By the Numbers: Comparing Eighties’ Movements

Textbooks of American history unfailingly contend that the Reagan Revolution was driven, in part, by the rise of social and religious conservatism, whipped up by Falwell’s Moral Majority.^{Footnote 5} This account is often repeated by more specialized studies of conservatism as well.^{Footnote 6} The temptation to place the Moral Majority at the center of that moralistic decade endures despite a number of studies that demonstrate its marginality and unpopularity. The Moral Majority had no grassroots organization. Sociologist James Ault found that outside its national headquarters, the Moral Majority was “little more than a loose network of like-minded pastors who kept one another abreast of relevant issues.”^{Footnote 7} It was, however, quite effective at grabbing headlines, developing direct mail, and inciting terrified intrigue among the liberal media.^{Footnote 8}

For these reasons, the Moral Majority generated no groundswell against liberalism. The Moral Majority even tended to alienate those supposed “new right” evangelical voters it was credited with mobilizing. As late as 1984 some careful observers still wondered whether white evangelicals could be mobilized into the Republican Party.^{Footnote 9}

Most Protestant fundamentalists reacted against liberalism by growing their own churches, which served as a countercultural haven from what they regarded as a coarsening and atomistic liberal culture.^{Footnote 10} Thus, for most Falwell-style fundamentalists, the reaction against liberalism was first and foremost a personal one, though it became political for some later.

Nonetheless, there were popular moralist campaigns that developed in the 1980s. The movement against drunk driving is one striking example. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), a group never mentioned in American history textbooks, claimed more than 300 chapters and 600,000 volunteers by 1985. Five years later, a number of surveys found that MADD was America’s favorite charity. MADD, however, was only the most visible organization in the anti-drunk-driving movement. A rival group called Remove Intoxicated Drivers claimed 130 chapters in thirty states by 1983.^{Footnote 11} It alone had a far larger grassroots base than the Moral Majority.

Though we lack precise numbers, the antipornography movement was relatively popular as well. Neighborhood groups bubbled up in many American cities to fight the development of porn districts. Some of these groups were quite active. One neighborhood organization in Indianapolis, for example, managed to collect some ten thousand signatures for its petition.^{Footnote 12} Meanwhile, a number of feminist groups sprung up in American cities as well, including the nationally prominent Women Against Pornography.^{Footnote 13}

Or, consider the animal rights movement. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), formed in 1980, had some 300,000 members by the end of the decade. Several hundred other animal rights groups competed with PETA for members. The growth of humane societies was even more spectacular. By decade’s end, there were several thousand such groups, claiming more than 10 million members. Some of these groups had been around for years, sustained by small memberships. The Humane Society of the United States, for example, was founded in 1954, but did not enjoy explosive growth until the 1980s. After 1984, it grew by about 100,000 members every year, reaching half a million supporters by 1988.^{Footnote 14}

Like the animal rights movement, the pro-life movement exploded in the 1980s. Pro-lifers in the direct-action wing of the movement were especially active. The National Abortion Federation estimates that between 1977 and 1994, such activists participated in 634 clinic blockades and 7,768 pickets. During that same period, pro-life activists were arrested 33,661 times.^{Footnote 15} Such numbers suggest that it should rank among the largest campaigns of civil disobedience in American history. The annual right-to-life march grew dramatically as well, from a mere 20,000 citizens in 1974 to nearly 100,00 by the 1980s.^{Footnote 16}

Thus, it is not wrong to describe the 1980s as a decade of reaction. Baptist fundamentalists simply were not its central actors, though they too shared a sense that Americans needed to say “no” to things that harmed themselves and others. And by the end of the decade, many did join Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue. But to imagine that fundamentalists were the decade’s most active moral crusaders against liberalism misses just how widespread such concerns were in the 1980s. Groups representing Americans from across the political and religious spectrum sought to limit the excesses of liberalism. And unlike the Moral Majority, they banded together in large numbers.

Land of the Free

To understand the popularity and growth of these movements, it is important to comprehend the historical context in which they emerged. All of these campaigns thrived in a legal and cultural setting that was unusually permissive when viewed both historically and in comparison to most other Western democracies.

