Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America
By Mark R. Levin
(Threshold Editions, 288 Pages, $26.99)
It’s here. A century in the making, insidiously installed in
piece-by-piece fashion courtesy of the American progressive
movement, the absolute power of Post-Constitutional America has
arrived.
Not unlike snorting just a bit of crack cocaine here and a
little more there and just enough the next day, all while
confidently proclaiming self-control and superb physical and mental
health, America has now awakened to the statist nightmare that can
only be induced snorting the political drug of progressivism. Mark
Levin accurately calls the appalling results “Post-Constitutional
America.”
Clearly, Levin has hit a sensitive chord in the Age of Obama. A
mere two days after his new book’s release, Ameritopia: The
Unmaking of America shot to Number One on the Amazon list of
100 bestsellers. This follows Levin’s earlier best-selling analysis
of statism and the Constitution, Liberty and Tyranny: A
Conservative Manifesto.
Having now spent serious time examining the roots of utopianism,
Levin has written a classic. The companion piece to Liberty and
Tyranny. This is a book that directly connects the dots
between today’s America and the earliest and most prominent
expressions of societies based on the endlessly bogus and
pernicious idea of human perfection.
Divided into three parts, Ameritopia takes a close look
at various expressions of utopia appearing as far back as Plato
(The Republic) and moving forward to Thomas More
(Utopia), Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan), and that
infamous utopian bard of class struggle, Karl Marx—of the
ultimately murderous Communist Manifesto.
Levin notes a myriad of cautions from prominent thinkers about
what is transpiring today, one from Supreme Court Associate Justice
Joseph Story anticipating the problem in 1829. Said Story,
presciently:
[G]overnments 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.
The “solid rock” of America, of course, has been the
Constitution. A Constitution carefully and knowledgeably crafted
based on the Founding Fathers’ acute understanding, both
intellectually and from experience, of what the English philosopher
John Locke had a century earlier enlightened as man’s nature. The
Founders next translated the understanding of that nature into a
written Constitution by using the French philosopher Charles de
Montesquieu’s principles of government based on a separation of
powers.
Detailing the utopian thinking that first surfaced thousands of
years ago, Levin guides the reader step-by-step from Plato’s “ideal
city” run by “Guardians” to the acid-like drippings that have both
corroded the Constitution while manifesting in its place the
absolute power that is the massive presence of the federal
government in every area of your life today—beginning with your own
home.
Dividing the book into thirds, Levin dissects utopianism, then
Americanism, and finally the combination of utopianism in America
that has created the Post-Constitutional “Ameritopia” in which we
all reside. Ameritopia—a place where the careful understanding of
man’s nature and the Constitution painstakingly constructed to
reflect that understanding has been exchanged for a
Post-Constitutional America. An America now teetering precariously
as the result of an addiction to an unending series of utopian
fantasies. Utopian fantasies destined always to eventually crash
and burn on the hard rock of reality that is human
imperfection.
Focusing sharply on how an America carefully constructed on John
Locke’s keenly observant treatises of man’s nature and the
resulting civil society, Levin examines a land where the government
now runs amok in an endless—and necessarily fruitless—busy-bodying
quest for human perfection. A Post-Constitutional government
regulating everything from your dishwasher to the brakes in your
car while, just as an aside, creating two massive entitlements
designed to prevent the impossible: the inevitable trials of old
age and the declining health that invariably accompanies it. In the
process running both Social Security and Medicare—not to mention
the nation’s fiscal and economic health—over a financial cliff into
a Grand Canyon of unsustainable debt.
“It bears emphasizing,” writes Levin, “—the utopian seeks
control over the individual. The individual is to be governed. Not
represented.” In other words, the utopian goal is absolute power. A
precise description of the premise behind everything from Obamacare
to campaign finance laws to the creations of LBJ’s Great Society
and FDR’s New Deal before that.
In making his case Levin moves effortlessly from the utopian
ancients to a discussion of precisely who in American history has
taken the country to such a point that the phrase
“Post-Constitutional America” could strike such a deep chord with
so many.
The most prominent of these American “utopian masterminds” is
without doubt Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was not simply the nation’s
28th president. He was, unique among his presidential peers, the
lone academic to serve in the office. As both scholar and
progressive, Wilson had used his pre-presidential time at
institutions like Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Wesleyan, Bryn Mawr, New
York Law School, and finally as president of Princeton to work out
a treatise that effectively became a kind of counter to Locke,
Montesquieu, and the Founders. The blueprint for a
Post-Constitutional America is doubtless Wilson’s
Constitutional Government in the United States.
What Wilson was really about, notes Levin, was a dismissal of
both the Declaration of Independence as well as what Levin
cites—accurately—as “the Founders’ announced purpose for American
independence…the Lockean exposition on natural law, the nature of
man, the social compact establishing the civil society, and the
essential ingredients of constitutional republicanism…. In short,
for Wilson, rights are awarded or denied the individual as
determined by the government.”
Or in other words, Wilson’s attempt at a constitutional do-over
was effectively and inevitably going to head a country founded on
principles of liberty down that oldest of roads to that oldest of
human conditions—tyranny. Levin again:
Tyranny, broadly defined, is the use of power to dehumanize the
individual and delegitimize his nature. Political utopianism is
tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable, and even paradisiacal
governing ideology.
At the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention on September
17, 1787, Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson rose to read a speech
from his aging friend and colleague Benjamin Franklin. It is a
speech that serves today as an effective warning, a bold
“I-told-you-so” from perhaps the oldest and wisest of the Founding
Fathers to the current generation of trustees of his beloved
American Republic. The Constitution, cautioned Franklin, “is likely
to be well administered for a Course of years, and can only end in
Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall
become corrupt as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of
any other…”
Asks Levin: “Have we become corrupt” and therefore invited a
need for “despotic government”?
Yes, he responds.
Levin cites a chilling sampling of moderns including the
managing editor of Time magazine and prominent columnists
for the New York Times and the Washington Post
who have, in the ageless style of American utopians like Woodrow
Wilson, effectively endorsed abandoning the Constitution to embrace
the eternal utopian “infatuation with totalitarianism.” One
advocates “changing or reinterpreting” the Constitution, while
another rhapsodizes over the “great advantages” to be found in the
government of the police state that is China.
Another prattles of a “fatuous infatuation” with the
Constitution and specifically describes the 10th Amendment as
“clearly the work of witches, wiccans, and wackos. It has nothing
to do with America’s real problems and, if taken too seriously,
would cause an economic and political calamity.” What does this
witches brew embedded in the Constitution actually say? In its
entirety, here is this heretical subversion of utopia: “The
powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States respectively, are reserved to the
States respectively or to the people.”
Imagine that. Power to the people. Positively frightening,
no?
Well, yes. It is if you are a utopian.
What Mark Levin has accomplished with this book is to frame in
detailed, precise, and readable fashion the historical connection
between the ancient dreams of utopians for absolute power and the
nightmare reality of what is becoming—what is—every day real life
in today’s America. He has written a succinct account of how a
nation, in Lincoln’s words, “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to
the proposition that all men are created equal,” has slowly and at
times not-so-slowly evolved into a centralized government of, by,
and for a political class of “entrenched experts and
administrators, whose authority is also self-perpetuating…and
growing more formidable.”
In the last line of the book, Levin asks what is surely destined
to be the real question of 2012—and beyond.
“So my fellow countrymen, which do we choose—Ameritopia
or America?”
It is alarming to say, but the jury is still out.
