Conservatives love to present themselves as defenders of the ideal of personal responsibility. According to a common trope, the Right believes that people should take charge of their own lives and that individuals should receive the rewards — or punishment — that accrue to them as the result of their actions. Liberals and leftists, on the other hand, don’t believe in personal responsibility: they supposedly promote a culture of people blaming others for their problems, constantly playing the victim and expecting “handouts” from the more virtuous and more productive.

The theme of personal responsibility is a favorite of right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, to take just one example. Shapiro champions what he calls “Judeo-Christian philosophy,” which “demands that we do our best and that we act virtuously on the individual level so that we can feel secure without invading each other’s rights. The Judeo-Christian tradition says that with freedom comes responsibility.” Left-wing “collectivist” philosophies, on the other hand,

expect us to give our individual striving up. All we have to do is trade our individual responsibility for the comfort of collective power. . . .  We can avoid that [individual] struggle by handing over all power to a nanny state.