After the repeal of Prohibition, driving drunk was barely regulated. While Scandinavian countries made it illegal to drive with a blood alcohol content between .05 and .08, America set its limit at twice to three times those rates. And even if caught while intoxicated at that relatively high level, the penalties in America were never severe. People who were routinely caught driving while drunk were not harshly penalized.^{Footnote 17}

Though alcohol consumption had certainly not returned to its former historical highpoint reached during the early years of the republic, alcohol consumption had been on the rise prior to the emergence of the anti-drunk-driving campaign.^{Footnote 18} Beer drinking increased 31 percent during the 1970s, a significant development given that most problem drinkers consume beer rather than wine or spirits.^{Footnote 19} The combination of lenience toward drinkers and rising alcohol abuse in the 1970s created dangerous roads.

If the liberalism of the 1970s had created a permissive, even welcoming, environment for drunk drivers, it did not compare to the revolutionary permissiveness pornographers encountered. A series of court decisions allowed the free and open sale of hard-core pornography for the first time in American history. Porn districts sprung up in large urban centers and small cities, making available material that had previously only existed in an underground market. As political scientist Donald Downs explained, “Material available by the mid-1970s contained sexual explicitness that was unimaginable as recently as 1968” (author’s emphasis).^{Footnote 20}

Unlike pornography, the consumption of animals had long been widespread in American society, though it had steadily increased since the Great Depression. The treatment of animals, however, deteriorated after World War II due to the development of factory farming and an increase in animal research. Factory farms were overcrowded and used new controversial technologies, including machines to debeak chickens and pluck feathers.^{Footnote 21} Meanwhile, the treatment of animals on farms and in labs was lightly regulated, and still is by European standards.^{Footnote 22}

As with the other Eighties’ campaigns against drunk driving, smut, and cruelty to animals, the pro-life movement thrived in an unusually permissive legal setting. In 1973 the Supreme Court crafted one of the most liberalized abortion regimes in the Western world. In this permissive legal setting, abortion rates climbed precipitously before peaking in 1981.^{Footnote 23} Even today, after some Western democracies have liberalized their laws, the United States is one of the most permissive nations along with Sweden, the Netherlands, and Canada. While third- trimester abortions for almost any reason are legal in the United States, abortions are restricted in most other democracies to the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. Many democracies, including France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy, also impose far more onerous waiting periods.^{Footnote 24}

The Price of Liberalism

The Eighties’ movements all argued that American freedoms and pleasures had been purchased at a high price. The expression of some common freedoms required suffering, the domination of innocent persons, and even death itself. Dead motorists, battered women, tortured animals, and crushed embryos were the casualties of Americans’ dogged pursuit of happiness.

In an influential essay published in Philosophy and Public Affairs, Bonnie Steinbeck succinctly summed up the views of many anti-drunk-driving activists: “It’s not unreasonable to require people to undergo great inconvenience to avoid killing other people.”^{Footnote 25} And yet for decades after Prohibition ended, Americans were not even asked to suffer minor inconveniences.

As the problem took its toll on the lives of children, the stage was set for what one historian called “the most significant shift against alcohol since Prohibition’s repeal in 1933.” It also enjoyed broad ideological appeal, uniting conservatives, progressives, and moderates. Routinely, these activists insisted that every liberal society needs to be ordered by moral decency. “Central to [activist] narratives,” historian Barron Lerner found, “was the idea that what had occurred was no accident, but rather the conscious act of someone who had deliberately disregarded the law and any semblance of decent behavior.” Candy Lightner, the founder of MADD, recounted her own moral shock upon discovering the leniency of American laws. As she put it, “I was so angry that this could happen in a civilized society.” Some even called drunk-driving-related deaths a “holocaust,” echoing the rhetoric of pro-life and animal rights activists.^{Footnote 26}

Like drunk driving, pornography generated a moral shock that struck citizens across the political spectrum. Neighborhood associations emerged to fight the urban blight and crime that grew up around porn establishments, as well as to protect children from a sexualized public culture. As political scientist Donald Downs concluded, such groups believed that pornography led to “declining property values, greater crime, and deterioration in the tone of life.”^{Footnote 27} Religious conservatives and feminists expressed variations of the latter two concerns. Both argued that pornography encouraged violence against women and degraded human beings by turning them into mere instruments of human desire.

