It is a concept that goes back to the ancient Greeks and has, in the abstract at least, an innocuous name. And yet it also pretty consistently provokes political brawls — and has again today.
The concept is the “common good.” It is most often associated with the right, and indeed some of the most intense recent squabbles over it are among conservatives.
But the left has also taken up its share, explicitly (as in Senator Chris Murphy’s recent book, “Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America”) and implicitly (fights over “Woke 1.0” and the like).
Is it a divisive tool of coercion or merely the return of an old debate?
Damon Linker, who teaches in the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania and writes the newsletter Notes From the Middleground, explored the concept and its relevance to today’s politics in a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion. It has been edited for length and clarity.
John Guida: What is the common good, and why has it often been so divisive?
Damon Linker: Americans tend to have a libertarian outlook on politics. Individuals come first. They form government to protect their rights. That can preclude thinking about politics in terms of collective goals — or what’s good for the whole country, its common good.
Still, people participating in politics can — and often do — make a case that they deserve power because they have a vision of what would be good for all of us. “Elect me and I’ll make the country more this way or that.” That’s a vision of the common good.
Guida: So something like Make America Great Again would count, in this view, as a version of the politics of the common good?
Linker: Yes, absolutely — as a slogan. Then we’d need some details about what “greatness” means. Donald Trump would say, cut back on immigration, impose protectionist trade policy (with tariffs), cut regulations on business and taxes on rich people and corporations, and stop promoting democracy around the world.
That’s MAGA’s vision of the common good. Or at least it was when Trump first ran in 2016. The MAGA right has moved somewhat beyond that by 2026 — or at least JD Vance aims to move beyond it.
Guida: That gets to the heart of the debate among conservatives right now. In a recent essay at The Daily Wire, Andrew T. Walker, who is a dean and teaches at the School of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote that the common-good quarrel on the right “hinges on a single question: Does government exist chiefly to secure liberty, or to serve the common good?” He added: “Are political communities meant to erect as few guardrails as possible so diverse peoples can actualize their choices? Or is the point of societies to embody a particular conception of the good life? And should, or how could, the government deploy its power to ensure those ends?” Who has taken up sides, so to speak, in this intra-conservative debate?
Linker: You have Reaganite conservatives wedded to a more purely libertarian vision of the country: Government exists to facilitate individual freedom, both in individual behavior as people, and in their collective projects, like starting businesses, hiring workers, getting rich and so forth. Those people often don’t think government should be understood as advancing anything like a common good, because that sounds like collectivism or “statism.”
But this is kind of misleading. Aristotle distinguished between different ends of politics: There can be a thin form of the common good that aims to secure the conditions of “mere life.” And then it can have a thicker goal, of leading people to a vision of virtue, or “the good life.” Reaganite conservatives clearly would support the first of these: Government is needed to defend the country against foreign and domestic enemies, to fight crime, to build roads and other infrastructure, and at least some forms of regulations to allow an efficient market to function.
Someone like Vance, by contrast, wants to expand on this to start talking about higher purposes — the good life or virtue, with religion included in that. So we have a disagreement about what the common good should be, or how it should be understood, rather than whether it should shape politics.
Guida: Can you expand on “thick” versus “thin” concepts of the common good?
Linker: Those who favor a thin notion of the common good kind of want government to let individuals do what they want with their freedom. They believe that we’re all better off, individually and collectively, if no one and no public power is pushing or pulling them in any direction.
A thicker notion of the common good, by contrast, thinks we all have a stake in encouraging certain behaviors and beliefs and discouraging others, because what we collectively affirm or criticize produces certain kinds of people and certain kinds of citizens. It’s better for the country if people are courageous, frugal, law-abiding and if they have children and raise those children to love the country and lead moral lives, and so forth. So government should have a role in fostering such views and behavior.
Guida: Do you see this fight over the common good as a proxy for the future of the Republican Party? To your point about pre-Trump conservatives, someone like Marc Thiessen — a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a columnist at The Washington Post — attacked Vance’s vision and said that anyone who embraces it should be disqualified from leading this country.
He wrote on social media that the post-liberal right — he was commenting on Vance — “believes that the classical liberal principles of our founders and the Declaration have failed and need to be replaced with a new order that elevates the ‘common good’ above individual liberty.” Will this debate set the course for the G.O.P.?
Linker: Thiessen is being a little misleading here. It’s true that the founders didn’t talk much about how to foster concern for the common good, but that was because the country was much more attached to more traditional notions of virtue and vice than we are today. They could take it for granted that the American people thought in terms of what was best for the country, even when they sharply disagreed about what that should mean.
Today, things have thinned out a lot. We disagree more deeply about what “the good life” is or should be. Some Americans are very religious, while others are very secular; some think abortion should be banned from conception, others that it should be allowed until birth; some want government doing much more than it does, others less. So these debates are fraught — and because we can’t take for granted a deeper moral consensus about these issues, any attempt to talk about politics in those terms sounds like we’re trying to impose it from above.
That’s probably unavoidable, and it is a problem for the Vances of the world: They are trying to encourage something that has waned, and I must say that doing so while serving as the vice president to Trump is a special kind of problem, given how little he personally exemplifies any notion of virtue.
Guida: That complicates debates over the future of the party?
Linker: Yes, absolutely. One thing that’s especially challenging is that the country has become more secular, and so has the Republican electorate, and religious voters have typically been more open to that way of thinking and speaking. Reagan and George W. Bush regularly gave speeches that made reference to honor, courage, self-sacrifice for higher goals. Trump never does that.
