A common refrain in some precincts of the self-styled “New Right” is that conservatives of the Reagan/Buckley tradition focus too much on “neutral principles” instead of directly promoting the conservative vision of virtue and the good society. On some level, this is a charge that goes back to Brent Bozell’s 1962 critique of Frank Meyer. And it surely contains an element of truth, as well as a grain of important wisdom: We should never lose the capacity to argue for right and justice and virtue against wrong and injustice and evil, and a society that loses all virtue and faith will ultimately be unable to sustain any political or social principle.

But it is often the case that these critiques dissolve under scrutiny of what conservatives already believe and what the New Right proposes to replace them with. There are two big reasons for that. One is that the New Right critics frequently fail to grasp the difference between legal and political arguments, or between political and cultural arguments. The other is that they fail to grasp how the “neutral principles” are, in fact, things of value in themselves.

This is one of those cases. Nate Hochman argues at the American Spectator that “parents’ rights” is a neutral principle that conservatives don’t and shouldn’t value except as a means to an end:

Neither the parents’ rights movement nor the conservatives who support it are really devoted to parents’ rights, at least as abstract concepts, even if they may be personally convinced that they are. In truth, they are devoted to certain parental rights in certain contexts and staunchly opposed in many others…No one, least of all conservatives, truly believes in absolute “parental rights”; in fact, in the abstract, many of the initiatives championed by the parents’ movement — i.e., bans on sex-change surgeries — actually restrict parental freedom. What we’re debating, in these contexts, is not really parents’ rights at all, but rather a vision of what society is and should be…

Conservatives would be well-served to understand and embrace this rather than to retreat into the warm, comfortable fog of abstraction. We have a vision of what a good society looks like, and we would like our laws to both reflect and encourage that which we think is good — and discourage that which we think is bad. Our vision includes the parental right to object to obscene material in classrooms; it does not include the parental right to mutilate children’s bodies. That’s because we are for good things and against bad things — preserving childhood innocence is good, and mutilating children is bad. Too often, conservatives are loath to speak the language of morality at all, opting instead for amoral frameworks that, in turn, corrupt their political understanding.

Hochman’s current example is the Florida social-media age-limits law signed by Governor Ron DeSantis. The law bans kids under 14 from having social media accounts, and requires parental permission for 14- and 15-year-olds. The law thus overrides the rights of parents to permit younger kids to use social media. Hochman doesn’t actually cite any conservatives objecting to this on principle. Instead, he uses a quote from a libertarian who objects that a more consistent view of absolute parental rights would in all cases leave parents in charge of when their kids can join social media. He also favorably cites progressives and Democrats (including Jamelle Bouie — not the best company for a conservative to join) arguing that the neutral principle of parental rights is a disingenuous smoke screen and, in Bouie’s words (which Hochman endorses) “not about all parents and all children and all the rights they might have.”.

Now, I’ll put my own cards on the table about this specific issue: philosophically and legally, I am in favor of banning kids, preteens, and even young teens from social media. The constitutional case against doing so is hogwash. That said, I’m deeply skeptical of laws such as this one because in order to function, they require an intrusive partnership between government and Big Tech to collect, deploy, and verify private, personal information in ways that are highly likely to produce undesirable and unintended consequences. Emma Camp at Reason observes: “While the bill does not specify how exactly social media sites should verify a customer’s age, with such large consequences for violating the law, it’s likely that companies will require customers to hand over their government ID, submit to a facial scan, or otherwise hand over sensitive information.” It’s good that the Florida legislature hasn’t itself created the monster here, but it has effectively ordered the tech giants to do so. We are likely to regret what this produces.

But are parental rights really just a hollow abstraction? I’d say no, and Hochman doesn’t really make the case that they are. He concedes that strong families are a bulwark against totalitarian governments, and are despised for that reason by statists, but in assessing the value of the family, Hochman lapses into utilitarianism:

As Nisbet alludes to, the “mediating institutions” that sit in the space between the state and the individual — the family, the church, the community centers, parochial schools, and so on — are the basis of civic virtue. For those institutions to flourish, the political regime must allow them a wide sphere of freedom. In this sense, parental freedom is a cornerstone of a good society. But the “freedom” is the means; the “good” is the end.

There is something very important missing here: The family is a good in itself. Its very existence is one of the ends for which we constitute a society and a civilization. It is more important to most people than politics or civic health. The duty of parents to bring up their children, and of parents to obey them, is deeply grounded in Christian and other faiths; from the Fourth Commandment forward, it is emphasized throughout the Bible. Catholic men are instructed in the model of St. Joseph for that reason. Strong parental authority over the upbringing of children is one of the things that parents value and children need and deserve. That’s why it’s long been recognized as fundamental to our laws, even when that meant giving parents broad latitude to bring up kids in ideas, faiths, and languages that the majority mistrusts or disapproves of. To say that conservatives value parental rights and parental authority is not to say that conservatives are obsessed with some stale procedural formula but that we treasure what matters most.

Of course, parental rights are not absolute; an essential part of conservatism is the realistic recognition that there are tradeoffs in everything, and we are often in the position where more than one good or right is in conflict. It’s not surprising that Bouie can’t or won’t grasp that concept, but Hochman should. Thus, for example, parents do not have unlimited rights to kill, maim, or batter their children or sell them into slavery. Thus, for example, society overrides the rights of parents when there are a number of things that kids just can’t legally do until they’re adults — where they aren’t considered legally competent to consent, and nobody else can consent for them.

But we talk in those terms precisely in order to have a framework for thinking through and explaining why we are limiting the presumptive and usual rights and authority of parents over their children. It’s not just a matter of saying “we tolerate parents’ rights until the instant they do something we disagree with.” The space in which the family operates should be a wide one, just as conservatives believe broadly in wide spaces for individual liberty and private, civil society and its communal institutions to function.

I’d extend this way of thinking to a lot of the things that voices on the New Right deride. The American way – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the rule of written law, our whole system of how to decide things for our society — is a good in itself, and conserving that system has value in itself. It is our patrimony, handed us by our ancestors at great price, deeply woven into our society, and proven successful, durable, and superior to all others over almost two and a half centuries of experience.

Religious liberty is likewise a good in itself even if it doesn’t lead everyone to truth because it enables man’s search for the divine to be a voluntary act of free will. Individual liberty is a good in itself even if it doesn’t always result in virtuous citizens because it promotes human dignity and self-reliance, and allows for the pursuit of that greater virtue that comes when virtue is freely chosen. Liberty, like democracy, is valuable as a means to an end, but also has a value of its own, just as the family does. The things conservatives are tasked to conserve are not just the proper instruction of individual virtue and the outward signs of a good society, but the rules, hierarchies, systems, and institutions that we recognize from the wisdom of experience (and, in some cases, from divine revelation) to be conducive to those things.