It was feminists, however, who first posited a causal relationship between pornography and sexual violence. Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 bestseller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, linked rape to pornography. As the historian Whitney Strub found, “Against Our Will fused pornography and rape in the feminist consciousness, laying the groundwork for further expansion on the theme.”^{Footnote 28} Conservatives, meanwhile, followed the lead of feminists. Ronald Reagan’s 1986 commission on pornography connected smut to violence, just as Brownmiller did.^{Footnote 29}

Brownmiller’s book struck a cord partly because it was published in an environment in which feminists were increasingly concerned about violence in the media as well as the growing frequency of sexual violence. According to the National Crime Victimization survey, the incidence of rape increased throughout the 1970s before peaking in 1979. By way of comparison, the incidence of rape in the 1970s was many times higher than it is today.^{Footnote 30} Meanwhile, feminists responded by sensitizing the public to the problem of sexual violence as well as creating rape centers and battered-women’s shelters.^{Footnote 31} Thus, the feminist campaign against pornography grew out of the movement’s larger concern with violence against women. It was the era’s left-wing response to America’s crime wave.

But even when smut was not connected to actual violence, feminists and conservatives nonetheless insisted that pornography tended to degrade human beings by transforming them into objects. As Downs observed, feminists’ emphasis on objectification “parallel[ed] the conservative critique of pornography, which also stress[ed] pornography’s depersonalizing effects.” Conservatives, however, argued that smut degraded men too, not just women.^{Footnote 32}

As competing views over the centrality of female objectification suggests, there were significant differences between conservatives and feminists in the antipornography movement. Conservatives wanted to maintain a more traditional sexual order, while feminists worried about the eroticization of female subordination. But such differences were sometimes overstated, especially by feminists who felt the need to distance themselves politically from religious conservatives.^{Footnote 33}

Conservative and moderate women, meanwhile, joined the feminist-run Women Against Pornography in considerable numbers. Like the activists against drunk driving, many members were concerned mothers. As Bronstein notes, they “typically identified themselves as mothers and expressed concerns about the values of the society in which they were raising their children.” Women Against Pornography “had tapped into an issue that was emotional and raw.”^{Footnote 34}

Whatever differences separated feminists, moderates, and conservatives, they all shared the sense that the American liberalism needed to be ordered by moral limits. Feminist Diana Russell spoke for Americans from across the political spectrum when she insisted that proponents of unfettered liberalism “seemed to have forgotten that many individual liberties are curtailed by all societies for the perceived welfare of the whole society.”^{Footnote 35} Conservative and moderate opponents of pornography could not have agreed more.

Much like activists in the antipornography campaign, animal rights crusaders insisted that the satisfaction of lesser desires could not justify domination, suffering, and violence. They also concluded that animals should not be treated as mere objects that are available for human consumption, just as critics of pornography stressed. Peter Singer, the movement’s philosopher, emphasizes in his work that “humans inflict suffering on nonhuman animals for trivial purposes.”^{Footnote 36} Meanwhile, sociologists James Jasper and Dorothy Nelkin found that animal rights crusaders routinely demand that human beings “must no longer treat [animals] as resources, as means for human pleasures.” Like activists in the antipornography movement, animal rights advocates tended to believe that human desires had become perverted through the use of animals in the entertainment industry and commercial testing. Too many Americans lusted after petty luxuries, which required the suffering and death of sentient creatures. Some feminists even drew pointed analogies between the plight of women and animals, claiming that both had been “objects for enslavement, entertainment, rape, or experiments.”^{Footnote 37}

The animal rights crusade is sometimes caricatured as a far-left movement. Though it certainly leans left, surveys suggest that a quarter of activists identify as either moderates or conservatives. Prominent conservatives have also lent their support to the movement, notably Jean Bethke Elshtain and Senator Robert Dole. In fact, Dole proposed a successful amendment to the Animal Welfare Act that improved the care of lab animals in 1985.^{Footnote 38} Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, were well represented in Congressional Friends for Animals, which formed in 1990 to promote animal rights and welfare.^{Footnote 39} More recently, Matthew Scully, a former speechwriter for President W. Bush and literary editor for National Review, authored a popular book that argued for the humane treatment of animals.^{Footnote 40} Clearly the movement appealed to Americans from across the political spectrum.

