By remaining silent on this issue, Willis argues, the left has not only abandoned the podium to conservatives but has allowed them to redefine the very terms of the debate. Noting, for example, some feminists’ complicity in the reduction of a broad range of women’s issues to the catchall of sexual violence, Willis laments the consequences, arguing that 
 

Similarly, she points out that hotly argued issues regarding governmental services to citizens were conflated and disposed of by conservatives with little resistance from the left, under the principle that government should be modeled on business organizations. “Today all these propositions are virtually unquestioned axioms of economic, political, and cultural common sense,” she writes.

The first half of Don’t Think, Smile! is taken up with a pastiche of brief essays on such topical matters as the publication of The Bell Curve, the trial of O. J. Simpson, the Million Man March, and Paula Jones’s lawsuit against President Clinton. Collectively titled “Decade of Denial,” these short articles are linked by the author’s insistence on freedom of sexual choice as “a matter of individual liberty” and her denunciation of the traditional family as “a social structure based on sexual repression and the subordination of women.”

Arguing that personal freedom must assume a central role in leftist thought, Willis goes so far as to castigate morality itself as “a structure of internalized coercion” (though she does concede that not “all moral imperatives are oppressive”). She adds that the left’s political future depends on a public commitment to such freedom. “What would have happened in 1994—or 1980—if desire had had a champion?” she asks.
 
 

If liberals had made this case, Willis writes, we’d be facing a different political landscape. But frustrated by their failure to defend their own convictions, she raises what she calls “the bleakest of questions: is the left so afraid of freedom that it would rather lose?”

John Biguenet’s work has appeared most recently in Granta, Esquire, and Joe. His books include The Craft of Translation and Theories of Translation (both from University of Chicago Press) as well as Foreign Fictions (Random House).