Summary
If you want to understand Bork’s main argument, focus on how he describes America’s cultural decline as a gradual, interconnected drift—driven by the redefinition of liberty and equality, rather than by isolated issues. “When politics becomes the nation’s substitute for morality, every cultural argument turns into a constitutional battle.”
What the Book Claims
Bork—then best known to the public as a former federal judge and a polarizing Supreme Court nominee—frames the book as a diagnosis of cultural and civic deterioration across the United States. His central claim is blunt: “modern liberalism” has metastasized into a governing ideology that simultaneously promotes
· radical egalitarianism (equality of outcomes rather than opportunity)
· radical individualism (a steady reduction of moral limits on personal gratification).
Bork contends these two impulses—equalizing society while liberating appetite—may conflict in theory. Still, in practice, they weaken institutions that once restrained behavior: family, religion, community norms, and cultural standards. This should underscore the importance of these pillars of societal health.
Highlight that the title ‘Gomorrah’ symbolizes moral collapse and serves as a warning about America’s decline, making the urgency of Bork’s thesis more straightforward.
The title announces Bork’s rhetorical approach: a warning shot. He borrows imagery from W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” recasting the “rough beast” not as a new Bethlehem-bound epoch, but as decadence that sends society toward “Gomorrah,” a biblical symbol of moral collapse. This vivid metaphor aims to convey to the audience the urgency of the moral emergency facing America.
“Bork doesn’t write about ‘issues.’ He writes about a civilization’s immune system failing—slowly, then all at once.”
Structure: A Tour Through Institutions, not a Single Argument
One reason the book has persisted as a reference point—praised and criticized alike—is its sweeping architecture. Bork organizes the work into large sections that move from diagnosis to cultural case studies to political consequences, ending in a question about democratic survival.
The table of contents signals the ambition: chapters on popular culture, censorship, crime/illegitimacy/welfare; abortion and end-of-life ethics; feminism; race; universities and intellectual life; and religion, followed by closing chapters that ask whether democratic government can survive and whether America can “avoid Gomorrah.”
Bork’s method is cumulative—he accumulates examples across domains to suggest a single shared cause.
The Core Argument: Liberty and Equality, Unmoored
Bork’s most consequential move is conceptual: he argues that America’s founding ideals—liberty and equality—have been reinterpreted into more radical forms that undermine social cohesion.
- Radical individualism becomes, in his telling, a culture of entitlement to gratification—especially sexual and expressive—where limits are treated as oppression rather than moral discipline.
- Radical egalitarianism becomes an insistence on leveling outcomes, enforced through institutional pressure and, at times, government action—producing resentment, identity sorting, and politicized life.
His case is not merely that “values changed,” but that the mechanisms of cultural formation—schools, courts, media—began to reward that change.
Stress that Bork sees popular culture not just as entertainment but as shaping societal norms-training society to accept contempt for restraint and authority-underscoring the importance of importance.
Few parts of the book drew more attention than Bork’s contention that popular culture doesn’t merely reflect society, it trains it, normalizing contempt for restraint and authority. From there, he argues for renewed seriousness about regulating obscenity and violence in the media, a position reviewers flagged as one of his most controversial proposals.
The New York Times review noted that Bork advances explicit calls for censorship, including targeting online obscenity and violent entertainment, and criticizes him for not fully grappling with who draws the lines and how to prevent suppression of protected speech.
“When a culture treats self-control as a vice, it shouldn’t be surprised when disorder looks like liberation.”
Crime, Family Breakdown, and Social Disorder
Bork places crime, illegitimacy, and welfare within a single narrative: weakening moral norms leads to personal instability, which leads to institutional strain and social fragmentation. He treats family dissolution not as a private lifestyle variance but as a public-order problem that reverberates through education, poverty, and public safety.
Whether one finds the causal chain persuasive, his method is consistent: he argues cultural permission structures change behavior, and behavior changes the state.
Bioethics: “Killing for Convenience”
One of Bork’s sharpest moral claims is that permissive individualism expresses itself most starkly in life-and-death questions. In the book’s treatment of abortion and end-of-life practices, he argues the culture is drifting toward what he labels “killing for convenience.” A legal review of Bork’s arguments highlights his concern about separating “personhood” from “humanity” and the implications for the very old or very ill.
For Bork, these issues are less about policy nuance than about what a society is willing to call “normal.”
Courts, “Judicial Activism,” and a Proposed Constitutional Fix
Bork devotes significant attention to the judiciary, arguing that courts—especially the Supreme Court—have become an engine of cultural transformation, advancing outcomes aligned with elite ideology rather than the constitutional text or democratic consent.
Most dramatically, he proposes a constitutional amendment that would allow Congress to override federal court decisions by a majority vote—an idea cited in book summaries and flagged by reviewers as both sweeping and risky. The New York Times review describes the proposal and criticizes Bork for failing to address how such a mechanism could politicize rights and destabilize constitutional safeguards.
Reception: Admiration for Scope, Alarm at Prescriptions
Contemporary reviewers tended to agree on two points even when they disagreed on conclusions: Bork is forceful and wide-ranging, and his remedies raise their own dangers.
- Kirkus characterized the book as a “thoughtful conservative’s devastating judgment” on liberalism’s cultural consequences, highlighting his indictment of moral relativism, politicized curricula, and “activist judges.”
- The New York Times acknowledged that Bork occasionally makes “astute points” about politicization and the diminished role of reason, but characterized the book as angry and rhetorically extreme, particularly regarding censorship and congressional override of judicial decisions.
The dividing line is often not his diagnosis, but his appetite for state power to correct culture.
Why the Book Still Gets Read
Read today, Slouching Toward Gomorrah functions as more than a period piece of the 1990s culture war. It’s a clear example of a conservative intellectual trying to answer a durable question: Can a liberal democracy survive if it cannot agree on moral boundaries—yet empowers institutions to impose them anyway?
Even critics who reject Bork’s prescriptions often concede the provocation is serious: he forces readers to consider whether a culture can remain free while treating self-restraint as optional and authority as illegitimate.