We need also to avoid the social devastation wrought by pornography and endless incitements to murder and mayhem.” Indeed, the Founding Fathers, Bork claimed, would be appalled by what modern culture had wrought: “Any serious attempt to root out the worst in our popular culture may be doomed unless the judiciary comes to understand that the First Amendment was adopted for good reasons, and those reasons did not include the furtherance of radical personal autonomy.”īork underscored that he was, indeed, advocating the censoring of films, pornographic “prose” and images, and the still-new Internet: “I am suggesting that censorship be considered for the most violent and sexually explicit material now on offer, starting with the obscene prose and pictures available on the Internet, motion pictures that are mere rhapsodies to violence, and the more degenerate lyrics of rap music. Like Irving Kristol before him, he advocated targeted censorship in hopes of straightening America’s slouch: “Sooner or later censorship is going to have to be considered as popular culture continues to plunge to ever more sickening lows.” If America didn’t limit speech, he argued, it would surely speed the end of Western civilization: “There is, of course, more to the case for censorship than the need to preserve a viable democracy. Bork made the ‘case for censorship’ to ‘avoid social devastation.’īork had a seething contempt for unfettered speech rights. Rereading Slouching Towards Gomorrah, it’s rather apparent why Bush, then preparing a run for the presidency, bristled at Bork’s almost cartoonishly reactionary politics.ġ.
Bush told a gathering at the Manhattan Institute that the Republican Party required a certain degree of modernization to compete in the 21st century, taking a not-so-veiled dig at Bork: “Too often on social issues my party has painted an image of America slouching towards Gomorrah.”
The New York Times called it an “an ugly and intemperate book” Christian conservative leader Ralph Reed praised it as “a must-read for anyone concerned about the state of American society at the close of the twentieth century.” And it sold by the pallet load.Ī younger generation of conservatives, wary of a waging an endless culture war, moved away from Bork-style rhetoric. A once great country, he argued, had come under assault by feminists, multiculturalists, gay- rights activists, the professoriate, libertarians, and liberals. It was a thesis Bork bluntly explicated in his bestselling 1996 book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, an angry jeremiad cataloguing the supposed moral collapse of the United States.
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