They've stolen my name.

In my younger days I did not hesitate for a moment to describe myself as a liberal, which in those far-off times meant two things: (a) substantively, it meant you were in favor of the underdog, e.g., working people, the poor, blacks; (b) procedurally, it meant you were in favor of civil liberties, e.g., freedom to speak and organize, the right to a fair trial.

Philosophically that old liberalism was based on something like Kant's categorical imperative: Always treat humanity, whether in yourself or in another, as an end, never simply as a means. Or in more popular language: Treat human beings as persons, never simply as things. Or in more exalted language: Always remember that the human person is a being of absolute and nearly infinite value. From this philosophical premise it followed that we should get rid of all unnecessary social inequality the substantive half of the liberal program) and that we should get rid of all unnecessary impediments to freedom (the procedural half of the program).

So defined, liberalism was not incompatible with Christianity. Just the opposite, in fact, for it was Christianity that had first taught the absolute and nearly infinite value of the individual human person. Liberalism could be seen as a secularized version of Christian anthropology.

For me this easy identification with liberalism changed forever on the day Roe v. Wade was announced in January, 1973, and I saw liberals greet the decision with jubilation. I could appreciate that the right to abortion was consistent, at least at first glance, with the personal freedom component of the liberal agenda; and I could even appreciate that an argument might be made that this new right was a boon for underdogs, in this case women, and therefore consistent with the substantive component of the liberal agenda. But no matter how hard I tried (and I did try), I could not see how abortion was consistent with the philosophical foundation of liberalism. If humans are of absolute and nearly infinite value, how can we abort them with justice? And it did not help very much to be told that the victim of abortion was a "potential" human, not an "actual" one. Even granting this, the potential human remained a thing of immense value; and how could aborting it be justified for anything less than the gravest reasons?

Nor was my mind put at ease when I was told that since only women could become pregnant, then only women were entitled to have opinions on abortion. If so, then the Christian-Kantian universalism that I had imagined to lie at the heart of liberalism was out the window. I found it difficult to understand how a liberal could believe that gender trumped humanity.

Still I continued to call myself a liberal. Only now I amended the description a bit, saying, "Well, I'm basically a liberal, but I don't agree on the abortion issue." But that was awkward.

Eventually I stumbled across Daniel Bell's description of himself as a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture. I liked that. Of course I wasn't a socialist; but neither for that matter was Bell, at least not according to the usual meaning of that word. Omitting the socialist part of the description, then, I took to calling myself "a political liberal and a cultural conservative." There, now. That felt just right.

I remained content with that self-description for a long time; but I am content no longer. The description works only as long as culture and politics remain relatively segregated from one another. Then you can be both a liberal and a conservative without violating the logical principle of contradiction. But when cultural issues invade politics, when political decisions become decisions about cultural questions, then the adjectival compromise has broken down.

For quite some time now this is in fact what has been happening; that is, culture and politics have been merging, and to be a political liberal has increasingly involved supporting the liberal cultural agenda. But with the coming of the Clinton administration, the floodgates have opened, and today American politics is inundated with cultural issues.

Clinton's program includes both traditional political subject matter (e.g., deficit reduction, health care for all) and cultural subject matter (e.g., gays in the military, public funding for abortion); and it can no longer be said, as it could not so long ago, that the cultural issues are a sideshow, while the traditional political issues are the main event. I suspect that Clinton personally is far more interested in health care and the economy than he is in gay rights and abortion; I even suspect that there must be days when he wishes that some of his "friends" in the gay rights and abortion movements would go jump off a cliff. But whatever his personal feelings, he and his administration are committed to the liberal cultural agenda; and in the public mind his administration is equally defined by gay rights and abortion as by deficit reduction and health care.

But cultural liberalism isn't confined to Washington or to the two issues of gay rights and abortion. For a long time it has been reaching, for instance, into policy decisions about education, which are still chiefly made outside of Washington. To be a liberal in education nowadays means that you are in favor of multiculturalism. Granted, this is a vague concept, which means ten different things to ten different people. Often it means multiracialism, which involves elevating one's racial identity above our common human identity. Sometimes it means that persons of diverse cultural ancestry should focus on their own particular cultural heritages, abandoning the search for a common human culture. But whatever it means, it is almost always incompatible with the Kantian universalism that underlay the old liberalism. To those of us who remember the lessons we learned when being schooled in that old liberalism, muticulturalism is the most illiberal thing in the world, reminiscent of such earlier twentieth-century notions as "proletarian science" and (worse still) "Aryan science."

I don't know how much the Clinton administration will stimulate the economy, but it is almost certain to stimulate cultural liberalism in the field of education, both by policy and by example.

So what shall people like me call ourselves? Certainly not conservatives, because even though we are in agreement with many 6f the conservatives on cultural issues, we are still out of step with them on traditional political and economic issues.

Shall we call ourselves "true liberals" and argue that we have a better right to the label than those who have recently usurped it? I admit to some sympathy with this approach, but I am doubtful it can succeed. About a hundred years ago Herbert Spencer and other champions of laissez-faire argued, with good reason, that they were the true liberals and that the new welfare state liberals were traitors. But words have a life of their own, and Spencer, it turned out, was fighting for a lost verbal cause.

Or shall we admit that we are neoconservatives? No, for that means we are really conservatives, and Republican conservatives at that. Most of us are still not ready to turn Republican, and we hope that the grace of final perseverance will keep us from that sad eventuality.

For the present, it seems, we'll just have to sit here like a character from a fairy tale, waiting for some angelic spirit to reveal to us our true name.