views of men and women," adding that whereas "our biological differences are self-evident, our human similarities are exciting." On the contrary, it is our biological differences that excite us. That progressive men and women have lost sight of this obvious point suggests that they are dangerously out of touch not just with "Middle America" but with common sense.

Once you reject the view of historical progress that means so much to people on the left, their sense of themselves as the party of the future, together with their fear of being overwhelmed by America's backward culture, becomes an object of historical curiosity, not the axiomatic premise from which political understanding necessarily proceeds. As I began to study the matter, I found that the left's fear of America went back a long way, at least as far back as the late thirties, when the New Deal suffered a series of setbacks from which it never quite recovered. It persisted, this uneasiness, even during the long period of liberal ascendancy that followed the Second World War. The conviction that most Americans remained politically incorrigible—ultranationalistic in foreign policy, racist in their dealings with blacks and other minorities, authoritarian in their attitudes toward women and children—helps to explain why liberals relied so heavily on the courts and the federal bureaucracy to engineer reforms that might have failed to command popular support if they had been openly debated. The great liberal victories—desegregation, affirmative action, legislative reapportionment, legalized abortion— were won largely in the courts, not in Congress, in the state legislatures, or at the polls. Instead of seeking to create a popular consensus behind these reforms, liberals pursued their objectives by indirect methods, fearing that popular attitudes remained unreconstructed. The trauma of McCarthyism, the long and bitter resistance to desegregation in the South, and the continued resistance to federal spending (unless it could be justified on military grounds) all seemed to confirm liberals in the belief that the ordinary American had never been a liberal and was unlikely to become one.

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