Intro: Pete du Pont of the National Center for Policy Analysis has been looking through Robert Bork's new book Slouching Towards Gomorrah. In some ways, he wishes he hadn't.
When Robert Bork surveys the American scene, he finds that modern liberalism has yanked us in opposite and equally appalling directions: we wallow in radical individualism and self-indulgence, yet pervert equal rights into a demand for equality of outcome.
Looking at popular culture, as typified by modern music and advertising, Bork finds art replaced by nihilism and narcissism. He sees respectable feminism destroyed by lunatics who seriously condemn Newton's Principia Mathematica because "science is a male rape of female nature."
He wisely notes that the primary legacy of affirmative action is greater group antagonisms and increased racial acrimony. He notes with sadness the damage wrought by political correctness on intellectual achievement and scholarship.
Bork is marginally hopeful that radical welfare reform can get people out of the illegitimacy-crime-drugs trap, but only after accepting as a given that welfare has produced a lost generation that may have to be kept on some kind of welfare permanently.
Finally, he notes that while there may be faint hope that collective disgust may someday save us, for now we're in the suburbs of Gomorra, facing an increasingly vulgar, violent, politicized culture.
Those are my ideas, and at the NCPA, we know ideas can change the world — and after reading Robert Bork, they'd better. I'm Pete du Pont, and I'll see you tomorrow.
Host outro: Tomorrow, Pete du Pont explains why there's so much excitement over government statistics.