Right-Liberalism is a Non-Starter |
Right-Liberalism is a Non-Starter
‘Moral sovereignty’ isn’t going to cut it as a foundation for conservatism in the 2020s.
Brian Cabana | May 6, 2026
Some time ago, a dispute arose between prominent right-leaning political commentators Carl Benjamin and James Lindsay regarding what might be the crucial fault line within anti-left discourse. Lindsay holds that modern far left, in veering into ideological collectivism, has deviated from the righteous path of liberal individualism, as has the right wing in propounding nationalist collectivism. Lindsay thus affirms a type of “horseshoe theory,” where liberalism, through its championing of strict, rights-based individualism, holds the straight and narrow line between collectivist nationalism on the purported “woke right” and collectivist identity politics on the “woke left.”
Meanwhile, Carl Benjamin replies — correctly — that modern left-wing excess simply represents the natural progression of liberal premises to their logical conclusion. In support of his position, he observes that every attempt at liberal governance eventually succumbs to some variant of politically correct authoritarianism, the only question being whether they do it quickly — as did the Jacobins and the Soviets — or slowly, as in the modern liberal West.
The reason why “Lindsay liberalism” — essentially a libertarian reading of the postwar liberal consensus — is susceptible to leftward drift lies in its commitment to the principle of individual moral sovereignty. Lindsay liberals are committed moral individualists. They believe that every individual harbors a private sphere of sovereignty, within which he has an absolute right to abide by his own conscience and pursue his own ends. Public ethics has no purview over the individual’s values and actions within his private, sovereign space. Rather, public ethics serves to police the boundaries between individual zones of sovereignty, to ensure that no individual oversteps his own “rights domain” and encroaches upon the rights of others. In particular, the state has no business instituting any substantive........