[.ca] Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and ... (ISBN 0060573112)

From Amazon.com:
Robert Bork will go down as one of history's footnotes. Nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan in 1987, he was voted down by the Senate following a no-holds barred confirmation fight. Almost a decade later, he returns to reopen old wounds with Slouching towards Gomorrah, an extended attack against everything liberal. From pop culture and our universities to the church (Protestant and Roman Catholic) and the Supreme Court--the very institution he once fought so hard to join--Bork finds fault wherever he looks. This is a bitter book from a passionate man who has very little good to say about the world he lives in.

Intellectual Grist for your mental mill:
I won't belabor this. If you are liberal you probably dislike this man full stop and nothing I say will change that. If you are conservative then you may already have a poster of him in your bedroom, and I am not trying to preach to the choir. In any case, what I do want to say is that he is extremely intelligent and wrote this book with the same kind of of "20,000 feet view" that Robert Caro has in his books. You may think that for someone as conservative as him it is not possible to stretch a "I hate liberals" mindframe into a book this long, or of any length, but not a paragraph goes by that does not add constructively to his viewpoint. Let me give you a few examples. His strongest argument is how liberals have perverted America's goal of equality of *opportunities* to equality of *outcomes*. This is a huge change. No longer is it acceptable for everyone to have the same *chances* to succeed, everyone must have the same actual success rate. If you've read "Atlas Shrugged", you know where this ends up. Since individual people have individual innate talents and abilities the only way to guarantee the same outcome is to force the "better" people of society to be brought down to the lowest common denominator. It is just not possible to raise everybody UP but it is possible to bring everyone DOWN. Another point is that liberals mention the Declaration of Independence and how it mentions the "Pursuit of Happiness" as one of its core goals. Liberals use this to justify their mindset that government should have no ability whatsoever to limit our independence. But the Constitution then explicitly spell out just how the government is going to limit our freedoms. Liberals tend to overlook this. Bork also mentions during this part how the founding fathers clearly viewed their statements about "pursuit of happiness" to be relevant to societies built upon moral foundations. As it is today, we have decoupled from morals when it comes to our pursuits and so we no longer have any moorings that our unbridled pursuit of happiness rests on. A final thing that I'll mention (but far from the final thing he does) is how the modern liberal's pursuit of infinite freedom actually brings about the reverse, limitations and restrictions. Take the crusade of not offending or prejudicing any one group. This openess to letting others succeed has turned into Political Correctness whereby people's ability to have independent, critical, thinking has been severely restricted. God forbid you offend anybody and you will be drummed out of your job/career posthaste! This is not more freedom, this is less. If you enjoy intelligent books, books that make you think, then it is worth reading this to see how your views line up against his. Personally I agree with some of the things he writes and disagree with others. If you disagree with him, well then, what kind of firepower do you bring to the discussion? He brings a lot. Why don't you see what you've got?

People should be aware of what is happening in the world:
This book is written by a wonderful intelligent man who speaks the truth and people don't want to beleive it. One of your reviewers called him an atheist who loved Jesus. He is hardly an atheist. He is a recent convert to Catholicism and a great example of the Christian faith for all. Pay attention, America!

It Needs to Be Said.:
Living as we are in an age where endless liberal spin and rationalizations have clouded our collective judgement, we are fortunate that a voice like judge Bork's speaks to us in clear, unequivocal terms. His observations are passionate but always tempered by reason and logic. It has been said that in difficult times, the obvious must be stated loudly and clearly. This is Robert Bork's legacy and one that offers hope in the midst of our degenerative social spiral.

Bork always borks himself:
Bork borks himself by including outrageous statements that fly in the face of reason and humanity. Bork borks himself by his absurd prudishness, which makes him seem more woman than man. Bork borks himself by his anti-intellectual approach, reading detective novels instead of the classics of Western thought.

An Excellent Diagnosis of a Culture's Decline:
Quoting Irving Kristol, Bork writes near the end of the third chapter, "Sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other." The purpose of Slouching Towards Gomorrah is to outline the causes behind this type of liberalism, the effects of its implementation, and what remedies, if any, are available. Bork proposes that this dual trend toward both radical individualism and radical egalitarianism is causing serious damage to American culture. While they appear to have contradictory ends, they bring about the same effect of eroding the institutions that have been a check against authoritarian government: family, the church, the rule of law, and public standards of morality. With "liberty" being defined in the Declaration of Independence free of external restraints (something Bork laments as reflecting a flawed assumption of human nature that goes all the way back to 18th century Enlightenment philosophy) and "equality" being defined closer and closer to the utopianism in the SDS document The Port Huron Statement, Bork gives the reader a grand tour of the effects in most elements of society: entertainment, law, politics, intellectual quality, public decency, etc. As far as these types of books go, this is the gold standard, and as the 2003 afterword highlights, the trend has only continued to continue from what Bork wrote seven years earlier.