The Great Comeuppance

Poetic Justice with bad hair

The conservative shuffle over to populism has finally broken into a run.  Unending economic hardship and liberal cultural triumph have torn the white middle class away from their neglectful conservative masters.  While those affluent overlords were swooning over no-capital-gains-tax fantasies and drinking themselves deep of Social Darwinist ideological purity, their downscale cousins were weathering decades of lowered wages and lowered expectations.  The America those workers knew, that sustained them and valued them, has been dying, and they’ve become desperate for a solution.  Now a large section of the supposedly conservative base supports a candidate who has argued for raising taxes and lowering pay for the rich, who opposes free trade and cuts to social welfare programs, and who condemns the influence of money in politics.  Donald Trump is what happens when the interests and sensibilities of such a large constituency are consistently ignored, marginalized and disdained.   Trump is the blowback from conservative failure.

Conservatism has always had a troubled relationship with its own base.  Modern American conservatism began in the 1950’s as a small intellectual movement that coalesced around National Review magazine, which argued over such things as whether the great British conservative Edmund Burke supported tradition per se, or as a means to protect ordered liberty.  They wrote homages to the British ruling class and Generalissimo Franco’s enthusiastically Catholic fascism – hardly positions likely to garner widespread support in a country with such a small-d democratic political culture.  Their anti-welfare-state positions gave them ready-made supporters among the rich and the business community, but little more.

So they went shopping for a constituency.  Their first lucky break was McCarthyism.  The conservatives were staunch anti-communists (opposed to socialism in general and Stalinism in particular) and they were quite happy to support a demagogue who accused liberal Democrats of being Soviet spies.  But McCarthyism was about more than overblown fear of communist subversion, it was also a movement of small town working whites against supposedly unpatriotic Northeastern establishment technocrats.  It was the first stirring of right-wing populism since the decline of the Father Coughlin and the America First crowd in the early 40’s.  That is, it was a base of support conservatives could use to attack the New Deal.

But McCarthyism collapsed and the conservative movement had to keep shopping.  This time they found a more reliable constituency: segregationists.  Opponents of civil rights shared conservative hostility toward the liberal federal government, and conservative’s natural deference to traditional social hierarchy meant they had no compunction about throwing their intellectual heft behind an explicit defense of white supremacy.  In the internal Republican fights of early 1960’s they supported Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a thoroughgoing conservative who forged an alliance of business interests and segregationists by strongly denouncing both the New Deal and civil rights legislation.  By the time Goldwater had become the Republican nominee in 1964, the ideology of modern American conservatism had hardened into implacable resistance against the three main threats to traditional American order: international communism, the welfare state, and racial integration.  Conservatism was now an alliance of the capitalist class and white supremacists, held together by a program of resistance to the federal government.

As the 1960’s progressed and liberation movements sprung up for not just blacks, but for women, Latinos, gays, etc. conservative opposition to racial equity broadened into opposition to all egalitarian social movements.   Shrewd Republican politicians like Nixon and Reagan rode white middle class resentment of those movements all the way to the White House.  The segregationists became the Moral Majority, then the Conservative Coalition and, finally, the Tea Party; but they were always the same rightward-leaning portion of the white working and middle class base, afraid of social change and looking to conservative politicians to halt it.

To achieve political influence and power, conservatism turned itself from a genteel ruling class intelligentsia into a broad populist movement.  But it sold its soul to do so.  It chose expediency over intellectual integrity, and it consistently appealed to the darker impulses of its base.  As the situation called for it, it invoked the threat of Stalinist feds, shiftless Negroes, family-hating feminists, child-molesting gays, welfare bums, union thugs, etc.  It portrayed liberals as snooty, condescending, feminized aristocrats, sipping lattes, nibbling French cheese, disdaining working class values and wasting working class tax dollars on undeserving populations.  Conservatism excused, justified, and encouraged the worst American instincts, and thereby undermined its self-proclaimed project of moral renewal.  It became gutter populism.

