I’ve been very grateful to participate in and help shape Capita’s Common Good Pluralism project. Among the many attempts to name what has gone wrong and what might come next, Common good pluralism stands out for its seriousness and ambition. Rather than stopping at critique, it offers a positive vision centered on family and community as foundational, on shared agency, on intermediary institutions, on qualitative growth, and on leadership capable of shaping moral imagination rather than merely managing incentives. (Read more about Capita’s Common Good Lab.)

I want this project to succeed, and the reflections that follow are offered in that spirit. As I’ve been reading, discussing, and processing common good pluralism, I’ve found myself continually noticing something that’s missing: a serious discussion about liberty, power, and restrained government.

The core argument of this essay is that, if common good pluralism is going to take root as a serious governing framework, it needs to make affirmative claims about the importance of liberty as a core part of the movement.

Many Reagan-era conservatives used the phrase “ordered liberty” to describe their governing philosophy. It’s obviously out of vogue now, and for some good reasons. The political coalitions that carried it have fractured, and the social and economic outcomes it was supposed to safeguard feel distant to many people.

But I still find ordered liberty hard to shake as a framework because it captures something enduring about the problem a large, pluralistic society has to solve: how to preserve liberty in a way that allows diverse people to live together without collapsing into either chaos or coercion.

The ordering of the phrase matters. It’s ordered liberty, not liberated order. The hierarchy is clear. Liberty is paramount. Order is secondary. Order modifies liberty; it does not replace it. There is room for disagreement about how much order is necessary, what form it should take, and who should be doing the ordering. 

Liberty, in this tradition, does double duty. It is a lofty claim about human agency and the dignity of choice, conscience, and self-authorship. More relevant to the current moment, and as conceived in this essay, liberty is also a concrete and specific insistence on freedom from government coercion. Building a society necessarily involves trade-offs, and the ordered liberty view is best summed up by Benjamin Franklin’s famous (and possibly apocryphal or misinterpreted) warning: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” 

It’s worth emphasizing just how dominant this framework has been. In U.S. politics over the last 30 or 40 years, generally speaking, some version of ordered liberty was taken as the default starting point, even amid fierce disagreements about the degree of ordering and who should be doing it. Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, (especially) Bill Clinton, and (even) Barack Obama all fit broadly within the same tradition. 

They disagreed sharply about markets, welfare, regulation, and the proper scope of government action, but they largely shared the premise that individual liberty was foundational, that power should be constrained by process and institutions, and that ordering should be justified rather than assumed. This is the foundation for what some critics deride as the “uniparty.” There are differences, and important ones, within this tradition, but generally those differences have played out within a framework shared by most of the relevant actors and movements.

That consensus is clearly breaking down.

Here’s a rough taxonomy of the ascendant movements that have emerged within that breakdown, starting with two different flavors of postliberalism.

• Progressive postliberalism is a broad spectrum, but a common thread is skepticism of technocratic incrementalism and antipathy toward traditional restraints on the exercise of power. Think about ideas like packing the Supreme Court or banning fossil fuels. Much of what gets labeled as wokeness fits here as well, such as Ibram X. Kendi’s proposal for a new federal agency called the Department of Anti-Racism, with sweeping authority to identify and correct perceived injustices, largely insulated from traditional checks. 
• Conservative postliberalism is similarly broad, ranging from traditionalist religious conservatives like Patrick Deneen to culture warriors in the Christopher Rufo mold. Although they have very different substantive goals, conservative postliberals have the same governing instinct as their liberal counterparts: a comfort with using muscular state power—in this case, to enforce traditional norms and counteract perceived cultural decay.
• Then there is the movement where common good pluralism generally fits, which can be described as post-neoliberalism. This movement is generally focused on how the dominance of an intellectual paradigm that elevates markets, growth, and maximizing individual utility has crowded out other ways of thinking about society and human flourishing. 

The role of liberty—in the sense of guarding against government dominance or coercion—is largely a settled question for postliberals, and still an open one in the post-neoliberal movement. Even if adherents wouldn’t frame it this way, both conservative and liberal postliberal projects are anti-liberty in practice. You cannot seriously advocate for dystopian federal bureaus with unchecked authority or celebrate the aggressive use of state power to dismantle private institutions and reorder culture without fundamentally rejecting liberty as a governing constraint. These frameworks are inherently comfortable with coercion. 

Post-neoliberalism is neither hostile nor affirmatively supportive of liberty. The extensive Hewlett Foundation memo that arguably helped launch the current post-neoliberal project offers a rich and often compelling critique of markets, growth, and atomization, but devotes remarkably little attention to rights, coercion, or the dangers of a muscular state.

This silence is not neutral. Movements that do not explicitly defend liberty rarely preserve it by accident. If post-neoliberalism is to mature into a serious governing framework rather than just a critique, it cannot rely on residual commitments inherited from an older consensus. It has to say, clearly and affirmatively, that liberty still matters, and why.

This brings us back to the core of the ordered liberty tradition and the freedoms it exists to protect.

Freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of conscience, freedom from coercion, and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure are not neoliberal affectations, nor are they artifacts of market ideology. They exist because government power, even when well-intentioned, can be dangerous. They reflect a sober understanding of human nature and institutional failure.

This is the baby-bathwater problem of post-neoliberalism. In rejecting the model’s real failures, are we also discarding essential protections against coercion? In our eagerness to recover shared agency, meaning, and belonging, are we remembering that coerced solidarity is not solidarity at all?

To end with a concrete example, consider family policy, which is one of the most important ways common good pluralism is likely to intersect with government in practice. Proposals like expanded child care, paid family leave, and stronger support for caregivers share an explicit moral core. They reflect judgments about what matters and about the kinds of lives and relationships a healthy society should make easier to sustain.

None of this is inherently problematic. Normative judgments about the good life are an unavoidable part of any functioning civilization. When families, communities, religious institutions, or culture do this work, disagreement and exit are relatively low stakes. Norms are shaped through persuasion, example, and choice.

The core insight of ordered liberty is that it’s just different when the government makes these judgments. Supportive policies can easily turn into prescriptive ones, and expectations can harden into requirements enforced by the threat of violence. That’s why ordered liberty places such emphasis on vigilance and restraint.

If common good pluralism is going to move from lofty moral vision to concrete policy, it must incorporate that vigilance explicitly and treat liberty not as an ambient inheritance from the previous arrangement, but as a principle that actively shapes how the common good is pursued.

Jay Chaudhary is a Senior Fellow for Mental Health & Community Wellbeing at the Sagamore Institute, and a Visiting Fellow at Capita.