Here's a bit on the "new Bork" versus the old Bork that non-theological conservatives here might find interesting. From the Andrew Sullivan NYT magazine article "The Scolds", October '98, an article that caused me to start taking the wackos around here seriously.
If one man alone could personify this hysterical pessimism about America, it would have to be Robert Bork There are perhaps few more tragic examples of the degeneration of conservatism into Puritanism than this once-piercing intellectual. Not so long ago, Bork was a pillar of conservative intellectual rigor and elegance. To be sure, his constitutional views placed him well outside the mainstream of liberal legal discourse, but even his enemies credited him with philosophical consistency, a sometimes tart and witty pen and a brilliant legal mind. He was famously subjected to one of the most scurrilous attempts to smear a Supreme Court nominee in recent history (For the record, I supported Bork's nomination and wrote one of the first articles attacking his opponents for extremism and inaccuracy)
But even in the wake of that inevitably embittering experience, Bork kept his cool. His memoir-cum-essay after the event, "The Tempting of America," was a restrained, sometimes funny, always compelling defense of extreme judicial passivity in constitutional law. In that book, he was firm even with the ideologues of his own side, warning conservatives not to respond to liberals in kind, nor to appoint an ideologically conservative judiciary, which would be just as activist as the alternative. "Conservatives," he wrote, "who now by and large, want neutral judges, may decide to join the game and seek activist judges with conservative views. Should that come to pass, those who have tempted the courts to political judging will have gained nothing for themselves but will have destroyed a great and essential institution."
Not many people outside conservative activist circles seem to have read Bork's latest book, published in 1996, but it became a New York Times best seller on the strength of its sales to conservative book clubs alone. It was called "Slouching Towards Gomorrah." In it, Bork describes contemporary America as a hellish "moral chaos," "punctuated by spasms of violence and eroticism." He predicts "the coming of a new Dark Ages." Much of this, he argues, is the product of modern liberalism, which has destroyed constitutional democracy by fomenting radical individualism and egalitarianism. Far from being in a conservative era, today's America, according to Bork, is dominated by the left, which has no viable opposition: "There is no group of comparable size and influence to balance the extremists of modern liberalism, no 'right' that has a similarly destructive program in mind."
The only hope, Bork posits, is "the rise of an energetic, optimistic and politically sophisticated religious conservatism." Thus the prophet of judicial restraint puts his weight behind the untrammeled religious right, just as surely as Kristol and Neuhaus.
The extremity of Bork's oratory is matched only by the simplicity of his argument. He makes almost no distinctions between the Clintonian liberalism of the 1990's and the radicalism of the 1960's. It is, for Bork, all of a piece. A President whose economic policy is designed to please bond traders, who bombs Sudan and Afghanistan without warning and who declares that the era of big government is over is simply a cover for liberal radicalism. And the agenda is terrifying: "Modern liberalism," Bork avers, "the descendant and spiritual heir of the New Left, is what fascism looks like when it has captured significant institutions, most notably the universities, but has no possibility of becoming a mass movement or of gaining power over government or the broader society through force or the threat of force." The Clintons, it seems, are Nazis manqué.
One pillar of Bork's case is that liberalism cannot win democratically, so it uses the courts and the executive to flout the popular will. And yet, at the same time, the people, in Bork's view, are depraved as well, spawning a popular culture that is in "a free fall, with the bottom not yet in sight." Indeed, Bork's book was an early indicator of a new theme among conservatives: not simply a hatred of liberal elites , but a contempt for the mass of Americans. Such disdain, of course, has come to a head during the Lewinsky affair. As public indifference to the scandal has continued, and as Clinton's approval ratings have remained buoyant despite a pitiless series of embarrassments, the new conservatives have had little alternative but to blame Americans for their lack of judgment.
Why would I want to read a booklength version of a Pilchian screed? "You're all a bunch of filthy sodomite whores!". Yawn. We in the 60+% are all stupid and immoral, and only the Borks and Pilches of the world can save us from our own stupidity. The decline of the West is all due to Clinton. Whatever you say, guys. |
