March 2012
Dystopia in America
by Andrew C. McCarthy
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 immortal Peanuts comic strip is impossible not to recall when reading Mark R. Levin’s new blockbuster, Ameritopia. For one thing, there is the sheer Schadenfreude of imagining how the people at the The New 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.
Nominally, “Ameritopia’s” roots lie in “Utopia,” the purportedly ideal society conjured in Sir Thomas More’s sixteenth-century novel. But, as Levin explains, statist attempts to devise a political order that embodies perfect social justice actually trace back thousands of years, to ancient Greece. The template is Plato’s Republic, long recognized by such giants as Popper and Bertrand Russell as a totalitarian tract, notwithstanding (or perhaps explaining) its continuing popularity in Western universities. Like Popper, Levin analyzes the Republic as the conception of Plato rather than, as the dialogue itself intimates, of Socrates—who, of course, paid the ultimate price under an oppressive government.
For the academic Left (Department of Redundancy Department), Plato’s blueprint for society is revered as the foundational political science treatise. Appropriately, Levin confronts it as such. Nevertheless, it is worth bearing in mind the dialogue’s true objective. Oxford’s Daniel N. Robinson describes the Republic as “man writ large.” The interlocutors initially seek to analyze not the state but human virtue. They settled on the state as their macro model, assuming that it reflected the essence of the citizen. This assumption bolsters one of Levin’s central themes: The American progressive movement’s adulteration of the Constitution based on the Wilsonian theory that government is a living organism—one that cannot be constrained by the eighteenth-century world in which it was created.
For the Left, the government requires active, enlightened leaders. In Plato’s trailblazing system, these were the “guardians,” who, Levin recounts, were to be foisted on the masses through a “noble lie”—a pretext for breeding a race of philosopher kings, men of gold, to be raised above men of silver and iron, the lesser classes of soldiers and citizens. Besides this remorseless system of eugenics, the classes would be indoctrinated by a rigorous, state-controlled education program, fortifying the guardians’ absolute control over society. The nuclear family would be abolished in favor of communal life—the preeminence of which is fortified (as in modern Islamist society) by the repression of free speech, lest individuals sow social unrest. “Having eliminated family ties, independent thought, and individual dignity,” Levin observes, “Plato turns to the City’s standards for medical ethics.” Controlling healthcare provides the authoritarian state with its best rationale for regulating life down to the granular level.
Crucially, Plato further bans private property. This is the leitmotif of the utopian canon and, consequently, the bull’s-eye in Levin’s critique: “There is, in fact, no such thing as private property of any kind on Utopia.” Instead, Thomas More’s principle of “economic egalitarianism requires everyone to turn over everything they produce to central storehouses.” Citizens are then to take in accordance with their needs—“Abolition of private property” being, in the eventual formulation of Marx and Engels, “the theory of Communism . . .
summed up in a single sentence.” But how are the state’s storehouses to be filled? “From each according to his abilities,” promises the utopian. People will produce for the state just as they would for themselves. And there’s the rub. Utopians “fabricate an egalitarian society that claims to provide for all wants and needs,” Levin observes, “by expunging the humanness from the human being.”
Acquisitiveness is an inextinguishable component of human nature. It motivates us to act, to achieve. Yes, like any attribute, it can be a severe danger if allowed to overwhelm the others—or, for that matter, if unduly suppressed. And yes, the talent and drive to acquire are unevenly distributed in nature. But these are not injustices; they are the human condition. In his radical egalitarianism and contempt for private gain, the utopian statist endeavors to program humanity against its nature—in contrast, one might add, to the Aristotelian strain of Greek philosophy which, taking nature as it finds it, recognizes the communal property scheme to be a prescription for rewarding sloth and provoking conflict.
Naturally, in proposing theories so contrary to human nature, utopians must offer implausible scenarios to rationalize their ideologies. For Marx and Engels, it is dialectic materialism: a Manichean world of bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the haves and have-nots, the capitalist and the relentlessly exploited laborer—their relations bowdlerized into a purely economic class struggle. It is, Levin argues, as if “religion, war, nationalism, law, and politics,” in all their complexity, have played no role in human history.
