Mark R. Levin

Scathing and direct, this book makes a strong and factual case for how this generation's Washington and their uncontrolled spending are putting the next 2 or 3 generations in this nation at great financial peril. Not for the weak hearted, Levin almost pleads to current Americans to read, understand, and follow this book to change the way we are literally spending ourselves to death. The most disturbing aspect of this book is the case he makes for how this country will be spending more on show more social programs ALONE than the GDP of America within 20 years. Think Black Friday hysteria is bad? Wait until food, shelter, and clothing are in short supply someday unless deemed worthy by the almighty Federals. This one really makes you think. show less

It's like Liberal Facism's mean little sister. In his effort to be treatise for the everyman, Levin dispenses historical investigation and simply gives broad generalizations which are to serve as adequate background for his reader. Therefore, instead of seeking to see how liberals came to prefer statism as a proper interpretation of American governance, he essentially informs his readers that liberals came to their conclusions via ignorance and self-serving vices.

Dismissively characterizing show more liberals on his self-defined moral high-ground, Levin encourages his reader not to be passive in political discussion in the public and private spheres (read: fervently engage liberals wherever you meet them). It is this combination that really makes Levin’s work horrible. He never equips his readers with any means of respecting the liberal they will be encountering when they follow his advice. Without a sense of shared values and empathy towards one another, what would any dialogue between a Levin-trained conservative and liberal ever result in other than more polarization?

Oh, and Levin mentions religion quite a bit, but ultimately for Levin, it is the tradition of unchecked market forces which will redeem society. I suggest Levin read the Pope’s 2009 encyclical Charity in Truth while readers looking for a critical, yet historically researched view of modern liberalism to read Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. Ironically, Goldberg's detailed look at liberal history tells his readers that liberals are worthy enough to spend the time to honestly study. Levin doesn't seem to believe that's the case. show less

IN 1CAmeritopia 1D Mark Levin 19s premise is that the political left is hopelessly utopian and therefore fanciful, not to say fanatical, in its hopes for change, while the right is realistic in its estimation of the human need for freedom within the bounds of a limited government that protects individual liberty. He boils down Plato 19s 1CRepublic, 1D Thomas More 19s 1CUtopia, 1D Thomas Hobbes 19 1CLeviathan, 1D John Locke 19s 1CSecond Treatise on Civil Government, 1D Charles de Montesquieu show more 19s 1CThe Spirit of the Laws, 1D what Jefferson, Madison and other Founders of the United States made of the previously listed writings and how they were influenced by them in writing the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. He also describes Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 19 1CThe Communist Manifesto. 1D Levin next examines how America 19s Constitutional experiment looked half a century after the founding when Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States and then reported on what he found in 1CDemocracy in America. 1D Levin follows up by examining how the governance of the United States came to be as it is today, and how it is different from what the Founders intended and what Tocqueville saw 180 years ago, focusing on the role of presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt who enacted their visions of federal government growth as an 1Cimprovement 1D on the original Constitution in the early twentieth century, thereby departing from the original intent of the Founding generation. Wilson certainly promoted and defined 14if he did not invent 14the term 1Cliving Constitution, 1D whereby the document is not seen as fixed law but as an open-ended guide that can and should be interpreted and reinterpreted according to an era 19s 1Cbest thought 1D (read 1Celite thought 1D).

Levin 19s book is a masterful polemic, educating as it seeks to influence. Whether you agree or disagree with Levin 19s conclusions, you will be engaged intellectually by the ideas he presents as well as his commentary on them. Utopianism from Plato to Hobbes to Marx has offered humanity a hope-filled fantasy that not only cannot fulfill its promise but must descend into a tyranny. All of the utopias outlined in this book deny human nature, put power in the hands of a few even while pretending that all men have 14or would if they knew what was good for them 14freely chosen to put their faith in a king, dictator or oligarchy; they all urge radical equality, which never raises men up but rather brings them all down.

