The eighteenth century Enlightenment -- along with its descendent ideology of liberalism -- is often conceived as taking one side over the other in a series of binary oppositions -- bourgeois vs. aristocrat, disadvantage vs. privilege, talent vs. birth, youth vs. age, and so on. All of which is probably true enough, but we tend to leave out one of the more intriguing of the oppositions: the contest between the living and the dead. In cases where the vital interests -- er, at least, interests -- of these two subsets of the body politic conflict, liberalism tends to plump for the former, conservatism for the latter. And I take it that part of the deeper story underlying Ray Madoff's brief, entrancing book, Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead (quite possibly the best, most ensnaring title for any work ever published on the topic of tax policy and estate planning) is as follows: Just as mid-twentieth century American liberalism has taken a beating across so many fronts in the last few decades, it has lost ground in this one too. Right now, the dead are winning.
