History According to Robert Bork

Even if only semi-consciously, Donald Trump recognized in 2015 that a narrative void had been presented by the hubristic failures of the post-Cold War political establishment in America and throughout much of the world. He filled the void by offering the Make America Great Again ethos, shouting that the woes of “the forgotten men and women” were owed to “stupid” and evil elites across the political spectrum who had embraced nefarious open border and trade policies. Further refined throughout his first term in office would be a narrative about the infestation of demonic leftism throughout American society and “Western civilization”; by his second term this notion has enveloped the whole of the so-called MAGA ideology. 

The result is that every crisis — past, present, and future — can be chalked up to “woke.” It is only the utter and uncompromising decimation of “woke” that will restore the exceptionalist hierarchies and meritocracies that produced America’s thriving blue-collar economy, international pre-eminence, and cultural superiority. Militant anti-“wokism,” in other words, is understood by its adherents to be the final piece of the puzzle. Irredeemable and treasonous heathens are learning exactly what it means to Make America Great Again.

Ever the diligent, irredeemable, and treasonous student, I decided in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election to see what literature I had lying around that could provide some illumination about the MAGA movement and its return to power. I recalled that a family member had years prior gotten a hold of Robert Bork’s 1996 book Slouching Towards Gomorrah from one of those little free library kiosks people keep on their lawns. Aware of Bork’s reputation and history, I plucked the book off the shelf in late November 2024 and decided to dive in. 

I wasn’t sure what I was going to find in Slouching Towards Gomorrah, if anything at all. Not long into the reading process, though, I did a curious Google search to see what had been said about the book and found a blog post from 2011 that caught my eye.

“I became a conservative after reading Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah,” wrote an Ivy League-educated military veteran named J.D. Hamel, better known today as Vice President JD Vance.

What made Bork’s book so compelling was the way it described the American Left. Bork theorized that in the absence of religious faith, the modern Left had become a substitute spiritual movement for many Americans, complete with prophets, heroes, rigidity, and often inexplicable passion.

I realized upon finding these words that by choosing to read Slouching Towards Gomorrah, I had in fact stumbled onto something of a key for unlocking the logic of the contemporary Trumpian moment.

Robert Bork began as a Yale law professor who would go on to serve as Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s solicitor general. He signed off on the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” firing of Archibald Cox after Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy William Ruckelshaus refused to do so. His first book, 1978’s The Antitrust Paradox, was considered highly influential to the architects of the coming Reaganomics revolution. At the end of the first year of his presidency, President Reagan nominated Bork to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and he was quickly confirmed by the Senate. 

But Bork did not enter mainstream societal consciousness until Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court bench in 1987. It was at that point that Bork became the referential poster boy both for steadfast constitutional originalism and contentious Supreme Court hearings. He was rejected by a Democrat-controlled Senate after leaders like Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden — then looking to build publicity for his 1988 presidential run — took issue with Bork’s views on matters like privacy and civil rights, among others. Bork’s legacy has been largely defined by that episode, which NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg called “the original sin” for many Republicans. Forty years later, though, Bork’s failed confirmation feels in many ways like the old cliché about losing the battle but winning the war.

As a person of the same generation as Vance, I think that I understand part of his attraction to Slouching Towards Gomorrah. Those of us born between the early ’80s and mid ’90s are well accustomed — even conditioned — to political betrayal, chaos, and absolutes. The world we were promised in school has not come to fruition, and in its place, we have come of age in a century defined by 9/11, the Great Recession, and Covid-19. Each of these events pierced the triumphalist pretenses that upheld the neoliberal consensus of the immediate post-Cold War era, opening up space for alternate explanations of the history that landed us in this disappointing moment. Though it was written in 1996, Slouching Towards Gomorrah offers one such account, and in its opening chapters, Bork makes it clear who is to blame: 1960s student activists and the broader cultural establishment who he believes coddled and enabled them. 

Though Bork had already published another book that rehearsed the details of his failed nomination battle, a reader of Slouching can still detect signs of lasting personal and career-related resentments. With Bill Clinton on his way to a second term in office, Bork has much to say about Supreme Court decisions he found abhorrent and disagreeable, and expresses a nagging, uncurious bewilderment about leftward shifts in social attitudes and popular culture from the 1960s onward. 

“The revolt was against the entire American culture,” writes Bork of 1960s student activists. He paints those who actively opposed the Vietnam War as self-obsessed, venomously jaded, and power-hungry — qualities we are told they would maintain and bolster as they attained cultural and political power in the decades that followed. Radical 1960s students are presented as weary, privileged hedonists who were uniquely narcissistic and authoritarian, tantruming against “a world of affluence they did not create but enjoyed with a sense of guilt as a matter of course.”

But Bork’s greatest vitriol is reserved for university faculties and administrations, countless in number, that he feels enabled, surrendered to, and even celebrated campus radicals in the 1960s. “Faculties and administrators … could not help feeling that the radicals were in some sense right about the unworthiness of America,” which explained for Bork why their responses to chaos, protest, and violence were supposedly muted. Their tolerant agreement was thus ripe for exploitation, and “in a test of wills, a comfortable, liberal, mildly guilty Establishment is no match for angry, nihilistic radicals.”

