A Politics of the Common Good?

Early this week, as I began thinking about what I might write on for my Friday post, I found myself gravitating to something on “the common good.” My Twitter/X feed has been a bloodbath for weeks, as various figures on the right spew venom at each other, with some arguing Republicans should follow Vice President JD Vance and the so-called post-liberals in championing the common good, while other, more Reaganite conservatives angrily reject this option as a concession to collectivism and “statism.”

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, meanwhile, has been promoting a book (Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America) that makes a left-leaning case for ideas parallel to Vance’s—which has inspired at least one spirited liberal to proclaim, “No, Senator Murphy, I Don’t Want to Join Your Cult.”

So late this week seemed like the perfect time to weigh in on the subject here.

But the very next day my editor at The New York Times reached out to see if I’d be interested in having a conversation about the topic in the form of a Q&A. Why yes, I’d be delighted to. That’s how we got to today’s post, which, after the paywall, provides a Gift Link to the conversation in the Times, so all of my paying subscribers can get to it whether or not they have subscriptions to the paper of record. (You really should subscribe to them, but not if it means you’ll have to give up your subscription to Notes from the Middleground in order to help pay for it.) If you do subscribe to the Times and don’t have a paid subscription here, you can read the Q&A here.

There’s no audio recording for this post, for obvious reasons. I’ll be back with my next, more normal post early next week. Until then, I hope you’ll give the Q&A a read. Gift Link after the paywall below.