Gutter populism in the service of cynical capitalism, that is. In policy, conservatives stuck to reducing the social safety net, de-regulating the market, and allowing the unobstructed flow of capital, goods, jobs and workers around the world.  The cliché has it that conservative politicians promised the base they would protect traditional family values while all they were really interested in was free-market economics.  That’s true of course.  Reagan made the decision early in his presidency to prioritize undoing the New Deal, not the Sexual Revolution.  But it’s not just that conservative office-holders fought half-heartedly against abortion while fighting like demons for upper-end tax cuts; it’s that they pursued economic policies – free trade, relaxed immigration, social insurance privatization, de-unionization – that working people generally oppose!  And working people haven’t been too crazy about the results of those policies: stagnating wages, the replacement of high-paying manufacturing jobs with low-paying service jobs, the immiseration of small-town and rural America.  At the end of the day, conservatives gave them nothing.

To keep working whites in their electoral coalition, conservatives had to do two contrary things: keep the populist fires of resentment and paranoia burning high, but keep them from spreading over into resentment of the rich.  They called a market-friendly healthcare plan socialism; they warned of death panels; they questioned the first black president’s religion and birthplace – all to frighten and anger the base.  They insisted the terrible liberal threat justified the most ruthless tactics – shutting down the government, undermining the government’s credit, stonewalling all compromise – and condemned as insufficiently conservative anyone who dissented.  And all the while they denounced resentment of the rich as envy, progressive taxes as class warfare, reliance on social insurance as irresponsibility, and the slightest trace of pragmatism or moderation as profoundly un-American.

Needless to say, it’s not easy to both intensify and contain populist passion.  Eventually, something had to give.  In theory, conservatives could have directed economic policy more toward middle class interests, as many reformicons have been urging.  But no, that would have undercut the central premise of American conservatism, that individual wealth results from the highest personal virtue.  And for a long time it seemed that thoroughgoing ideological conservatism was spreading and consolidating among the white middle class.  Tea Party activists sure made a good show of hating government programs.  But no, both the traditional populism of American whites and their own real and pressing material interests made genuine widespread conservatism improbable. We are led to the startling revelation that a great deal of the conservative base has never really been conservative.  In particular, they never accepted the notion that what is good for the rich is always good for the rest of us.  It turns out they hate Wall Street as much as they hate Washington and Harvard and Hollywood.  This has all been a terrible shock to the conservative chattering classes.  After spending decades indoctrinating the rubes, firing up their hatred of the liberal establishment and the cultural establishment and the Republican establishment, those rubes now direct that hatred, ironically enough, at their real enemies, those alleged conservative masters themselves!  Working whites have stopped pretending to be conservatives, they’ve stopped fooling both the conservative movement and themselves, and they’ve gone home.

To be precise, they’ve come to the realization that American elites don’t really give a damn about them.  Conservatives promised American unity, prosperity and peace, all while inviting jobs overseas, allowing banks to crash the economy, and invading a country that posed no threat to us.  They carelessly discarded American jobs, American prosperity, American lives, and – maybe worst of all – American promise.  The sold it all for a few extra points on the Dow.

But liberals haven’t done much better.  Conservatives may have had ulterior motives for accusing liberals of elitist condescension, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong.  Since the time of Jefferson and Jackson, American populism was generally a phenomenon of the left, i.e. regular people fighting against exploitation by a rich and powerful elite.  But American populism ruptured in the 60’s when the Civil Rights movement put liberals and working whites at odds.  This is the part of the story we didn’t mention above: conservatives were able to attract large number of whites in the 60’s and 70’s because liberals were so willing to let them go.  At first liberals had tried to turn economic populism for whites into economic populism for everyone.  But many whites resisted full racial equality and began voting for thoroughly conservative politicians who, as we noted, were quite happy to profit from white resentment.  Liberals abandoned the project of broadly shared prosperity and instead focused on cultural emancipation for everyone who wasn’t a straight, white male.  That emancipation was and is a tremendously worthwhile goal, but excesses in pursuit of that goal further alienated the white working class that until then had been the heart of the liberal base.  Liberals and whites walked away from each other, each convinced the other had shown itself to be unworthy of friendship.

We still live amongst the wreckage of that Great Rupture.  Race, as always in American life, has poisoned everything.  Post-60’s liberals, twisted round by white guilt, abandoned sober color-blind integration for the romance of black nationalism and multiculturalism.  They rejected the heroic and hard task of assimilating blacks into the American mainstream and settled instead for the cheap tokenism of affirmative action.  That is, they chose sanctimony over results.  And, crucially, they condemned all dissent as abject racism.  They so over-reacted to rampant racism, militarism, fundamentalism and patriarchy that they started to wonder if there was something dark lurking at the heart of American culture.  They became suspicious of patriotism and religion and the military per se, and even of the American people themselves.  They adopted a host of problematic cultural attitudes – post-patriotic, post-religious, post-color-blind, post-gender – that were unpalatable to middle America.  They still pushed for programs to help workers – universal healthcare, family leave – but they came to culturally mistrust the very people their economic policies were designed to help.  And after a while they even abandoned those policies.  Many became New Democrats like Bill Clinton, promoting privatization and free trade and curtailing government programs.  They rejected American culture from the left and pro-worker policies from the right.  They became caricature anti-populists.

