On most influential accounts, the future of American liberalism looks pretty bleak. The overwhelming tide of Reaganism, along with associated phenomena including the rise of a significant religious right, have seemingly swept aside the notions of progressive reform that we tend to associate with the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society. The undeniable disarray of the Democratic Party suggests that the main institutional defender of liberalism in America is now ill-equipped to do the job. Moreover, if we continue to insist that liberalism is, at base, something equivalent to the New Deal policy agenda, then surely liberalism has no future at all. For if anything seems clear, it is that the New Deal and its various offspring are indeed quite dead, repudiated finally and definitively both in the 1984 election and in the preceding two elections as well.

There is, of course, a recent and burgeoning literature on the nature of a "neo-liberalism" which, presumably, would reestablish the liberal consensus. But this literature tends to operate in terms of images, personalities, and policies rather than underlying philosophical principles. Such accounts will not do. For if we identify neo-liberalism largely in terms of some new set of persons and proposals, we will have begged the question as to why those persons and proposals should be called "liberal" in the first place. We will be unable to explain, that is, why this liberal candidate or that liberal policy should not be more correctly understood as just another part of the emerging conservative hegemony.