- Levin, Mark R.
Ameritopia.
New York: Threshold Editions, 2012.
ISBN 978-1-4391-7324-4.
-
Mark Levin seems to have a particularly virtuous kind of multiple
personality disorder. Anybody who has listened to his radio
program will know him as a combative
“no prisoners”
advocate for the causes of individual liberty and civil society.
In print, however, he comes across as a scholar, deeply versed
in the texts he is discussing, who builds his case as the lawyer
he is, layer by layer, into a persuasive argument which is difficult
to refute except by recourse to denial and emotion, which are the
ultimate refuge of the slavers.
In this book, Levin examines the utopian temptation, exploring
four utopian visions: Plato's
Republic,
More's Utopia,
Hobbes's Leviathan,
and Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto
in detail, with lengthy quotations from the original texts.
He then turns to the philosophical foundations of the
American republic, exploring the work of
Locke,
Montesquieu,
and the observations of
Tocqueville
on the reality of democracy in America.
Levin argues that the framers of the U.S. Constitution were well
aware of utopian visions, and explicitly rejected
them in favour of a system, based upon the wisdom of Locke
and Montesquieu, which was deliberately designed to operate
in spite of the weaknesses of the fallible humans which would
serve as its magistrates. As Freeman Dyson observed, “The
American Constitution is designed to be operated by crooks, just as
the British constitution is designed to be operated by
gentlemen.” Engineers who value inherent robustness in
systems will immediately grasp the wisdom of this: gentlemen are
scarce and vulnerable to corruption, while crooks are an
inexhaustible resource.
For some crazy reason, most societies choose lawyers as legislators
and executives. I think they would be much better advised to opt
for folks who have designed, implemented, and debugged two or more
operating systems in their careers. A political system is, after
all, just an operating system that sorts out the rights and responsibilities
of a multitude of independent agents, all acting in their own
self interest, and equipped with the capacity to game the system and
exploit any opportunity for their own ends. Looking at the classic
utopias, what strikes this operating system designer is how sadly
static they all are—they assume that, uniquely after
billions of years of evolution and thousands of generations of
humans, history has come to an end and that a wise person can now
figure out how all people in an indefinite future should live
their lives, necessarily forgoing improvement through disruptive
technologies or ideas, as that would break the perfect system.
The American founding was the antithesis of utopia: it was a minimal
operating system which was intended to provide the rule of law which
enabled civil society to explore the frontiers of not just a
continent but the human potential. Unlike the grand design of
utopian systems, the U.S. Constitution was a lean operating system
which devolved almost all initiative to “apps” created
by the citizens living under it.
In the 20th century, as the U.S. consolidated itself as a continental
power, emerged as a world class industrial force, and built a two
ocean navy, the utopian temptation rose among the political class, who
saw in the U.S. not just the sum of the individual creativity and
enterprise of its citizens but the potential to build heaven on Earth
if only those pesky constitutional constraints could be shed. Levin
cites Wilson and FDR as exemplars of this temptation, but for most of
the last century both main political parties more or less bought
into transforming America into Ameritopia.
In the epilogue, Levin asks whether it is possible to reverse
the trend and roll back Ameritopia into a society which values
the individual above the collective and restores the essential
liberty of the citizen from the intrusive state. He cites hopeful
indications, such as the rise of the “Tea Party”
movement, but ultimately I find these unpersuasive. Collectivism
always collapses, but usually from its own internal contradictions;
the way to bet in the long term is on individual liberty and free
enterprise, but I expect it will take a painful and protracted
economic and societal collapse to flense the burden of bad ideas
which afflict us today.
In the
Kindle edition
the end notes are properly bidirectionally linked to the
text, but the note citations in the main text are so
tiny (at least when read with the Kindle application
on the iPad) that it is almost impossible to tap
upon them.
May 2012 