Walter Berns brilliantly diagnoses the Supreme Court’s First Amendment fever.

The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy By Walter Berns Basic Books, 266 pp., $12.50 Using the freedoms of our First Amendment as a point of departure, Professor Berns ends up providing us with a far-ranging and utterly devastating indictment of secular liberalism. Indeed, no other single work of modern times illustrates so persuasively how the Supreme Court and our presumed “intellectual” elite, the guardians and purveyors of the liberal orthodoxy, have managed to distort the original meanings and purposes of our basic freedoms to suit their ideology, and how this revisionism endangers the very survival of our Republic.

Central to the development of Berns’s indictment is the time-honored classical teaching that civil, orderly, and decent republican government depends on the moral character and virtue of the people. The political and social institutions of a republic thus bear a very special responsibility for constantly reinforcing and nourishing those values essential to its moral health. And this continuing responsibility is all the more imperative in the American context because, from our very beginning, we were destined to be a large commercial republic wherein there would flourish a distinct tendency to place great emphasis on materialistic goods and values with a corresponding de-emphasis of the necessary moral underpinnings. But that responsibility, says Berns, has been betrayed, most particularly by the Supreme Court’s interpretations of the basic liberties contained in the First Amendment. The Court, after all, sets down the authoritative guidelines for permissible and impermissible use of our most important liberties. In this sense, the Court, far more than the President or Congress, is instrumental in determining the nature, level, and substance of what can be properly termed our public morality.

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George W. Carey

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The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy By Walter Berns Basic Books, 266 pp., $12.50 Using the freedoms of our First Amendment as a point of departure, Professor Berns ends up providing us with a far-ranging and utterly devastating indictment of secular liberalism. Indeed, no other single work of modern times illustrates so persuasively how the Supreme Court and our presumed “intellectual” elite, the guardians and purveyors of the liberal orthodoxy, have managed to distort the original meanings and purposes of our basic freedoms to suit their ideology, and how this revisionism endangers the very survival of our Republic.

Central to the development of Berns’s indictment is the time-honored classical teaching that civil, orderly, and decent republican government depends on the moral character and virtue of the people. The political and social institutions of a republic thus bear a very special responsibility for constantly reinforcing and nourishing those values essential to its moral health. And this continuing responsibility is all the more imperative in the American context because, from our very beginning, we were destined to be a large commercial republic wherein there would flourish a distinct tendency to place great emphasis on materialistic goods and values with a corresponding de-emphasis of the necessary moral underpinnings. But that responsibility, says Berns, has been betrayed, most particularly by the Supreme Court’s interpretations of the basic liberties contained in the First Amendment. The Court, after all, sets down the authoritative guidelines for permissible and impermissible use of our most important liberties. In this sense, the Court, far more than the President or Congress, is instrumental in determining the nature, level, and substance of what can be properly termed our public morality.