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We will be coerced into virtue, as modern liberals define virtue: a ruthlessly egalitarian society. This agenda is, of course, already well advanced.

Quite true. But what is the political response, coercion the other way into virtue as we define it? Bork, at the end of this essay stipulates that there is not a political answer to this threat citing with second sight Newt Gingrich by name nearly 2 decades ago. In other words, taking back the Congress after 40 years does not change the culture, neither does welfare reform, or electing Ronald Reagan.

Yet Bork's indictment of our condition in 1994 is even more dreadfully vindicated in 2012 so, what do we do? We, as sons of liberty must be aware of the limitations of the power of the state to enforce virtue whether virtue as defined on the left or virtue as defined by the right. If we rigorously enforce laws against pornography we risk creating a tyranny. If we stand by passively we watch the culture deteriorate.

I have come to believe that ultimately culture trumps politics. I am sure the left has come to this conclusion long before I have and they have done something about it long before I woke up. What did they do? They created, The Frankfurt School, they devised methodology for revolution by people like Saul Alinsky, they deliberately fomented economic disintegration by people like Cloward-Piven. Today they contrive from top-down the occupy movement.

Perhaps Bork was a touch naïve in his judgment that the war on the body politic and on the culture by the left was not a conspiracy.

To wage our counterculture war we had our churches but this institution like virtually other institution catalogued by Bork in his essay, has been infiltrated and corrupted against our sense of virtue by the left.

So, just as there is no political solution, there is no institutional solution.

Bork ends by exhorting us to optimism but I see very little to warrant optimism. If there is any salvation for us as conservatives it is to have resort to an individual salvation of our fathers quite apart from any culture or political trend.

"Perhaps Bork was a touch naïve in his judgment that the war on the body politic and on the culture by the left was not a conspiracy."

That is my sole disagreement with Bork in this piece as well. We now have the Venona papers, the books of Vasili Mitrokhin and any other numbe of credible sources that indicate a lot of these things were being deliberately orchestrated from the outside with the express purpose of bringing about the downfall of the US.

Those things were only coming into the light at the time Bork was writing this. There's no doubt Bork was aware of Cloward-Piven, Alinsky, Gramsci, et al, but perhaps viewed them as independent theorists/academics first, and activists second, rather than the unwitting elements of some coordinated conspiracy.

Very cogent observations. We will not make ourselves a moral nation by legislating morality. The source of our morality must be our SELVES, not any institution or collective. But most of all, we must stop apologizing for having that morality, for stating the obvious, and for standing by the principles that have evolved over ages.

A moral people have no need of pornography. Or drugs. Or violence. A moral people have little use for laws or the tyranny of the state. But the more immoral we become, the more some turn to the state to "protect" us from what are ultimately the consequences of our own decisions.