Austin, Tex.

WORK and opportunity, poverty and dependency, material security and insecurity: for generations of reformers, the constitutional importance of these subjects was self-evident. Laissez-faire government, unchecked corporate power and the deprivations and inequalities they bred weren't just bad public policy - they were constitutional infirmities. But liberals have largely forgotten how to think, talk and fight along these lines.

And they've done so at the wrong time. The Supreme Court is again putting up constitutional barriers against laws to redress want and inequity. While it handed liberals a victory on the Affordable Care Act, it also gave a boost to conservatives to revive the old laissez-faire Constitution in the polity and courts: new doctrine and dictums for their attack on the welfare and regulatory state.

But there is a silver lining for liberals as well: in much the same way that the conservative court of the 1930s forcedFranklin D. Roosevelt and his allies to construct the constitutional foundations of the New Deal state, today's court challenges the White House, the Democrats and the liberal legal community to reassert a constitutional vision of a national government empowered "to promote the general Welfare" and - in JusticeRuth Bader Ginsburg's terse formula - "to regulate the national economy in the interest of those who labor to sustain it."

The majority opinion of Chief JusticeJohn G. Roberts Jr., along with the jointly written dissent of the other four conservatives, outlines the doctrinal and rhetorical bases for assailing much of the New Deal-Great Society constitutional order over the coming years.

The opinions are laced with shout-outs to the Tea Party and the right wing, affirming their crackpot originalism. The joint dissent, for example, invokes James Madison's views on the spending power to shed doubt on the constitutionality of three "federal Departments devoted to subjects not mentioned among Congress' enumerated powers": Education, Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development.

The joint dissent also offers a stark revision of federal spending doctrine that could sharply curtail new social provisions. Even the new doctrine that the majority adopted may hobble efforts to condition federal grants-in-aid on compliance with national goals, like child-care assistance for the working poor.

You would think that liberals would have a full-bodied response. They don't.

Instead, they are on the defensive, training their fire on the revivalists' theory of constitutional interpretation. But conservatives dominate the debate not because they have a killer theory (they don't), but chiefly because they have a bold, clear account of past constitutional commitments, adding up to a vision the Constitution promises to promote and redeem: individualism, small government, godliness and private property.

Liberals have too often been complacent and purely defensive. The Constitution, they often declare, does not speak to the rights and wrongs of economic life; it leaves that to politics. Laissez-faire doctrines were buried by the New Deal.

Until last week, this response may have been understandable. But it was always misleading as history, and wrong in principle, as well. And it was bad politics, providing no clear counternarrative to support the powers of government now under attack from the right.

That's a major failing, because there is a venerable rival to constitutional laissez-faire: a rich distributive tradition of constitutional law and politics, rooted in the framers' generation. None other than Madison was among its prominent expounders - in his draft of the Virginia Constitution, he included rights to free education and public land.

Likewise, many framers of the Reconstruction amendments held that education and "40 acres and a mule" were constitutional essentials that Congress must provide to ex-slaves. They also held that equal rights and liberty for white workingmen required a fair distribution of initial endowments, including free homesteads and free elementary and secondary education, along with land-grant-funded state colleges.

In the wake of industrialization, turn of the century reformers declared the need for a "new economic constitutional order" to secure the old promises of individual freedom and opportunity. America was becoming a corporate oligarchy, making working people wage slaves, impoverished and ill-equipped for democratic citizenship.

The New Deal brought this progressive vision to partial fruition. In the preindustrial past, Roosevelt explained in countless speeches, the Constitution's guarantee of equal rights "in acquiring and possessing property" joined with the ballot and the freedom to live by one's "own lights" to ensure the Constitution's promise of "liberty and equality."

But the "turn of the tide" came with the closing of the frontier and the rise of great "industrial combinations." New conditions demanded new readings. "Every man," he said, has a "right to make a comfortable living." Alongside education, "training and retraining," decent work and decent pay, his Second Bill of Rights set out rights to social insurance, including health care.

The distributive tradition has evolved, but its gist is simple and durable: you can't have a republican government, and certainly not a constitutional democracy, amid gross material inequality.

That's because gross economic inequality produces an oligarchy in which the wealthy rule. Insofar as it produces a lack of basic social goods at the bottom, gross inequality also destroys the material independence and security that democratic citizens require to participate on a roughly equal footing in political and social life. And access to such goods is essential to standing and respect in one's own eyes and those of the community.

In the face of the court's new constitutional offerings to the assault on the welfare and regulatory state, liberals must remind Americans of the constitutional promises and commitments that led us to create that state in the first place. They must remind lawmakers that there are constitutional stakes in attending to the economic needs and aspirations of ordinary Americans, their dread of poverty and their worries that mounting inequalities are eroding our democracy and its promises of fairness and opportunity.

The Constitution on this account promises real equality of opportunity; it calls on all three branches of government to ensure that all Americans enjoy a decent education and livelihood and a measure of security against the hazards of illness, old age and unemployment - all so they have a chance to do something that has value in their own eyes and a chance to engage in the affairs of their communities and the larger society. Government has not only the authority but also the duty to underwrite these promises.

Often during the 2008 campaign, and a few times since, the former constitutional law professor in the White House has spoken in this key. Now he might take a leaf from Roosevelt and use the bully pulpit to explain these constitutional ideals for our time. He should defend the distributive tradition and its vision of government as if our constitutional democracy depended on it. After all, it does.

William E. Forbath is a professor of law and history at the University of Texas.