For decades, “common sense” has been a convenient framing for conservative ideas, in contrast to the dangerous and alien notions favored by a liberal intellectual elite. The label hides a more complicated picture. While conservative intellectuals present their ideas as straightforward and natural, they hold onto the trappings of erudition—and maintain a specific canon—in their own counter-institutions. Higher education, they believe, should remain an exclusive undertaking.
Conservative hostility to perceived academic trends is being put to new use as Republicans pursue state and federal legislation that targets teaching they associate with “critical race theory” (the Claremont Institute has devoted a number of essays to the topic). Most of the proposals that have gained traction at the state level are focused on high school education. But in March, Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton introduced legislation to ban any teaching of critical race theory in the U.S. military.
The legislation to restrict subjects from classrooms joins a raft of proposals designed to attack universities and their financial basis more broadly. Cotton has drafted legislation to tax the endowments of private universities—except those with a “religious mission”—and distribute the revenue to vocational training programs. He frames the tax as a penalty for “indoctrinating our youth with un-American ideas.” In Florida, meanwhile, Republican senators advanced a bill that would transfer scholarship funds toward only those university degree programs that lead directly to employment.
In his recent book The Rise of Common-Sense Conservatism, historian Antti Lepistö provides some crucial backstory for how conservative intellectuals came to claim the mantle of popular opinion against an allegedly hostile intelligentsia. Starting in the 1970s, neoconservatives began to formulate arguments based on the authority of common sense. In the pages of publications like The Public Interest, writers like Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb turned from social science to moral philosophy to celebrate the intuitions of the “common man” against the bureaucrats behind the social programs of the Great Society.
This was not a natural move for self-identified conservatives, who inherited a tradition skeptical of untutored popular democracy. To justify common sense, Kristol and Himmelfarb turned to philosophers like Adam Smith and David Hume, refashioning theories of moral psychology descended from the Scottish Enlightenment to advance their critiques of contemporary social policy and the welfare state. These eighteenth-century thinkers had developed a system to explain how everyday moral intuitions fit within and even sustained the commercial exchanges of an emerging capitalist economy. In essays like “Adam Smith and the Spirit of Capitalism” (1976), Kristol presented these arguments about common sense morals and free commerce to a readership growing hostile toward liberal social engineering.