Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline
by Robert H. Bork
Regan Books. 382 pp. $25.00
This book, which became a (perhaps) unexpected best-seller, is a catalogue raisonnée of the legacy of the 1960’s, and in particular of that decade’s sudden explosion of hatred toward this country on the part of some of its most privileged citizens, the children of the liberal middle class. To read Judge Bork’s succinct account in the opening pages of the events he witnessed on the campus of Yale University, where he then taught in the law school, is to recall the surprise and confusion some of us felt when we first beheld that strange spectacle: indulged and self-indulgent college students portraying themselves, in all apparent sincerity, as victims of the cruelest tyranny, while their elders, professors and deans, unable to oppose or even answer them, suffered their accusations meekly or added their own voices to the chorus of condemnation.
My own most vivid memory from that time is of sitting in the University of Michigan’s Hill Auditorium, a concert hall usually given over to such musical giants as Vladimir Horowitz, now given over to violent leftist oratory. In the chair next to me was a girl dressed in the characteristically disheveled co-ed costume of the time who every few minutes would leap from her seat to scream vile obscenities at the top of her lungs, then sit down to gossip amiably with the friend beside her about the dating scene in their dorm.
No wonder some of us thought these passions were too shallow to survive the moment, and would soon be spent. But of course we could not have been more wrong. As Bork writes, what took place then was self-sustaining—not merely a spasm of disgust at the escalating war in Vietnam but a “revolt against the entire American culture.” This revolt soon turned into a steady state of siege, either directly or implicitly coming to dominate most reasoned discourse on American life.
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Chapter by chapter, Slouching Towards Gomorrah methodically takes us through the sectors of our experience which have been infected by the excesses of post-1960’s liberalism: from popular culture to crime, illegitimacy, the welfare system, abortion, euthanasia, sexuality and sexual roles, race, intelligence, religion, and morality. On each of these topics Bork brings to bear an astonishing range of information and argument.
Take crime and, especially, illegitimacy. Bork points to the tripling in the rate of violent crime in the two decades from 1960 to 1980 and, in the same period, the rise in illegitimacy from 5 to 18 and now 30 percent. How shall we understand this? Acknowledging the economic and sociological factors at work, in particular the baby boom and its consequences, he also highlights influences which are, or used to be, played down in the standard accounts of the subject: for example, the role of a mass entertainment industry emphasizing “unbridled emotion and sexuality.” Although the glamorizing of sexual freedom has affected all strata of the young, the most significant damage has been done to children raised by unwed adolescents, large numbers of whom are of underclass origins. From early on, these children are handicapped psychologically, showing deficits in thinking and learning which are soon reflected in poor school performance and high dropout rates, which in turn lead to even higher rates of illegitimacy and crime.
All this is now quite familiar, and widely lamented; but it was not too many years ago that any effort to call attention to these problems, or to warn about their consequences, was greeted with utter disdain and condemned as snobbish, or racist, or as masking an effort to return to the sexual constrictions of the Victorian era. A similar disdain greeted those who sought to point to the consequences of our unfettered attitude toward abortion, a subject Bork treats in a chapter titled “Killing for Convenience” and links to the movements for assisted suicide and euthanasia.
Bork does not mince words. Thanks to the chain of federal and Supreme Court cases following Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision on abortion, we are now, he writes, well on our way to accepting the killing without consent of many of our elderly ill and infirm. These decisions, he asserts, are “equal in their audacity and abuse of judicial office to Dred Scott,” the 1856-57 decision legitimizing slavery; in their disregard for human life at either end of the biological spectrum, they both reflect and serve to confirm “the nihilism that is spreading in our culture.”
At his most furious in his discussion of abortion and euthanasia, Bork is at his most caustic in his discussion of radical feminism, which he considers the single most destructive movement to emerge from the 60’s. Not only have radical feminists raised the temperature of our rhetoric to grotesque proportions—as in the statement by one of them that the American social system, a/k/a the “patriarchy,” has been organized specifically to “control, degrade, torture, kill, and rape our bodies”—but the movement’s wild distortions have come to be accepted by more and more people as simple matters of fact. Thus, such fantasies as that widespread wife-beating takes place in America on Super Bowl Sunday, or that there are 150,000 deaths annually from the patriarchy-induced condition of anorexia nervosa, find their way into college textbooks and curricula, there to be established as incontrovertible truths. So successful has the movement been in intimidating male opposition—to contradict its misstatements is, after all, implicitly to support the degradation of women—that Bork believes it will take nothing less than another women’s movement to undo the damage.
It is a paradox of our time that radical feminism, with its touchiness about “oppression,” arose just when freedom and opportunity for women became available on an unprecedented scale. As Bork observes, a similar pattern can be found in the area of race, where again we find dramatic progress accompanied by a quantum increase in black racial suspicion, in some instances delusional (as in the contention that AIDS was invented to infect and exterminate blacks, or that the CIA is behind the drug trade in minority communities) and extraordinary degrees of resentment and hostility toward whites, even, or perhaps especially, among black intellectuals. It was once believed these hatreds were residual and would diminish in time, but so far there have been few signs of that; in the meantime, as white liberals bow their heads in guilt, a counter-resentment takes hold among other whites, and grows.
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One approaches this book’s final chapter wondering whether Bork will seek or find some plausible ground for hope. Yes and no; he does, yet he does not. Given the persistence and single-mindedness of the liberal intellectual culture, which seems quite content with the demoralization it has achieved, the prospects for salvation seem dim. We ought not expect our cultural elites to draw back in regret—least of all the courts, which Bork lambastes as “an agent of power without legitimacy either in democratic theory or in the Constitution.” But will their triumph survive?
Here Bork seems to equivocate. He glimpses the possibilities held out by our current religious revival, but one senses that this is merely a gesture on his part, born of a wish to avoid the appearance of wholly unredeemable pessimism. That pessimism is the true message of this work, and no political successes by the Right, not even the commercial success of a book like Slouching Towards Gomorrah itself, should suffice to convince us he is altogether wrong.
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