoly on the idea.

Just as there are many competing visions of the good life at an individual level, people frequently disagree about what a good society would look like. Most political leftists believe religiously affiliated employers should be required to pay for their workers' birth control—and the language they use in defense of that position and others like it is nothing if not moral. Yet most people on the political right see that understanding of the common good as utterly mistaken. In a democratic society, how do you ensure that only the correct vision is coercively enforced?

Put more simply, there is no such thing as the (singular noun) common good, although there might be overlapping areas of mutual interest, as well as areas where overlap is undesirable.

At a sufficiently high level, we can all agree the concept is tied to human flourishing. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines the common good as "the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily." The dispute, then, is about how to help people thrive. For many of us, protecting individual liberty is crucial as both a component of and a requirement for achieving that goal.

A free society is in itself a good thing. That doesn't mean freedom is the only good or even the highest good. But it is a good that must be included in any final accounting of the common good. To deny someone control over his own life is to assert your supremacy over him, violating his innate dignity as a person. The more coercion exercised, the greater the violation.

I suppose in that "sum total of social conditions" we have an instance of 1 + 1 ≠ 2: as there is no meaningful aggregation of your happiness with my happiness and the happiness of John Rawls or Thomas Hobbes. The devil (or perhaps that's the choir of angels) is in that "either as groups or as individuals."

Pretend that such an aggregation is possible, and you have the picking of ideas that have to be repressed in order that others be tolerated.

[W]hat would the Will-to-Power Conservatives do with state control once acquired? The specifics vary from person to person, but the policy agenda can be characterized as right-wing on social issues (blue laws; crackdowns on pornography) and left-wing on economics (industrial subsidies; generous unemployment insurance). At the nexus of the two are proposals to use the tax code to encourage larger families, in which women preferably work less outside the home.

Herbert Marcuse might disagree with the ends, but he cannot object to the means. "By virtue of representing the correct vision of the good, they say, they have every right to use the coercive power of the state to interfere with others' choices. In place of equal rights under the law, it's error has no rights."  Stephanie Slade concludes, "This is no way to achieve the common good."

I repeat: there is no such thing as the, singular noun, common good.  I submit, though, that letting emergence do its thing is likely to produce a less intolerable ordering of things than anything structured by a vanguard, whether the vanguard is working off Rosseau or the Letters of Paul.