The Monica Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment crisis that grew out of it have done more than reveal the degree to which politics in the United States has been polarized along partisan lines. The scandal has revealed the extent to which the language of morality has been corrupted by the concepts of law. In different ways, both conservatives and liberals have proven that they are incapable of distinguishing between the realm of law and the realm of morality.

This is most obvious in the case of conservatives. The determination of GOP Senate leaders to marshal witnesses to testify in Clinton's trial is the latest abuse of the Constitution with the purpose of shaming the president -- despite his almost-certain acquittal.

From the beginning, when they cheered on Paula Jones lawsuit against the president for sexual harassment, conservatives have acted as though morality can and should be directly translated into law. An older generation of traditional conservatives took it for granted that the realm of law and politics was responsible only for a small part of a sound social order. Virtue and vice did not map directly onto law and crime; there were many things that were dishonrable, but not illegal, and much else that was legal but disgraceful. The moral policing of society, therefore, had to be undertaken by informal means, such as social pressure, praise and shame, in areas in which the clumsy mechanisms of courts and legislatures had no place.

That wise old moral traditionalism is alien to today's religious right. Relgiously minded GOP leaders are influenced by the Protestant fundamentalism of their core constituencies in the South and the Sunbelt. Like adherents of the religious right, who believe that U.S. statute books should directly copy the Book of Leviticus, the more radical Republican leaders have tried to criminalize dishonor. The revelations that Henry Hyde, Bob Livingston and others have committed adultery, like the president they are pursuing, have provided a kind of poetic justice; the pursuers have become the pursued.

While conservatives have been wrong to try to subordinate law to morality, all too many liberals have been guilty of a different offense: acting as though there is no realm of public morality apart from the law. When the Lewinsky scandal broke last year, Democrats such as Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman initially staked out what remains the soundest position -- the president's actions merit moral condemnation, but they do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses. To be plausible, this argument must be balanced -- the disgust with the president must weigh as much as the rejection of impeachment. Unfortunately, as the months have passed, the Democrats have fallen into the trap of treating impeachment as just another partisan issue that they can use for their electoral advantage. From liberals we hear less and less outrage over Clinton's affair and his cover-up.

Instead, the argument that the president's actions were a matter of legitimate public concern and condemnation, but not a legal matter, has been overshadowed by the quite different argument that the president's actions were a private matter and none of the public's business. This is the subtext of the constant, ritualized invocation by Democrats of the term "consensual sex." The "consensual sex" argument changes the subject from objective standards of behavior by public servants to the subjective state of mind of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. As long as sex is "consensual," that is, as long as rape is not involved, then it is "private" and the details do not matter.

Needless to say, this makes a mockery of ordinary standards of morality and decorum, which distinguish between adulterous sex and non-adulterous sex; affairs consummated in hotel rooms and affairs consummated in offices; affairs between social equals and affairs between employers and their subordinates. These commonsense distinctions (which apply equally to heterosexuals and homosexuals) are obliterated by a morality -- or rather an amorality -- that divides sex into two kinds, consensual and nonconsensual, non-rape and rape.

By engaging in this kind of legalistic hair-splitting, the Democrats unwittingly have illustrated the Dukakis Effect. The Effect was first identified during the 1988 presidential campaign debates, when CNN's Bernard Shaw asked Michael Dukakis if he would favor the death penalty for man who had raped his wife. The question was outrageously unfair -- just as outrageously unfair as the harassment of Clinton by Richard Mellon Scaife, Kenneth Starr and the Republican House has been. In each case, however, the question, once raised, provided liberal Democrats with a chance to prove that their moral reflexes are normal. Dukakis, instead of demonstrating anger at the hypothetical rapist -- or at Bernard Shaw -- launched into an emotionless, professorial disquisition on the morality of the death penalty. To much of the American public, Dukakis seemed as alien as Star Trek's Mister Spock, the relentlessly logical character from the planet Vulcan.

Similarly, the appropriate response by liberal Democrats to the Republican campaign against the president should have been anger -- anger at the Republicans, and anger at the president. By now, it appears, Clinton has long since been forgiven by the leading members of his party. Sure, they will go through the motions of censuring him, but as a sop to public disapproval of Clinton's personal morality, not out of sincere loathing for his behavior. The challenge to liberals has been to provide an account of sexual morality that is more subtle and adequate than that of the religious right, while still retaining the concepts and terms of traditional morality. Instead, many liberal public figures have abandoned the language of morality altogether for the language of lawyers -- weasely, shyster lawyers, at that.

Conservatives such as William Bennett who are upset with the state of moral discussion in the United States, then, are right -- but for the wrong reason. We Americans are not more immoral than our ancestors in our actions; but we appear to be losing the ability to think and talk about morality, in a language other than that of prosecutors (the right) or defense attorneys (the left). The right's unforgiving legalism and the left's all-too-forgiving legalism are equally remote from the language of genuine morality. In the moral lexicon, the key sets of opposites are honor and shame, virtue and vice, good and evil, decency and vulgarity -- not inappropriate and appropriate, consensual and nonconsensual, public and private, legal and illegal. The attempt to treat law as though it is morality leads to tyranny; but the attempt to recast morality in terms of the categories and euphemisms of law and individual rights leads just as inevitably to decadence.

Decadence is another word missing from the liberal vocabulary. There is some justification for this, since conservatives are in the habit of denouncing as "decadent" perfectly healthy and moral things that they dislike (such as gay marriage or innovative art). Nevertheless, there really is such a thing as decadence, and the emergent liberal morality -- if it's private and not illegal, then it's not immoral -- fits the description pretty well. It is a decadence less like the spontaneity of Woodstock than like the self-conscious, highly formalized cynicism of pre-Revolutionary France, where men and women addressed one another as "Sir" and "Madam" while engaged in what was euphemistically known as "carnal commerce." Clinton is less a child of the 1960s in Haight-Ashbury than a throwback to the 1760s at Versailles.

What we think of as "old-fashioned Victorian morality" originated as a 19th Century backlash by the middle class against 18th Century elite cynicism. Is another backlash on the way? At the moment, liberals are hoping that the mean-spirited bumbling of the Republicans in this crisis will lead to Democratic gains at the polls. Even if that is the case, one has to wonder whether the right, in the long run, does not have the advantage of sharing the moral vocabulary of ordinary people, who overwhelmingly condemn Clinton's morals even as they approve of his job performance. The conservatives have confused the realms of law and morality -- but at least they know that these are two different realms. About all too many liberals, one can no longer be sure that they know the difference.