Pottsy0729 @Pottsy0729 - Twitter Profile

1 day ago

People need to understand what is happening around the phrase “the common good.” Postliberals are deliberately using language that is familiar to constitutional conservatives to make postliberalism sound like a restoration of the American founding rather than a rejection of its governing principles. They argue that the founders cared about the public good. Of course they did. They use that truth to blur the difference between a constitutional government ordered toward the good of the people and a political ideology that gives those in power greater authority to define what the common good is and then to impose it. This is the strategy, and it is unfolding in real time on social media. First, they insist that anyone criticizing postliberalism must oppose the common good itself. Then they flood the conversation with founding-era quotations containing those words, as though the existence of the phrase proves that the founders shared the postliberal understanding of state power. Finally, they portray constitutional conservatives as twentieth-century libertarians who corrupted the “real” founding by placing too much emphasis on individual rights and restraints on government. But the founders never treated the common good as a free-floating justification for political power. They joined it to natural rights, consent of the governed, freedom of conscience, divided authority, constitutional limits, and the rule of law. Those restraints were not obstacles to the common good. They were part of its meaning, because the founders understood that rulers who claim the power to define and enforce the good without limitations will eventually use that power against the people. That is the distinction postliberals need you not to notice. They are borrowing the language of the founding while quietly changing what the language authorizes. They want constitutional conservatives to hear familiar words and assume they are looking at a familiar political philosophy. They are not. Believing that government exists for the common good is American. Using the common good as a rhetorical weapon against individual rights, religious liberty, limited government, and constitutional restraints is something fundamentally different.

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Pottsy0729

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