Levin turns his attention to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, which, like the Republic and Utopia, offers a top-down plan in contrast to Marx’s bottom-up revolution. Nevertheless, foreshadowing Marx, Hobbes launches from an unreal premise: the dystopian “state of nature.” As Levin explains, Hobbes’s horror at the anarchic ruthlessness of the British civil wars heavily influenced his political philosophy, in which mankind’s primordial condition is framed as a “war of everyone against everyone.” Regarding his fellow men as enemies, the individual, in a struggle for survival, does not recognize the rights of others—not even the right to bodily integrity. In this state, there is no place for industry, property, or knowledge, much less a functioning society; there is only, in the memorable words of Hobbes, “continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
In the Hobbesian dystopia, fear plays the part of a Big Bang of sorts—it is the starting point of civilization. Man is intimidated into surrendering the whole of his personal autonomy to a sovereign power in exchange for security. This submission is the prerequisite for moral virtue and societal advance. The sovereign may be a single ruler or an assembly, but is, in either event, omnipotent and above reproach by the subjects. In this social contract, liberty belongs to the sovereign alone—although Hobbes cedes to the subjects limited natural rights to the defense of their own bodies. As Levin points out, man must trust, against the weight of logic and experience, that “the Subjects will be treated equally under the law” by the unaccountable despot, who will altruistically provide “a stable and secure society.”
It was left to John Locke, the Englishman who most profoundly influenced America’s founders, to reverse Hobbes’s framework by confuting his premise. Though flawed, man is created by God and infused with reason, which is the “law of nature.” Reason instructs us that God creates us as equals and wills that we survive. Consequently, we must have equal and inalienable rights to preserve life, liberty, health, and property. Being created equal, “there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours,” as Locke writes. Reason and self-interest thus induce men to cooperate in the state of nature. In stark contrast to Hobbes, Locke sees war not as man’s default condition, but as the result of transgression against the natural order.
Government, then, is not the source of moral virtue. The source is the individual person exercising his preexisting liberty. Sovereignty inheres in the individual, and a legitimate government can only be formed through his consent. Reason counsels man to give his consent, especially for the purpose of securing his property rights through, in Levin’s phrase, “just and predictable laws and their impartial enforcement.” Locke thus dismantles the bedrock of the utopian castle. Statist central planning is rejected because, in the ideal society, free people employ reason to pursue their interests. One of these interests, despite the one-dimensional progressive caricature of them as selfish, is the betterment of our fellow men. Radical egalitarianism is rejected because, while liberty demands equality of opportunity, it recognizes that equality of result is neither possible nor, if society is truly to progress, desirable.
To be clear, promotion of liberty does not translate into a rejection of government. As Levin asserts, “There can be no political liberty without law.” Moreover, reason and experience dictate that nations must be able to protect themselves from external threats. Government, however, is inherently coercive—otherwise it would be useless. It thus tends to dominate and destroy if left unharnessed. Consequently, limiting it while ensuring its effectiveness is the great work of the statesman. In the case of America’s founders, Levin recounts, their great work in this regard was mightily influenced not only by Locke, but also by Charles de Montesquieu, the French philosopher who died twenty years before shots were fired at Lexington and Concord.
For Montesquieu, a republic—in which the people hold sovereign power—was government in its highest form. It was a historical rarity, however, because it required “an additional spring, which is VIRTUE”—a “love of the republic” coupled with a culture in which “the one who sees to the execution of the laws feels that he is subject to them himself.” The maintenance of popular sovereignty and ordered liberty calls for deft balancing. Government, Montesquieu contended, must be structurally limited: compartmentalized to prevent a potentially tyrannical alignment of the powers to make, enforce, and sit in judgment of the laws. Equally essential, the government official must grasp his role as the servant, not the master: the law must be an expression of the popular will and culture, not a cudgel to coerce the free citizens into compliance with the pieties of meddlesome officials.
As Levin details, America’s founding documents are full of allusions to Locke and Montesquieu. The latter believed that a written constitution would be critical to constraining government, and his imprint stretches across the U.S. Constitution—which limits the three federal branches of government to the powers expressly enumerated, which separates their powers as an internal check, and which checks them from without by a federalist structure that preserves state sovereignty. Indeed, the Bill of Rights—the guarantee of Locke’s cherished inalienable rights without which the states would not have adopted the Constitution—was also meant to address Montesquieu’s well-founded fear that, as a nation and its central government expanded, the republic would be smothered. The purpose of the Tenth Amendment, which protects the rights of the states, was to safeguard against this very threat.
Similarly, Locke pours off of key passages of the Declaration of Independence with its emphasis on the theory of natural law, the primacy of inalienable rights, equality of opportunity, the people’s sovereign right to oust any government not established by consent, and the centrality of private property to liberty. Levin further takes pains to demonstrate that Locke’s emphatic condemnation of slavery resonated with the Declaration’s drafters—including Jefferson, a slaveholder, whose original draft nonetheless indicted King George III for waging “a cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying & carrying them into slavery.” The passage was deleted at the insistence of the Georgia and South Carolina delegations—the original sin that stained the Union’s birth. Yet, as Levin trenchantly argues, slavery could not have long survived the Declaration’s championing of human dignity.
