Huffery and Puffery on the Right - Liberty and Tyranny Reviewed
by Roger Donway[Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, Mark Levin. Threshold Editions. 254 pp., $25.00]
Is there a right-wing echo chamber? Last March, the estimable blog American Thinker opined that Mark Levin’s book “brings to bear the principles of the American Founders and Framers of the Constitution (and the great thinkers who guided them), illustrating, dissecting, and explaining our current political arguments.” In April, the conservative columnist Tony Blankley said: “[Liberty and Tyranny] is really a superbly useful book. It is the perfect companion for the college freshman to fortify the student against what he or she is about to hear.” In May, The New Criterion, a journal of great discernment, declared Levin’s work to be “an important book” arriving at “its perfect moment.”
Well, I thought, it must be so. Levin is an intelligent man, after all. To be sure, he is a popular radio talk-show host, but he is not just some disc jockey who moved up to fill the slot because no one else was available. He served in the Reagan administration as chief of staff for Attorney General Edwin Meese. And certainly his heart is in the right place. Levin currently heads the Landmark Legal Foundation, which fights for sound constitutional jurisprudence, freer educational systems, and less oppressive environmental regulation.
But now that I have read Liberty and Tyranny, two questions are uppermost in my mind: How did Mark Levin come to write a book that is so packed with empty huffing? And why is everyone on the Right puffing it?
Here is my working hypothesis: A person deeply ensconced in the conservative movement, as Levin is, can avoid serious challenge to his beliefs and arguments just as easily as Leftists ensconced in the elite universities, mainstream media, entertainment industry, or mainline churches. The Right’s echo chamber is tiny compared to the Left’s, but it is no less able to surround its inhabitants with uncritical voices of affirmation. Perhaps the only advantage we on the Right possess in this regard lies in the ease with which we can seek out voices that are both challenging and intelligent—if we so wish.
What Motivates Tyrants?
To appreciate the emptiness of Levin’s book, consider his analysis of tyranny. Throughout the work, he presents accusations against a figure whom he calls the Statist. This fellow first makes an appearance on page 8, replacing the Modern Liberal, who on page 4 is said to “believe in the supremacy of the state.” It’s the same guy. And since the Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman has a book and a blog called “The Conscience of a Liberal,” I decided to hold him in mind as a touchstone while reading Levin’s descriptions of the Statist’s methods.
• The Statist concocts “one pretext and grievance after another to manipulate public perceptions and build popular momentum for the divestiture of liberty and property from its rightful possessors.”
• “The Statist veils his pursuits in moral indignation, intoning in high dudgeon the injustices and inequities of liberty and life itself.”
• “The Statist is building a culture of conformity and dependency, where the ideal citizen takes on drone-like qualities.”
And what are the motives of the Statist?
• The Statist is dissatisfied with the condition of his own existence.”
• “[The Statist] condemns his fellow man, surroundings, and society itself for denying him the fulfillment, success, and adulation he believes he deserves.”
• “[The Statist] is incapable of honest self-assessment and rejects the honest assessment by others of himself, thereby evading responsibility for his own miserable condition.”
My point here is not that Paul Krugman isn’t a liberal and a statist. He is, by anyone’s reckoning. My point is that Levin, with his focus on some floating abstraction, characterizes liberals in ways that seem to fit only the most Machiavellian and narcissistic of power-seekers. If Levin seriously believes that all liberals fit his description, then he should prove it by citing the words of liberals like Krugman. Lacking such evidence, Levin gives his opponents no reason to doubt their own worldview, but much reason to mock his.
Which brings me back to the subject of the right-wing echo chamber: Mark Levin has been ill-served by it. At some point during the writing of this book, he needed a Leftist editor or friend or neighbor who could say to him, “You know, Mark, that really doesn’t sound a lot like me.”
What Justifies Liberty?
