The premise of Robert Bork's article "Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Can Democratic Government Survive?" is that democracy as currently practiced by the United States is indeed not a democracy at all. Rather, due to the proliferation of alternative and minority viewpoints, and the transformation of judge-made law to address these viewpoints, the democracy has in fact become ruled by the will of the minority. Bork states that modern liberalism is "fundamentally at odds with democratic government because it demands results that ordinary people would not freely choose" (Bork 46). What he is saying, in essence, is that because liberals choose to give voice to the viewpoints of groups that do not themselves make up the majority, they have removed the rule of the majority from our nominally democratic form of government.
The particular institution Bork targets for the codification and legalization of these viewpoints is the Supreme Court. He quotes Abraham Lincoln to establish his point: "`The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal'" (Bork 46). Interestingly enough, however, Bork seems to target only specific decisions of the Supreme Court. For example, he chooses to quote Professor Lino Graglia's observation that changes in the Court's personnel have failed to result in the overruling of any major judicial victory by the American Civil Liberties' Union (ACLU) (Bork 46-48). The quote continues to state that these decisions in fact deserve overruling because they "`serve as the mirror, mouthpiece, and enacting arm of a cultural elite that is radically alienated from and to the left of the ordinary citizen'" (Bork 48).
Bork's position, therefo...