Live and Let Die: Conservative Liberalism and Collective Goods

Describe your ideal world.

In my ideal world, we would have lots of collective goods. A short list would include a healthy culture, a fair economy, a strong religion, a clean environment, excellent public health, strong borders, strong families and a positive sense of ethnic identity. We would be able to feel at home in our own countries again because our coherent nations would be run for our benefit as a place for our descendants to flourish. We would also have individual liberty, but it would be fenced in within these boundaries.

Now, let me ask you a simple question: is it possible to attain any of these collective goods under the paradigm of conservative liberalism and libertarianism which comprise the mainstream liberal Right? Both of these varieties of rightwing liberalism are built on individualism, selfishness, secularism and materialism. They both hold as a matter of principle that individual liberty is the highest and only good in life. They believe that constitutional government exists to protect that good and no others.

This is where I part ways with the rightwing liberals. While I grant that individual liberty is a good, I do not believe it is the only good. I do not believe that the government exists solely to protect individual liberty. In fact, I believe individual liberty can lead to a miserable dystopia when taken to absurd extremes. I believe in limiting individual liberty in order to balance it with other collective goods. If I could trade excessive individual liberty and equality for more ethnic and cultural cohesion, I would do it in a heartbeat.

The coronavirus pandemic has sharpened and highlighted the division between the liberal Right and the non-liberal Right. The liberal Right simply does not believe in collective goods like public health, worker safety and preserving the environment. It only pretends to believe in collective goods like “family values” or “strong borders” to win elections. It never fails to prioritize and cater to business interests after the elections are over. In contrast, the non-liberal Right is horrified by the idea of allowing a raging epidemic to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans while simultaneously devastating the economy.

How can the economy flourish if the coronavirus becomes endemic in the United States? Why would anyone believe the economy can flourish with a sick and less productive workforce with staggering medical bills? Why would anyone believe that consumers wouldn’t alter their behavior to avoid getting and spreading the virus? Why should an individual have the right to essentially poison the rest of society? From even a sheer cost/benefit perspective, does allowing an individual to poison the rest of society even make economic sense? Haven’t we reaped vast economic benefits from previous generations eradicating infectious diseases like yellow fever and malaria? If those diseases had not been eradicated by public health measures in the 20th century, could we ever have developed large swathes of our country? What about our national parks? Haven’t we also reaped vast economic benefits from preserving the environment?

We are radicalized moderates, not extremists. None of the things that we believe in are “extreme.” It is the liberal Right that is “extreme” because it only values one good. Healthy people have a positive sense of identity, identify with other people in their tribe and community and feel connected to and invested in its past and future. This is normal for all human beings. It is “conservative” to want to preserve your inheritance as a birthright for future generations. It is “liberal” to want to transform your nation into an economic zone for it can become a playground for the wealthy. It is “liberal” to be a rootless wanderer with massive psychological problems who bounces around the country like a pinball to market forces to consume material goods. It is “liberal” not to care about anyone else in your community but only to think about yourself. Similarly, the liberal Left only cares about equality, which is why it revolts against nature because it is unable to accept the limits of human biology. It is two sides of the same coin.

It is true that we believe in diminishing and reducing the scope of individual liberty and equality in order to create a better and healthier society by elevating other collective goods. By having a cohesive nation with strong borders, we are limiting the freedom of the wealthy to exploit foreign labor. By protecting the family, we are limiting the freedom of spouses to dissolve marriages on a whim. By banning the pornographers, we are limiting the freedom of women to sell lewd images to their beta orbiters on the internet. Virtually everything that we want and need to do as a society puts us at odds with rightwing and leftwing liberals who oppose us for wanting to reverse the worst excesses of liberalism.

I’m ready to leave them to their rights and liberties and their truths and conspiracies. None of it is worth what we have traded in order to live out their awful vision of a good society.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

25 Comments

  1. Oh yes, a healthy country, economy, culture, etc, while Mommy Hunter has everyone locked in their houses… what a load of horsehit

    • I’m not sure how you can have any of those things under liberalism.

      If you know how that is possible, please explain. How can you have a healthy economy and country with a raging epidemic? What is the cost to the economy of a sick workforce and hospitalizations alone? Not to mention hundreds of thousands of deaths.

      • Conservatism, Inc. is just one big grift. These “conservative” bastards haven’t conserved anything, and they never intend to either. They have sold off U.S. citizenship and the industrial base and have proposed selling off Social Security and the National Parks. This would supposedly allow individuals to reap the benefit of the ever increasing stock market and provide more money for improvements to the parks without costing the taxpayer a dime.

