Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse.

• Author: Mirsky, Yehudah

Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. Mary Ann Glendon. Free Press, $22.95. Not for nothing did the ACLU become the scapegoat of the 1988 election. Bush's rhetoric worked for the same reason good demagoguery usually does: It tapped into the unarticulated but pressing intuition of the people.

What was that dark feeling? That all this "rights talk" has gone too far, that policy discussions that should be carried on in terms of fair play and common sense have been frozen in the absolute language of rights: a right to welfare, a right to shelter, to abortion, to government contracts; prisoners' rights, pornographers' rights, even lab rabbits' rights; my right to clean air versus your right to smoke, or, as in the celebrated Boggs case in New York, my right to sleep on the sidewalk versus your right to live on a nice block. Last February the cover of Harper's finally posed the question directly: "Enough About Rights. What About Obligations?"

I had hoped that Glendon would give us a thoughtful answer. I was disappointed. Glendon is surely correct to say, as she does early on, that "the romance of rights" has overtaken the legal profession (or at least that sector of it devoted to public and constitutional law), "infiltrating the more carefully nuanced languages that many Americans still speak in their kitchens, neighborhoods, workplaces, religious communities, and union halls." She rightly asks "whether an undifferentiated language of rights is really the best way to address the astonishing variety of injustice and forms of suffering that exist in the world." But she never answers this in a very satisfying way. Instead the reader is treated to some Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau (de rigueur for a Harvard Law professor), a lengthy discussion of the erratic development of the right to privacy and the failure of American tort law to impose obligations of Good Samaritanism, the need for legal bases for child care and other family-oriented social welfare programs, and a broad-brush treatment of the use that continental and Canadian courts have made of American-style notions of rights, especially when it comes to abortion. Glendon makes a number of excellent observations along the way (for instance, that abortion ought more logically to have been seen as a prerogative of family planning than as a personal right to privacy) but fails to establish a convincing connection between the prevalence of rights talk and larger social and political...