Frank's cavalier pronouncement that "Abortion is never halted" is literally correct-abortion was never halted even when it was illegal all over the country-but entirely misses the point: the goal of the right is not to stop abortion but to demonize it, punish it and make it as difficult and traumat- ic as possible. All this it has accomplished fairly well, even without over- turning Roe v. Wade. Current legal restrictions include bans on funding abortion for Medicaid patients, parental consent requirements, regulations that make abortion clinics prohibitively expensive to operate, waiting peri- od and counseling requirements that force women to make more than one trip to the clinic. (Evidently, for all his class consciousness Frank is unaware of how heavily these restrictions weigh on poor and working-class women, who can't afford to travel or take time off from their jobs, and must often delay their abortions beyond the safest period to save enough money for the fee.) And then there are the extra-legal tactics-the right's relentless stigmatizing of abortion (helped along by apologetic liberals), its harassment of clinic patients and staffs, its hit-list websites posting "murderers'" names and addresses, and its terrorist assassinations of doctors.
As a result large sections of the country have few or no abortion providers. Many clinics close because they can't afford to comply with regulations, can't get insurance, or are kicked out by landlords. Fewer and fewer doctors are willing to perform abortions, and most medical schools do not even teach the procedure. Increasingly, women who exercise their legal right do so in an atmosphere that encourages guilt, shame and fear. At the Little Rock abortion clinic women worried about being ostracized were their secret to be known. "I'd lose my job," one said. "My family's reputation would be ruined. It makes me nervous even being in the waiting room." Nor should we imagine that such sentiment is confined to the likes of conservative Arkansas (where, nevertheless, Kerry got 45% of the vote). What are we to make of the recent cases of high school girls in the northeast, bastion of the cultural elite, who could find no solution to their unwanted pregnan- cies but to kill their newborn infants? Tom: is this real enough for you?
The idea that cultural radicalism is antithetical to egalitarian class poli- tics-that it is at best a divisive distraction, at worst a weapon of the bour- geoisie-is not new. It has been floating around the socialist and communist movements since the 1880s and has been predominant on the left for the past century (except, perhaps, for a brief period during the 1960s). One strand of the argument rests on a populist identity politics that associates conventional morality with "working class values." For most of history, only aristocrats had the power to avoid work, pursue pleasure and out with impunity the moral norms that applied to their inferiors; sexual rebellion in particular has been identified with domination (see the writings of the Marquis de Sade). In the modern era, feminist and other cultural radical movements have typically been founded by people who are economi- cally secure enough to be free of day-to-day worry about survival and so able to focus on what's wrong with the quality of their lives. At the other end of the class hierarchy, since the emergence of the "lumpenproletariat" in the 19th century, "vice" has also been associated with social outcasts who have nothing to lose. It is therefore supposed to be a point of work- ing-class pride, solidarity, and salt-of-the-earth status to reject the "deca- dence" of the rich and the upper middle class as well as the fecklessness of the very poor. The contemporary right's incitement of working people to direct their class anger against the "cultural elite" was in fact anticipated by the venerable and still prominent left tradition of charging cultural radicals with trespassing on the values of workers. Its exponents do not see- because they are blinded by their own guilt and fear of freedom-that subjection to sexual conformity and bromides about the "dignity of work" is if anything part of working-class oppression; that sexual happiness and freedom from alienated labor are universal goods to which everyone is entitled. Another left rationale for rejecting cultural politics is rooted in the historical connection of cultural movements to the marketplace. The rise of capitalism, which undermined the authority of the patriarchal family and church, put widespread cultural revolt in the realm of possibility. Wage labor allowed women and young people to find a means of support outside the home. Urbanization allowed people the freedom of social anonymity. The shift from production- to consumption-oriented capitalism and the spread of mass media encouraged cultural permissiveness, since the primary tech- nique of marketing as well as the most salient attraction of mass art is their appeal to the desire for individual autonomy and pleasure and specifically to erotic fantasy.
Accordingly, left cultural conservatives have argued that feminism and cul- tural radicalism, in weakening traditional institutions like the family, have merely contributed to the market's hegemony over all spheres of life. Many leftists, including Frank, see the cultural movements through the lens of their hostility to consumerism: observing that commercial exploitation of sex is ubiquitous and that rock and roll, feminism, and other countercul- tural artifacts have been used to sell everything from cars and fashions to credit cards and mutual funds, they conclude that cultural liberation, like the backlash against it, is a tool of capitalist domination. That capital is promiscuous in its zeal to reduce human impulses to selling points-willing to dish up feminism or family values, sex or religion as the occasion demands-is interpreted to mean that there is no real opposition between cultural left and right.
Again, this mindset puts a progressive political gloss on what is really a form of puritanism, offended by the fleshpots of the market, not just the profits. What it ignores, or denies-as Marx never did-is the paradoxical nature of capitalism. In destroying the old patriarchal order, in making all that was solid melt into air, in fomenting constant dynamism and change, capital made space for the revolutionary ideas that would challenge its own authority. In letting loose the genie of desire in the service of profit, consumer culture unleashes forces that can't reliably be controlled. Frank and his fellow anti-culture-warriors sneer at the idea that there can be anything subversive about popular culture, and indeed, these days the process of channeling potentially rebellious impulses into safe activities like shopping seems to be working well. Yet in the very different political and social context of the `60s, the invitation to pleasure that pervaded mass culture, from its advertising to its music, played an important role in the cultural revolt: it peeled off the repressive, security-oriented surface of post-World War II America and suggested to young people that another way of life was possible.