All these concerns come together perfectly on immigration.  This is one issue on which conservative and liberal ideologues agree: the more immigration, the better.  Conservatives are happy to remove constraints on the labor market, and consequently drive down wages and benefits.  And their free-market dogmatism prevents them from seeing the economic injury caused by flooding the market with cheap labor.  To them, resistance to immigration can only be motivated by the lazy and irresponsible desire to avoid honest competition, and nothing matters more to a conservatives than allowing competition to prove one’s moral worth.  Meanwhile, liberals are eager to prove their humanitarian virtue by rejecting any American immigration policy that might particularly benefit Americans.  Their love for the foreign poor blinds them to the damage done to their own countrymen.  Indeed, their cosmopolitan detachment protects them from any pedestrian concerns about American workers or – grab the smelling salts! – American culture.  To them, resistance to immigration can only be motivated by racism, and nothing matters more to liberals than proving they’re not racist.  Conservatives have no consideration for American workers as workers, but liberals have no consideration for them as Americans. 

And working people of all races are starting to understand that the people running the country are not looking out for them.  Indeed, when you consider the takeover of American politics by rich donors, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that almost nothing constrains elites from pursuing policies that actively hurt working people.  And history and ideology have conspired to leave working people, and working whites particularly, with no responsible leadership.  Both conservatives and liberals pretend to be populists during election time, and liberals even make half-hearted attempts to help working people; but there is no political movement that fights for the interests of American workers as American workers.  Indeed, elites would condemn as vulgar and unrespectable any politics that was both patriotic and pro-worker.

This is where the white middle and working classes finds themselves.  Liberals have abandoned them to the gutter populism in which conservatives have so cynically invited them to indulge.  And behold the result: Donald Trump, the genuine gutter populist!  Decades of gutter populist propaganda, combined with genuine economic pain, and good old-fashioned Puritan paranoia have left working whites bitter, angry and desperate.  Many of them are still right-wing populists, fearing blacks and feminists and gays and Muslims.  That hasn’t changed just because they now perceive the damage that conservative policy has done them.  That’s why they should gravely worry us.  And following Trump won’t exactly improve that.

Looking for a real leader

But they love Donald Trump because he perfectly speaks to their fear and desperation.  He shares their deepest instincts: that it’s regular working Americans who make America prosper, that America is strong and good and our standing in the world should reflect that, that economic and political elites have been ignoring those first two points, and at their peril.  Unfortunately, he also shares their darker instincts: that America is morally superior to every other country, that regular Americans are the best people in the world, particularly straight, white, Christian, male breadwinners.  He’s been rightly called the American id, the strutting embodiment of all those impulses.  But part of the reason his shtick works so well is that he’s little more than id himself!  He lacks a coherent ideology or set of policies because all he has are those nationalist instincts and a gigantic, monumental, indestructible faith in both them and himself.  He’s not just looking out for working white people, in cultural sensibility he is them, but independent and strong enough to fight like hell.  He’s not just a genuine gutter populist, he’s a determined gutter populist.  They delight in his irrepressible contempt for decent propriety.  He’s the cocksure naughty boy, breaking all the rules, smirking as the children cheer, and sneering at the grownups who try to shame him.  He is the national will to tear everything down and dance on the rubble.

We may even see – God help us! – President Donald Trump if enough independents feel sufficiently marginalized and desperate.  But it need not have been this way.  It’s conceivable – isn’t it? – that  we could have had a constructive and enlightened populism, one that picked itself up out of the gutter and fought for the interests of all American working people.  Or does the damnable intransigence of racial hostility make that impossible?  Both conservatism and liberalism, in their current forms, have eagerly exploited and exacerbated that hostility.  Neither is capable of addressing the current crisis, which is at bottom a crisis of political imagination.  Both are too rigid, too wedded to blind and implausible ideologies, too comfortable in their institutional power, too removed from the realities of American life.  They fight their petty, scripted battles over the heights of American society, while the foundation rots beneath their feet.  They have become irrelevant.

