In fact, conservative moralists won't begin to seriously address what is happening in our society until they take on the very market capitalism and consumerist culture they uphold and promote. In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism 30 years ago, Daniel Bell, no liberal, warned that free markets no longer make free men because "economic liberalism has become ... corporate oligopoly, and, in the pursuit of private wants, a hedonism that is destructive of social needs."

Mr. Bell warned against both conservatives' and liberals' emphasis on material consumption as the engine and measure of social health.

Even economist John Maynard Keynes, who designed government-driven economic growth to increase material abundance, equality and social felicity, wrote later in life that he'd been wrong to "believe in a continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, ... who can be safely released from the outward restraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct."

Hoping to lift humanity by removing "outward restraints" of poverty and its attendant repressions, Mr. Keynes and colleagues had "completely misunderstood human nature, including our own. ... It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary accomplishment of our predecessors in the ordering of life ... or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect this order."

Mr. Keynes' belated recognition that social life is too complicated to be redeemed through material progress alone is a rebuke not just to liberals or Marxists but also to a capitalist materialism that rationalizes the most disruptive and degrading effects of mass marketing and production.

While conservatives ignore criticism of corporate mass marketing – or, indeed, while they rationalize pumping its offerings into the national bloodstream – young people's love and libido are indeed "melting into air" as markets deliver us from censors to sensors.

By defending business at all costs, today's conservatives are tearing up the social contract they claim to defend. Corporate minions and shareholders who are busy hollowing out our children's sense of themselves as rational citizens and even as sexual beings are among the real traitors to the civic-republican society our parents and grandparents struggled with, loved and served.

Now, I know what you are going to say, “Show me the conservative who will say that business should be defended at all costs!” And when I am unable to turn up someone to make the argument that crudely, you will respond by saying that such conservatives don’t exist. But things aren’t that simple. You won’t find many liberals either who will say flatly, “I am indifferent to the way the mainstreaming of sluttiness through the mass media affects young people.” But it’s funny how the only time the Left seems to raise its voice on the matter of sexual degradation it’s to critique conservative bluenoses. And it’s also funny how the Right – with the notable exception of Bill Bennett and the late C. Delores Tucker, on the matter of rap music, and also some religious conservatives – tends to criticize artists pretty heavily, but we’re hit-and-miss about taking on the corporate interests that make money off the pornification of the public square. Or so it seems to me.