Thread by @AmSolidarity

This poll a good example of what often passes for conservatism in this country.

It has such an impoverished understanding of liberty that it can't conceive of anything between "I do what I want" and communism.

Edmund Burke, often considered the founder of conservatism as a political philosophy, had this to say:

"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites."

Guess he should have subscribed to Prager U.

The truth is that neither of the duopoly parties in this country have a remotely adequate understanding of how our individual rights should be balanced with responsibilities to serve the common good.

A lot of our problems as a nation are expressed by this graph.

Republicans routinely elevate the abstract right to property over concern for the well-being of our neighbors.

Democrats routinely elevate the abstract right to personal autonomy over social cohesion and even over respect for life itself.

There's an idea out there that politics is a spectrum between everything being about the individual and everything being about the state.

This is a scam. Statism and individualism are two sides of the same coin.

What do they leave out?

Families. Local communities. Churches and other religious institutions. Civil society. The things that bind us together on a human scale.

Government can support those vital institutions in the middle.

It also cannot replace them.

The market can't replace them either.

Over the long term, what we've seen is the constant expansion of both capitalist enterprise and state bureaucracies.

What's gotten weaker: families, local communities, churches, and civil society.

We have a society where you can have products from across the world delivered to your door in hours, and in which fewer people than ever say they have a real friend they can talk to.

Perhaps we made a wrong turn somewhere.

If you want to read more about this, check out our friend @PatrickDeneen 's book "Why Liberalism Failed."

If you want a candidate who supports an economy and a society oriented toward human dignity and the common good, we humbly ask for your vote for @BrianCarrollASP.