About the Author
Mark R. Levin, nationally syndicated talk-radio host and president of Landmark Legal Foundation, is the author of Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, which spent more than three months as a #1 New York Times bestseller 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 bestsellers. 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.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
EPILOGUE
MY PREMISE, IN
THE first sentence of the first chapter of this book, is this: “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.”
Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Hobbes’s Leviathan,
and Marx’s workers’ paradise are utopias that are anti-individual and
anti-individualism. For the utopians, modern and olden, the individual
is one-dimensional—selfish. On his own, he has little moral value.
Contrarily, authoritarianism is defended as altruistic and masterminds
as socially conscious. Thus endless interventions in the individual’s
life and manipulation of his conditions are justified as not only
necessary and desirable but noble governmental pursuits. This false
dialectic is at the heart of the problem we face today.
In truth,
man is naturally independent and self-reliant, which are attributes
that contribute to his own well-being and survival, and the well-being
and survival of a civil society. He is also a social being who is
charitable and compassionate. History abounds with examples, as do the
daily lives of individuals. To condemn individualism as the utopians do
is to condemn the very foundation of the civil society and the American
founding and endorse, wittingly or unwittingly, oppression. Karl Popper
saw it as an attack on Western civilization. “The emancipation of the
individual was indeed the great spiritual revolution which had led to
the breakdown of tribalism and to the rise of democracy.”1 Moreover, Judaism and Christianity, among other religions, teach the altruism of the individual.
Of
course, this is not to defend anarchy. Quite the opposite. It is to
endorse the magnificence of the American founding. The American founding
was an exceptional exercise in collective human virtue and wisdom—a
culmination of thousands of years of experience, knowledge, reason, and
faith. The Declaration of Independence is a remarkable societal
proclamation of human rights, brilliant in its insight, clarity, and
conciseness. The Constitution of the United States is an extraordinary
matrix of governmental limits, checks, balances, and divisions, intended
to secure for posterity the individual’s sovereignty as proclaimed in
the Declaration.
This is the grand heritage to which every
American citizen is born. It has been characterized as “the American
Dream,” “the American experiment,” and “American exceptionalism.” The
country has been called “the Land of Opportunity,” “the Land of Milk and
Honey,” and “a Shining City on a Hill.” It seems unimaginable that a
people so endowed by Providence, and the beneficiaries of such
unparalleled human excellence, would choose or tolerate a course that
ensures their own decline and enslavement, for a government unleashed on
the civil society is a government that destroys the nature of man.
On
September 17, 1787, at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention
in Philadelphia, Delegate James Wilson, on behalf of his ailing
colleague from Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin, read aloud Franklin’s
speech to the convention in favor of adopting the Constitution. Among
other things, Franklin said that the Constitution “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.…”2
Have
we “become corrupt”? Are we in need of “despotic government”? It
appears that some modern-day “leading lights” think so, as they press
their fanatical utopianism. For example, Richard Stengel, managing
editor of Time magazine, considers the Constitution a utopian
expedient. He wrote, “If the Constitution was intended to limit the
federal government, it sure doesn’t say so.… The framers weren’t afraid
of a little messiness. Which is another reason we shouldn’t be so
delicate about changing the Constitution or reinterpreting it.”3
It is beyond dispute that the Framers sought to limit the scope of
federal power and that the Constitution does so. Moreover,
constitutional change was not left to the masterminds but deliberately
made difficult to ensure the broad participation and consent of the body
politic.
Richard Cohen, a columnist for the Washington Post,
explained that the Constitution is an amazing document, as long as it
is mostly ignored, particularly the limits it imposes on the federal
government. He wrote, “This fatuous infatuation with the Constitution,
particularly the 10th Amendment, is 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. The Constitution is a wonderful document, quite miraculous
actually, but only because it has been wisely adapted to changing times.
To adhere to the very word of its every clause hardly is respectful to
the Founding Fathers. They were revolutionaries who embraced change.
That’s how we got here.”4 Of course, without the promise of
the Tenth Amendment, the Constitution would not have been ratified,
since the states insisted on retaining most of their sovereignty.
Furthermore, the Framers clearly did not embrace the utopian change
demanded by its modern adherents.
Lest we ignore history, the
no-less-eminent American revolutionary and founder Thomas Jefferson
explained, “On every question of construction, carry ourselves back to
the time when the constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit
manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be
squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the
probable one in which it was passed.”5
Thomas L. Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times
and three-time Pulitzer Prize recipient, is even more forthright in his
dismissal of constitutional republicanism and advocacy for utopian
tyranny. Complaining of the slowness of American society in adopting
sweeping utopian policies, he wrote, “There is only one thing worse than
one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we
have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks.
But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China
is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just
impose the politically difficult but critically important policies
needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”6 Of
course, China remains a police state, where civil liberties are
nonexistent, despite its experiment with government-managed
pseudo-capitalism. Friedman’s declaration underscores not only the
necessary intolerance utopians have for constitutionalism, but their
infatuation with totalitarianism.
It is neither prudential nor virtuous to downplay or dismiss the obvious—that America has already transformed into Ameritopia.
The centralization and consolidation of power in a political class that
insulates its agenda in entrenched experts and administrators, whose
authority is also self-perpetuating, is apparent all around us and
growing more formidable. The issue is whether the ongoing transformation
can be restrained and then reversed, or whether it will continue with
increasing zeal, passing from a soft tyranny to something more
oppressive. Hayek observed that “priding itself on having built its
world as if it had designed it, and blaming itself for not having
designed it better, humankind is now to set out to do just that. The aim
… is no less than to effect a complete redesigning of our traditional
morals, law, and language, and on this basis to stamp out the older
order and supposedly inexorable, unjustifiable conditions that prevent
the institution of reason, fulfillment, true freedom, and justice.”7 But the outcome of this adventurism, if not effectively stunted, is not in doubt.
In
the end, can mankind stave off the powerful and dark forces of utopian
tyranny? While John Locke was surely right about man’s nature and the
civil society, he was also right about that which threatens them. Locke,
Montesquieu, many of the philosophers of the European Enlightenment,
and the Founders, among others, knew that the history of organized
government is mostly a history of a relative few and perfidious men
co-opting, coercing, and eventually repressing the many through the
centralization and consolidation of authority.
Ironically and
tragically, it seems that liberty and the constitution established to
preserve it are not only essential to the individual’s well-being and
happiness, but also an opportunity for the devious to exploit them and
connive against them. Man has yet to devise a lasting institutional
answer to this puzzle. The best that can be said is that all that really
stands between the individual and tyranny is a resolute and sober
people. It is the people, after all, around whom the civil society has
grown and governmental institutions have been established. At last, the
people are responsible for upholding the civil society and republican
government, to which their fate is moored.
The essential question
is whether, in America, the people’s psychology has been so
successfully warped, the individual’s spirit so thoroughly trounced, and
the civil society’s institutions so effectively overwhelmed that
revival is possible. Have too many among us already surrendered or been
conquered? Can the people overcome the constant and relentless
influences of ideological indoctrination, economic manipulation, and
administrative coerciveness, or have they become hopelessly entangled in
and dependent on a ubiquitous federal...
Product Details
- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Threshold Editions (January 17, 2012)
- Language: English
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