        In real life people would blow their Social Security money on the stock market, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo and all the other Wall Street crooks would eat up the money then the market would crash leaving old people destitute. Good for the Usual Suspects, bad for everyone else. The politicians would take their cut too, naturally.

        National Parks like Yellowstone would be so expensive they would become exclusive playgrounds for the wealthy like Aspen or Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Locals would not be allowed in except to work at shit jobs. Luxurious estates would dot what had been wilderness leaving the scumbag class that ruined the country living in wealthy isolation and splendor.

        Many of this new class of filthy rich would be Third World wogs who got rich off of fleecing the wogs in their own country, too. These are the people Trump, Rush, Hannity and the Republicans admire, the slimy financial types like the ones on CNBC. They think there is something heroic about amassing a fortune.

    • “Oh yes, a healthy country, economy, culture, etc, while Mommy Hunter has everyone locked in their houses… what a load of horsehit”

      Beside the point. A healthy country, economy and culture are relics of the past in Jewish-occupied USA. What Brad and those of his mindset are belligerently ignoring is said occupation has not drawn a self-imposed line in the sand at the doors of the CDC and Bristol-Meyers Squibb. Whether this is an outright gay-op, seizing on a crisis for malicious agendas, or just straight up bungled by the authorities, the fact remains that those authorities do not have our best interest in mind, and have proven their corruption and ill intentions in the medical-industrial sphere beyond a reasonable doubt. The results of ignoring this fundamental fact will be disastrous.

    • You can just compare the health of all those things in the USA vs Taiwan. Or pretty much anywhere else in East Asia where gross individualism is non-existent for the most part, so people don’t complain about being inconvenienced if it’s for the benefit of the group.

  2. My ideal world? Unmarried and childless, drinking margaritas with ramz paul and Matt Forney in the Philippines. That’s what makes life worth living.

  3. Sites like National Review have no significant audience and the “conservative liberalism” you speak of is more or less, at the national level, a collection of vague prejudices dressed with some crude rhetoric and back-filled with a few “historical” pretensions. The only real audience for that stuff are the party functionaries, who do not read it to inform themselves but rather to understand what they’re supposed to say to the voting rabble. So when they talk about “individual liberty” being the highest good, they aren’t speaking about any sort of freedom our ancestors would have recognized, but rather about Jews and other criminals and con-men doing whatever they want, winking at each other pretending they’re in Galt’s Gulch as they decry anyone who says anything that might limit in any way the power of the Jews to do anything to anyone of us they choose. They are not liberals, they are deadly enemies.

    • The highest good of capitalism is the practice of usury, by a few at the expense of the many, not individual freedom for all. It is not a system of “fair exchange,” or of “supplying demand,” but of buying cheap and selling dear, and of monopolization that forces people to take what they are given, not giving them what they want or need.

      Now, forget everything you thought you knew about socialism, or national socialism….

      • As the college professors say, under capitalism firms “maximize profits”. An older term for this destructive behavior: greed.

  4. The conservatarian doesn’t even care what happens to his own immediate family, he’d happily abort his inconvenient child or euthanize a parent. Imagine how much less he thinks of his extended family—his race.

    And as much as the American reflexively objects to the idea, legal free speech needs to be better defined by a government. Liberal ideas can’t be implemented without incredible amounts of violence, therefore they shouldn’t be covered as free speech, any more than me saying “hey we should go out and do something to so and so”.

    Racial integration? Causes mass murder of Whites: not free speech.
    Feminism? Causes mass murder of the unborn:
    not free speech.

  5. One of the best and most succinct takedowns of liberty for liberty’s sake. Agree with everything 100%

  6. “is it possible to attain any of these collective goods under the paradigm of conservative liberalism and libertarianism which comprise the mainstream liberal Right?”

    …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

    I don’t know, Sir, but there is one thing I do know : ———– there is no system, nor combination of systems, which could produce a good result with such a level of corruption as exists in Washington D.C.

    In Tucker Carlson’s recent book, ‘Ship of Fools’, he very cogently address this matter, much as he has every night on TV, for a very long time.

    The reality is that we have many good laws, but, they are flouted, not just by a few individuals, some of the time, but, systemically by many politicians.

    There is a deficit of character in The United States’ Government, and legislation will not be the remedy to make that go away.

