Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America — Mark R. Levin — Threshold Editions —Hardcover: 270 pages — January 2012 — ISBN 978-1-4391-7324-4

It’s an election year and Cassandras of every political persuasion are predicting the destruction of America unless we all jump on their particular bandwagon.

Joining the crowd is Mark Levin who, contrasting with the others, once again makes his case for a falling sky with characteristic concision, documentation, and trenchant, lapidary prose.

While all of Levin’s books have been a pleasure to read, in Ameritopia he yields most of his page space to lengthy excerpts from four major works that, in Levin’s opinion, have laid the foundation for the political heresy of utopian thought. Some readers might find the book slow going, primarily because Levin lets the utopians speak their minds in their own sometimes quite convoluted prose. The casual reader should thus be forewarned about—but not discouraged by—the density of information he will encounter.

The four major works that Levin explores in some detail are: Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Marx & Engels’s Communist Manifesto.

Life is a sprawling, largely undirected process, so for anyone to attempt to bring it under some sort of political control is to embark on a fool’s errand. Nevertheless, that hasn’t discouraged some utopian thinkers (Levin calls them “masterminds”) from giving it a try. As history has shown, the results, in every case, have been tyranny, misery, and death.

Levin feels that tyranny and utopianism are inextricably interrelated:

Tyranny, broadly defined, is the use of power to dehumanize the individual and deligitimize his nature. Political utopianism [or just plain utopianism] is tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable, and even paradisiacal governing ideology. There are, of course, unlimited utopian constructs, for the mind is capable of infinite fantasies. But there are common themes. The fantasies take the form of grand social plans or experiments, the impracticability and impossibility of which, in small ways and large, lead to the individual’s subjugation.

It isn’t really a stretch to conclude that utopianism is THE overarching philosophy serving as the framework for just about all of the totalitarianisms the world has suffered: socialism, communism, Nazism, democratism, statism, etc.

But utopianism is far more all-encompassing than any of those particular “-isms”:

Utopianism is irrational in theory and practice, for it ignores or attempts to control the planned and unplanned complexity of the individual, his nature, and mankind generally. It ignores, rejects, or perverts the teachings and knowledge that have come before—that is, man’s historical, cultural, and social experience and development.

In Levin’s view, utopian programs, if left unchecked, threaten to swallow up the grand edifice of civilization itself.

Levin’s aim in the book is to acquaint the reader with utopian thinkers of the past and show how in 21st century America this pernicious philosophy has enjoyed a rapid recrudescence, despite the sensible warnings from such brilliant social theorists as John Locke, Charles de Montesquieu, and Alexis de Tocqueville.

My only complaint with Ameritopia is Levin’s failure—or is it reluctance?—to distribute the blame for this sorry state of affairs. That the “D” party promotes such dangerous idiocy goes without saying, but he expends nary a word about how the “R” party has acquiesced in these matters. Thus, for him to approvingly quote an “R” politician speaking more than thirty years ago cautioning against such thinking rings hollow.

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Contents:

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

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Related Internet resources:

TAC review of Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny.
TAC review of John Locke: Philosopher of American Liberty.
Ameritopia on Amazon.com.
Liberty and Tyranny on Amazon.com.