The rise of collectivist conservatives

Today’s Republican Party is a comedy of incompetence and strife. Yet beneath the hijinks lurks a struggle to define the proper relationship of the individual to society and to the state. If we don’t dig too deep, the fight for the soul of the conservative movement looks something like this: In the rugged individualist corner is Fox News performance artist Glenn Beck—today’s most spirited and surreal public defender of the American tradition of flinty self-reliance. In the collectivist corner is heavyweight conservative columnist David Brooks, who has used his New York Times platform to wage a relentless “scientific” campaign against what he sees as the pernicious individualism of Goldwater conservatives like Beck and Rush Limbaugh.

“Your rights as an American are individual rights,” Beck reminds us. “I feel like I need to keep saying that word so it stays in the front of your and everybody’s mind—individual, individual, individual!” To add heft to his indignant free-associative musings, Beck turns regularly to semi-pro philosophers such as Ayn Rand Institute president Yaron Brook to decry the “ideology of altruism and collectivism” before his considerable television audience.

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Will Wilkinson is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and editor of Cato Unbound. He writes on topics ranging from Social Security reform, happiness and public policy, economic inequality, and the political implications of new research in psychology and economics. He is a regular commentator on public radio's Marketplace and his writing has appeared in The Economist, Reason, Forbes, Slate, Policy, Prospect, and many other publications.