Slouching Towards Gomorrah.

• Author: Cole, David

This could only be the work of Joe Klein. The further I read in Slouching Towards Gomorrah, the new best-seller ostensibly written by Robert Bork, the more convinced I became that the book was in fact an elaborate parody. It's a brilliant idea: Take all the nasty lies those liberal special interest groups spread about then-Judge Bork during the battle over his Supreme Court nomination, exaggerate them a hundred-fold, and then publish a book as if it were written by the demonized Robert Bork. For good measure, have him attack not only the right of privacy and judicial activism, but rap music, portable radios, and the ordination of women priests. The left will love it, because it will confirm all their worst fears about Bork; the right will love it, because it will confirm all their worst fears about the nation. Best-seller.

As parody, Slouching Towards Gomorrah barely succeeds. Its vituperative tone and inflated rhetoric quickly become tiresome, its arguments are all too familiar, and its complaints numbingly repetitive. One begins to feel like one is seated at a family dinner next to a cantankerous great uncle who can't stop talking about how bad things are these days long enough to pass the mashed potatoes.

As a thoughtful work of non-fiction, Slouching Towards Gomorrah is hard to take seriously, in part because it's difficult to believe that Bork is serious. The book broadly indicts "modern liberalism" for all of our ills, from increasing crime to decreasing civility, from affirmative action to the feminization of religion and the military, from non-harmonious pop music to sexy television shows. Somehow all of this is linked to the 1960s, of course, and more specifically, to the advent of portable radios at that time, which allowed youth to listen to music without parental oversight. The result: "modern liberalism," which is one part "radical individualism" and one part "radical egalitarianism," the extremes of which, respectively, are nihilism and fascism. To Bork, we are virtually, if not already, there.

There are several reasons why it is difficult to take this argument seriously. The first is that Bork fails to engage any of the serious defenders of that which he criticizes. preferring instead to attack straw men of his own creation. Thus, he attacks modern liberalism without even discussing the work of today's pre-eminent defenders of liberalism, such as Isaiah Berlin or Ronald Dworkin. He does the same thing with feminism, abortion...