To put Levin 19s conclusion in my own words, the bloody Pol Pot regime of Cambodia in the 1970s should be seen as adhering more faithfully to utopian radical egalitarianism than any other in history because Pol Pot dehumanized everyone equally and, if they resisted being dehumanized, he killed them equally. This is what Levin would call a hard or 1Creal 1D tyranny. The path to such a tyranny can either be a precipitous revolution or, in the case of the United States, a soft tyranny under which the individual human spirit and its most compatible institutions of free trade and representative government are gradually hectored out of existence by myriad petty regulations and a striving for procrustean egalitarianism.

Reading this book is not especially easy, though I thought all the while I was reading it how easy Levin has made the reader 19s task by selecting, assembling and summarizing quotations from so many classics. If anything, he has made a great deal of it easier to absorb than it would otherwise be if, say I for example, were to spend the next year or two intensely trying to read all of these works for myself.

Levin 19s writing does become repetitive since many passages from writers such as Locke and Montesquieu are not only quoted in the chapters devoted to each of them but are repeated in subsequent chapters. This and his tendency to summarize the quotations is helpful, especially considering that, while all of these thinkers are challenging, Plato and Montesquieu, being translated from foreign languages, are at least presented in more or less modern English, while More, Hobbes and Locke are quoted in their original language(s), which represent stages of the development of English from pre-Elizabethan to post-Elizabethan to pre-American Revolution. Consequently, More 19s English is relatively difficult to understand while Locke 19s is comparatively easier but still quaint to the modern eye and ear, and the difficulty of reading Hobbes 19 English falls in between those two.

Is Levin 19s premise a conceit that exaggerates? Are all leftists utopians? Are there no utopians on the right? I believe that, in general, Levin is right, that utopianism too often rejects human nature, trying to remold people into 1Cideal beings 1D subservient to a greater good that too often turns out to be the whims of an elite leadership within the utopian model. This is true of Plato, More and Hobbes in their openly utopian models, but it also turns out to be the reality of every socialist experiment even when the advocates deny that their socialism is utopian or that their leaders are a permanent feature of their scheme. Rather, every form of socialism seems to devolve immediately into nothing more than a system of neo-feudalism where a few privileged leaders lord it over masses of deliberately impoverished peasants.

Ironically, Levin notes that some opponents of the U.S. Constitution have implied or stated that constitutionalism is utopian, the exact opposite of Levin 19s thesis. To them, their fantasies are factual while a system designed to accommodate rather than change the facts of human nature, such as Madison 19s conception of the Constitution, is utopian. (This reminds me of the most profound insight into the mind of Adolf Hitler that I have read: Toward the end of World War II, as unmistakable evidence of impending defeat poured in every day, Hitler turned to an aid and expressed frustration over the lack of connection between the data coming to him from the world and the reality that he knew to be the true state of things.)

It is not generally through an embrace of constitutionalism that the right itself takes up anything like utopianism, but there are questions of utopianism on the conservative and classical liberal side that bear consideration. For example, James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, constructed a clever system of separation of competing powers at the federal level that seems to have worked but only for a few decades. Was he too clever by half? Should he have followed the advice of the Anti-federalists and put far more emphasis on the separation of powers between state and federal? Perhaps, although the Federalists saw as their mandate the arrangement of a national government; explicitly tinkering with the power of the states, even to define powers in their favor, might have backfired and not helped to get the states to accept the Constitution. Such considerations have more to do with the politics of the day and little to do with utopianism.

