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

liberal (in the traditional sense) could not help feeling that the radicals were in some sense right about the unworthiness of America. The students had taken seriously the rhetoric of their liberal elders and the faculties were in a poor position to say they really hadn’t meant the full implications of what they had said in the past. Not all liberal faculty reacted in this way. Splits developed. Some enthusiastically supported the radicals; some, feeling guilt, could not resist. But others, though not enough, were honest old-style liberals; they meant what they had said about reason, the life of the mind, and openness to ideas reasonably presented. The radicals resented this last group most of all. My friend Alexander Bickel, a constitutional scholar, had a reputation as a liberal, but because he tried to uphold standards of reason and civilized discourse and because he thoroughly disapproved of the mob, he was harassed regularly and hung in effigy in the law school courtyard during alumni weekend. Since nothing good was expected from a conservative, the radicals left me pretty much alone.
    Walter Berns captured the emptiness of both the radicals and the Establishment. Members of SDS, he said, are miserable and obsessed, while the Organization Man is content. “Beyond this there is no difference. The Organization Man says SDS should not burn down the universities, but he can provide no reason other than one coming from the law, which is of course no reason at all to SDS. SDS, in turn, says that the Organization Man should feel miserable too and join them in burning down the universities, but they can provide no reason other than one arising out of theiridiosyncratic despair, which the Organization Man neither shares nor understands. The only thing that can come out of this confrontation is a test of wills.” 12 In a test of wills, a comfortable, liberal, mildly guilty Establishment is no match for angry, nihilistic radicals. Nihilists must be sat upon rather than argued with, but the “oppressive” Establishment lacked the will for that.
    In the crunch, the universities proved hollow. The Sixties students did not create the emptiness of the universities; they simply exploited it and made it obvious to the world. They learned that the universities would usually cave in and so their “non-negotiable demands” escalated. The student radicals were flabbergasted. This was no way for oppressors to behave. Even the radicals didn’t want enemies who didn’t believe anything. Only institutions that were already soft, alienated from the surrounding society, without belief in themselves and the worth of what they did would have surrendered so easily and so completely. The rot was there before the radicals hit.
    Nihilism was the order of the decade. It came in two varieties: hedonism and political rage. Some students or dropouts exhibited both. The Hippies rejected middle-class morality for an unprecedented permissiveness. The incessantly repeated slogans were taken seriously: “If it feels good, do it,” “Do your own thing,” and “It is forbidden to forbid.” The symbol of this attitude was, of course, the Woodstock festival, where half a million youths camped in the rain and mud to listen to rock music, take drugs, and engage in sex. That, too, was celebrated by a similar gathering on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first: this time, farce was repeated as farce.
    Radical groups, even as they grew more violent in their effort to destroy the white, bourgeois world, were without any notion of what was to come after. As one of the apostles of violence put it, “The idea was not to create a perfect state operating by the clockwork principles of Marxist law but to promote a chaos that would cripple America and ultimately cast it into a receivership that would be administered by the morally superior third world…. [P]eople shouldn’t expect the revolution to achieve a Kingdom of Freedom; more likely, it would produce