Conservative Social Engineering and Air Pollution: Government Regulation of the Broadcast Media
![handle is hein.journals/lstf18 and id is 85 raw text is: Conservative Social Engineering and Air Pollution:
Government Regulation of the Broadcast Media
Timothy 0. Lenz
Department of Political Science
Florida Atlantic University
I. Introduction
In American public discourse, social engineering, which involves using
law to influence values and behavior,' is considered virtually synonymous with
liberalism. In fact some conservatives maintain that a distaste for social en-
gineering was so strong that it united the two main strains of conservatism: the
traditional strain, rooted in normative values, and the libertarian strain, rooted
in individual autonomy.' But liberals do not have a monopoly on social en-
gineering; conservatives read the Constitution as a document that reserves
(particularly to the states) the police power to legislate for the public health,
welfare, safety, and morals. However, conservatives are apt to refer to the
community's right, the majority's right, or society's right as euphemisms for
government power because conservative rhetoric remains anti-government.
Contrary to the conventional understanding of social engineering as liberal, the
legacy of Warren Court activism includes constitutional doctrines that limit
social engineering based upon the traditional governmental powers to legislate
morality.
This article examines conservative social engineering in order to provide
a better understanding of contemporary justifications for using law to regulate
values (and ultimately behavior) in a post-individual rights era of American
politics that is characterized by widespread criticism of individual rights. The
critics come from widely divergent points on the ideological spectrum, but they
share a belief that social responsibility, community, and traditional or family
values have been neglected because of an inordinate emphasis upon individual
rights. One example of post-individual rights analysis is the argument that the
various civil rights movements since World War II have resulted in legalism,
a pejorative reference to public affairs dominated by rights talk.
In Taking Rights Seriously, Ronald Dworkin observed that [t]he lan-
guage of rights now dominates political debate in the United States,3 and he
tried to develop a general theory of law that fused legal and moral issues in
order to avoid focusing upon unduly narrow conceptions of legal rights. More
recent works have been even more explicitly critical of modern conceptions of
rights: Mary Glendon's Rights Talk is subtitled The Impoverishment of
American Political Discourse. These critical analyses have contributed to a
Legal Studies Forum, Volume XVIII, Number 1 (1994)](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/lstf18&div=12&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Conservative Social Engineering and Air Pollution: Government Regulation of the Broadcast Media
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