The media is going to work overtime to ignore Mark Levin’s brand-new book “Ameritopia.” He asks: Do we choose between America as it was founded on liberty or a radically socialist Ameritopia? Levin says we’ve already chosen (b). No one in the liberal media wants that announced so explicitly from their mountain tops.
The arrogance of socialists is apparent on the back cover of Levin’s book. It carries a passage from Adam Smith that aptly defines the modern leftist: “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.” That perfectly defines utopians like Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, who has explicitly declared his affinity for tyranny. “I think we’re entering an era...where being in politics is going to be more than anything else about taking things away from people.”
Friedman has explicitly described and desired the idea of being Dictator for a Day to fix all of our country's problems. He has enthusiastically promoted how the don't-call-them-communists in China can so "efficiently" impose their will. No one in the liberal media is horrified by the sound of that. He's proclaimed his vision around the liberal TV and radio circuit, the same circuit that doesn't have the "open-mindedness" to cross swords with Mark Levin.
In his book, Levin explores the utopian political philosophers from Plato’s “Republic” to Thomas More’s “Utopia” to Hobbes’ “Leviathan” and The Communist Manifesto. They still echo in modern liberal thought: “The modern arguments 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.”
What’s chilling is that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explicitly rejected history, as Levin quotes from the original: “Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality, instead constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience,” which was just a variegated collection of developing “class antagonisms.”
In discussing the rise of liberalism, Levin spends time reminding readers of how Woodrow Wilson pushed for a process of “constitutional adaptation” with “boldness and a touch of audacity” – the audacity of socialist aspirations. Then Levin turns to the revolution that was Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
He notes that Roosevelt’s redefinition of “freedoms” and “rights” sounded quite similar to a 1936 Soviet list of “fundamental rights,” including the right to work and the right to leisure, the right to universal and compulsory education and the right to “maintenance” in old age. Never mind that neither in the communist U.S.S.R. or in socialist countries like Britain, governments have failed to provide a “right” to health care or other services in reality.
One of Levin’s most quotable lines is “The ‘living constitution’ is a constitution on its deathbed.” That line should land in a 21st century volume of great quotations.
Can you imagine some self-admiring genius like Chris Matthews trying to face off on Hardball with Levin? This author doesn’t need sickening thrill-up-my-leg gushing. He just deserves a few minutes to share his ideas. But no one expects he'll ever darken the door at MSNBC.
