"The form that a future left-wing challenge to our present liberalism may take could be considerably different from those with which we are familiar in this century. The threat to liberty posed by communism was so direct and obvious, and the doctrine so discredited at present, that it is hard to see it as anything but totally exhausted throughout the developed world. A future left-wing threat to liberal democracy is much more likely to wear the clothing of liberalism while changing its meaning from within, rather than to stage a frontal attack on basic democratic institutions and principles. For example, almost all liberal democracies have seen a massive proliferation of new “rights” over the past generation. Not content merely to protect life, liberty, and property, many democracies have also defined rights to privacy, travel, employment, recreation, sexual preference, abortion, childhood, and so on. Needless to say, many of these rights are ambiguous in their social content and mutually contradictory. It is easy to foresee situations in which the basic rights defined by, say, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were seriously abridged by newly minted rights whose aim was a more thoroughgoing equalization of society."