In a March essay for The Atlantic, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule argued that the American right should abandon constitutional originalism for “common-good constitutionalism,” a legal approach aimed unapologetically at establishing a conservative moral order. “The Court’s jurisprudence on free speech, abortion, sexual liberties, and related matters will prove vulnerable under a regime of common-good constitutionalism,” he declared. “The claim, from the notorious joint opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that each individual may ‘define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life’ should be not only rejected but stamped as abominable, beyond the realm of the acceptable forever after.” Instead, he wrote, our beliefs should be handed to us by a state given broad authority “to protect the public’s health and well-being” and “the weak from pandemics and scourges of many kinds—biological, social, and economic—even when doing so requires overriding the selfish claims of individuals to private ‘rights.’”
All told, the essay is less a serious entry in longstanding scholarly debates over constitutional interpretation than an important document in the literature of an emerging conservative nationalism—a faction on the right set on upending pluralism and liberalism as the ideological frameworks governing American society. While conservative Christians have traditionally grounded their politics in the idea that the Constitution is inseparable from Christian theology, figures like Vermeule, The New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari, and First Things’ R.R. Reno are pushing a social conservatism that elides the Constitution entirely. The tension between individual rights and the dream of a pious country, they argue, should be resolved simply by suppressing or destroying individual rights altogether.
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