Harvard Law & Policy Review

In recent years, the idea of promoting widespread property ownership in the United States by means of public policy has enjoyed a renaissance across the political spectrum. George W. Bush and other American conservatives have borrowed the term "ownership society" from Margaret Thatcher's Britain and employed it to justify a range of proposals from the partial privatization of Social Security to individual health savings accounts.

Over the past generation, the economic risks American families face have increased substantially. Yet public programs have largely failed to adapt to these new and newly intensified risks, and private workplace benefits have eroded. As a result, Americans increasingly find themselves on an economic tightrope, without an adequate safety net if, as is ever more likely, they lose their footing. This tightrope both creates anxiety about the future and causes hardship when families do lose their balance.

Sixteen years after the Cold War supposedly ended, its beginnings are big political business today. Both U.S. political parties are competing with each other for the mantle of Churchill and Truman. The Bush administration has pilfered from the neo-conservatives (and liberal hawks like Paul Berman) the propagandistic invocation of "Islamic totalitarianism" to draw parallels between its conduct of the "war on terror" and the previous experience of resistance to the ambitions of Hitler and Stalin.