Gentle Individualism, Rugged Communitarianism

As we enter the 250th year of America’s existence as a liberal society, it's time to shout our values from the rooftops.

When the war closed [WWI], the most vital of issues both in our own country and around the world was whether governments should continue their wartime ownership and operation of many instrumentalities of production and distribution. We were challenged with a choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of diametrically opposed doctrines of paternalism and state socialism.
—Herbert Hoover

We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.
—Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York

Mindwar creates false binaries. I don’t know who coined the phrase “rugged individualism,” but surely there is something gentle in respecting the person and property of every individual. No doubt, there is a ruggedness to making one’s way in the world without government goodies and nationalized industries, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Nowadays, the phrase is almost always used sardonically.

I also don’t see how communitarianism ever got associated with what government authorities ought to do, but community is not something that state officials can compel. The charge of American “atomism” has always been something of a straw man flogged by socialists.

Just ask Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote:

Americans of all ages, of every condition and disposition, are constantly forming associations. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which everyone takes part, but they also have associations of a thousand other kinds—religious, moral, serious, trivial, very general and very particular, immense and very small. They form associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to erect churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the ends of the earth; and in this way they create hospitals, prisons, and schools.

Civic participation, a la communitarians such as Michael Sandel, too often stands in for politics: the Church of State. In other words, being critical of the limits of the market sphere is one thing. Operationalizing your critique is quite another.

When state proxies attempt to force a community into existence through redistribution and economic planning, collectivism is the result. Collectivism is, after all, a term for forced redistribution by a violence monopoly. Political means (top down) are not the same as communitarian means (bottom up).

Community slowly dies in collectivism, which involves neither warmth nor gentleness. Every person concerned with the good should therefore reject the false binary above and embrace gentle individualism and rugged communitarianism.

Gentle Individualism

With gentle individualism, we treat persons not as milk cows or human ATMs but as people pursuing happiness. Instead of pointing guns at them, we appeal to their compassion or commercial instincts, but leave them to live their conception of the good in peace.

Contrary to the narratives of snakes like Mayor Mamdani, individualism is not about stepping over the weak to grab some golden ring; it is an acknowledgement that the individual is the primary unit of decision-making, and each person’s life is made up of a series of decisions.

Like grains in an hourglass, our choices are scarce. Every decision has an opportunity cost. Each of us creates good and pursues happiness in different ways, so unless others are harming someone, we must leave them to their pursuits. There is gentleness, indeed warmth, in that acknowledgement.

The most productive members of society were not put on this earth to be victims of ideologues and their running dogs. Entrepreneurs and investors are stewards of capital. Their success as good stewards ought not be punished, any more than redistributionists should continuously reward idleness and cultural decay. We ought carefully to appeal to others’ sense of charity when we ask them to deploy capital to something other than wealth creation in society.

Gentle individualism is about persuasion, not compulsion.

Rugged Communitarianism

With rugged communitarianism, each finds her way to community. This process can be iterative and imperfect, but the goal is to discover the interdependencies we choose as gentle individualists. No doubt, human beings are interdependent. But the bulk of our interdependencies can be captured in the cold calculation of warm customer service. People who engage in sustainable patterns of production and trade create and distribute wealth, indeed, as if by an invisible hand. Those who refuse to engage in entrepreneurial markets are usually net consumers.

A society of net consumers is a dying society.

But there are those among us who, despite finding dignity in work, struggle to stay ahead. In our compassion, we should form communities to assist. Mutual aid is not a government program, however. It’s the product of people with common interests, needs, or mission working together—freely—to lift each other when they fall. That’s how community works. It’s not a redistribution-and-disbursement algorithm run by predators and parasites in Washington.

It’s real people helping people in better ways.

Yes, there is a certain ruggedness to the process of community self-organization, but very little good can be achieved by appeal to the Department of Gimme Gimme, much less by handing taxpayers the tab. Charity and community are far more organic, effective, and ethical than collectivism.

Who We Are

As we enter the 250th year of America’s existence as a liberal society—not liberal as in collectivist, liberal as in concerned with human freedom—we must shout our values from the rooftops: gentle individualism and rugged communitarianism.

When you are good at serving others by creating customer value, you are engaging sustainable patterns of production and trade (wealth creation). When you are good at getting together with others in your community to make your community stronger—perhaps to lend a hand to the least advantaged—you are practicing morality. Saying you support another government program is not a moral practice. It is a cheap opinion. It is laziness or selfishness masquerading as compassion.

Let’s enter 2026 by telling the world who we are.

We are both wealth creators and compassionate actors. We are gentle individualists and rugged communitarians.