- Levin, Mark R.
Liberty and Tyranny.
New York: Threshold Editions, 2009.
ISBN 978-1-4165-6285-6.
-
Even at this remove, I can recall the precise moment when
my growing unease that the world wasn't
turning into the place I'd hoped to live as an adult
became concrete and I first began to comprehend the
reasons for the trends which worried me. It was
October 27th, 1964 (or maybe a day or so later, if
the broadcast was tape delayed) when I heard Ronald
Reagan's speech
“A
Time for Choosing”, given in support of Barry Goldwater's
U.S. presidential campaign. Notwithstanding the electoral
disaster of the following week, many people consider Reagan's
speech (often now called just “The Speech”)
a pivotal moment both in the rebirth of conservatism in
the United States and Reagan's own political career. I know that
I was never the same afterward: I realised that the vague feelings
of things going the wrong way were backed up by the facts
Reagan articulated and, further and more important, that there were
alternatives to the course the country and society was presently
steering. That speech, little appreciated at the time, changed the course
of American history and changed my life.
Here is a book with the potential to do the same for
people today who, like me in 1964, are disturbed at the
way things are going, particularly young people who, indoctrinated
in government schools and the intellectual monoculture of higher
education, have never heard the plain and yet eternal wisdom
the author so eloquently and economically delivers here.
The fact that this book has recently shot up to the number one
rank in Amazon.com book sales indicates that not only is the
message powerful, but that an audience receptive to it exists.
The author admirably cedes no linguistic ground to the enemies
of freedom. At the very start he dismisses the terms
“liberal” (How is it liberal to advocate state
coercion as the answer to every problem?) and
“progressive” (How can a counter-revolution
against the inherent, unalienable rights of individual human
beings in favour of the state possibly be deemed progress?)
for “Statist”, which is used consistently
thereafter. He defines a “Conservative” not as
one who cherishes the past or desires to return to it, but
rather a person who wishes to conserve the individual
liberty proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence and
supposedly protected by the Constitution (the author and I
disagree about the wisdom of the latter document and the
motives of those who promoted it). A Conservative is not
one who, in the 1955
words
of William F. Buckley “stands athwart history, yelling Stop”,
but rather believes in incremental, prudential reform, informed by the
experience of those who went before, from antiquity up until
yesterday, with the humility to judge every policy not by
its intentions but rather by the consequences it produces, and always
ready to reverse any step which proves, on balance, detrimental.
The Conservative doesn't believe in utopia, nor in the
perfectibility or infinite mutability of human nature. Any
aggregate of flawed humans will be inevitably flawed;
that which is least flawed and allows individuals the most scope
to achieve the best within themselves is as much as can be
hoped for. The Conservative knows from history that every
attempt by Statists to create heaven on Earth by revolutionary
transformation and the hope of engendering a “new man”
has ended badly, often in tragedy.
For its length, this book is the best I've encountered at delivering
the essentials of the conservative (or, more properly termed, but
unusable due to corruption of the language, “classical liberal”)
perspective on the central issues of the time. For those who have read
Burke,
Adam Smith,
de Tocqueville,
the Federalist Papers,
Hayek,
Bastiat,
Friedman,
and other classics of individual and economic liberty
(the idea that these are anything but inseparable is
another Statist conceit), you will find little that is new
in the foundations, although all of these threads are pulled
together in a comprehensible and persuasive way. For people
who have never heard of any of the above, or have been
taught to dismiss them as outdated, obsolete, and inapplicable
to our age, this book may open the door to a new, more clear
way of thinking, and through its abundant source citations (many
available on the Web) invites further exploration by those
who, never having thought of themselves before as
“conservative”, find their heads nodding in agreement
with many of the plain-spoken arguments presented here.
As the book progresses, there is less focus on fundamentals
and more on issues of the day such as the regulatory state,
environmentalism, immigration, welfare dependency, and foreign
relations and military conflicts. This was, to me, less
satisfying than the discussion of foundational principles.
These issues are endlessly debated in a
multitude of venues, and those who call themselves
conservatives and agree on the basics nonetheless come down on
different sides of many of these issues. (And why not?
Conservatives draw on the lessons of the past, and there are
many ways of interpreting the historical record.) The book
concludes with “A Conservative Manifesto” which,
while I concur that almost every point mentioned would be a
step in the right direction for the United States, I cannot
envision how, in the present environment, almost any of the
particulars could be adopted. The change that is needed is
not the election of one set of politicians to replace
another—there is precious little difference between
them—but rather the slow rediscovery and infusion into
the culture of the invariant principles, founded in human nature
rather than the theories of academics, which are so lucidly
explained here. As the author notes, the statists have taken
more than eight decades on their long march through the
institutions to arrive at the present situation. Champions of
liberty must expect to be as patient and persistent if they
are to prevail. The question is whether they will enjoy the
same freedom of action their opponents did, or fall victim as
the soft tyranny of the providential state becomes absolute
tyranny, as has so often been the case.
April 2009 