Where conservatives *might* be guilty of utopianism 14especially the sin of denying human nature 14is in regard to questions of lawfully enforced morality. Take for example the trade in illicit drugs. Conservatives want to maintain laws against traffic and use of certain drugs even though this is social engineering without regard to human nature in all of its aspects: not only the tendency of some people to use drugs but the economic motive to supply a demand; paradoxically, laws against drugs motivate and empower career criminals to traffic in drugs. Kill or send any of them to prison and you do not deter but rather encourage the remaining traffickers to step up their activities and effectively call up new dealers to take the places of those removed. Drug dealers will only thank the police for eliminating their competitors for them. Yet for many conservatives this marketplace logic matters not at all because drugs are immoral and therefore should be illegal; facts cannot be allowed to get in the way of that reality. Conservatives do not even notice what ought to their first clue that something is amiss in their drug-warrior convictions: regardless of their campaign rhetoric, most leftist utopians have been drug-warriors themselves. The conservative might think that this is only because the left can 19t bring itself to legalize drugs because of the public backlash that might result, but actually drug prohibition is a pretty good way to control people. If rank and file leftists do tend to use illegal substances, this only makes them that much more vulnerable to the utopian masterminds to control them.

Perhaps the reason why I have myself have journeyed from libertarianism to a more conservative libertarianism in recent years has something to do with the utopianism of some of my fellow libertarians. They seem to think that libertarianism should lead to kicking over the traces and achieving a quasi-anarchistic (or not so quasi-) society, a world where each individual is free to radically reject the social contracts made by past generations. This is a species of ignorance of human nature possibly akin to that of the leftist utopians, albeit one that trusts the individual rather than being like the traditional utopias from Plato to Marx and beyond, which all distrust the individual in the masses while peculiarly trusting the individual who has been sactioned to run the government. Yet some libertarians distrust all the precedents of social relations, including the Constitution in the American setting; they reject all the laws that promote social relations in the present generation because they personally never voted for them. It is because of tradition, though, that we know and trust that others will keep their word and fulfill their contracts with us. As Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence, breaking with traditional ways of doing things such as governance should not be done lightly but only for good cause.

Ultimately, the correctness of Levin 19s thesis is due to the overall difference between the left 19s insistence that we must change human nature to conform with the utopian ideal, on the one hand, and the tendency on the other of classical liberalism 14a considerable though not the only component of modern American conservatism 14to observe human nature and celebrate its strengths while only providing enough government to curb its weaknesses. As I hinted above, Madison 19s idea was to use the weaknesses of human nature against each other by creating a society that is too free and various for factions bent on evil ends to achieve unity and thereby majority. This idea seems to have worked for the first fifty years of the Republic, to judge from Tocqueville 19s account, but subsequently there has been an erosion of the safeguards that the Framers of the Constitution tried to build into their system. The balance of power between the states and the federal government, taken for granted by the Framers as not needing too much special protection, has shifted as the few places in the Constitution where the states 19 powers are mentioned have been changed or ignored. Today, federal office holders whether executive, legislative or judicial, tend to assume that the federal government should interfere with the operation of state and local government and, because some of them expect to transfer between branches of the branches of the federal government in the course of their careers, they are more jealous keepers of the entire federal government 19s power and less so of that of the branch that they temporarily occupy.

In addition, as Levin points out, the federal government has expanded the power of the legislative and executive by creating many new bureaucracies that produce so many new rules and regulations that Levin says that no one can count them. What is more, a great many of these rules are redundant as they are made by departments and bureaus whose jurisdictions overlap. But the most worrisome feature of this governmental growth is that elected representatives have abdicated their authority to unelected and too often unvetted and unconfirmed officials who run the government entities that increasingly regulate our lives. Elections are virtually irrelevant so long as these bureaucracies exercise so much of their power without oversight by elected officials; and often the lack of oversight is due the degree of complexity caused by Congress and the executive having created so much bureaucracy that they are incapable of understanding themselves let alone overseeing. (In this regard, it is interesting that President Franklin Roosevelt, having created a vast number of bureaucracies, eventually made an attempt to bring back under his own control some of the power he had earlier ceded to them.)

The arrogant conceit of the 1Cmasterminds 1D is that their idealistic theories can be made to work by shear will regardless of real-world difficulties, Particularly in the fields of energy and fuel standards, the government seems to think that it can command technological advances by fiat at the same time that its regulations suppress innovation.

