Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America
Page 1
The man of system … is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.…
—Adam Smith
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759
AN INTELLECTUALLY BRACING NEW VOLUME ON AMERICA’S TRANSFORMATION AND THE CLASH BETWEEN CONSTITUTIONALISM AND UTOPIANISM—FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIBERTY & TYRANNY
MARK R. LEVIN
Hailed by Rush Limbaugh as “the most compelling defense of freedom for our time,” and “the necessary book of the Obama era” by The American Spectator, Mark R. Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny made the most persuasive case for conservatism and against statism in a generation. In this most crucial time, this leading conservative thinker explores the psychology, motivations, and history of the utopian movement, its architects, and its modern-day disciples—and how the individual and American society are being devoured by it.
Levin asks, what is this utopian force that both allures a free people and destroys them? Levin digs deep into the past and draws astoundingly relevant parallels to contemporary America from
Plato’s Republic
Thomas More’s Utopia
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan
Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto
… as well as from the critical works of John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other philosophical pioneers who brilliantly diagnosed the nature of man and government. As Levin meticulously pursues his subject, the reader joins him in an enlightening and compelling journey. And in the end, Levin’s message is clear: the American republic is in great peril. The people must now choose between utopianism or liberty.
President Ronald Reagan warned, “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Levin agrees, and with Ameritopia, delivers another modern political classic, an indispensable guide for America in our time and in the future.
MARK R. LEVIN, nationally syndicated talk-radio host and president of Landmark Legal Foundation, is the author of Liberty and Tyranny, the 38-week New York Times bestseller that spent more than three months at #1 and sold more than one million copies. His books Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America and Rescuing Sprite: A Dog Lover’s Story of Joy and Anguish were also New York Times and national bestsellers; he also contributed the preface to his father Jack E. Levin’s Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address Illustrated. He has worked as an attorney in the private sector and as a top adviser and administrator to several members of President Ronald Reagan’s cabinet. He holds a B.A. from Temple University and a J.D. from Temple University Law School.
Follow Mark Levin on Twitter and visit him on the web at www.marklevinshow.com.
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Copyright © 2012 by Mark R. Levin
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Levin, Mark R. (Mark Reed), 1957–
Ameritopia : the unmaking of America / Mark R. Levin.
p. cm.
1. United States—Politics and government—Philosophy. 2. Democracy—United States. 3. Utopias—United States. 4. Utopias—Philosophy. I. Title.
JK31.L47 2012
320.97301—dc23
2011042260
ISBN 978-1-4391-7324-4
ISBN 978-1-4391-7328-2 (ebook)
To my beloved family
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CONTENTS
Introduction
PART I: ON UTOPIANISM
CHAPTER ONE
The Tyranny of Utopia
CHAPTER TWO
Plato’s Republic and the Perfect Society
CHAPTER THREE
Thomas More’s Utopia and Radical Egalitarianism
CHAPTER FOUR
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and the All-Powerful State
CHAPTER FIVE
Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and the Class Struggle
PART II: ON AMERICANISM
CHAPTER SIX
John Locke and the Nature of Man
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Influence of Locke on the Founders
CHAPTER EIGHT
Charles de Montesquieu and Republican Government
CHAPTER NINE
The Influence of Montesquieu on the Framers
CHAPTER TEN
Alexis de Tocqueville and Democracy in America
PART III: ON UTOPIANISM AND AMERICANISM
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Post-Constitutional America
CHAPTER TWELVE
Ameritopia
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
IN LIBERTY AND TYRANNY, I described the nature of individual liberty and the civil society in a constitutional republic, including the essential principles of America’s societal and political order. I also discussed the growing tyranny of government—statism, as I broadly labeled it—which threatens our liberty, the character of our country, and our way of life. At the time I warned that if we do not come to grips with the significance of this transformation, we will be devoured by it.
