Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [1]
Designed by Joy O’Meara
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Levin, Mark R. (Mark Reed), 1957–
Ameritopia : the unmaking of America / Mark R. Levin.
p. cm.
1. United States—Politics and government—Philosophy. 2. Democracy—United States. 3. Utopias—United States. 4. Utopias—Philosophy. I. Title.
JK31.L47 2012
320.97301—dc23
2011042260
ISBN 978-1-4391-7324-4
ISBN 978-1-4391-7328-2 (ebook)
To my beloved family
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CONTENTS
Introduction
PART I: ON UTOPIANISM
CHAPTER ONE
The Tyranny of Utopia
CHAPTER TWO
Plato’s Republic and the Perfect Society
CHAPTER THREE
Thomas More’s Utopia and Radical Egalitarianism
CHAPTER FOUR
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and the All-Powerful State
CHAPTER FIVE
Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and the Class Struggle
PART II: ON AMERICANISM
CHAPTER SIX
John Locke and the Nature of Man
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Influence of Locke on the Founders
CHAPTER EIGHT
Charles de Montesquieu and Republican Government
CHAPTER NINE
The Influence of Montesquieu on the Framers
CHAPTER TEN
Alexis de Tocqueville and Democracy in America
PART III: ON UTOPIANISM AND AMERICANISM
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Post-Constitutional America
CHAPTER TWELVE
Ameritopia
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
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,