Enough With Levin's My Way or the Highway Conservatism

Mark Levin's insistence that his beliefs are the One True Path is as un-conservative as it gets.

Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny is too "deep" and "sophisticated" for me. Or, at least, that's what Levin says, in his reply to my criticisms of where he is guiding the conservative movement:

The book is much more sophisticated than Knepper's ability to comprehend. Or maybe he just didn't read it, which is more damning. Apparently he finds it un-conservative to explore conservatism on a philosophical and principled level and then apply conservatism to a political agenda in current times. Moronic.

In an astounding attempt to be as literal as possible, he says that I'm wrong that he begins his self-proclaimed classic book with a bullet-point agenda. I would simply ask him to turn to page seven. But wait, says Levin: that's not the beginning-beginning! Before the agenda begins, he notes that conservatism cannot be deduced by a scientific or mathematical formula, after all. Fine. But his half-hearted disclaimer can't mask the fact that there actually is a bullet-point agenda that begins on page seven and ends on page thirteen. I'm not going to ignore the entire remainder of the book because of some maxim uttered on page six. I actually don't have anything against bullet-point agendas in themselves -- it's the insistence upon his own as the One True Path that's so jarring to me. Levin doesn't say that his agenda is one that he personally recommends, or that it's what his prudence has led him to, or that we can argue around the edges. No, to the contrary: this agenda is something that "the Conservative will have to do if the nation is to improve." The Conservative, with a capital-c, has to enact what Levin recommends, or else the nation will degenerate.

So, it would appear that Levin thinks that he has stumbled upon, at least to some degree, a workable formula -- one that actually produces some very radical measures, such as eliminating lifetime tenure for judges. Am I less of a conservative for thinking that efforts to democratize our courts are as dangerous as lifetime tenure? Levin also lambastes secularism -- a cardinal principle of our own Constitution -- as a destroyer of civil society and insists that only faith can justify our moral order. Now, according to Paul Johnson's History of the American People, many religious leaders at the time of its writing decried the Constitution as an irreligious document. It never mentions the Bible, God, or Jesus, and it mentions religion only once: to note that the federal government should not be sponsoring it. Levin's insistence on pure faith in preserving our republic is, I think, disturbing: it seems to be saying that there is no rational, evidence-based justification that can be given for our style of government.

Levin notes that dispositions must inevitably be applied to policy, as if I were actually implying that conservatives should simply sit around like Epicurus in his garden and ignore the world around us. My point, of course, is that reasonable conservatives should be able to disagree on policy prescriptions without the fear of being accused of "hating the Constitution," as Levin has yelled at dissenting callers to his shows. Might one, for instance, advocate a pathway to citizenship as the most prudent measure in dealing with illegal immigrants? Can we at least consider this in good faith? The answer is No: that'll earn you the nickname "Juan McCain" -- which totally isn't race-baiting -- or "Lindsey Grahamnesty." They are RINOs and must be purged.

Finally, the melodramatic shrieking about "tyranny" has got to go. Liberals aren't tyrants. Saddam Hussein was a tyrant. Pol Pot was a tyrant. President Obama and Speaker Pelosi are misguided politicians. Edmund Burke, in his Reflections On the Revolution In France, counseled us to remember that it's inevitable that governments will misbehave: it's simply in the nature of man to do so. Instead of being quick to anger about it, Burke recommends that we nurse its wounds like a child would to a father. In this respect, at least, Levin and the Tea Party movement are channeling Tom Paine's overreaching Rights of Man far more so than Burke's Reflections. Anyone who accuses intellectual critics of "hating the Constitution" definitely ain't a conservative in my book.