DEMOCRATS ARE CONJURING UP NEW 'RIGHTS'.

• Author: Welch, Matt

"LIVING CLOSE TO work shouldn't be a luxury for the rich," Democratic presidential candidate and former congressman Beto O'Rourke tweeted in September. "It's a right for everyone."

In a video of a campaign stop embedded in the tweet, the perpetually earnest Texan elaborated on this new right.

"Here's a tough thing to talk about, though we must," O'Rourke said. "Rich people are going to have to allow, or be forced to allow, lower-income people to live near them.... We force lower-income, working Americans to drive one, two, three hours in either direction to get to their jobs, very often minimum wage jobs."

There are a half-dozen fuzzy-to-erroneous ideas baked into that language--"we" don't "force" just about anyone to drive two-plus hours a day to and from work, for starters. But the underlying principle is worth pondering, particularly since you see it all over the left side of the political spectrum these days. O'Rourke is urgently demanding a federal role in life choices that are shaped by policies at the state and local level.

The Bill of Rights, famously, focuses on "negative" rights--the stuff that government is prohibited from doing to you. ("Congress shall make no law," etc.) In 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt suggested a "second Bill of Rights" that would put the federal government in the position of affirmatively guaranteeing "positive" outcomes--"the right of every family to a decent home," freedom from "unfair competition and domination by monopolies," and so on.

The idea went nowhere constitutionally, but the principles behind it survived beyond FDR, notably through President Harry Truman's 1949 Fair Deal, which called for such positive goods as universal health care, and which served as a precursor to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs of the mid-1960s.

Ambitious, managerial progressivism crashed and burned with the quadruple disappointments of Vietnam, inflation, rising crime, and the longstanding surveillance abuses uncovered in the Watergate scandal. The next two Democratic presidents were both defined by what former California Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown once called the "era of limits." Even President Barack Obama initially coupled his signature domestic expansion of government, the Affordable Care Act, with talk of tackling long-term entitlement reform and enacting a "net spending cut."

That era is no more. Even in the face of...