The Fall of the Berlin Wall is invoked as an emblem of political change whose meaning unsettles the usual opposition between conservative morality and Communist rule. Rather than recounting the Wall’s physical collapse, the book focuses on a pointed exchange about what helped bring it down: the attraction of American popular culture. The event becomes an ironic measure of how political resistance can carry desires that conservative critics themselves condemn.

The Wall in a Conservative Argument

The discussion begins with Robert Bork’s complaint about the entertainment industry and the demand for what he regarded as degraded material. Bork attributed that demand to human nature left without strong external restraints. The book counters that this explanation leaves capitalism out of the picture: an economy organized around expansion continually generates new consumer demands. Moral conservatives, in opposing permissive culture while passionately supporting unrestrained capitalism, therefore oppose an effect of the economic order they endorse.

The Conference Exchange

At a conference, Bork objected to Michael Jackson’s crotch-clutching performance at the Super Bowl. Another panelist answered that the desire to enjoy such manifestations of American culture had brought down the Berlin Wall. The exchange does not offer a history of the Wall’s fall; it compresses a political irony into a confrontation over popular entertainment. What Bork treated as evidence of cultural decline was presented as part of the appeal of a society whose cultural products had helped discredit the Communist alternative. Bork recognized the irony enough to suggest that the Wall should be put back up, but, in the book’s reading, missed its deeper implication.

Political Forces and Cultural Desire

The book places this remark beside a broader account of the forces that overthrew the Eastern European Communist regimes: youth culture, the intellectuals of the 1960s generation, and workers who still favored Solidarity over individualism. These groups do not fit neatly into a conservative story of political liberation. Their role complicates any attempt to separate opposition to Communist rule from the cultural and social demands conservatives regard with suspicion. The Wall’s fall thus appears not as a victory for conservative morality, but as a change propelled in part by forces that conservative politics also contests.

The Event as an Ideological Reversal

The anecdote gives the Wall’s fall a second meaning: the opponent of permissive culture confronts, in the form of political history, the consequences of a popular desire that helped undermine Communist rule. The book develops this reversal through the idea that a speaker can receive a message back from another in an inverted form. The conservative complaint about cultural indulgence returns as an account of what helped bring down the Wall; the supposed external enemy reveals a contradiction within the complainant’s own position. The event matters here less as a narrated scene than as a test of political interpretation: it exposes the entanglement of anti-Communist victory, popular culture, and the capitalist consumer demand moral conservatives seek to restrain.