campaign of 1980, however, he ridiculed Carter for saying very much the same thing. The theme of "spiritual rebirth" gave way to a strategy of evasion and denial. There was nothing wrong with America after all. "Don't let anyone tell you that America's best days are behind her, that the American spirit has been vanquished." Moral regeneration, it appeared, could be achieved painlessly through the power of positive thinking.

Reagan's rhetorical defense of "family and neighborhood" could not be reconciled with his championship of unregulated business enterprise, which has replaced neighborhoods with shopping mails and superhighways. A society dominated by the free market, in which the American dream degenerated into pure acquisitiveness and self-seeking, had no place for "family values." ^* This was the fundamental contradiction not merely of the Reagan administration but of the new right in general. If the right was to attract support from workers troubled by moral decay, alienated from neoliberalism, but indifferent or hostile to free-market economics, it needed to stir up resentment of elites without stirring up the old populist resentment of capitalists. The notion of a "new class," though not designed with this purpose in mind, enabled people on the right to depict "permissive" social morality, which might otherwise have been seen as the cultural expression of consumer capitalism itself, as part of a "concerted attack on business," in the words of the Wall Street Jour-

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The ties of kinship and marriage create obligations that override considerations of personal advantage and cannot be discharged simply by a prearranged schedule of payments. By contrast, the market—no respecter of persons—reduces individuals to abstractions, anonymous buyers and sellers whose claims on each other are determined solely by their capacity to pay. The family depends on an active community life, whereas the market disrupts communities by draining off their best talent. Under Reagan, the inner logic of the market became fully explicit: idealization of the man on the make; a pursuit of quick profits; feverish competition leading (as a means of stabilizing it) to the creation of far-flung economic empires impervious to local, state, and finally even national control; a widening chasm between rich and poor; hostility to labor unions; urban redevelopment designed to raise real estate values and to force lower- and middle-income families out of the city; impoverishment of public facilities, public transportation in particular—all in the name of "family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom."

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