Rediscovering Americanism - Excerpts from Epilogue of Rediscovering Americanism by Mark R. Levin

By Mark R. Levin
Volume 29, Number 3 (Spring 2019)
Issue theme: "Living Within Limits - The Enduring Relevance of Garrett Hardin"


Suffice it to say that America’s founding principles are eternal principles. They are principles that instruct humanity today and tomorrow, as they did yesterday. These principles are born of intuition, faith, experience, and right reason. They are the foundation on which the civil society is built and the individual is cherished; they are the basis of freedom, moral order, happiness, and prosperity.

Yet these principles are apparently so grievous and abhorrent that they are mostly ignored or even ridiculed today by academia, the media, and politicians — that is, the ruling elite and its surrogates. They reject history’s lessons and instead are absorbed with their own conceit and aggrandizement in the relentless pursuit of a diabolical project, the final outcome of which is an oppression of mind and soul. Indeed our ears are pierced with the shrill and constant chorus of promises and shibboleths about utopian statism, which, of course, serve the purposes of a sterile, scientific project and its centralized administrative-state masterminds. The equality they envision, but dare not honestly proclaim, is life on the hamster wheel, where one individual is indistinguishable from the next.

In many respects, the progressive has succeeded in his primary objective: the deconstruction of the American republic for concentrated, centralized power — the exact opposite of the Founders’ intentions. During the last century or so, American began the transformation into a kind of pseudo-constitutional or post-constitutional republic, in which the natural law truths of the Declaration of Independence and the justice and security of the Constitution are typically and repeatedly abused to, paradoxically, enshrine in law and justify as legitimate the progressive’s autocratic and egalitarian agenda.

[L]est we forget: It is one thing for the individual to be all he can be, but it is quite another thing for the government to be all it can be. The former was born to be free; the latter was established with limits. ■