I just finished reading Mark Levin’s new book, Rediscovering Americanism and The Tyranny of Progressivism. The book debuted at No 1 on the NY Times bestseller list.This is the third of Levin’s books I’ve read and reviewed. There definitely is a theme: The necessity of stopping the march of progressivism in order to preserve individual liberty.From my review of The Liberty Amendments – Mark Levin’s Constitutional Sequester (2013):
The sense I get from reading the entirety of Levin’s Amendments is that they effectively are constitutional sequesters meant to restrain the runaway extra-constitutional expansion of the federal government without deferring to human nature. Fundamentally, the proposed amendments are a firm check on the well-documented inclination of those with federal power to expand federal power.
From my review of Plunder and Deceit (2015), Mark Levin’s tough medicine for the plundered generations:
If The Liberty Amendments framed one answer, Plunder and Deceit clarifies and documents the problem.The problem is a problem Levin has been focused on for years — Progressive Plunder. In this audio addressing teachers’ unions opposition to Scott Walker’s public sector union reforms, Levin is blunt: “It’s plunder! Plunder! That’s what progressivism is.”Like I said, Levin doesn’t waste time. The very first sentence of Plunder and Deceit asks:
Can we simultaneously love our children but betray their generation and generations yet born?
In that seemingly simple question, Levin hits on the essence of what is happening to our country….
As with my prior reviews, I’m not going to try to catalog the book. If you want to read the book, read the book.
I can tell you that it contains voluminous discussion and historical documentation of the Founders and drafters of the Constitution. The focus is on how they understood natural law, the inherent rights of the individual, and why the Constitution was structured through the separation of powers and the Bill of Rights to protect against government tyranny. This is the essence of Americanism.
The book is something of a course not only on history, but also the political philosophy behind the concept of Americanism. So the book is much more than the macro-level points I quote below.
It’s the commitment to the sanctity of the individual and guarding against tyranny which are the great takeaways for me. Levin provides extensive discussion of progressive ideology and how it has marched its way through American institutions, as a way of demonstrating how progressivism stands against the values of Americanism.
The initial chapters lead to the conclusion that progressivism is the enemy of individual liberty:
“They revile the Constitution’s limits on unified, centralized power and its separation-of-powers formula….The progressive’s deliberate effort to denude the individual of his free will and uniqueness; to organize mankind by a growing and ubiquitous centralized authority and collective command into a conforming, uniform mass; and to reject right reason and sober circumspection about true reform of the progressive project despite its manifest failures and dangerous boundlessness, presents all the markings of a nihilistic, autocratic mentality — unsurprising considering its ideological roots. But the disastrous consequences for the individual cannot be overstated.” (pp. 129-130)
Those consequences, as we have documented here many times, are clear to Levin:
“The future is always said to be better than the present, but only if the individual surrenders more of his liberty and property to the state and conforms to the demands of the state. Ultimately, if persuasion by exploitation and propaganda is ineffective, the citizenry must be forced to bend to the progressive’s plans by the might of government’s extraconstitutional administrative means. “(p. 230)
The book is over 200 pages, but if I had to reduce it to Tweet-size, it would be this sentence from page 236:
“It is one thing for the individual to be all he can be, but it is quite another thing for the government to be all it can be.”
That’s such a great formulation.
And it’s the essence of Levin’s writings in all three books.
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