Conservatism Is Not Individualism

I graduated from college last weekend. Accomplishing something draws on individual effort, social benevolence, and serendipity (some call it God’s grace) resulting in a strange mixture of credit due to a graduate, their family, and faith. As Americans, we are raised with a mindset of rugged individualism, which can often go to unreasonable lengths. When President Obama’s recognition that infrastructure is a necessary condition to the economic prosperity America currently enjoys, the right-wing outrage and backlash demonstrated how dearly this precept is held. Oftentimes, those being introduced to the two-party American system are taught that liberals emphasize collective responsibility and conservatives hold people individually responsible. This dichotomy, when pushed too far, does conservatism a disservice.

Conservatism opposes universal, outsourced collective responsibility with engaged, personal community responsibility. When a liberal claims that as a society we owe each member access to health care, the conservative responds not that we owe each other nothing, but that we all long to belong to communities where we care for each other. The conservative solution is a community fundraiser put on by a sick man’s friends and family, neither bureaucracy nor autonomy.

We are born with responsibilities not only to ourselves, but our families. Our families sustain us selflessly for years before we can even pretend to be self-sustaining individuals. The stable social soil of a family and community create the bounded realm of liberty within which one can attempt to grow into a good person. Conservatives become unreasonable, unpleasant, and downright ungrateful when they ignore these innate debts because they fear that acknowledged dependence on one another would lead to dependence on the government. Serving our communities in civil society is the best antidote to the sterile indignities of collective care. We should be able to admit that “we didn’t build that” alone; but we should also be able to name those who helped.

Milestone events like a graduation tend to bring together all the important people in your life from disparate spheres of your community. Your aunt with whom you can be truly honest about family struggles, your collegiate best friend and support system, your academic competitors and inspirations, and the guiding faculty join your nuclear family to celebrate the culmination of your life goal up to this point: to be come a well-educated, well-formed human being. I was reminded of the breadth and depth of influential relationships in my life and felt truly blessed. I did not earn my college degree by myself but it is very much my responsibility what I do with it.