"Modern liberalism is fundamentally at odds with democratic government because it demands results that ordinary people would not freely choose."
In his new book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Robert Bork exposes the cunning liberal technique of governing "through institutions that are largely insulated from the popular will. The most important institutions for liberals' purposes," he observes, "are the judiciary and the bureaucracies."
Judicial activism must be counted among the forces "destroying America's political and cultural unity," says Judge Bork. "As the courts recklessly squander our common cultural inheritance in the names of radical individualism and radical egalitarianism, they necessarily offer themselves and their authority over law as the only institution capable of holding our turbulent society together. But that task will prove beyond the capabilities of the courts."
Recognizing that modern liberals have "no intention of relinquishing any of their power to the popular will," Bork proposes to win back that power the same way it was lost, step by step. "Victory over modern liberalism will require a robust self-confidence about the worth of traditional values," says Bork, who concedes that "the relativism of modern liberalism has already seriously damaged" that confidence. "When the barbarians struck in the Sixties," he recalls, "America did not show confidence in its own worth and values. We were taken by surprise. . . . Now that we have seen the emptiness of the liberal criticism of America, now that we have seen the catastrophes that the ideas of modern liberalism have produced and are producing, perhaps we will shed our guilt and forth-rightly speak and act" to defend those clearly superior, traditional values.
Judge Bork concludes that, "for the immediate future, what we probably face is an increasingly vulgar, violent, chaotic, and politicized culture. Our hopes, our struggles, and our optimism must be for the long run," he advises, urging continued resistance "to radical individualism and radical egalitarianism in every area of culture." Bork offers no simple solution, no master plan, no miracle cure. "There is," he concedes, "no single grand strategy."
How, then, do we recapture our culture? "Just as the New Left abandoned an overarching program and became a series of like-minded groups advancing area by area, so it must be counterattacked area by area," Bork declares. "Religion must be recaptured church by church; and education, university by university, school board by school board. Bureaucracies must be tamed. The judiciary must be criticized severely when it oversteps its legitimate authority, as it now regularly does. A few of the necessary actions must involve the government," Bork concedes, "as in capturing and punishing criminals, and, perhaps, in administering censorship of the vilest aspects of our popular culture; otherwise, government must be kept at a distance." In other words, if we as a nation want to avoid winding up in Gomorrah, each one of us, individually, had better do what the teachers in the old days used to tell us: Stop slouching!
