The "Common Good" Excuse Both Parties Are Using to Skip Congress

Over the course of the last several weeks, a phrase has begun popping up both in the right’s think tanks and social media acolytes. The populist right, which has gained more influence in the Trump era, has started referring to the “common good” when discussing policy and power in Washington, and it goes all the way to the top.

The latest insight into this came when the New York Times Magazine recently took a deep dive into the Heritage Foundation’s internal turmoil. Heritage, a longtime conservative think tank, has been quietly shifting toward more populist policies. The Heritage of old, for example, wouldn’t be embracing tariffs and public interest in private companies.

Among the many things the report shed light on, there was a tidbit about Kevin Roberts beginning to tell staff the movement needed to stop talking about individual liberty and start talking about the common good. Roberts has started reframing “freedom” not as the right to do what you want but as what you “ought” to do. On its face, it’s a small rhetorical shift for an organization that spent fifty years building its brand on limited government and free markets. But in reality, it’s a philosophical about-face, and it’s happening after the political left has spent two administrations running its own version of “common good” politics and policy.

Andrew T. Walker@AndrewTWalker

I am not going to comment on the merits of the lengthy New York Times Magazine piece on Heritage. But one observation in the article seems to helpfully capture the entire "fight on the right" as a fundamental, zero-sum dispute: whether there is such a thing as the "common

10:58 PM · Jul 29, 2026 · 260K Views

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Both the postmodern left and the postmodern right have quietly abandoned the idea that rights and liberties are the baseline. They’ve replaced liberty and freedom with a more bureaucratic belief in a “common good,” one enforced through agencies and executive orders rather than the legislative process the Constitution actually requires. Instead of getting government out of the way, they want the government to enforce their idea of what’s best for you.

The political ideology between the left and the right doesn’t matter here. Both sides want to use the same mechanism: Using raw political power to enforce their will, so you’ll either get a Democratic nanny state or a Republican nanny state. When you strip away the branding, “common good” usually just means “our side’s agenda, minus the vote.”

The “common good” framing under Roberts is not new. Back in 2022, he wrote for Heritage’s own site that the phrase “common good” had been “co-opted by the modern American Left,” arguing that conservatives needed to reclaim it. Under his vision, the conservative movement should wield the free market itself to reinforce its values on family, order, and a redefined sense of what liberty is for. By 2023, Heritage was publicly rethinking the relationship between free enterprise and the common good, signaling that it was turning its back on the free enterprise wing of the conservative movement.

But what triggered the change in Roberts’ (and Heritage’s) attitude toward the free market? It seems to have begun with Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule’s parallel legal version of this fight back in 2020.

In an essay arguing conservatives should abandon originalism in favor of “common good constitutionalism,” Vermeule’s theory gives judges and administrators wide latitude to rule in favor of whatever they’ve decided the common good requires. Legal scholars on the right and left tore into it. Randy Barnett called it dangerous. Others called it a blueprint for administrative overreach with a natural-law coat of paint. Nobody on Vermeule’s side has ever answered the obvious follow-up questions well: Common good, according to whom? Enforced by what authority if Congress never voted on it?

Today, populist Republicans (many of whom call themselves conservatives but are drifting away from traditional conservative ideas) are openly discussing a greater push for the “common good” through the executive branch. They are reacting to what progressives had done under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, drawing up the modern playbook for governing through agencies instead of the legislative branch.

The Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Power Plan tried to force a nationwide shift away from coal-fired power using EPA regulatory authority Congress never explicitly granted for that purpose. The rule never actually took effect, thankfully. It got tied up in litigation for years, and by the time the Supreme Court ruled on the underlying legal theory in 2022’s West Virginia v. EPA, the Court didn’t just strike down that one rule. Instead, it laid out a new standard called the “major questions doctrine,” and the standard applies well beyond the EPA: If an agency wants to make a decision of vast economic and political significance, it needs clear authorization from Congress, not a creative reading of an old statute.

The Biden administration tried to do the same thing with student loan forgiveness. Using the HEROES Act, a law originally passed to ease loan burdens for service members and disaster-affected borrowers during declared national emergencies, they tried to cancel roughly $430 billion in student debt without a vote. The Supreme Court struck that down too, in Biden v. Nebraska. The Court’s decision was the same: A decision this size belongs to the people’s elected representatives, not an agency head armed with a broadly worded statute and a sympathetic cause.

Both administrations had defensible policy goals in the eyes of their supporters. Neither one wanted to spend the political capital, or accept the risk of losing, that comes with actually passing a law.

The Trump administration, in its second term, is taking it a step further. They are going well beyond regulating industries and pushing “feel-good policies” that impact those industries. It’s taking ownership stakes in those industries, which traditional conservatives should be aghast at.

Over the past year, the federal government has taken a roughly 10 percent equity stake in Intel, a 15 percent stake in MP Materials, stakes in Lithium Americas and Trilogy Metals, and a “golden share” in U.S. Steel that gives the White House veto power over where the company operates and who it answers to. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who is also one of the chief engineers of the Trump administration’s failing tariff scheme, has floated doing the same with major defense contractors.

Supporters call it industrial policy and national security strategy, and there’s a real argument for keeping chip production and rare-earth supply chains onshore. It’s the mechanism the administration is using that is the problem.

Congress didn’t authorize the Treasury to become a shareholder in private American companies. There is no statute that specifically gives the Treasury Department the authority to do it, and for an administration that was elected by conservative voters and vocally supported by them, it is in no way a conservative policy. It’s something we see out of socialist regimes. It’s the exact same move the EPA made when it decided coal plants were bad for the country and tried to regulate them out of existence, and it’s the exact same move the Department of Education made when it decided student debt was bad for the country and tried to erase it by decree.

Different party, different industry, same shortcut around the people who are supposed to write the laws. And it’s a shortcut the Supreme Court has repeatedly told the executive branch it cannot take.

A “common good,” by a literal definition of the words, requires something close to actual consensus, or at least the kind of durable majority that survives an election cycle and gets written into statute. You need a legislative majority that can pass a statute the next administration can’t simply reverse with a signature. What we have instead is a rotating cast of appointees deciding, agency by agency, what the common good happens to require during the present administration, and then using rulemaking, executive orders, and, now, direct ownership stakes to make it stick until the other side wins and does the opposite.

Calling an agenda “the common good” doesn’t make it common. Mostly it just makes objecting to it sound cruel to ordinary Americans the political powers that be say they represent.

The “common good” isn’t winning the elections that matter. The executive branch can be elected through the Electoral College even without winning the popular vote (which I am not arguing we should do away with). And even if it does win the popular vote, as Trump did, the American people were pretty clear when they voted for him that their interests were in economic change that would undo what the Biden administration did and reverse the chaos at the border. The American people almost assuredly did not vote for cost increases via tariffs and for the government to take a public stake in private equity, just like they did not vote for the “common good” policies of the Obama or Biden administrations.