The symptoms of the tyranny that threatens liberty and republicanism have been acknowledged throughout time, including by iconic Americans. For example, Supreme Court associate justice Joseph Story, among America’s most prominent legal thinkers, explained in 1829, “governments are not always overthrown by direct and open assaults. They are not always battered down by the arms of conquerors, or the successful daring of usurpers. There is often concealed the dry rot, which eats into the vitals, when all is fair and stately on the outside. And to republics this has been the more common fatal disease. The continual drippings of corruption may wear away the solid rock, when the tempest has failed to overturn it.…”1
In 1838, Abraham Lincoln delivered an address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. He declared, “At what point … is the approach of danger to
be expected. I answer, If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”2
In this same vein, for years President Ronald Reagan cautioned that “[f]reedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”3
During the three years since the publication of Liberty and Tyranny, and despite growing alarm by an increasingly alert segment of the public, too many of our fellow citizens remain oblivious to the perilousness of their surroundings, not realizing or accepting the precariousness of their liberty and the civil society in the face of the federal government’s dramatic, albeit predictable, engorgement of power. This is the grave reality of our day.
But what is this ideology, this force, this authority that threatens us, and its destructiveness, which Reagan, Lincoln, Story, and the Founders so feared? What kind of power both attracts a free people and destroys them?
The mission of this book is to delve deeper into these essential questions, the most important of our time, and identify, expose, and explain the character of the threat that America and, indeed, all republics confront. In this way we can better comprehend the existential danger to a free and prosperous people.
In Ameritopia, I explain that the heart of the problem is, in fact, utopianism, a term I discuss in great detail throughout the book. Utopianism is the ideological and doctrinal foundation for statism. While utopianism and statism or utopian and statist are often used interchangeably, the undertaking here is to probe more deeply into what motivates and animates the tyranny of statism. Indeed, the modern arguments about the necessities and virtues of government control over the individual are but malign echoes of utopian prescriptions through the ages, which attempted to define subjugation as the most transcendent state of man.
Utopianism has long promoted the idea of a paradisiacal existence and advanced concepts of pseudo “ideal” societies in which a heroic despot, a benevolent sovereign, or an enlightened oligarchy claims the ability and authority to provide for all the needs and fulfill all the wants of the individual—in exchange for his abject servitude.
By sorting through an immense volume of writings, I chose those books and passages—using the original words of certain classic philosophical works—that best describe the utopian mind-set and its application to modern-day utopian thinking and conduct in America. Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto are indispensible in understanding the nature of utopianism. They are essential works that have in common soulless societies in which the individual is subsumed into a miasma of despotism—and each of them is a warning against utopian transformation in America and elsewhere.
I also contrast the utopian societies created by these writings with the enlightened thinking of philosophical pioneers John Locke and Charles de Montesquieu, among others, who described truisms about the nature of man—liberty, rights, and life—that informed the Founders and became the touchstone of American society. Indeed, their wisdom served as the bone and sinew of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Moreover, a proper examination of democracy’s tendency to descend into a soft tyranny or worse would be incomplete without Alexis de Tocqueville’s prescient insight. Although not a contemporary of the Founders, he wrote elaborately about the unique character of the American people and their government, praising them but also drawing attention to the historical weaknesses of democratic institutions and to the fragility of liberty.
I also endeavor to show how insidiously contemporary utopians or statists have poisoned modern society by changing the paradigms under which governmental action is both contemplated and executed. For example, we seldom question today whether it is appropriate for the federal government to undertake a given task, no matter how significant or minute. In infinite ways, whether we realize it or not, this is the utopian mind-set at work.
Finally, there is a reflexive desire when concluding a project such as this to put a positive spin on the situation. I have not done so here. I remain convinced that we, the people, are at great risk. There simply are no easy answers to the challenges we face. It will take nothing short of a prodigious effort, of the kind I discussed in Liberty and Tyranny, over a course of many decades, to reestablish America as a constitutional republic. However, this is an effort we must make, no matter how complicated and daunting. Otherwise, as Lincoln put it, the nation will surely “die by suicide.”
