This article needs additional citations for verification. (February 2009) |
Author | Robert H. Bork |
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Language | English |
Genre | Liberalism in the United States |
Published | 1997 |
Publisher | ReganBooks |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardback & paperback), audiobook, e-book |
Pages | 382 (hardcover) |
ISBN | 978-0060987190 |
OCLC | 37126415 |
306.0973 |
Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline is a 1996 non-fiction book by Robert H. Bork, a former United States Court of Appeals judge. Bork's thesis in the book is that U.S. and more generally Western culture is in a state of decline and that the cause of this decline is modern liberalism and the rise of the New Left. Specifically, he attacks modern liberalism for what he describes as its dual emphases on radical egalitarianism and radical individualism. The title of the book is a play on the last couplet of W. B. Yeats's poem "The Second Coming": "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" Bork contends that the "rough beast of decadence … now sends us slouching towards our new home, not Bethlehem but Gomorrah." More directly, the title borrows from Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem.