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The progressive limits to rights mobilization have become starkly apparent in the past two decades. No new suspect classes have been forthcoming from the Supreme Court since 1977 despite continued demands for legal recognition by lesbians and gays, indigenous peoples and others interested in expanding civil rights doctrine. Public tolerance for civil rights measures has likewise dried up. Since the 1960s, referenda on civil rights have halted affirmative action programs, limited school busing and housing discrimination protections, promoted English-only laws, limited AIDS policies, and ended the judicial recognition of same-sex marriage, among other issues. Nearly 80% of these referenda have had outcomes realizing the Madisonian fear of “majority tyranny”¹ and signaling the Nietzschean dread of a politics of resentment (Brown, 1995, p. 214; Connolly, 1991, p. 64).

Handler's genealogy of postmodernism recounted in his address recognizes its origin in aesthetic disciplines and its somewhat viral transcription into social jurisprudence: “the postmodern concept of subversion developed first in language and literary theory, art, and architecture and then spread into politics and law” (1992a, p. 698). Although Handler's rejection of deconstruction stems from what he sees to be its political quiescence, its association with aesthetic critiques of modernism haunts his claims as one source of its essential conservatism. Aesthetic values, he implies, remain distant or distinct from pressing issues of political and social inequality.