twentieth century approached its end, it would be the left that was everywhere in retreat?

But the characteristic mood of the times, a baffled sense of drift, is by no means confined to people on the left. The unanticipated success of the right has not restored moral order and collective purpose to Western nations, least of all to the United States. The new right came to power with a mandate not just to free the market from bureaucratic interference but to halt the slide into apathy, hedonism, and moral chaos. It has not lived up to expectations. Spiritual disrepair, the perception of which furnished much of the popular animus against liberalism, is just as evident today as it was in the seventies. Contributors to a recent symposium on the state of American conservatism report widespread "discouragement" with the accomplishments of the Reagan revolution, so called. Like liberals, conservatives suffer from "demoralization," "malaise." The "crisis of modernity" remains unresolved, according to George Panichas, by a "sham conservatism" that merely sanctions the unbridled pursuit of worldly success. The "everyday virtues of honesty, loyalty, manners, work, and restraint," Clyde Wilson writes, are more "attenuated" than ever. In the early sixties, it was still "possible to take for granted that the social fabric of the West ... was relatively intact." Under Reagan, however, it continued to unravel.

Ritual deference to "traditional values" cannot hide the right's commitment to progress, unlimited economic growth, and acquisitive individualism. According to Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming, "skepticism about progress," once the hallmark of "intellectuals identified as conservatives," has all but disappeared. "Political differences between right and left have by now been largely reduced to disagreements over policies designed to achieve comparable moral goals." The ideological distinctions between liberalism and conservatism no longer stand for anything or define the lines of political debate.

The uselessness of the old labels and the need for a reorientation of political ideas are beginning to be acknowledged. A few years ago, in a book

-22-