Dystopia in America
On the stripping of liberties by progressives, as detailed by Mark R. Levin's Ameritopia.
I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.” The saturnine wisdom of Charles M. Schulz’s immortalPeanuts comic strip is impossible not to recall when reading Mark R. Levin’s new blockbuster,Ameritopia.1 For one thing, there is the sheer Schadenfreude of imagining how the people at the TheNew York Times, those notorious lovers of humankind, must have reacted upon learning that a new book by the popular conservative radio host would debut at number one on the paper’s bestseller list—the slot Levin’s last book, Liberty and Tyranny, owned for more weeks than the Gray Lady cares to remember.
Linus’s snark, more to the point, marks the scrimmage-line in the epic struggle Levin depicts. On one side stand progressives, whose professed humanitarian devotion thinly camouflages a disdain for flesh-and-blood people . . . particularly the kind who go to Tea Party rallies. To the social engineers, people are little more than laboratory specimens in statist experiments contrived to drag the benighted species toward perfection—which is to say, to subjugate people into serving the engineers’ conception of the good.
Huddled on the other side are those of a conservative cast of mind, reckoning human beings as basically worthy but incorrigibly fallible, and human interactions as infinitely complex and dynamic. In our quaint way of thinking, human nature defies grand statist schemes. To quote Karl Popper, as Levin does at the outset of Ameritopia, “Any social science which does not teach the impossibility of rational social construction is entirely blind to the most important facts of social life.” Worse, such schemes are invariably orchestrated by the state. Comprised of people, the state magnifies human flaws; yet, being a mere “Form of Government” (to borrow from the Declaration of Independence), and not a person animated by human incentives and virtue, the state is bereft of the people’s capacity to perceive, self-correct, and improve.
On this side of the scrimmage line, where Levin emphatically situates himself, the key to human flourishing is individual liberty. Leavened by society’s mores and shielded from state meddling, freedom unleashes the people’s work ethic and creative genius. As proof that this is the true path to our advancement, consider the scarcity of great achievements attributable to government planning. Or one could consider the historically unparalleled and sustained success of the American experiment, only recently frustrated by the Fabian conquest of the welfare state.
It is on this conquest that Ameritopia fixes its sights. Levin thus revisits the battleground between statists and conservatives explored in Liberty and Tyranny (which was reviewed in these pages in September 2009). In this book, however, his focus is different: He examines not so much the present crisis, but how we got here. Levin’s lens trains on the intellectual underpinnings of totalitarianism and of the American founding—that sharp turn in our understanding of the relation between the citizen and the state. The author leaves no doubt about which governing construct, in his view, has the better of the argument. But that by no means makes this a cheery tale. Reminiscent of Whittaker Chambers’s melancholy assessment in Witness that his renunciation of Communism amounted to joining the losing side, Levin ruefully observes that “Ameritopia”—the term he coins for the overrunning of our freedom culture by the Progressives’ utopian project—is not some distant prospect.
Ameritopia is here.
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