I believe the provenance of liberty and tyranny matters. To know liberty is to cherish it. Conversely, utopianism is tyranny born of intellectual bankruptcy and dishonesty. The proof is seen every day in the words and actions of politicians, judges, bureaucrats, and the media. It is my hope that, in some small way, this book will contribute to a broader awakening of the citizenry and the reaffirmation and reestablishment of the principles that secure and nurture individual liberty, inalienable rights, the civil society, and constitutional republicanism.
Mark R. Levin
PART I
ON UTOPIANISM
CHAPTER ONE
THE TYRANNY OF UTOPIA
TYRANNY, BROADLY DEFINED, is the use of power to dehumanize the individual and delegitimize his nature. Political utopianism1 is tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable, and even paradisiacal governing ideology. There are, of course, unlimited utopian constructs, for the mind is capable of infinite fantasies. But there are common themes. The fantasies take the form of grand social plans or experiments, the impracticability and impossibility of which, in small ways and large, lead to the individual’s subjugation.
Karl Popper, a philosopher who eloquently deconstructed the false assumptions and scientific claims of utopianism, arguing it is totalitarian in form and substance, observed that “[a]ny social science which does not teach the impossibility of rational social construction is entirely blind to the most important facts of social life, and must overlook the only social laws of real validity and of real importance. Social sciences seeking to provide a background for social engineering cannot, therefore, be true descriptions of social facts. They are impossible in themselves.”2 Popper argued that unable to make detailed or precise sociological predictions, long-term forecasts of great sweep and significance not only are intended to compensate for utopianism’s shortcomings but are the only forecasts it considers worth pursuing.3 (Although Popper differentiated between “piecemeal social engineering” and “utopian social engineering,” it is ahistorical, or at least a leap of faith, to suggest that once unleashed, the social engineers will not become addicted to their power; and Popper never could enunciate a practical solution.)
Utopianism is irrational in theory and practice, for it ignores or attempts to control the planned and unplanned complexity of the individual, his nature, and mankind generally. It ignores, rejects, or perverts the teachings and knowledge that have come before—that is, man’s historical, cultural, and social experience and development. Indeed, utopianism seeks to break what the hugely influential eighteenth-century British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke argued was the societal continuum “between those who are living and those who are dead and those who are to be born.”4 Eric Hoffer, a social thinker renowned for his observations about fanaticism and mass movements, commented that “[f]or men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future.… [T]hey must be w
holly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.”5
Utopianism substitutes glorious predictions and unachievable promises for knowledge, science, and reason, while laying claim to them all. Yet there is nothing new in deception disguised as hope and nothing original in abstraction framed as progress. A heavenly society is said to be within reach if only the individual surrenders more of his liberty and being for the general good, meaning the good as prescribed by the state. If he refuses, he will be tormented and ultimately coerced into compliance, for conformity is essential. Indeed, nothing good can come of self-interest, which is condemned as morally indefensible and empty. Through persuasion, deceit, and coercion, the individual must be stripped of his identity and subordinated to the state. He must abandon his own ambitions for the ambitions of the state. He must become reliant on and fearful of the state. His first duty must be to the state—not family, community, and faith, all of which challenge the authority of the state. Once dispirited, the individual can be molded by the state with endless social experiments and lifestyle calibrations.6
Especially threatening, therefore, are the industrious, independent, and successful, for they demonstrate what is actually possible under current societal conditions—achievement, happiness, and fulfillment—thereby contradicting and endangering the utopian campaign against what was or is. They must be either co-opted and turned into useful contributors to or advocates for the state, or neutralized through sabotage or other means. Indeed, the individual’s contribution to society must be downplayed, dismissed, or denounced, unless the contribution is directed by the state and involves self-sacrifice for the utopian cause.