While many animal rights activists leaned left, pro-lifers have certainly leaned right. Nonetheless, considerable ideological diversity has been found in the pro-life movement. The most radical wing of the movement was pioneered by leftist Catholics, some of whom had cut their political teeth protesting the Vietnam War and nuclear proliferation.^{Footnote 41} Meanwhile, many politicians in the Democratic Party were strongly pro-life before they ran for the presidency. Jesse Jackson even used to speak at pro-life rallies in the 1970s.^{Footnote 42} Since 1980, however, the parties have taken increasingly polarized stands on the issue of abortion, which pushed many pro-lifers into Republican Party politics. As the New Right operative Richard Viguerie once observed, the “abortion issue is the door through which many people came into conservative politics.”^{Footnote 43} Yet even today the ideology of activists is not easily situated in a conservative worldview. As sociologist Ziad Munson found in his recent study, “Pro-life activists’ moral universe is not easily mapped onto the standard conservative-liberal continuum or onto any existing categories of attitudes toward social and moral issues.”^{Footnote 44}

To focus on the ideological bent of animal rights crusaders and pro-lifers, however, misses the extent to which both movements were driven by a single issue rather than a larger ideological agenda. It also tends to obscure their striking commonalities with one another. In particular, activists for both causes made the shocking claim that there were death camps within America’s borders because its laws defined persons in an arbitrary way. And pro-lifers, like animal rights activists, concluded that satisfying one’s ambitions and desires should not require the sacrifice of life itself. As sociologist James Hunter explained this way of thinking, “to pursue a career is fine, say the pro-lifers, but not at the sacrifice of a child’s life.”^{Footnote 45} The many avenues through which Americans pursue happiness should never be paved with innocent blood, said animal rights crusaders and right-to-lifers.

As with feminists and conservatives in the antipornography campaign, the perspective of animal rights activists and pro-lifers actually seemed to converge over time. Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, which is sometimes called the bible of the animal rights movement, never claimed that animals possess an inherent right to life. In fact, as a utilitarian, Singer believes that animals should be killed if doing so serves weightier interests. But if Animal Liberation is the movement’s bible, most activists are heretics. Much like activists in the right-to-life movement, animal rights crusaders believe that the beings they defend are intrinsically valuable. As Jasper and Nelkin found, “animal rights activists borrowed a moral vocabulary from the fetal rights and anti-abortion movements.”^{Footnote 46} Meanwhile, a lesser-known philosopher, Tom Regan, eventually did make a case for the inherent worth of animals, which he acknowledges at least suggests that fetuses may have a right to life as well.^{Footnote 47}

Feminists, of course, tended to see the abortion issue differently. But the same critique of liberalism that led some feminists to condemn pornography and the treatment of animals raised questions about abortion. In the 1980s, many feminists in the antipornography and animal rights movements were drawn to a communitarian ethic of care, popularized by psychologist Carol Gilligan. Contrary to the liberal tradition, this ethic posited that human beings—and especially women—were culturally and even naturally interdependent, as well as tied to one another in webs of moral obligation. Values such as autonomy were criticized as male-centered, selfish, and barbaric.^{Footnote 48} A number of pro-choice thinkers criticized some feminists’ interest in a communitarian ethic of care precisely because it did not provide a secure philosophical foundation for abortion rights. Law professors Pamela Karlan and Daniel Ortiz, for instance, insisted that a feminist ethic of care “speaks largely against abortion rights. Its communitarian underpinnings and tendency to impose moral responsibility in situations of need make defending abortion difficult.”^{Footnote 49}