Slouching focuses on three campus uprisings in particular: the 1970 protests at Yale during the New Haven Black Panther trials — protests witnessed firsthand by law professor Bork; the black student takeover of Willard Straight Hall at Cornell in 1969, and lastly, the Kent State massacre in 1970. In each case, the story is essentially the same: radical, often privileged students respond violently to illusionary affronts, wreak unfathomable havoc and destruction upon their surroundings, and in the end wriggle monumental concessions from the university establishment and its leadership that irrevocably alters the institutions and culture around them. 

The result of such coercion and violence is what Bork terms as “modern liberalism”: an elitist, minoritarian ideology which has come to dominate and control American society. That serious and elite (mostly) white male gatekeepers would so readily and mindlessly relinquish power to radical, nihilistic leftists is, to Slouching’s author, an unfathomable affront, even an abomination.

Bork claims in Slouching’s introduction that what he is writing about is not a conspiracy, but instead a pervasive “syndrome” on the part of like-minded 1960s radicals-turned-1990s elites. Whether conspiracy or syndrome, much ink is spent characterizing the ways the chief villains — radical leftist elites hiding in shadows untouched by politics and government — have destroyed the Great America by permitting, if not explicitly puppeteering, abject nefariousness.

Today, the villainous ideology described in Slouching has come to be known by other more familiar names: “DEI,” “the radical left,” and, of course, “wokeness.” Figures like the highly influential MAGA-intellectual Christopher Rufo have recognized the power of Borkian-style history as a means to infuse Trumpism with a concretized enemy. Rufo has made a significant name for himself by arguing that “woke” DEI and “critical race theory” policies are acts of “cult indoctrination” implemented by a shadowy leftist elite that is pedophilic in nature. In hyper-Borkian fashion, catastrophic American decline is foretold as a consequence of 1960s radicalism and multiculturalism.

“Over the past two years” declared Rufo during a speech in 2022, “I’ve looked at the federal bureaucracy, the universities, K-12 schools, and big corporations. And what I’ve found is that the revolutionary ideas of the ’60s have been repackaged, repurposed, and injected into American life at the institutional level.”

“The choice today,” concluded Rufo toward the end of the speech, “is between the American Revolution of 1776 and the leftist revolution of the 1960s.”

Like Slouching Towards Gomorrah, historian Gary Gerstle’s 2022 book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order is an attempt to explain and historicize a contemporary world wrought by the 1960s. Both books place great importance on the machinations of the New Left and its impact on the politics and culture of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. But Gerstle traces a considerably more grounded — and tragic — path from the complicated, often ambiguous reality of the 1960s through the hyper-capitalist, rather than ultra-leftist, political economy that dominated the next half-century.

“Support for neoliberalism,” writes Gerstle, “spilled beyond Reagan and his political precincts and into the districts of the New Left, a constellation of radical liberation movements that emerged in the 1960s.”

Gerstle further explains that neoliberalism appealed to many New Leftists as an alternative to “the over-organization and bureaucratization of American society resulting from New Deal reform,” and offered “possibilities for personal freedom”. Many from the ’60s generation sought a politics that moved beyond Depression-era economic and social framings that felt increasingly archaic and outmoded. This ultimately, and paradoxically at times, meant a rightward turn.

It is a point that even Rufo seems to concede. 

“The leftist dream of a working-class rebellion in America fizzled after the ’60s,” he said in the aforementioned 2022 speech. “By the mid-1970s, radical groups like the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground had faded from prominence.” 

Struggling with exactly these sorts of contradictions, Bork tells us that it is “well to remember the limits of politics. The political nation is not the same as the cultural nation; the two have different leaders and very different views of the world. Even when conservative political leaders have the votes, liberal cultural leaders operate and exercise influence where votes do not count. However many political victories conservatives may produce, they cannot attack modern liberalism in its fortresses.” 

And yet the second Trump term has been defined by “attacks on modern liberalism in its fortresses.” I think now about how on the morning after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, key Trump administration staffer Stephen Miller took to X to declare that “an ideology at war with family and nature” had infected the United States. This ideology, he said, was “envious, malicious, and soulless,” an affront to those who “uphold order, who uphold faith, who uphold family, who uphold all that is noble and virtuous in this world.” As such, “the fate of our children, our society, our civilization” hinged on its eradication. 

Miller’s posts were like reading Slouching Towards Gomorrah all over again, only now the channeled Bork was writing from the perch of authoritarian power. Compare the above to a brief passage from the actual Bork on page 4 of Slouching’s introduction:

The enemy within is modern liberalism, a corrosive agent carrying a very different mood and agenda than that of classical or traditional liberalism. That the modern variety is intellectually bankrupt diminishes neither its vitality nor the danger it poses.

So, why, given the gravity of the situation, did Bork proclaim that the supposedly coercive radical leftist “modern liberal” ideology could not be defeated in its “fortresses?” And hasn’t he been disproven now? In a sense, it doesn’t really matter. Because in the end, the terms of the stakes he established have enabled an authoritarian government to blame the ever-deepening chaos, violence, and instability it requires for continued vitality on ideological enemies fermented by the 1960s. When exactly those enemies will be satisfactorily vanquished once and for all remains to be seen.