New Right

It's a bit of a stretch to map the old Whig-Tory dichotomy onto today's political spectrum.

The modern Conservatives are still heirs of Tory tradition, yet they have absorbed elements from other movements like Liberal Conservatives or New Right.

Likewise, the Liberals drifted toward progressive causes beyond the original Whig platform.

The real reason this historical rivalry matters is that it seeded the idea of organized party politics, disciplined caucuses, policy agendas, and an expectation that a party could take responsibility for governing rather than relying on ad hoc alliances among noble families.

And the first is respect for the person as such.

So this notion that often advanced by people on the new right, on the post-liberal right, That the common good is somehow opposed to individual rights is just a non-starter, according to sort of modern Catholic social teaching is you have to have respect for the person as such.

You have to have, as Andy talked about, you know, the compendium of the social doctrine of the church, which I highly recommend.

people read for answer to these questions rather than going to Adrian Vermeule, is that it talks about how the big constituent elements of Catholic social teaching are the dignity of the human person, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity.

What are the common common good ideas out there? Those who advocate the common good in a more robust centralized government sense, what are they trying to accomplish and where does that overlap or where does maybe there's sort of variants that don't agree with each other?

It's a good question, and I don't know the answer.

So if some of these folks were listening to this conversation right now, and not to try to condense it all, but would they, and this is a legitimate question, I'm not being rhetorical here, would they disagree that solidarity has to be a part of the conversation, that we have a responsibility to everybody? Would they disagree that subsidiarity, this idea of different entities in society having obligations and powers, meaning that you have to distribute authority and not have higher level bodies just take over everybody's power in perpetuity, would they disagree with that? Would they disagree with the idea of statesmanship and prudence and the concern about ideology not being that good at actually governing? Would they recognize that all of this fervor around the new right or populism or integralism has not solved problems related to China or immigration? or gambling or decreasing marriage rates or birth rates? Do they recognize that all of this talking about stuff hasn't translated into governing successes? I don't know what their beef with all of this is.

What I would like to think is that they have raised really legitimate questions about In their words, probably too much liberty to in the sense of always prioritizing a libertarian individual rights framework for everything like rights talk that we do have to be more concerned about, like a community common good and local democracy and these things like victimless crimes, gambling, drug use, so forth.

I think this can't really be stressed too hard.

Adam Smith, great figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, author of these two classic works, The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, since the 1980s, really, maybe the 1970s, has been claimed by people on the political right, some of the key ideological figures of what in the 70s came to be known as the New Right.

as their kind of iconic figure.

And this has