Despite the complex tensions and affinities between these movements, the Reagan administration warmly embraced three of them. Reagan authored the pro-life tract, Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, and appointed right-to-life activist C. Everett Coop as his Surgeon General. As Surgeon General, Coop chaired presidential commissions on drunk driving and pornography. And although Reagan was hardly an animal rights activist, he nevertheless signed legislation important to the animal rights movement, including a strengthened amendment to the Animal Welfare Act in 1985.^{Footnote 50}

The Liberal Response

Although all of these moral crusades invoked rights, many liberal and libertarian critics argued that such movements undermined basic American freedoms. Politics, in their view, should provide as wide a scope as possible for personal choice and autonomy. Citizens, therefore, should be free to choose whether they drove under the influence, viewed pornography, ate and hunted animals, or sought abortions. State neutrality toward the moral choices of Americans should govern political life. Opponents further argued that the supposed harms advanced by these movements were both dubious and difficult to regulate. Thus, critics accused these movements of illiberal fanaticism and reviving the retrograde conservatism of an earlier era.

Even the campaign against drunk driving, by far the most successful Eighties’ movement, found such criticisms hard to overcome. For example, all forty drunk-driving bills that were proposed in the New York legislature by 1983 failed. As one legislative aid explained to Doris Aiken, the state director of Remove Intoxicated Drivers, “You can’t legislate morality; people like to drink and love their cars in America.”^{Footnote 51} A version of this objection was uttered countless times against opponents of drunk driving, pornography, animal cruelty, and abortion.

Thanks to the failure of Prohibition, however, it was an argument that had special cultural force in the case of drinking. Critics often compared the anti-drunk-driving movement to the temperance crusade of an earlier era. Its activists were even called “teetotalers” and “neoprohibitionists.” Likewise, Frank Rich, the editor of Modern Drunkard Magazine, derided MADD as a “fraudulent gang of liberty-squashing fascists.” More sober libertarians argued that random roadside checks violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches.^{Footnote 52}

Similar charges were leveled against opponents of pornography, especially by libertarians and liberal feminists. Such critics, for instance, called the anti-smut movement conservative and puritanical. Activists in Women Against Pornography were denounced as “neo-Puritans and prudes conducting a sexual witch hunt.”^{Footnote 53} Meanwhile, “pro-sex” feminists further emphasized the virtues of liberalism. According to philosopher Linda LeMoncheck, most workers in the sex industry as well as many liberal feminists regard sex work as “pleasurable, profitable, and liberating.”^{Footnote 54}

Despite their many differences, the organized campaigns against the animal rights and pro-life movements defended autonomy and the ethics of the market. Both camps, for example, preferred to emphasize the importance of individual choices, rather than engage the deeper philosophical claims regarding the moral status of animals or human embryos. Philosophers Lawrence Finsen and Susan Finsen found that the fur industry defended itself by arguing that “choice is an important issue to many women.” One typical ad campaign showed a woman draped in fur holding a child. The caption read: “Some people are opposed to a very basic luxury: Your freedom of choice.” The National Rifle Association, likewise, defined hunting as “a freedom of choice issue.” Meanwhile, the American Medical Association defended scientific research on animals by invoking the “public’s freedom of choice.” Remarkably, the pro-choice movement and fur industry even came up with the same epithet to describe their opponents: “the antis,” shorthand for anti-choice.^{Footnote 55}

The Eighties’ Movements in Historical Context

The turn against liberalism’s perceived excesses in the 1980s fit a larger historical pattern. As the late James Q. Wilson explained, although Americans “assert large claims to freedom, spontaneity, and self expression,” they generally “accept constraints, moderate excesses, and reveal our capacity for self control.” During periods that weaken constraints, “the defenders of morality [redouble] their efforts.”^{Footnote 56} Likewise, sociologist James Ault regards such cycles of protest as a “distinctly American pattern of conflict.” Because America has provided “the greatest scope for individual freedom of any nation on Earth,” Ault contends, it routinely inspires movements that fight for a “restored sense of the obligations that bind.”^{Footnote 57} In other words, America’s moralistic campaigns are first and foremost a mark of the nation’s liberalism rather than its conservatism.

