The capacity of the reactionary mind to invent catchall signifiers of supposed left-wing depravity often seems limitless. But in the canon of conservative epithets, there is probably none more common or enduring than “collectivism.” Spend any time immersing yourself in reactionary writing or literature and you quickly discover that collectivism can be virtually anything. Taxation and regulation are collectivist. So are social welfare programs, trade unions, and Medicare. The various mid-twentieth-century experiments in economic planning were collectivist, as was Keynesian economics. These days, the term is frequently invoked in reference to identity politics.

In the 1960s, Milton Friedman could be heard warning that the collectivist menace was on the march, and “welfare rather than freedom” had become “the dominant note” — not only throughout the Eastern Bloc but also in the world’s liberal democracies. Today, the Daily Wire warns us that collectivism is “the most broadly promoted theme throughout courses at America’s highest ranked colleges and universities.” The National Review, meanwhile, finds it rampant in the ranks of a leadership class that seeks to “make group identity the dominant category in our thinking about and practice of politics.” The Mises Institute, for its part, deems modern progressivism a “collectivist, anti-individual” philosophy out to “destroy civilization itself.”

Collectivism can thus be liberal or socialist, modern or postmodern, economic or completely unrelated to material realities. It is a scourge infecting America’s academic and political institutions, and a defective pathology peculiar to intellectual and cultural elites. Though you’d be hard-pressed to find any deeper consistency at work here — if twenty-first-century Ivy League progressivism and the USSR are ultimately traceable to the same thing, these words might as well mean anything — there is nonetheless a unifying principle.