It is held as a truism for some in the purported “Right” that liberty and order are a zero-sum game and that the “Common Good” must restrict liberty to ensure society serves “higher interests”. This is ultimately a Left-wing view, as James Lindsay points out.
The model of the “common good” that everyone is discussing now, coming from the “New Right” (Woke Right), is ultimately neo-Integralist. This model is also what ESG is and also DEI, just with a different guiding theology. Communism (per Marx) too.
In short, Integralism holds that man has temporal (real world, political) ends handled by civil government and spiritual ends handled by the church or ecclesia. It goes on to say that man’s spiritual ends are higher and more important than his temporal (practical) ends, so the state has a duty to order man’s temporal (practical, political) affairs such that he fulfill his ultimate spiritual ends. The Church or ecclesia has the keys and model for those spiritual ends and therefore has to be INTEGRATED into the state apparatus (hence the name “Integralism”) in order to make sure the state forces people toward their spiritual ends correctly.
As a part of this program, the “common good” is invoked as justification under the theory that if the society is not serving man’s highest spiritual ends, then it is also failing to order man’s life in a way that produces the true common good. That is, if there is misalignment between the temporal (political, practical, economic) order and the spiritual (ultimate) order, then the common good will not be maximized and might not even be achieved.
The theory holds that liberalism itself, which is its primary enemy, allows too much individual liberty, which is like a slow dissolving acid of the societal bonds and ordering necessary to produce the common good in society and thus to order life toward man’s highest spiritual ends. It might also allow people the freedom to reject, doubt, or question those highest spiritual ends or the Ecclesial Authority and its state apparatus that seeks to implement it, or even just its methods.
John Adams answered this idiocy in 1765, by the way, explaining that the freedom to question such authorities and to gather knowledge about their real doings, motivations, foundations, etc., is the highest and most important of all freedoms and the literal reason America was peopled (and to be founded) in the first place. That is, Adams is clear that America was founded to be an ANTI-INTEGRALIST experiment from its pre-revolutionary, indeed earliest Colonial, days, even though it made the mistakes (all ended by 1833) of establishmentarianism in many of the states.