All of the 1980s crusades did, in fact, have nineteenth-century precursors. At the end of the nineteenth century, as urbanization, growing affluence, and immigration weakened social restraints, middle-class Americans responded with campaigns to improve character, regulate prostitution, prohibit drinking, and ameliorate the suffering of animals. Wilson found that these campaigns enjoyed some remarkable successes. For example, Wilson concluded that crime dropped by the end of the nineteenth century even though urbanization, immigration, industrialization, and rapid economic growth should have increased it.^{Footnote 58}

However, the Eighties’ movements emerged in a very different political and cultural context from their nineteenth-century predecessors. By the 1980s, the rights revolution, operating through the courts, had expanded many of the very liberties these campaigns sought to restrict. Abortion rights proved to be nearly absolute and impossible to limit in the ways that many European governments had done. Likewise, the movement against pornography constantly ran up against an unsympathetic court, which protected smut as something like an absolute First Amendment right. Even feminists’ efforts to find creative ways around Supreme Court precedents by claiming that pornography violated the civil rights of women failed. This civil rights approach to fighting pornography was rejected by the Supreme Court in 1986, dealing something close to a mortal blow to the antipornography movement.^{Footnote 59}

The rights revolution also changed the political culture, partly by weakening competing political traditions, especially republicanism. Law professor Mary Ann Glendon argued that the rights revolution nurtured a political culture that encouraged Americans to “frame nearly every social controversy as a clash of rights.”^{Footnote 60} Thus even when the Supreme Court did not effectively declare the ends of the Eighties’ crusades unconstitutional, their activists still had to articulate their arguments for new social and legal constraints in terms of rights. Consequently, conservatives—and not simply feminists—argued that pornography discriminated against women, while activists in other movements campaigned for the rights of motorists, animals, and embryos.

Because these Eighties’ campaigns framed their causes in terms of rights, it was easy for some observers to miss the ways these movements were reacting against the rights revolution, even as they conformed to a political culture that practically required “rights talk.” Wilson, for example, has drawn a stark contrast between the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In both periods Americans confronted trends that tended to destabilize the social order, including growing affluence, urbanization, and immigration. Yet Wilson argued that while Americans asserted an “ethos of self control” in the nineteenth century, they asserted “an ethos of self expression” in the twentieth century.^{Footnote 61} The Eighties’ movements, however, did seek self-restraint, but they had to do so in the name of rights. These movements sought to reassert a decent and constrained liberal order that, if successful, would have required greater governmental regulations and the curtailment of taken-for-granted liberties.

Rights talk within these movements was strategic, but it was not insincere: they all believed that rights were at stake, especially the movements for life.^{Footnote 62} But the Eighties’ movements were reacting against what they perceived as a libertine current in American life, and they thought other social goods mattered too. As the rhetoric highlighted in this article should make evident, activists in these campaigns valued goods such as dignity, decency, respect, an ethic of care, and the fate of civilization itself. Even the rights claims themselves encompassed a social dimension that imposed duties and responsibilities.^{Footnote 63} As feminist critics have observed, the posited right to fetal life is in some large measure a “welfare right” since it requires the aid of its hosts.^{Footnote 64} Likewise, a successful animal rights movement would prove quite onerous for human beings since they would be responsible for caring for many animals that cannot survive or avoid suffering by themselves. And, in fact, many activists tend to “adopt” many vulnerable animals.^{Footnote 65} Thus, even the seemingly classic liberal freedom of a right to life articulated by the Eighties’ movements would impose positive duties on fellow citizens.

