I know two quite different Mark Levins and I am crazy about both of them. The first is the one I listen to on the radio. The loud one, the one that gets all worked up, the one I imagine standing up and waving his arms, veins protruding from his neck, pupils dilated. The other one writes books, and those books are so calm, so carefully argued, and so patiently explicated, that you can only imagine him sitting in an overstuffed leather chair near a fireplace puffing thoughtfully on his calabash.
The second Levin explains his mission this way in his latest, Plunder and Deceit:
… To persuade as many fellow citizens as possible, through scholarship, facts, and ideas, to avert a looming tragedy.… A real and devastating American tragedy, the loss of the greatest Republic known to mankind.
The whole book is written in that voice, although the evidence he presents about our pending national tragedy is enough to make anyone scream. Plunder is an orderly, devastatingly careful assault on the nuts and bolts of the American crisis, from taxation to immigration, from the appeasement of our enemies to the bleeding of our defense budget, to the ideological capture of the educational system by the enemies of American ideals, and—perhaps most importantly—an expose of the lies that the left tells about civil society, the economy and America’s historic role in the world.
No wonder it’s a national best-seller. No wonder the New York Times, in an ironic confirmation of one of Plunder’s central theses, kept it off its best-seller list for a week, pretending it didn’t really exist, or something.
What to do? Mark calls for a new trans-generational movement to fight against the frightening march toward an all-powerful centralized state. Both those now in power and their children must fight for
the rebirth of a vibrant civil society and restoration of a vigorous constitutional republic, along with the essential and simultaneous diminution of the federal government’s sweeping and expanding scope of power and its subsequent containment.
He knows it won’t be at all easy, in no small part because the younger generation—for whose survival as free Americans this fight must be waged—are among the most thoroughly indoctrinated by the very ideas and programs that seal their doom. Levin carefully gives the lie to claims that the young are in rebellion “against authority.” In truth, they are captives of the current system, and support its expansion.
It’s a hell of a fight, isn’t it? It’s made even worse by the miserable quality of “conservative” leadership post-Reagan, as we’ve seen in the Senate in recent months.
It’s enough to make you scream. But read the book first, so you’ll have all the reasons you’re screaming along with the first Mark Levin.
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