A little over a year ago, President Clinton vetoed the first partial-birth abortion bill. The bill would have made it illegal for doctors to perform a procedure in which a fetus, usually in its final weeks of gestation, is completely delivered but for the head, whereupon the doctor inserts a needle into the skull and sucks out the brain fluids, thereby crushing the head and aborting the baby. The bill, which would not have curtailed a woman’s access to other, somewhat less gruesome procedures for dealing with unwanted pregnancies in the second and third trimesters, thus represented but a minor limit on “choice”—a limit that some traditional liberals, like Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, were willing to accept. But not President Clinton, who declared his intention to veto the bill again if Congress were to pass it in the same form.
Yet only a few months after vetoing last year’s version of the bill, President Clinton signed a bill ending the half-century-old entitlement to welfare. No longer would the poor have a right, guaranteed by the federal government, to a basic standard of living. What is more, Clinton signed the bill over the protests of many traditional liberals, again including Senator Moynihan, who predicted it would force a third of a million children onto the streets.
What was going on here? Were these two decisions merely tactical, examples of that famous process of “triangulation” whereby the President zigs and zags in order to position himself in the politically popular center? That could not be. Since both bills were favored by the majority of Americans, sheer triangulation would have dictated that Clinton sign them both. Alternatively, triangulation mixed with a bit of old-time liberal ideology would have dictated that he give way on partial-birth abortion but veto the welfare bill (as undoubtedly a President Moynihan would have done). That he did the opposite suggests that the President was responding not to focus groups and polls but to something deeper that characterizes our historical moment. Although the partial-birth abortion debate continues—and Bill Clinton is a notoriously slippery politician—that “something” transcends the particular circumstances of particular bills and goes straight to the heart of modern liberalism.
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Facing the conditions produced by industrialism in the late 19th century, and spurred on as well by the utopian promises of Marxism and socialism, liberals in this century devised a whole complex of policies whose goal was social and economic security. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) would protect investors against banking panics; Social Security would provide for the elderly; Project Head Start, a subsidiary of the War on Poverty, would help disadvantaged preschoolers. The climax of this secular trend, which informed both ideological and party politics from the time of the Progressives through the New Deal and the Great Society, was Bill Clinton’s unsuccessful effort to nationalize health care in 1993 and 1994.
Over the decades, conservatives correctly assailed many of these programs as plagued by waste and fraud, damaging to a free economy, and, most significantly, as in the case of Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC), destructive of the very human lives they aimed to improve. Yet, at least in intention, the original impulse at work behind these policies had nothing to do either with socializing the economy or with turning whole groups into permanent wards of the state. Quite to the contrary, liberal reform aimed at providing a helping hand to the deserving poor, the elderly, the sick, and the lower middle classes. It was only over time that many government welfare programs mutated into something else, and liberals sought new and ever more radical justifications for their existence and expansion.
But making humanity less prey to the vicissitudes of fortune was not the only impulse of modern liberalism. Another might be called the impulse toward personal autonomy or, as we call it today, choice. This, too, underwent a metamorphosis over time.
In 19th-century America, although the basic rights to life, liberty, and property were protected by law, choice itself was tightly constrained by moral and civic considerations, by custom and by local legislation. Profane and blasphemous speech was proscribed, pornographic materials were censored, gambling was prohibited. Moreover, ordinary employments were not allowed on the Sabbath. By and large, Americans did not view such laws as limits on their liberty. The constraints they imposed were, rather, believed to follow from a universal sense of what goes into the making of a civilized society.
It is precisely this understanding of the relation between the individual and civil society against which a later liberalism—the liberalism of “self-actualization” and “life-style”—would rebel. Here is how Michael J. Sandel (speaking as a critic) formulates the essence of today’s liberalism of choice:
Its central idea is that government should be neutral toward the moral and religious views its citizens espouse. Since people disagree about the best way to live, government should not affirm in law any particular vision of the good life.
And this brings us back to President Clinton. In signing the welfare-reform bill, the President was implicitly acknowledging the demise of one liberal impulse, the impulse toward security, just as he did when he announced in January 1996 that the era of Big Government was over. In declining to countenance a blanket restriction on partial-birth abortion, he was acknowledging that the other liberal impulse, the impulse toward choice, was still very much alive and well.
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In acting as he did, the President was on to something important. The impulse toward security had indeed become a mockery of itself, even in the eyes of some liberals. Despite large increases in government spending, the welfare of the poor in America had stagnated, or gotten worse, and preserving the federal entitlement to welfare had come to seem not a progressive step but a reactionary defense of the status quo—a status quo that had become an inducement to widespread social pathology.
