Monday, September 29, 1997

The new liberal cause: our bodies

by Charles Krauthammer

For a long time from the counterculture of the 1960s until, well,
yesterday it was pretty easy to tell conservatives from liberals.
Conservatives were the folks who told you how to live your personal
life. Liberals were the ones who told government and everybody else to
lay off and leave you to your own space.

Conservatives went around promoting virtue and regulating vice:
pornography, drugs, illegitimacy and the like. Liberals stood for
selfexpression and autonomy. The "right to choose" is quintessentially
liberal, whether it be abortion or euthanasia or, as they say today,
whatever.

Then came tobacco. Liberals, who had developed a 30year reputation for
being soft on drugs and crime and polymorphous perversities that even
Freud could not have imagined, all of a sudden became caped crusaders.
When it comes to smoking, they are bluenose prohibitionists.

True, the antismoking campaign has broad support. But liberal Democrats
have labored mightily to make it their cause. It began with the famous
hearings chaired by the preeminent California liberal, Henry Waxman, at
which tobacco executives were made to line up and swear that nicotine is
not addictive. Its apotheosis was Al Gore's convention speech with its
lachrymose retelling of his sister's death and his solemn pledge "until
I draw my last breath" to "pour my heart and soul" into carrying on the
antismoking fight. War on tobacco would be the liberals' cause.

This seems odd. Liberals have always looked down their noses at any kind
of prohibition, whether it was alcohol in the '20s or abortion today.
They're for choice, are they not? But as smokers are chased out of their
offices and banished from polite society, what little prosmoking
resistance there is comes from the right: from libertarians, from
freemarket conservatives, and from traditionalists lamenting the
state's forced extirpation of a venerable and private habit.

So what happened to liberals? My theory is this: Liberals have watched,
astonished, as for decades conservatives thrived politically by showing
concern for individual behavior. After years of deriding conservative
"moralizing," liberals now are playing catchup. Hence, for example,
their slavish, often comical, adoption of the language of "family
values."

Conservatives have made a political career out of showing concern for
the soul. Liberals cannot quite bring themselves to support state
regulation of the soul. (Indeed, by "family values," they mean not
sexual morality but subsidized child care and a living wage.) So they
have come up with their own alternative: not care for the soul, but care
for the body. Health is their religion; the body, their temple.

No concern about right behavior? Not us, say the liberals. We too
believe in virtue. No smoking! And that's just for starters. We are
going to teach your kids safe sex, take Alar off their apples, feed them
yogurt and broccoli for lunch, and, for the ride home, lash them to
their safety seats in cars with mandatory air bags.

Who says we don't care? Our motto: A healthy (multicultural) mind in a
healthy body. Call it pagan if you like. We call it prudent.

Now, if you have any doubts about the liberals' newfound religion, take
in a sex education class at your kids' school. The hour is not devoted
to biblical/Victorian/traditional morality. Sure, the kids are taught
do's and don'ts. It's just that the don'ts are not actions that damn
your eternal soul but behaviors that doom your precious body.

The core of the modern sexual code is disease prevention. The reason
your little ones are taught the proper placement of a condom over a
banana is to protect them from sexually transmitted diseases. With AIDS
as a foil, sex ed is not a form of moral education. It is a branch of
hygiene.

As are the other liberal virtues. Like the mania for health foods. It
feeds a nutritional fanaticism and fastidiousness that makes Islamic and
Jewish dietary prohibitions look positively, well, liberal. In elite
society, thinness is not just attractive but virtuous, a sign of
selfdenial and strength of character. Fatness is not just unaesthetic;
it is a moral failing. Temptation no longer comes in the form of the
devil. It comes in the form of dessert.

This cult of the body is the perfect successor to the culture of
narcissism of the Me Generation. Its genius is to take the stigma out of
selflove and turn it into virtue. Its beauty is to take health and
hygiene perfectly good things, mind you and make them a religion.
In a political era demanding more public displays of piety and morality,
liberals can now enthusiastically declare: We got religion too.