Coercing Virtue

In Coercing Virtue, leading social and legal commentator Judge Robert H. Bork focuses his gaze on one of the most powerful but overlooked forces in a long-running and now global culture war: judges. He describes the increasing influence of judicial imperialism - courts taking more and more decisions out of the realm of democratic governance - and tries to explain the surprisingly passive response of citizens when judges usurp their right to govern themselves. He also discusses the relation between judicial activism and steady erosion of the ideals of democracy and the rule of law. This erosion is slow, but, warns Bork, it has the capacity to alter our form of government without any public deliberation or consent. Bork's thesis is that judicial imperialism is rampant among Western nations and that this prevailing trend suggests an underlying problem more fundamental than mere bad luck in choosing judges. He explains that judges everywhere have aligned themselves with the "intellectual class," which is composed of professors, journalists, members of the entertainment industry, and others who earn their livings with words and images. Bork argues that, ironically, members of the intellectual class are not necessarily very good at real intellectual work and that all too frequently their dominant passion is socialism. Although socialism's economic program is out of favor, that program is only one manifestation of the socialist desire for leveling in all areas of life. In particular, Bork asserts, there is a socialism of the culture that demands a flattening of moral and social hierarchies. Judges who belong and respond to the intellectual class, implement this agenda through rulings that purport to be constitutional but have little, if any, basis in actual constitutions. Coercing Virtue shows how numerous aspects of the activists' program - hostility to religion, destruction of sexual standards, endorsement of racial and sexual preferences in employment and university admissions, the invention of a right to choose abortion, to name only a few - have spread across national boundaries. He calls on citizens in all Western-style democracies to stand up and take notice of what is happening in their courts before it is too late.