Book Review: Ameritopia by Mark Levin
After reading Mark Levin’s masterpiece Liberty and Tyranny at least half a dozen times, I couldn’t wait to read his latest creation, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America. I wasn’t disappointed.
The brilliance of Levin’s work is that he shows the vast differences between the liberty-loving philosophers who helped form our Constitution and the philosophers who believed Man is able to achieve utopianism, “the ideological and doctrinal foundation for statism.”
Mostly, Levin reminds us how America became the exceptional nation she is and why she is still worth fighting for.
In the first few chapters, Levin exposes the idealistic (yet unrealistic and flawed) visions of Plato, Thomas More, Thomas Hobbes, and Karl Marx. Levin defines each of these philosopher’s versions of Utopia, which includes much leveling of playing fields, taking away of liberties, breaking down the family unit and, well, just about everything the Progressives of 2012 are doing today.
When these misguided philosophers are juxtaposed with great men such as John Locke, Charles de Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville and our American founders, it’s like comparing a mountain to a cloud. There’s nothing there.
Levin defines utopianism as that which “substitutes glorious predictions and unachievable promises for knowledge, science, and reason, while laying claim to them all . . . A heavenly society is said to be within reach if only the individual surrenders more of his liberty and being for the general good, meaning the good as prescribed by the state.”
When reading about Thomas More’s fantasy world “Utopia” you’ll probably think of sci-fi movies like H.G. Well’s “The Time Machine” where everyone dresses alike and acts like zombies waiting for their “leader” to tell them what to do. Private property and free will? Forget about it. Sort of John Lennon’s ideal “Imagine” type world, in which religion, country, everything is gone.
The chapter on Karl Marx and his “Communist Manifesto” is fascinating. Knowing how today’s progressives seem to worship Marx, it’s good to read exactly what they’re so enthralled with.
And then we have men like John Locke whose writing formed much of the foundation of our Constitution along with Alexis de Tocqueville, who warned of the dangers of a “soft tyranny”.
The second half of the book gives us some frightening insight as to where we’re possibly heading in America today.
“America has been transitioning from a society based on God-given inalienable rights protective of individual and community sovereignty to a centralized, administrative statism that has become a power unto itself,” Levin writes.
His chapters on progressive presidents like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt are very important for all of us to share with our children and grandchildren. Our modern utopian-like entitlements were born of these men and of course it’s not something they’re teaching in school.
“America has become a society in which the people are wise enough to select their own leaders, but too incompetent to choose the right light bulb,” Levin says.
Sigh.
Can we fix this mess? I don’t know and neither, sadly, does Levin. It’s a hard pill to swallow, knowing we’ve come so far and yet the “lollypops and rainbows” philosophies of the past progressive philosophers are still trying to be imposed by the current administration.
It’s up to all of us to make changes. It’s up to us to make our voices heard and break through the media block. The one good thing Obama has done is open our eyes to all we can lose if given way to someone who consorts with communists and radicals and terrorists and people like Bill Ayers and Derrick Bell.
Time to get to work.
