the culture of the new class was not just antibourgeois but antibusiness. It aimed to replace private enterprise with a vast bureaucracy that would undermine initiative, destroy the free market, and subject everything to central control.

These wildly divergent descriptions of the new class made it clear that the term referred to a set of politically objectionable attitudes, not to an identifiable social grouping, much less a class. Why, then, was it necessary to speak of a new class at all, when it served simply as a vague synonym for "liberalism"? No doubt the term made it possible to introduce attacks on the liberal "intelligentsia" with the disclaimer that it carried "no pejorative connotations," in Murray's words. But the real beauty of the concept lay in the way it obscured the difference between opposition to "middle-class values" and opposition to business. "Liberalism," as a description of what ailed America, did not have the advantage of this ambiguity. The political alignments of the seventies and eighties indicated that a defense of values loosely identified with the counterculture was quite compatible with a defense of business and the free market. Neoliberals declared themselves probusiness at the same time that they endorsed the sexual revolution, championed gay rights and women's rights, opposed the death penalty, and applauded the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade. The free-market element in the Reagan coalition displayed much the same pattern of economic conservatism and cultural liberalism. Quite apart from the libertarian movement—the clearest example of this configuration—public opinion polls consistently showed that a great many of the people attracted to Reagan's economic program either had no particular interest in the "social issues" or held views commonly described as liberal. Even in the heart of the Reagan administration, the White House itself, the right-wing position on social issues elicited little enthusiasm. Nancy Reagan deleted a discussion of abortion from the State of the Union Message in 1987, saying, "I don't give a damn about the right-to-lifers." Reagan made himself the champion of "traditional values," but there is no evidence that he regarded their restoration as a high priority. What he really cared about was the revival of the unregulated capitalism of the twenties: the repeal of the New Deal. As governor of California, he condemned the "wave of hedonism" that had rolled over America and pleaded for a "spiritual rebirth, a rededication to the moral precepts which guided us for so much of our past." In the

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