However bad Levin’s critique of tyranny may be, his philosophical justification of liberty is worse. It comes mainly in Chapter 3, “On Faith and the Founding,” where Levin discusses the influence that religion had on America’s Founding Fathers and on their philosophy of liberty. Personally, I am sympathetic to the view that the Founders were religious men and that most of them were Christian rather than Deist. At any rate, no one who knows the influence that John Locke’s political philosophy exerted on the Founders can doubt their dependence on theological premises.
But consider this confused sentence from Levin’s book: “Is it possible that there is no Natural Law and man can know moral order and unalienable rights from his own reasoning, unaided by the supernatural or God?” What does this mean? Is Levin saying that the natural law (the “moral order”) would not exist if God did not impose it on the world? Some of the greatest Christian theorists of natural law certainly thought otherwise. Hugo Grotius, for example, wrote that natural law would exist “even if we concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God.”
Or is Levin implying that man cannot know the natural law “from his own reasoning”? That is even more bizarre and would have been rejected by most (or perhaps all) natural law philosophers. Theorists such as Thomas Aquinas, for example, who certainly believed that the natural law was created by God, nonetheless held that man could know it by unaided reason. That is why it is called “natural” law, after all, to distinguish it from “divine” law, which is known by revelation.
Having forced the reader to struggle through one confusing sentence, Levin follows it up with a second that is still more confusing: “There are, of course, those who argue this case—including the Atheist and others who attempt to distinguish Natural Law from Divine Providence.” Divine Providence? Last time I checked, “Divine Providence” referred to God’s role as the author of history—of the history of the cosmos generally and of humans’ mortal lives and immortal fates more particularly. Divine Providence raises questions of God’s foreknowledge, human free will, predestination, and so forth. But trying to “distinguish Natural Law from Divine Providence” is like trying to distinguish a kitten from a Lunar Excursion Module. What can one say but: “They’re very different things”?
Slowly, the paralyzing suspicion arises that Levin does not know what he is talking about, especially when he writes sentences like these: “It is the Divine nature of Natural Law that makes permanent man’s right to ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ In the last sentence of the Declaration, the Founders proclaimed: ‘And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” Yes, as the Founders embarked on a perilous course of action, they proclaimed their reliance on Providence, on the Divine author of history. That makes sense. But what has that to do with the divine origin of natural law or the permanence of man’s rights? The Founders were not such fools as to imagine that Divine Providence enforces natural law. Indeed, it is precisely because Divine Providence is oblivious to natural law—because rights are frequently violated and oppressors often prosper—that Christians must wrestle with “the problem of evil.”
So what is Levin arguing about the foundations of liberty? I cannot figure it out. He writes in one place that natural law is “divined by God.” “Divined”? “Guessed, inferred, or intuited” by God? Or did Levin mean to say “devised by God”? Is Mark Levin Mr. Malaprop? Perhaps so. He writes in another place that, against tyranny, civil society is “the sole anecdote.”
Advocating Policy
Above, I said that Levin’s heart is in the right place, and it is. In his final chapter, Levin lays out a ten-point plan that offers much one can applaud: Eliminate the progressive income tax. Eliminate inheritance taxes. Limit federal spending to less than 20 percent of GDP (I’d prefer 10 percent). Reject justices who reject originalism. Sunset all federal agencies—each year. End multiculturalism, diversity, and bilingualism in public institutions. Fight all efforts to nationalize the health care system. Ensure that all foreign policy decisions are made for the purpose of preserving and improving American society. Demand that all public officials justify their public acts under the Constitution. Defeat all efforts to regulate the content of political speech on broadcast outlets.
But a laundry list of proposals does not a manifesto make. Every two years, the Cato Institute offers incoming politicians a Handbook for Policymakers. It recommends specific reforms in every area of government, provides reasons for the reforms, sets forth succinct indictments of current operations, and gives a brief bibliography of serious sources. For Levin to offer something more profound than Cato’s biennial handbook, he would either have to dig more deeply into the nature of liberty and tyranny, which we have seen he does not, or he would have to discuss American policy debates at a more sophisticated level. And there too, he fails.
