“How you approach the common good will tell you where you are on today’s conservative spectrum,” Southern Baptist Theological Seminary associate professor Andrew T. Walker said, responding to the story on X. “The thicker one’s conception of the common good, the more one will migrate toward a politics that focuses less on individual autonomy and more on the intrinsic goods necessary for social flourishing.”

Over 260,000 people have since viewed Walker’s post.

Later, at the Daily Wire, Walker expanded on his two sides of the conservatism debate.

“On one side stands what I’ll call ‘drag queen conservatism,’” Walker wrote, “the view that a genuinely free society will inevitably produce things many of its citizens find repugnant, and that tolerating them is the price of liberty.”

“On this account, the state’s job is to maintain the playing field, not referee it,” Walker continued. “Neutrality is the highest political good; government lets its citizens order their lives however they want, and any political movement that seeks to advance a substantive vision of virtue eventually migrates into authoritarianism.”

He contrasted that with what he called “social cohesion conservatism,” “the view that government can, at some level, administer a thicker vision of human flourishing from the top down; that government exists to make possible the conditions in which the good can be achieved equally by all.”

Walker’s framing of “drag queen conservatism” versus “social cohesion conservatism” is a little unfair, but he has hit on a growing dividing line among conservatives. A fairer framing might be “autonomy conservatives” versus “common good conservatives,” and the issues that divide them extend far beyond drag queen story hours.

The Daily Wire’s own editor-in-chief, Brent Scher, for example, supports online gambling and apparently believes conservatives should generally permit activities that voters decide are “fun.” Scher does draw lines. Meth and child pornography are out, according to him. But pornography and online gambling are apparently acceptable exercises of adult freedom.

This position has a long and proud history in the conservative movement, and Milton Friedman gave it its most intellectually serious expression. Like Scher, Friedman supported the legalization of gambling, drugs, and pornography, framing his philosophy as “the maximum freedom for each individual to follow his own ways, his own values, as long as he doesn’t interfere with anybody else who’s doing the same.”

The difficulty with this principle is that many of the gravest social harms do not take the form of one person directly injuring another. They accumulate gradually, across millions of nominally voluntary choices, until the institutions on which liberty itself depends begin to weaken.

When your guiding principle is “maximum freedom” for the individual “as long as he doesn’t interfere with anybody else,” it becomes difficult to justify government coercion against industries whose harms are real but diffuse. 

Gambling, pornography, and drugs can all be defended as voluntary transactions between consenting adults. Yet the cumulative consequences of those transactions can reach far beyond the people immediately participating in them.

Online gambling is a good example. It is especially harmful to young men, who are disproportionately prone to problem gambling. Legalization is associated with lower savings and investment, more credit card debt and overdrafts, declining credit scores, and increases in bankruptcies and loan delinquencies. The damage is greatest when betting is available instantly online, turning every smartphone into a 24-hour casino. For young men who should be building savings, careers, and families, online gambling instead encourages addiction, debt, and financial instability.

Marijuana use, particularly when begun young, is associated with impaired attention and memory, cannabis-use disorder, and increased risk of serious psychiatric problems; young men with cannabis-use disorder appear especially vulnerable to schizophrenia.

Pornography use, meanwhile, is associated with depression, anxiety, loneliness, lower life satisfaction, and sexual problems, although researchers caution that some of these relationships are associative rather than clearly causal. Like online gambling, both industries exploit instant digital access to turn potentially habit-forming behavior into an always-available product, encouraging young men to retreat from work, relationships, and family formation rather than invest in them.

The common-good argument is not that every unhealthy behavior should be prohibited. It is that government may legitimately distinguish between ordinary private vice and commercial industries whose business models depend upon cultivating addiction, exploiting weakness, and undermining institutions that the state has an independent interest in preserving.

Gambling, porn, and pot are not the only reasons record-high numbers of young men between the ages of 18 and 44 are not married, but they are a big factor. And our nation’s record-low marriage rates are the reason fertility rates are also at record lows. Collectively, we are simply not projecting ourselves into the future.

Autonomy conservatives can lament these trends, too. But autonomy conservatism has no satisfying political answer to them. If each individual choice producing a decline in marriage and family is presumptively beyond the reach of government, collective decline becomes little more than the aggregate expression of private preference. And if some young men are too weak to avoid the dangers of gambling, porn, and pot, that is an acceptable outcome for autonomy conservatives — we can just import more young men through mass migration, which Friedman also supported.

Our Founding Fathers took a different approach.

“The aim of every political Constitution is or ought to be first to obtain for rulers, men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society,” James Madison wrote in Federalist 57, “and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous, whilst they continue to hold their public trust.”

John Adams made the same principle explicit in the Massachusetts Constitution: “Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man.”

Adams also understood that the common good depended upon institutions that existed long before government. “The foundations of national Morality must be laid in private Families,” he wrote in his diary. “In vain are Schools, Academies and universities instituted, if loose Principles and licentious habits are impressed upon Children in their earliest years.”

The founders were deeply suspicious of concentrated government power over conscience and religion. The Constitution prohibited religious tests for federal office, and the First Amendment denied Congress the power to establish a national religion. But none of this meant that the founding generation regarded government as neutral between virtue and vice. Their political thought assumed that republican liberty depended upon habits and institutions — especially family, religion, and civic virtue — that government could legitimately protect.

Nor was this merely abstract philosophy. Governments throughout the early republic routinely regulated conduct they believed threatened public morality and social order. States restricted gambling, alcohol, prostitution, obscenity, and commercial activity on Sundays. Marriage itself was heavily regulated because it was understood not merely as a private contract between two autonomous individuals but as a social institution essential to the raising of children and continuation of society.

When pornography became a mass commercial product, Congress restricted its distribution through the mail. Gambling was also heavily regulated. Although many of the original states authorized lotteries for particular public purposes, private gambling was restricted in various ways, with Virginia limiting it in certain establishments and Massachusetts prohibiting forms of dice and card gambling.

The founders may not have supplied a precise formula for defining the common good, but they plainly rejected the idea that maximizing individual autonomy was the highest purpose of government. Where private appetites threatened family stability or social order, they understood government to have a legitimate role in restraining them.

That does not mean common-good conservatism supplies an automatic answer to every political question. Nor does it mean that every vice should be outlawed or that government can manufacture virtue from Washington. Prudence, constitutional limits, and the dangers of state power all still matter.

But the disagreement becomes unavoidable when private choices impose diffuse social costs. Drugs, gambling, pornography, commercial surrogacy, marriage penalties, and immigration all force conservatives to confront the same underlying question. Autonomy conservatives begin with a strong presumption against coercion and generally demand evidence of direct harm to others. Common-good conservatives are more willing to ask whether an industry, institution, or policy strengthens or corrodes the social conditions upon which ordered liberty depends.

YOU CAN’T UNDERSTAND AMERICA WITHOUT THE BIBLE

The question dividing conservatives, then, is not whether liberty matters. It is whether liberty is the highest political good, or whether it must sometimes yield to the conditions that make a free society possible in the first place: strong families, social order, and a people willing to reproduce themselves.

The founders understood that distinction. Conservatives today should, too. A conservatism devoted only to maximizing individual choice may succeed in protecting liberty from government while allowing the social institutions that make liberty possible to disappear.