    • @Jimmy…

      “We need a new political party and new political leaders, the Radical Worker Party”

      Yes, Jimmy, so long as we are together in this current configuration, we do need viable 3rd, 4th, and 5th parties in this country.

  7. I’ll tell you my ideal world, Brad.

    In my ideal world, the United States and our European brothers and sisters would have total sovereignty over their homelands. International Jewish finance capitalism would have met its demise in 1945, and as a result our white nations would be operating the healthcare system in a manner that serves the public well-being, rather than for the purposes of fattening Shlomo’s bank account and destroying countless white lives in the process. Rather than deadly vaccines, pharmaceuticals that create more problems than they fix, and manufactured health crises such as your beloved coronachan, white European altruism would define this facet of society. Problem, reaction, solution would not be a methodology employed by the authorities we trust with our lives.

    Alas, we presently live in an inversion of this world I have described. Masters of the art of inversion that they are, the Jews have somehow made this a blind spot for you and countless others on the dissident right, despite decades of evidence and the obvious that is right under your nose every single day. Because of this blind spot you have, you are playing RIGHT into the kosher dialectic they have created with this latest manufactured crisis. But even worse, you are affording these people (and I use that term very loosely) a level of trust and benefit of the doubt that causes irreparable harm to our greater cause. The occupying authorities do not spare any segment of our society of their evil, and the fact that idiotic boomer conservative types are distrustful in this instance is TOTALLY irrelevant to the larger point. You play kosher dialectic games with Qtards while I and others are remaining consistent in our skepticism and yes, hostility, to the medical-industrial-complex. That position has not changed one iota with coronachan, not in cause nor effect.

    I hope you’re not working with the feds as was suggested on Unz, and I hope you see the error of your ways here.

  8. Michael Hudson has a good exposé on the Covid19 bailout scam over at Unz Review. My apologies for diverting readership, but his work is meritorious.

  9. Russia is also failing spectacularly at controlling the pandemic due to the even worse disease of “Neoliberalism” (capitalism). The Oligarchs, and even Putin himself, all fervently believe in the U.S.’s economic system (as President Calvin Coolidge said “the business of America is business”). Hence, Russia’s “Covid game of elites”: https://southfront.org/russias-covid-game-of-elites/

  10. is it possible to attain any of these collective goods under the paradigm of conservative liberalism and libertarianism which comprise the mainstream liberal Right?

    Yes, it is possible to obtain all of those collective goods within the paradigm of conservative liberalism and even, to some degree, “libertarianism” depending on the definition.

    The “problem” has never been an ideology. Ideologies hardly matter. Most of the problems you cite have to do with the foreign cabal that runs our institutions, most specifically, the media.

    The didn’t use “liberalism” to gain control of those institutions.

    “Liberalism” is a giant red herring. But it’s an easy scapegoat because the real problem is very taboo to discuss.

  11. Ronald Reagan – the OG of the Liberal Right. This excellent article is exactly the way I have felt decades – it is one of the reasons I have not voted since 1988.

  12. Great article. The solution is for Brad to be my neighbor. And so on. Done with politics, I’m voting OUT the fool who ignored this for months. There is no right wing conspiracy in the world that Trumps common sense.

  13. An Austrian painter chose to have the nation’s economy serve the people, which is the antithesis of the capitalist pigs version.

  14. Brad,

    It is when you write something spot-on like this that I come back to your site and remember why I started reading your material in the first place.

    This article sums up precisely why I bothered to put on a polo and khakis and drive to Charlottesville. This is why I dove into the “alt right”. All of the above.

    The only complaint I have is that your view tends to (or seems to) be heavier handed towards (normie) people who call themselves conservatives than it is toward (normie) liberals. I truly believe there is a vast difference between the rank and file Republican or “Libertarian” voter vs the leadership, politicians, and media pundits who speak for the party in public. I believe that 75-80% of Republican and Libertarian voters choose the GOP as the “lesser of two evils” because they deeply sense the wrongness of liberal “equality for all”. They only reason they don’t move toward dissident right politics in droves is because they literally have no viable candidates to vote for and feel powerless. They are also scared, because there are no social rewards for joining the dissident right.

    I really wish that you could vocalize the truth in what I’m saying more. The fact is, the people I know in my local southern community who vote Republican are head and shoulders above the people who vote Democrat. They are generally salt of the earth types, and probably wouldn’t disagree with much you said in this article when pressed to voice their real opinions. They feel like they’re in a no-win scenario, because to vote with the democrats invariable means to vote for a bigger welfare state that supports our ethnic and racial competition rather than US.

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