Levin rehearses the history of social insurance from Social Security to Medicare and Medicaid to the latest and largest expansion of government entitlements, the Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act (PPACA) colloquially known as Obamacare. Both its official and vernacular names are ironic since the new law will certainly protect patients from nothing and render decent health care unaffordable, and President Obama had nothing to do with writing it and, I wager, still has never read it. Not only will the massive law cause costs to skyrocket, private insurance companies to go out of business and employers to end health benefits since the federal government will take over their provision, but an unknowable number of agencies will necessarily be created to deal with the administration of the new law, and each of them will have to have its own budget that will increase every year and never decrease.

What Levin means to present is a choice for the future of his country: America as it was founded, based on individualism, private property, industry and virtue, or 1CAmeritopia 1D where utopianism 1Cmetastasizes 1D into the opposite from the kind of society that made the United States successful and the destination of choice for everyone in the world who had an ambition and a desire to make a better life for themselves and their families. (Utopians often aim to undermine or abolish the family, BTW.) In the classical liberal view 14and according to the evidence of upward mobility in societies that take the classical liberal approach even in part 14it is the pursuit of self-interest that paradoxically improves the lives of everyone in the community and the nation, not the pursuit of equal redistribution of wealth and outcomes as recommended by the classical utopians and modern expertocracies of the progressive liberals and their socialist cousins. No government can redistributes wealth; it will rather only redistribute poverty.

Levin admits that he does not have a crystal ball. A dystopic utopia (a redundancy) is not necessarily our destiny; however, Ameritopia 14America turned into a tyrannical utopia 14is path we are already on; it is always easiest to stay on the same road rather than discover where it was that we took the wrong turn so as to get back on the right road. Our current destination, Ameritopia, might seem like the promise of a better tomorrow, but whether achieved by revolution or evolution utopia always rather seems to become the tyranny today. show less

This book addresses a topic critical to America's future, and it could be understood by the average reader. Levin makes his conservative stance transparent (as does the introduction by Rush Limbaugh and afterword by Edwin Meese). While I'm not convinced he would relegate so much to the states if current law swayed more toward his own moral views, he distinguishes between criticism and opinion sufficiently for his book to remain instructive. His main point is that the history of the Supreme show more Court is a constant trend toward activism over originalism. This trend violates the intent of the Constitution. It has led to increasingly complex law, supplanting the role of the legislature with a web of implications set by the courts. Rather than define the law, activist rulings continually create a need to refine the law and open up whole new paths of precedent triggered by the introduction of new concepts. For example, the 14th ammendment can be violated by a "compelling interest." I found it interesting to learn how much of the Supreme Court's expanded role was spawned from cases involving the 14th ammendment. It was leveraged in key decisions related to abortion, affirmative action, immigration, and elections. (If Republicans regret the decisions resulting from the 14th ammendment, they should note their party is solely responsible for it's wording. Amend with care.) Levin's adherence to principle breaks down somewhat in his chapter about the Court's rulings about enemy combatants. "There has been no widespread detention of U.S. citizens - only two, to the best of my knowledge - and only after an extensive vetting process" (p.122). He also seems to justify the Bush administration's steps in this matter on the basis that they aren't as extreme as the wartime detentions ordered by Lincoln and Roosevelt. Despite these criticisms, I found Levin's arguments generally understandable, principled, and balanced. He himself criticizes the Bush administration for signing McCain-Feingold. His closing chapter explores potential solutions to activism, including impeachment, Congressional limits on judicial scope, and changes to confirmation processes and tenure.

Those who support the activist rulings, do so only because they agree with the prevailing winds. When the direction shifts, they will, no doubt, decry expansive rulings as violating the appropriate role of the court. A judiciary fixed on original principles would preserve a proper balance of powers, while leaving specific laws to be written where laws should be written. show less