So you could say the party has become coarser, less moral, less likely to be stirred by rhetoric about virtue. It’s somewhat odd in that context to hope for a revival of a politics of the common good. Vance usually tries to get there by talking negatively about the left and libertarians, and hoping that his opposition to them will allow talk of the common good to emerge organically. I’m not sure how plausible that is. There are ways in which Democrats are more comfortable speaking that kind of language.
Guida: One argument from conservatives is that the left has been practicing its own version of common-good politics — so the right should, too. As Walker put it, “the modern Left harbors no doubts and legislates its own common good under the guise of neutrality — it is pursuing a thick common good with something close to religious fervor.”
What is the left’s engagement with common-good politics?
Linker: Liberals aren’t all that comfortable talking about the common good; they talk of moral neutrality — the government shouldn’t tell us how to live, what to do with our bodies, regulate abortion or sex and gender at all, and so forth. But at the same time, they frequently talk about economic policy and regulations creating the conditions for the flourishing of individuals and communities.
That’s a good example of a “thin” notion of the common good.
Some on the left are drawn to a thicker understanding of it. Think back to Hillary Clinton talking during the 1990s about the need for a “politics of meaning,” which she got from a writer who died a couple of years ago, Michael Lerner (and his book of the same title). She went on to write a book that the right loved to mock called “It Takes a Village,” giving a kind of left-communitarian case for using government to make it easier to raise children, start a family, saying we’re all in this together.
Guida: And more recently (in May), Senator Murphy’s book called out a “spiritual rot” and “disintegration” in America.
Linker: He’s speaking to a widespread sense that the country is terribly divided by partisanship, almost as if we’re close to coming to blows. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we set aside those differences and affirmed collective purposes or goals.
The problem, though, is that unless people agree about what those collective purposes or goals are, the effort to organize politics around them will only make the division worse. So, for example, if a Democratic administration says, “The common good requires everyone having access to health care, so we must create Medicare for All,” lots of Republicans will say: “See, the Democrats want to turn us socialist. We don’t want to live in a country like that. It’s collectivism or statism. That’s why we need to stop them and beat them badly in the next election.”
That’s the problem with trying to solve division with a politics of a thick common good. In many ways, our politics were more capable of that back in the postwar decades, when we were less deeply divided along ideological, partisan lines. The Cold War, plus residual support for the New Deal welfare state and decades of strong economic growth, helped build national consensus (even while other issues, like race and civil rights, divided us badly).
Guida: Would you describe “Woke 1.0” (as it was recently called) as a form of common-good politics?
Linker: Yes, definitely. What we call “wokeness” was an effort by progressive activists and their allies and admirers to rewrite the rules of social life such that holding certain positions on race, gender, crime and immigration was necessary in order to be accepted, keep jobs, get promoted, publish a book and so forth.
That’s an interesting variation on the politics of the common good, because it kind of circumvents politics to change the moral fabric of civil society — by shaping public opinion, bureaucracies, human resource departments, hiring committees, etc.
But it’s still a politics of the common good, and a fairly thick one, because it’s holding out a vision of virtue and vice: If you affirm these views, you are a good person, but if you don’t, you’re a bad person, should be fired, excommunicated from civilized life, lose your job (and other forms of social cancellation).
And of course this didn’t succeed in bringing us all together. It polarized things further by giving the right something to fight against. So we got anti-wokeness, and that helped to get Trump re-elected.
Guida: If the common good can be shaped by both cultural and political power, how do you think about the difference?
Linker: I began by saying that all politics is in some ways a disagreement about the common good. Well, a lot of what consumes the country now, both culturally and politically, is a fight about what our common good is and should be.
Who are we as a country? Are we just a collection of 340 million individuals doing our own thing? (That’s a libertarian vision, and different versions are affirmed by the Reaganite right and the center left.) Or are we a collective body devoted to a creed or set of principles, like those enumerated in the Declaration of Independence? (There are Reaganite, harder-right and liberal versions of that, and left-wing versions, too, that build out a much thicker vision of what those moral principles entail.)
Or are we a concrete, rooted community tied to a specific place with a specific history that it’s difficult for outsiders to join? (That’s closer to what Vance has decided to advocate in his postliberal version of right-leaning American politics.) Those are hard questions for 340 million people to ask and answer without ending up flying off in a million different directions.
Guida: The writer Yuval Levin suggests that our Constitution acted as a unifying force for the country and can again. Others argue that we are, as you noted, such a big nation — both in population and geography — that federalism or localism is the way out of our constant national bickering. Where do you see these debates taking us in the near- or long-term future?
Linker: I wish it were possible for the Constitution to serve that unifying purpose, but left and right disagree strongly about what the Constitution implies and how to interpret it, so I don’t know if that would help us transcend our differences.
As for federalism, that sounds good in theory — that’s what it’s there for, to allow different regions to govern themselves apart from the country as a whole. The problem there is that our divisions are more local than that — with urban sensibilities pitted against more rural ones. That cuts through many states, with millions of conservatives in California effectively disenfranchised at the state level, and many liberals in cities within red states feeling the same way.
I’m afraid my view is that we need to keep muddling through, holding elections (and fighting back against efforts by Trump and his allies to sow suspicion about them). And we can hope that someone in one of the parties succeeds in accomplishing the realignment that we’ve all felt for the past decade is struggling to be born, but has so far failed to appear fully.
That would enable one of the two parties to win a bigger and more enduring victory that becomes the basis for a new consensus. There have been times in the American past when we’ve had such a consensus, and other times when we have been very far from it (worst of all, of course, in the lead-up to and through the Civil War). So longer term, that’s what we have to hope for and work for: a new broader consensus on what our common good as Americans in the 21st century should be.
Damon Linker is a senior lecturer in the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center. He writes the newsletter Notes From the Middleground. John Guida is an editor in Times Opinion.
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