Robert Bork

Robert Bork appears as a moral conservative whose diagnosis of cultural decadence, in the account presented here, turns against the economic order he supports. He acknowledges a market for what he considers depraved entertainment, yet attributes that demand to human nature rather than to capitalism’s drive to produce ever-expanding demand. The resulting contradiction becomes visible again when he objects to Michael Jackson’s Super Bowl performance and is reminded that enjoyment of American popular culture helped bring down the Berlin Wall.

The diagnosis of cultural decadence

Bork’s argument begins by rejecting the idea that the entertainment industry imposes depravity on an unwilling public. The demand, he insists, is already there. He compares the sellers of degraded material to crack dealers: consumer appetite does not excuse those who profit from supplying it, but responsibility cannot be placed on sellers alone. The fault, he concludes, lies in human nature when it is not restrained by external forces.

The book treats this as more than a complaint about entertainment. Bork’s explanation relocates the source of the problem from the economic system to human beings themselves. In his account, people are not naturally rational and moral without strong external restraints; experience, he argues, has disproved that optimistic view. An eager and growing market for depravity, together with profitable industries that serve it, is offered as evidence for the need to constrain human conduct.

That reasoning leaves a prior question unanswered: what produces the expanding demand? The book’s critique is that Bork names the market but does not explain its formation. Instead of connecting the appetite for new forms of consumption to capitalism’s requirement for continual reproduction and expansion, he treats it as a durable feature of human nature. His proposed emphasis on restraint and censorship therefore addresses the visible cultural symptom while leaving the economic process that continually generates new demands outside the diagnosis.

The contradiction within moral conservatism

The argument turns on a reversal. Bork opposes permissive liberal culture while, as the book observes, passionately supporting the capitalist economy whose expansion helps produce that culture. The target of his moral campaign is consequently not external to his own political position. His struggle against an apparent enemy—consumerist permissiveness—becomes a struggle against an ideological consequence of the economic order he endorses.

The book places this impasse alongside the idea of the cultural contradictions of capitalism, associated with liberal thinkers such as Daniel Bell. The connection matters because it shifts the issue from personal blame to structural conflict: an economy can encourage expanding consumption while its defenders condemn the cultural effects of that expansion. Bork’s appeal to human nature closes off that contradiction rather than resolving it. By locating the cause in an insufficiently restrained population, his account directs attention toward control of conduct and away from the system whose reproduction requires the creation of further demand.

This is why the book characterizes his reasoning as an ideological short circuit. Bork’s own evidence—the eager market and the profitable industries built around it—could lead toward an examination of capitalist production and consumption. Instead, the argument passes directly from evidence of demand to a claim about human nature and the need for strong restraints. The moral diagnosis thus preserves the economic commitment that the critique identifies as part of the problem.

The Berlin Wall anecdote

At a conference, Bork referred disapprovingly 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 helped bring down the Berlin Wall. Bork’s reported response was that this seemed as good an argument as any for putting the wall back up. The exchange condenses the book’s larger account into a single reversal: the popular culture he condemns is presented as one of the forces that undermined a Communist regime.

Bork is not portrayed as missing the surface irony. The account explicitly says that he is aware of it. What he misses, in the book’s interpretation, is its deeper political significance: the cultural appetite he dislikes cannot simply be set against the political victory he welcomes, because the two are connected in the episode. His quip turns the contradiction into a reason to restore the barrier rather than an occasion to reconsider the relationship between moral conservatism, popular consumption, and political change.

Narrative and political significance

The book uses Bork less as the subject of a full biography than as a concentrated example of a political deadlock. His remarks make the tension legible: he condemns the products of consumer culture, recognizes that they answer a real demand, and calls for external restraint, yet does not follow that demand back to the capitalist economy he supports. The conference story then supplies a consequence that sharpens the point: the enjoyment he deplores is linked by another speaker to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Within the broader argument, this contradiction helps explain why moral conservatives may oppose liberal permissiveness without recognizing the economic tendencies that sustain it. Bork’s diagnosis turns structural conflict into a problem of human nature, while the book insists that the system’s demand for expansion must remain in view. His example also gives the author’s political argument its unsettling edge: a culture condemned by conservatives can become part of the force that defeats the political order those same conservatives oppose.