It’s unclear where working whites will go now.  They broke with conservatism when they came to understand that the system cannot be indifferent; it can only work for them or against them.  That is, they now know – in their experience and in their bones – that their economic condition is a function of more than just their own actions.  When they make this simple fact an explicit doctrine and a rallying cry and an organizing principle then they will have become full populists.  What they will do with that populism, whether it will be a force for preserving and promoting the best of America, or whether it will degrade and destroy – we don’t know yet.  Only disaster can result if they allow leaders like Trump to drag them further into the gutter.  They have the potential to become a powerful force for unmediated white authoritarianism, and that’s an outcome too awful to contemplate.

If there is to be a constructive populist alternative, an inclusive, color-blind, mature populism, it can ultimately come only from a reconstructed liberalism.  Bernie Sanders has taken liberalism halfway there, with his stress on economic concerns over cultural ones, and his nascent and inchoate economic nationalism.  The rupture between liberalism and white working people must be reconciled, and that can only happen when liberals come to understand the centrality of our shared American identity.  And maybe a program of working class unity could reduce racial tension.  Maybe such a movement could address our actual problems and offer real solutions.  Maybe it could remind us all who we are to each other, what we owe each other, and what we can accomplish together.  Maybe it could elicit the better angels of our nature.  And maybe, finally, it could tell us how we can be healed.

The Politics of Intransigence

William Buckley, in the first issue of National Review in 1955, famously distilled conservative instincts down to the desire to “stand athwart history yelling stop,” and ever since that’s just what conservatives have been doing.  They haven’t stopped history, but that hasn’t kept them from yelling, even when history has long since passed them by.  And particularly in the age of Tea Party purity, to be a conservative is to be forever fighting wars long lost.  Tea Partiers throw themselves into the debt limit breach like Spartans at Thermopylae, though the fiscal Persians passed through long ago.  They denounce the progressivism of Franklin Roosevelt and even Woodrow Wilson.  They call Social Security a Ponzi scheme.  They wish to eliminate Progressive Era reforms like the Federal Reserve, the income tax and the popular election of senators.  They rail against radical cultural developments like the widespread use of contraception.  And – the cultural battle du jour – they hope to forestall gay marriage.  But now President Obama, canny leader from behind that he is, has publically joined the fight for marriage equality just as conservatives are losing that war, too.

And make no mistake, that war is lost.  First there were civil unions.  Then there were state supreme court decisions.  Then there were democratically elected state legislatures (such as New York and Washington).  Last year the Obama administration announced it would not defend DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act, the Clinton era law preventing the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages).  Now federal courts are striking down key provisions of DOMA.  It looks like some states, such as Maryland, are about to legalize gay marriage by popular referendum.  Sure, there are states which will never accept it (North Carolina comes to mind), but that won’t matter if the US Supreme Court rules that marriage is a civil right that cannot constitutionally be confined to heterosexuals.

And this is a big loss.  It might just be the last big loss for cultural conservatives, only because they have little left to lose.  Since the days of Bill Buckley’s exhortation to intransigence, conservatives have resisted racial inclusion, gender equality, drug usage, secularization, and the entire sexual revolution, including the acceptance of contraception, pornography, experimentation, abortion, homosexuality, and blatant sexual expression in the popular media.  How many of those battles have conservatives won?  Drug use may be the only one.  (And thank God they did win that one, though not without some terrible repercussions; for example, the war on drugs remains blindingly irrational.)  A generation from now, the vast majority of Americans will think about gay marriage the way we now think about inter-racial marriage.  That is, we won’t understand why anyone was ever against it.  (Presumably, though, even then some small stubborn conservative contingent will still be struggling to reverse it.)

