IN LIBERTY AND TYRANNY, I described the nature of individual liberty and the civil society in a constitutional republic, including the essential principles of America’s societal and political order. I also discussed the growing tyranny of government—statism, as I broadly labeled it—which threatens our liberty, the character of our country, and our way of life. At the time I warned that if we do not come to grips with the significance of this transformation, we will be devoured by it.
The symptoms of the tyranny that threatens liberty and republicanism have been acknowledged throughout time, including by iconic Americans. For example, Supreme Court associate justice Joseph Story, among America’s most prominent legal thinkers, explained in 1829, “governments are not always overthrown by direct and open assaults. They are not always battered down by the arms of conquerors, or the successful daring of usurpers. There is often concealed the dry rot, which eats into the vitals, when all is fair and stately on the outside. And to republics this has been the more common fatal disease. The continual drippings of corruption may wear away the solid rock, when the tempest has failed to overturn it.…”1
In 1838, Abraham Lincoln delivered an address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. He declared, “At what point … is the approach of danger to be expected. I answer, If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”2
In this same vein, for years President Ronald Reagan cautioned that “[f]reedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”3
During the three years since the publication of Liberty and Tyranny, and despite growing alarm by an increasingly alert segment of the public, too many of our fellow citizens remain oblivious to the perilousness of their surroundings, not realizing or accepting the precariousness of their liberty and the civil society in the face of the federal government’s dramatic, albeit predictable, engorgement of power. This is the grave reality of our day.
But what is this ideology, this force, this authority that threatens us, and its destructiveness, which Reagan, Lincoln, Story, and the Founders so feared? What kind of power both attracts a free people and destroys them?
The mission of this book is to delve deeper into these essential questions, the most important of our time, and identify, expose, and explain the character of the threat that America and, indeed, all republics confront. In this way we can better comprehend the existential danger to a free and prosperous people.
In Ameritopia, I explain that the heart of the problem is, in fact, utopianism, a term I discuss in great detail throughout the book. Utopianism is the ideological and doctrinal foundation for statism. While utopianism and statism or utopian and statist are often used interchangeably, the undertaking here is to probe more deeply into what motivates and animates the tyranny of statism. Indeed, the modern arguments about the necessities and virtues of government control 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.
Utopianism has long promoted the idea of a paradisiacal existence and advanced concepts of pseudo “ideal” societies in which a heroic despot, a benevolent sovereign, or an enlightened oligarchy claims the ability and authority to provide for all the needs and fulfill all the wants of the individual—in exchange for his abject servitude.
By sorting through an immense volume of writings, I chose those books and passages—using the original words of certain classic philosophical works—that best describe the utopian mind-set and its application to modern-day utopian thinking and conduct in America. Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto are indispensible in understanding the nature of utopianism. They are essential works that have in common soulless societies in which the individual is subsumed into a miasma of despotism—and each of them is a warning against utopian transformation in America and elsewhere.
I also contrast the utopian societies created by these writings with the enlightened thinking of philosophical pioneers John Locke and Charles de Montesquieu, among others, who described truisms about the nature of man—liberty, rights, and life—that informed the Founders and became the touchstone of American society. Indeed, their wisdom served as the bone and sinew of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Moreover, a proper examination of democracy’s tendency to descend into a soft tyranny or worse would be incomplete without Alexis de Tocqueville’s prescient insight. Although not a contemporary of the Founders, he wrote elaborately about the unique character of the American people and their government, praising them but also drawing attention to the historical weaknesses of democratic institutions and to the fragility of liberty.
I also endeavor to show how insidiously contemporary utopians or statists have poisoned modern society by changing the paradigms under which governmental action is both contemplated and executed. For example, we seldom question today whether it is appropriate for the federal government to undertake a given task, no matter how significant or minute. In infinite ways, whether we realize it or not, this is the utopian mind-set at work.
Finally, there is a reflexive desire when concluding a project such as this to put a positive spin on the situation. I have not done so here. I remain convinced that we, the people, are at great risk. There simply are no easy answers to the challenges we face. It will take nothing short of a prodigious effort, of the kind I discussed in Liberty and Tyranny, over a course of many decades, to reestablish America as a constitutional republic. However, this is an effort we must make, no matter how complicated and daunting. Otherwise, as Lincoln put it, the nation will surely “die by suicide.”
I believe the provenance of liberty and tyranny matters. To know liberty is to cherish it. Conversely, utopianism is tyranny born of intellectual bankruptcy and dishonesty. The proof is seen every day in the words and actions of politicians, judges, bureaucrats, and the media. It is my hope that, in some small way, this book will contribute to a broader awakening of the citizenry and the reaffirmation and reestablishment of the principles that secure and nurture individual liberty, inalienable rights, the civil society, and constitutional republicanism.
Mark R. Levin