  I argue that the conflict between the fermi-liquid and non-fermi-liquid
metallic states viewed by Anderson as the central intellectual issue of cuprate
superconductivity, and which motivates the recent criticism by Baskaran and
Anderson [cond-mat/9706076] of the work of Zhang [cond-mat/9610140], is a
fundamentally wrong concept. All experimental evidence points to adiabatic
continuability of the strange metal into a conventional one, and thus to one
metallic phase rather than two, and all attempts to account theoretically for
the existence of a luttinger-liquid at zero temperature in spatial dimension
greater than 1 have failed. I discuss the underlying reasons for this failure
and then argue that the true higher-dimensional generalization of the
luttinger-liquid behavior is a propensity of the system to order. I speculate
about how the conflict between antiferromagnetism and superconductivity, the
two principal kinds of order in this problem, might result in both the observed
zero-temperature phase diagram of the cuprates and the luttinger-liquid
phenomenology, i.e. the breakup of the electron into spinons and holons in
certain regimes of doping and energy. The key idea is a quantum critical point
regulating a first-order transition between these phases and toward which one
is first attracted under renormalization before bifurcating between the two
phases.