Liberty and Tyranny contains seven policy chapters. They discuss constitutional jurisprudence, federalism, the free market, welfare, environmentalism, immigration, and foreign policy. Much of the information Levin sets forth in these chapters is well worth knowing, such as the explosive growth of entitlements, the murderous consequences of banning DDT, and the Balkanization of our culture via immigration. But these basic facts are already familiar to conservatives, while the arguments Levin bases on those facts are either sketchy or dubious.
Look at his chapter 4, “On the Constitution.” Comprising but twelve pages, it is only half as long as the comparable chapter in Cato’s book, “Congress, the Courts, and the Constitution.” Despite that, fully one quarter of Levin’s limited space is given over to lengthy block quotations. The result is what professors call a cut-and-paste job.
Then there is Levin’s scholarship. Even the Cato handbook, which does not aim to be a work of ideas, backs up its discussion of constitutional jurisprudence by citing such historians of the Founding as Edwin Corwin and Bernard Bailyn, as well as such contemporary scholars as Randy Barnett, Douglas Ginsburg, and Richard Epstein. By contrast, Levin’s chapter quotes no scholarly work on his side of the debate, apart from one page in one article by Michael W. McConnell. And as for Levin’s understanding of the Founders, his citations make one doubt that he has studied their work in any depth. For example, when citing Madison’s view on the crucial issue of originalism, Levin draws on Wise and Witty Quotations from the Men and Women who Created America. That does not inspire confidence, nor does the fact that his version of the text contains a non-obvious typo.
More troubling still is the way in which Levin dismisses the libertarian theory that says judges should interpret the Constitution as a bulwark of freedom. Levin’s comment is: “Still others are persuaded by the Statist’s semantic distortions, arguing that the judge’s job is to spread democracy or liberty.” For the word “liberty,” Levin footnotes Clint Bolick’s book David’s Hammer: the Case for an Activist Judiciary. But neither in his text nor in his note does Levin describe Bolick’s position. Had he done so, he would have had to admit that libertarians do not believe a judge’s job is to “spread” liberty but to protect it from government encroachment, as the Constitution enjoins. Conceivably, such a discussion might have reminded Levin of something he says on the very same page where he criticizes libertarians: “The government was intended to be a limited one,” a sentence that, ironically, bears a footnote to the libertarian Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Is there any clearer sign of an author’s intellectual confusion than his making contradictory arguments on a single page?
A Lost Opportunity
Despite the manifest failings of Liberty and Tyranny, more than one million copies have been printed. The book spent four weeks atop the New York Times best-seller list and five weeks at the #1 ranking of Amazon sales. To that extent, at least, the Right-wing echo chamber has succeeded. A million people have been persuaded to buy a book that praises free-market policies at home and the pursuit of national self-interest abroad.
Unfortunately, a million people—a million intelligent, book-reading conservatives—have also been assured that statism is rooted merely in the psychology of narcissism, and that no purely rational argument for individual rights can serve as the basis of a free society. Such conservatives will find themselves mentally helpless when they encounter the well-reasoned arguments of non-narcissistic liberals. And they will also find themselves mentally helpless when they try to justify their belief in freedom to sympathetic secularists. In that sense, the right-wing echo chamber has failed.
I hope that, if Mark Levin produces another book, he will take a lesson from his National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg, who spent two years writing a thoughtful, well-researched, and highly readable work called Liberal Fascism. What makes Goldberg’s volume so superior to Levin’s is an intense focus on one ideological theme in the battle for American liberty, and a minute examination of that theme, historically and philosophically. True, Goldberg’s book sold only 200,000 copies, not a million, and it only reached #3 on the Amazon sales list, not #1. But Goldberg’s book will still be in demand a generation from now, long after libraries have tossed out their unread copies of Liberty and Tyranny.