Why do conservatives keep losing?  What is it about the cultural evolutions mentioned above that have proven so irresistible to standing athwart?  What do those developments have in common? Some commentators sense the unifying theme: Andrew Sullivan explicitly draws out the connection between acceptance of homosexuality and acceptance of recreational marijuana use; Rod Dreher sees parallels, as well.  Daniel McCarthy casts his net much wider, claiming that these recent developments are “a consequence of a shift in the foundations of Western civilization that has been taking place over centuries—a shift from Christian to liberal foundations.”  Could any conservative disagree?  That is, all the cultural developments listed above are about individuals defining their own meaning and controlling their own lives.  They’re about liberating individuals from cultural constraint.  In the good old conservative days, each person was expected to fulfill well-defined social roles – father, employee, countryman – each with powers and duties that could not be ignored or questioned.  And each role fit neatly into its spot in the social hierarchy.  That is, each role dictated who owed deference to whom: women to men, children to parents, non-whites to whites, etc.  And it was the job of social institutions – family, church, community – to define and enforce those roles and that hierarchy.  But individuals and groups that were exploited or oppressed by that hierarchy began to rebel against it; first blacks, then women, then gays, and so on.  That’s the problem: and so on.  The engine of individual liberation, once set in motion, is exceedingly hard to stop.  In 1955, the notion that black Americans could control their own lives, unconstrained by white supremacy, was radical.  But once you accept it, how can you demand women stay in their place?  What about other races?  What about gays?  What about the sexual impulses of white suburban kids, previously constrained by Puritan repressiveness, but now urged to liberation by the irresistible physicality of rock-n-roll?  The cultural scolds of the 1950’s were right: Elvis’ dancing was revolutionary!

And, as Noah Berlatsky nicely explains, present-day conservatives are just as right when they claim that allowing gays into the institution of marriage fundamentally changes that institution.  More precisely, it caps marriage’s evolution into an instrument of personal development, all as part of the liberal cultural movement described above.  Conservatives are dead right when they stress the centrality of marriage as a social institution.  They know that when marriage has completely succumbed to the philosophy of personal liberation they will have lost one of their most important battles.  But once again, they’re fighting a battle already lost.  The meaning of marriage has been changing for a very long time, and the changes started long before anyone considered that gays might marry each other.  (Conservative historian Garry Wills explains that marriage was not even a Catholic sacrament until the 12^th century!)  Stephanie Coontz provides an excellent summary of the fundamental changes in the understanding of marriage over the last couple of centuries.  “For millennia, marriage was about property and power rather than mutual attraction. It was a way of forging political alliances, sealing business deals, and expanding the family labor force. For many people, marriage was an unavoidable duty.”  But then it became permissible to marry for love.  Then the need for parental approval was dropped.  In the 60’s the Supreme Court struck down state bans on contraception within marriage and on interracial marriage.  And, most relevant to our discussion, in the 60’s and 70’s marriage lost its patriarchal strictures and became thoroughly liberalized.  Coontz writes, “The collapse of rigid gender expectations and norms has fostered the expectation that marriage should be an individually negotiated relationship between equals, replacing the older notion of marriage as a prefabricated institution where traditional roles and rules must be obeyed.”  Marriage is no longer about the political or economic merging of families.  It is no longer even primarily about fostering the proper setting for child-rearing.  The arrival of no-fault divorce in the 1960’s made legally explicit the notion that marriage is about individual choice and individual happiness.  Contemplating this history makes clear that the conservative fight against gay marriage is essentially symbolic. Liberal individualism has already changed marriage immeasurably; allowing gays to marry merely completes that change and makes it undeniable.

But marriage is a special case; it’s different from the other cultural developments listed above: it is not a merely an individual choice.  The point of marriage is to employ the weight of society to buttress a personal relationship, for social and individual good.  It used to be that there were three parties to marriage: the bride, the groom and the rest of society.  (Check out Roderick Long’s excellent depiction of the understanding of marriage in 19^th century America; it showcases wonderful historical expressions of the view that society has much to say about the particulars of individual marriages.)  And as a social institution with a pragmatic social purpose, its particulars could be defined collectively through the democratic legislative process.  But it’s not just that the purpose of marriage has changed from economics and child-rearing to personal fulfillment.  That change effects a much more radical transformation: marriage is no longer a social institution.  If it’s just about personal fulfillment then it’s simply a contract between individuals.  Society is no longer a party.  Society no longer has any justifiable claim upon marriage or one’s duties as a spouse and parent.  I decide if I marry or divorce in the same way that I decide if I eat chocolate or vanilla.  And my spouse and I define our roles within our marriage.  No one has any right to tell me what to do.  And it follows inexorably that neither can anyone tell a gay person whom to marry.  The triumph of liberal individualism simply and starkly prohibits society from constraining personal choices.  And it makes marriage into merely another such choice.  For good or ill – actually, for good and ill – all social relations are now choices.