But that is not all. The security impulse arose out of a particular set of historical and economic realities: the stark realities of the early part of this century. In later, more affluent times, among generations that had little direct experience of poverty and economic dislocation, the social question simply came to seem less pressing than the personal question. The New Left in the 60’s, the acolytes of feminism and gay liberation, were speaking out of a personal experience very different from that of the previous generation of liberals, and this was inevitably reflected in the values they invoked.
Those values have now become institutionalized—so much so that the “right to choose” is something which not only upper-middle-class liberals but all Americans take for granted. Premarital sex, abortion, divorce: who has not taken advantage of the choices now available? In 1992, in its controversial Casey decision, the Supreme Court rightly observed that to overrule Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion decision, would be “to refuse to face the fact that for two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society” on the understanding that they have a constitutional right to choose.
That is undeniably true—although it is also true that there is an essential peculiarity about the way in which the “right to choose” was itself chosen by the American polity. The economic reforms associated with liberalism’s first impulse, the impulse toward security, were enacted with the support of democratically elected legislatures at the state and federal levels. Although efforts were made to constitutionalize these reforms—for example, the Supreme Court made it more difficult for states to refuse aid to the indigent—the Court never recognized a fundamental right to public assistance; it did not have to.
By contrast, the “right to choose” has never had the explicit support of democratic majorities. Instead, it has found its way into America’s soul by some other route: namely, the courts. Over the past 40 years, liberals pushing the doctrine of choice have succeeded in constitutionalizing it in the areas of speech, religion, family law, reproductive rights, and “life-style” generally. As the Supreme Court sweepingly put the constitutional case in the Casey decision, quoted above: “These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, . . . are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
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In the end, though, it may not matter that the right to choose initially lacked the support of political majorities—any more than it now matters that these “choices” have been declared “central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.” The point is that what was initially favored by the few has become enshrined in American culture, and will be dislodged only by the formation of a new political majority. But however that larger struggle eventually turns out, the “right to choose,” notwithstanding its origins in contemporary liberalism, is today cherished straight across the political spectrum, including by many conservatives. At least in some cases, moreover, conservatives cherish it not only because it makes life easier, or more fun, but on the basis of what they take to be sound conservative doctrine.
This is so especially among conservatives of the anti-government and libertarian persuasions. Consider Charles Murray, who has long been one of liberalism’s most penetrating critics and whose 1984 book, Losing Ground, probably did more to undermine the intellectual clout of the liberal impulse toward economic security than any other single work.
In his recent book, What It Means To Be a Libertarian, Murray offers a vision of the good society. That vision does differ from some versions of personal liberation on offer at the moment: for example, Murray emphasizes that the personal pursuit of happiness is not for everyone, but only for “mindful human beings.” Still, when it comes to particulars, Murray is not very far from today’s liberalism of choice:
A lone adult should be permitted to engage in any activity of his choice in private. This freedom includes whatever he wants to read, watch, say, listen to, eat, drink, inject, or smoke. . . . Groups of adults have the same freedom, with the usual proscriptions against force and fraud.
Such a definition of choice—largely shared by such prominent conservative thinkers as Milton Friedman and the late F.A. Hayek—would appear to be sufficiently capacious to include most items on the Left’s agenda, from the right to abortion, to the right to euthanasia, to the right to pornography, to the right to ingest addictive drugs. In the recent words of another libertarian author, limited government is commendable because it allows individuals to try “new ways of life.”
What some conservatives appear to want, in other words, is for a hundred flowers to bloom. So do many liberals; and since we all have different “value judgments” as to when life begins, or ends, or about what constitutes a family, or about how to pursue “happiness,” we should all be able to agree that government must remain, in Sandel’s paraphrase, “neutral toward the moral and religious views” of its citizens, and that choice must in every case be respected.
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The only thing missing from this consensus is a frank recognition that a government which is “neutral toward the moral and religious views” of its citizens inevitably exercises moral effects of its own, of which last year’s presidential veto was a quintessential expression. When, for instance, the state can no longer say that pornography and gambling are bad for the soul and detrimental to civil order, or that divorce can result in an abrogation of duties to one’s spouse and one’s children, or that abortion raises the most fundamental questions about our attitude toward life itself, then the state effectively begins to say that such activities are morally tolerable, and thereby to collude in their spread. Moreover, the individual in this new dispensation (as Pierre Manent has pointed out) is in fact no more free than he was before; morally, he is as constrained by the new scheme of choice as by the older scheme of ordered liberty.
The convergence of liberals and at least one wing of the conservative movement on the principle of “choice” may well confirm what has long been observed of America—that there is but one political philosophy, and its name is liberalism. If that is the case, there is ample reason to fear that we have not yet traversed the whole path onto which we have been led by our attachment to limitless freedom, and from which most of us have found it almost impossible to extricate ourselves.
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