Ameritopia — Mark Levin — Lukewarm

 

This is a tough one for me because I agree with many of Levin's conclusions but the evidence he presents for them is meandering at best. Essentially Levin is arguing that America has ceased to be a democratic republic and is instead some variation of a dystopian society. The approach is refreshing. Many dystopian novels (1984, Fahrenheit 451, etc.) focus on what life could be like given a set of political and social structures. Those structures are rarely given much attention. Levin, on the other hand, focuses on what those structures are and argues that The United States of America has solidly embraced the most fundamental of them already, thus placing the USA on a path inevitably leading to the dystopian world other authors describe.

Levin's reading of Locke and Montesquieu is accurate and concise. Having read both of them in some degree of completeness I can say with some certainty that their viewpoints are well represented in the first half of Ameritopia. I especially enjoyed the explicit connections between Montesquieu and the founding documents. Locke's influence was, in my opinion, overshadowed by the emphasis on Montesesqueue, but it's a minor complaint. The arguments that show how the USA has embraced the dystopian structures highlighted earlier in the book seem mostly solid. Many of the examples were extreme, for example, there are perfectly good Lockean arguments for proper environmental regulation. Still, overall this section was well done. The bits on FDR were especially interesting.

His reading of the other philosophers was not good. Plato, in particular, was badly maligned. After bashing on Republic for some 50 pages Levin admits that Plato may have meant Republic as a cautionary tale rather than a prescription. Which to me is laughable. Of course Plato meant it as a cautionary tale! That's why in the end, the society collapses into anarchy. Plato was merely describing the natural consequences of tight, centralized control. (If you want to think about this cycle in gory bloody damn detail, I'd highly recommend Pierce Brown's Red Rising.) If Levin wanted to convince people on the fence, unnecessarily bludgeoning one of history's most celebrated philosophers was a dumb way to start. Russo and Hobbes are similarly caricatured. If this is all you'd read of them, you'd walk away with a very wrong impression.

In summary, Ameritopia is an interesting idea with poor exposition. It seems to me that Levin could have made a more compelling case if he'd started by agreeing with sources that warn against utopian ideals instead of bashing on those that extoll them. In the end, it comes off as unnecessarily confrontational. Give it a read if you have a lot of time, but don't take it as gospel in a vacuum; you need to read the primary sources.