But consider the question: Could conservatives have allowed gays to marry each other while maintaining the general framework of well-defined, hierarchical social roles?  Could there have been room for gays in the old conservative vision of marriage?  Theoretically, yes; but realistically, no freakin way!  You’d have to put aside the fact that acceptance of gays and gay marriage came much later than the transformation of heterosexual marriage, and put aside the tenacious Old Testament revulsion of homosexuality (and of sexual expression in general), and put aside centuries of irrational prejudice and oppression.  Even putting aside all those stumbling blocks you’d still be stopped short by the deepest of conservative fears: the fear of mixing categories and blurring boundaries.  Hierarchies demand discreet roles.  Men must be men and women must be women.  The God of Genesis made each animal distinct and separate; one never gives rise to another.  If a man marries a man it confuses those separate categories, it blurs the distinctions between the sexes.  To conservatives, gay marriage is a moral monstrosity, like the miscegenated giants of Genesis 6, born of the daughters of men, fathered by the sons of God.  And hierarchies, particularly ones based on social categories like gender, race or sexual orientation, cannot help but oppress.  The logic of conservatism seems to require a subject class.  It’s no longer acceptable to advocate subordinate status for non-whites or women.  Once gays are safely on that no-oppression list, conservatives may have no one left to bully.  (Thank God for Muslims!)

Liberalism taught subject classes that their subjection was unjust.  The rest is merely the inevitability of that idea.  But there’s more: there’s conservative complicity in the overthrow of their own worldview.  Conservatives hold that freedom and equality are enemies, that more of one means less of the other, but the broader debate surrounding gay marriage nicely demonstrates how closely bound freedom and equality can be.  As we’ve seen, the goal of the liberal cultural project is the complete liberation of the individual from cultural constraint.  But this dauntingly vacant freedom implies an equally daunting and radical egalitarianism.  For each person to be free no one can claim power over another.  No person or institution has any justified authority over anyone’s meaning, goals or standards.  Thus, as conservatives have argued for almost perfect freedom in economic affairs – sounding like anarchists – they have inadvertently undercut their own arguments about cultural and moral truth.  But not just in the obvious way that conservative embrace of market freedom contradicts their defense of cultural control.  When they argue for freedom they unknowingly argue for equality as well, and that equality is a dagger aimed at the heart of cultural authority.  Modern conservatives thought they could be cafeteria liberals, simultaneously champions of freedom and warriors against equality.  But they were wrong: hierarchy and freedom are as much enemies as allies.

When gay marriage becomes widely accepted, it will have become so through liberal process and in liberal form.  It will be seen as the culmination of the liberal cultural revolution whereby all social institutions have been relieved of their authority to shape individual judgments.  It will not be an accommodation of gays into the conservative notion of marriage, though some conservatives – most notably Andrew Sullivan – have long urged such accommodation.  Sixty years ago, American social conservatism was about hierarchy composed of well-defined social roles that themselves expressed received moral truth.  But all the standing athwart in the world could not withstand the righteous power of those demanding liberation from that hierarchy.  Rhetorically at least, conservatives have repudiated that old-fashioned hierarchy; now all they have left are the well-defined social roles and the received moral truth.  But those roles and that truth are quickly succumbing as well. And it could not have been otherwise.  As an important conservative theorist once said, ideas have consequences.  More to the point, they have momentum.  Conservatives, being conservatives, waited too long to lose the hierarchy.  They defended it so long that the notions of well-defined roles and moral truth have become conflated in the public mind with that hierarchy, and they have all been rejected as a whole.  Thus the new non-hierarchical conservatism is punished for the injustices of its hierarchical progenitor.  The sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons.  By forcing impulses of liberation into liberal channels, conservative resistance against social developments like gay marriage has only added to the triumph of the new individualism.  What started as emancipation from arbitrary and unjust power became emancipation from every possible external constraint.  In the new liberal vision, persons are not the roles they play, but unique, growing, complicated, uncertain creatures; each one a project, a growing, an ongoing liberation.  Modern freedom is self-actualization defended with relativism.  My life is entirely mine and entirely not yours.  Granted, conservatives have much to say against that disposition and they are furiously standing athwart it and yelling stop.  The history of the last 60 years promises that there will indeed be much yelling, but no stopping.