THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING "COMMON-GOOD" IDEOLOGUES...:

Of late, however, I have noticed a very online propensity to downplay the negative qualities of Vladimir Putin's Russia, or even of the Chinese Communist Party. Sometimes this downplaying shades into outright praise. Russia, we're told, is seeking national glory. Russia knows who Russia is, and that degree of self-identity is worth imitating. Or take, for example, a recent essay by Arnaud Bertrand in American Affairs extolling China's anti-poverty campaign.

China might not see eye to eye with the West on individual freedom, but it certainly agrees with American conservative principles of personal responsibility. The differ­ence is that, for China, the government has a large role to play in creating the material and societal preconditions that allow people to exercise that responsibility.

Well, that's an understatement, to say the least. Moreover, "large role to play" is doing a whole lot of work in that sentence that should give Americans, and especially conservatives, a moment's pause. But the reason such an essay could be written in the first place is that China's eradication of poverty is seen as one successful way in which a concern for the common good can justify expansive government planning. Let's leave aside the considerable objection that Chinese communism represents the only way to address poverty, and that China's record of doing so is hardly unblemished. But a common good defined by material plenty on the one hand but a denial of political rights on the other is no common good worth pursuing.

Lest I be seen accusing Bertrand of defending communism tout court, I do not want to signal that. But if one reads the essay, there does seem to be a convenient glossing over of human-rights abuses and government oppression. Which is why it was somewhat concerning to see Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard law-school professor and author of the new book Common Good Constitutionalism, praising Bertrand's article as consistent with his own governing ideals, in which the government is empowered to accomplish a seemingly unbounded number of projects for the sake of its population if they can be reconciled with the common good. Birds of a feather, as they say.

But I won't caricature Vermeule's book, which I have read, as a defense of communism (it is certainly not that). Rather, it argues for a constitutional order that puts immense power in the hands of the state to provide for the common good, what he calls "peace, justice, and abundance -- including their updated cognates -- health, safety, security, and a right relationship to the natural environment -- under the conditions of a large and complex modern polity and economy." In the abstract, that sounds delightful. But navel-gazing intellectualism must meet realpolitik. And that's where things, as history would show, get more complicated.

That brings me back to the common good. This essay makes no attempt to end the debates over the common good. I'm a Christian -- specifically, a Baptist -- which means I hold a fervent commitment to the reality of the natural law and the necessity of the common good, but with a hearty distrust in the power of government to get too much swagger in its fulfillment thereof. The common good ought not to be a top-down bureaucratic consistory organized by those whom C. S. Lewis considered the "Conditioners." Elite technocrats seeking to steward society toward some eschatological vision of the good never ends well. Conservatism reflects the belief that government should reflect the deep social agreements arising from its people. This should be done under the rule of law with a shared balance of power checking human avarice, not under the diktats of philosopher-kings or any other kind of absolute power, the track record of which is historically hostile to representative government or human rights.

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