Slouching Towards Gomorrah by Robert H. Bork Read Free Book Online

society…against stability, traditional liberalism, capitalism, and intellectualism. The Nazis, like the New Left, referred to themselves as the “movement” and they hated the “system.” Both proclaimed that liberal democracy was a fraud and rationality merely a prop for the evil status quo. “[T]he emotional context within which these negations are proclaimed is one of hatred and rage.”
    Both fascists and the New Left had faith in the therapeutic value of violence. Watching on television a group of students chanting “The streets belong to the people,” Berger felt almost a physical shock as he remembered a verse of the Nazis’ “HorstWessel Lied”: “Clear the streets for the brown battalions. “There was as well the glorification of youth, which was explicit in the anthem of Mussolini’s Italy.
    Both the fascists and the New Left dehumanized their enemies. (It is instructive to remember that the
Port Huron Statement
abjured violence because it transformed the target into a “depersonalized object of hate,” which is what New Left violence soon did.) The Nazis referred to Jews as “pigs” which is what American radicals called the police. Finally, there was a “mystical elitism” that made the radicals sure they represented a “general will.” “This elitism is particularly repulsive in view of the democratic rhetoric” of the new radicals. Despite its democratic rhetoric, the New Left was not only contemptuous of liberal parliamentary democracy,but “fundamentally contemptuous of
any
procedures designed to find out what people want for themselves…. What this elitism means in practice can be readily grasped by watching the manipulations of any SDS group on an American campus.” 11 †
    That was the pattern across the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s: violent rhetoric and violent action from the fascists of the New Left, followed by the abject moral surrender of academic officials the public had a right to expect would defend the universities and the orderly processes of their governance. University establishments collapsed under moral, and sometimes physical, assault, and often publicly accepted the Left’s indictments of themselves and of America. In this, Yale and Cornell were entirely typical. Scenes such as these, and worse, were played out on scores of campuses. Almost nowhere did the faculty and the administration stand firm. ††
    What can account for the abject surrender of the elders? What could account for such craven responses, such self-abasement before barbarians, white and black, such willingness to jettison without struggle academic standards it had taken decades, even centuries, to establish? Fear played a part, for there was usually an implication, and sometimes the explicit threat, of violence. That need not have been a problem. The police were always available. It is true that calling in police often caused more students to join in the disruption and violence, but the issue was who controlled the universities. The price should have been paid. Crime on a campus is not essentially different from crime anywhere else.
    But universities thought of themselves as divorced from the communities they lived in, indeed divorced from, and superior to, American civilization. It was often psychologically impossible for them to call upon the civil authorities to maintain campus order. Faculties found upper-middle-class student radicals more congenial, on both political and cultural grounds, than working-class policemen. I remember a university official (not at Yale) who described his anguished dilemma when the radicals threatened to burn the school’s buildings. Asked what the dilemma was, he said that while the physical destruction of the university would be a great evil, it was almost unthinkable to call in the forces of the outside world.
    There was more to it than that, however. There was a predisposition to surrender. Faculties and administrators being overwhelmingly