In the late twentieth century, however, it had become difficult to talk about these nonliberal values, partly because of the declining cultural authority of American Protestantism. Whatever their sectarian differences, nineteenth-century reformers worked within a common cultural framework that celebrated self-restraint. Thus, they labored together for a common Protestant civilization, which demanded everything from abolitionism to temperance.^{Footnote 66} The Eighties’ movements enjoyed no such solidarity or cultural power. Much like the Sixties’ movements of liberation,^{Footnote 67} the Eighties’ campaigns were badly fragmented. They struggled as “single-issue” crusaders, competing for the attention of elites and ordinary Americans. One of the problems with placing the Moral Majority at the center of grassroots resistance during the Reagan Revolution is that it suggests that the era’s reactionaries against liberalism were bound together by a comprehensive worldview. Even within each movement activists often disagreed about a range of salient political issues. Meanwhile, the very fragmentation of the Eighties’ movements rendered it difficult for historians and social scientists to notice what they had in common.

Along with the decline of American Protestantism, female reformers lost their cultural authority as republican mothers. Much like their nineteenth-century predecessors, the Eighties’ crusades were dominated by female activists. Women in the 1980s, however, no longer possessed the moral authority that women in the nineteenth century leveraged on behalf of moral campaigns. Historian Rebecca Jo Plant has described the fall of republican motherhood after World War II, when Americans began to “conceptualize motherhood as a ‘biological office,’ devoid of intrinsic moral meaning and purpose.” Thus, by the 1980s, women as mothers could no longer “exert a morally charged influence within the public and private realms.” Motherhood, as Plant concludes, “became more compatible with liberal individualism.”^{Footnote 68} Appeals for a more caring or nurturing society, therefore, enjoyed diminished force.

Activists in the Eighties’ movements seemed to have different senses of their own potential power as women and mothers. In the anti-drunk-driving movement, Mothers Against Drunk Driving drew on whatever residual cultural power the notion of republican motherhood still possessed. Such appeals may have enjoyed some power, though they were also objects of ridicule.^{Footnote 69} Women in the right-to-life movement, meanwhile, seemed to draw moderately on their cultural capital as mothers in some contexts, especially pregnancy-help centers.^{Footnote 70} Other campaigns, especially the feminist antipornography movement, probably underestimated their own moral authority as women, particularly their power to shame men. Feminist theory posited that men are drawn to pornography principally because they hate women and seek their humiliation. Such tenets did not give feminists a sense that they could control pornography by shaming the men who wiled away their leisure hours in porn districts. Women in the animal rights movement, meanwhile, seemed to have even less sense of their potential power as either women or mothers.

Of course, women in the Eighties’ movement did have the vote, and many became single-issue voters. However, the courts also effectively weakened this important power by depriving them (and sympathetic men) any right to push for bans on pornography or abortion. The courts, in other words, selectively disenfranchised the Eighties’ movements by allowing legislatures to consider some of their policy ambitions, but not others. Thanks to the rights revolution, it had become unconstitutional to “legislate morality.”

Thus, when compared to their nineteenth-century predecessors, the Eighties’ movements confronted formidable new legal and cultural challenges that made curtailing liberties difficult. Nonetheless, many of the trends that so alarmed activists in the 1980s have headed in the other direction. Drunk-driving-related deaths are way down, as are abortion rates and the consumption of fur coats. The treatment of animals on farms and in the lab has improved moderately. Clearly, pornography represents a countertrend: it exploded due to new technologies well beyond what was imaginable in the 1970s and ‘80s. Its popularity, however, has not increased sexual violence, which has fallen considerably since the 1970s. Thus, much evidence suggests that Americans are managing their liberties in ways that would please activists in the Eighties’ movements. Meanwhile, economic woes, domestic terrorism, and cultural conflict with Islamic traditions have diminished Americans’ appetite for new moral campaigns.

Despite such encouraging social trends, America remains a land of relative freedom compared to many European democracies. Moral choices of all kinds are regulated less here than abroad. Even the drunk-driving campaign, which was far more successful than other Eighties’ movements, did not achieve legal restrictions that approach those commonly found in European democracies. In “contrast to what happens in many other countries,” concluded Barron Lerner, “impaired driving remains a right in the United States.”^{Footnote 71}

As long as America provides a wider scope for individual liberties than other democracies, American citizens of many stripes—not just Falwell-style fundamentalists—will react periodically against the perceived excesses of our liberal tradition. And unlike their nineteenth predecessors, tomorrow’s reformers will have to do so in a legal and cultural context less friendly to such appeals.