The United States is—or at least was—anti-utopian not only in its founding framework but in its spirit. For this proposition, Levin leans heavily on Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political philosopher whose Democracy in America is a searing study of the nation through which he traveled extensively in the 1830s. Tocqueville brilliantly captured not only the strengths of the American character, but the susceptibility of our democratic society to the populist allure of Utopianism. As to the latter, Tocqueville contrasted the “manly and lawful passion for equality” that enables citizens to strive for greatness with a very different and all too human quality: “the depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.”
This perversion of equality, what Levin calls “radical egalitarianism,” could potentially destroy the real thing. It could also erode America’s strongest trait: the manner in which popular sovereignty and self-determination are not only proclaimed by the laws but ingrained in the custom and culture. This, Levin exclaims, is the utopian temptation.
Tocqueville elaborated that free societies generate unparalleled wealth—which is all to the good. But they necessarily create great disparity between the richest and poorest. Neither classification is permanent for there is constant mobility up and down the ladder. And the vast majority of people live between the extremes. They desire to improve their lot, and that ethos catalyzes a prosperous, civil society. They see their prospects as bright, and, whatever envy they may feel, they are predisposed against revolution, which would, in Tocqueville’s formulation, “threaten the tenure of property.” Still, in a dynamic and free economy, some citizens inevitably fall on hard times, and even more have spurts of insecurity. They become open to the prospect of assistance from the government—the society’s seemingly stable source of public authority. The belief that, short of upheaval, their lot can be improved and society made more just by government’s “democratic and administrative utilitarianism”— pinned by Levin as the disguise worn by radical egalitarianism—becomes alluring.
The seeds of a soft tyranny are sowed. Levin explains that Tocqueville sought “in vain for an expression that [would] accurately convey” the concept, finding “inappropriate” the “old words despotism and tyranny.” Levin nails the elusive concept down as utopianism. Tocqueville sensed that the old tyranny could emerge from a modern democracy in three ways: in the guarantee that the privileges and status of equal citizenship endure regardless of the individual’s parasitism; in the notion that elected officials and “a vast, neutral administrative state” are capable of gradually perfecting life and ensuring its proper regulation; and in the incremental erosion of community life as individuals, “incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives,” turn inward.
At length, Levin reminds the reader of Tocqueville’s prescient alarm: “With the people denuded of spirit and exceptionality, dependent on government for their welfare, the democracy gradually transitions into a powerful administrative state.” In order to “spare [the people] all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living,” this “immense and tutelary power” cultivates dependency—it “provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property,” and so on. It gradually spreads its tentacles from strategic hubs to the whole community:
It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
The final indignity in this regression would be the unwitting collusion of citizens in their consignment to this “dreary existence.” In the husk of their democracy, to quote Levin, citizens would continue to go “through the motions of electing their guardians.” Yet, as the administrative state metastasized, the vote would become meaningless, except for providing the psychologically satisfying mirage of participation in “self-government.”
In a plea as dolorous as it is hopeful, Levin notes that the American experiment was a quite conscious exception to “history’s preference for tyranny.” While it seemed to have triumphed for a time, there are no permanent victories, and counter-historical trends have to fight especially hard to survive.
For the last century, it is the statists who have done the fighting. Woodrow Wilson’s campaign to discredit the Constitution as an obsolescent relic has been inculcated in generations of legal scholars and social scientists. Franklin Roosevelt’s welfare state has radically reversed our conception of “rights” from protections of individual liberty to redistributionist guarantees of security. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society erected profligate, degenerative healthcare and antipoverty programs. Now, finally, we have the copestone: Barack Obama’s dizzying seizure of effective control over vast sectors of the economy—healthcare, housing, financial services, energy—and the economy’s consequent paralysis and impending collapse under unprecedented mountains of debt.
As a result, liberty’s defenses are long past being breached. If you doubt that, Levin suggests having a gander at your pantry, your garage, your medicine cabinet, your child’s bedroom (or, indeed, your own), your business, and the stuff of your hobbies—try to find something, anything, the manufacture or use of which is not regulated by at least one of the myriad bureaus of a federal behemoth that recently announced its determination to regulate carbon dioxide (the air we exhale) as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
The stark question Mark Levin poses is whether we are so far gone that the losses are permanent. Do we throw off Ameritopia and pivot back toward liberty and self-determination? Or will we remember this pass as “the good old days,” the soft tyranny in an inexorable disintegration into some harsher variety that has, for millennia, been the fate of failed democracies? Levin—insightful, fact-driven, pulling no punches—characteristically declines to don rose-tinted glasses. Ameritopia is the deep contemplation of a staunch believer in the vision of the American founding, one who sees that if dramatic counteraction does not begin promptly, all will be lost. The chilling part is that he is anything but sanguine about the likely outcome.
