The conservative movement has spent thirty years winning every abstract constitutional argument it set out to win, and not a single one of those victories has kept a rural parish open or a local hardware store solvent. Ramesh Ponnuru, in his National Review essay and Freedom Conservatism Conference speech, urges “freedom conservatives” to remember that “it is a time of tax cuts,” “a time of constitutional reclamation,” and “a time when school choice has expanded much faster and further” than in previous decades — a catalogue of procedural triumphs that, taken together, amount to a quiet confession that the movement has substituted argument for stewardship and called the substitution conservatism.

Let me grant the strongest version of Ponnuru’s argument, because it is stronger than most of what passes for conservative thought in this moment and deserves to be taken seriously. He is right that the Supreme Court’s originalist majority has delivered genuine structural victories: on religious freedom, on racial preferences, on the administrative state’s reach. He is right that school choice creates space for traditionalist families that a monopoly system foreclosed. And he is right, in a way his own side rarely admits, that some of the economic frustrations young people feel are “justifiable responses to the ways that government policies have made housing, health care, and higher education too expensive.” That is an honest concession, and it is more than most of his colleagues will grant.

But the beam in the freedom conservative’s eye is not complacency about climate or Pollyannaism about the economy. It is something far more fundamental. The movement he has spent his career defending has presided over the single greatest dissolution of family, community, place, and settled work in American history, and it has done so while winning every argument Ponnuru catalogs. The tax cuts arrived and the town kept emptying. The originalist justices were confirmed and the parish kept closing. School choice expanded and the VFW post on Main Street sat hollow — the last of the older wars’ veterans dead, the younger ones who came home too wounded to fill the chairs — while no one in Washington or New York had any reason to care. The victory Ponnuru celebrates is a victory in a courtroom while the community the law was built to defend dissolved under the very market forces his movement lionized and the very financialization his movement’s donors perfected.

I know this particular blindness from the inside, because I once lived inside its economic analogue. I traded agricultural futures in a Chicago tower, watching the corn as a number on a screen, breathing air that didn’t smell like soil, betting on the price of a crop grown by people exactly like the neighbors I had left behind. The distance between the futures pit and the field has never been measured in miles. It is measured in moral attention. And the freedom conservative’s legal and economic architecture has the same quality: it is a beautiful, internally coherent system of abstract rules that never asks what is happening to the concrete institutions those rules were supposed to protect. The removal power Ponnuru’s allies defend in the courts will not stop a hedge fund from buying the only nursing home in a county and billing the residents’ estates for the privilege of extracting the equity. The school-choice victory he celebrates will not reopen the hardware store that closed when the local bank was acquired by a regional chain that answers to shareholders in Charlotte. The tax cut will not restore the family dairy farm that sold its herd because the milk price collapsed under the weight of a consolidated supply chain that answers to a single snack-food conglomerate.

The deepest failure in Ponnuru’s essay is his treatment of community as a pleasant backdrop to the real work of constitutional argument, rather than as the thing the argument exists to defend. He writes of “social cohesion” as a desirable condition for self-government, and he worries that high immigration levels might strain it. But cohesion is not an abstract quality a nation possesses or lacks; it is built, brick by brick, in the parish hall and the co-op boardroom and the VFW post and the sidewalk outside the local bank. And every one of those institutions has been hollowed out, not by immigration — which he treats with a careful balance I respect — but by the very economic forces his movement has spent a generation defending as the price of freedom. The private-equity fund that bought the nursing home did not come from abroad. The consolidation that turned a thousand independent dairy farms into a dozen corporate potato plantations did not require a single immigrant to cross a border. The regional bank that closed the local branch and moved its decision-making to a distant headquarters was not responding to a lax visa policy. The dissolution Ponnuru cannot see is the dissolution his own side engineered, and it happened on his own side’s watch, with his own side’s philosophical blessing.

The way out is not a different set of constitutional arguments. It is the cooperative, the mutual, the member-owned firm that can survive whatever the Supreme Court does to the administrative state. The credit union on East Lake Street in Friendship — thirty-one thousand member-owners, one vote each — keeps capital circulating inside the county regardless of whether the Fed governor is removable at will. The organic dairy co-op in La Farge sets its own price and keeps a hundred farm families on the land, no matter how the Court rules on the Appointments Clause. Those institutions are the real bulwark against the concentrated power the freedom conservative claims to fear, and they are built not in the marble halls of Washington but in the county board rooms and the church basements where the movement once had its roots. They are the distributed answer that centralizes nothing, and they are the only kind of victory that will still be standing when the tax cuts have been spent and the courtroom arguments are forgotten.