by Hannity Posted in: 2012 Election, Ameritopia: The Making of America, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, U.S. Constitution
Last night on Hannity, talk show host Mark Levin joined Sean to discuss his new book, “Ameritopia, The Making of America,” and also weighed in on what he says is a GOP race to the presidential nomination that is all but set in stone.
Check out the interview, and read the full transcript below. Plus, let us know if you agree with Levin’s depiction of the current state of our country by commenting on this post.
HANNITY: Welcome back to HANNITY. Now in his brand new book, just out today, “Ameritopia, The Making of America,” the great one, Mark Levin, explains that all throughout history tyranny has originated from the dream of a Utopian society that can never exist.
Now he argues that Americans are traditionally independent and explains how the battle between centralized government and individual freedom is being played out more than ever right here in American society.
Now joining me to discuss his brand new book, the GOP race and much more, the man himself, nationally syndicated radio talk show host, I call him the great one. Hello, great one!
MARK LEVIN, “AMERITOPIA” AUTHOR: Have you lost weight, by the way?
HANNITY: Yes, I did. Do I look better?
LEVIN: You look a little thin to me.
HANNITY: All right, this is a little inside joke. I’m trying to get you out of your bunker for years –
LEVIN: Congratulations.
HANNITY: You are impossible to get out and get on TV.
LEVIN: I like being in the bunker. I like being home. What is so bad about that?
HANNITY: No, but your fans love to see you. I had to start a petition on your radio show when I was a guest to get your audience to call in and get you out of there.
Well, first of all, why don’t we get your thoughts, before we get into this book. This book, I will argue, is going to be a classic. That one day some society will look at this and make it a foundation. That powerful.
LEVIN: When we are dead and gone.
HANNITY: When we are dead and gone, a long time from now hopefully. Look at this race. See what is happening in South Carolina. We watched Iowa and New Hampshire. You saw the debate last night. What is your take on the race and do you buy into the argument that it will be really difficult to beat Obama?
LEVIN: Well, a couple of things. You know what concerned me about that debate last night? Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney stumbled a lot and he’s been running for president since, you know, James Buchanan.
And at this point, he should be able to answer these things like this about his income taxes, about Bain, about any of it. So he’s not the inevitable anything that the Republican establishment tell us he is.
And the fact is, if he turns out to be the nominee, I’m going to support him, but there are other conservatives in this race who I think deserve a first look by a lot of people, let alone a second look. Newt Gingrich had a hell of a debate. Santorum had a hell of a debate. Perry was good I thought, too.
HANNITY: I thought Perry had his best debate showing to date. You now, it’s sad because if he would have come out of the box like –
LEVIN: We have plenty of time. You know, let me just be clear about this. We have in many states proportional delegates selection.
HANNITY: Proportional distribution.
LEVIN: That distribution, some states — Florida lost half its delegates because it jumped the line and then we have Florida or Nevada or something and then a month break. I don’t know why we have to decide this in Florida. Who says? Why should we?
HANNITY: Well, we don’t have to decide it, but look at the history of this. No modern day person, non-incumbent has won Iowa, New Hampshire. We might get different results in Iowa now. And if he would win South Carolina, we don’t know what’s going to happen in South Carolina.
LEVIN: You know what it means?
HANNITY: No one has won the presidency without South Carolina.
LEVIN: Nothing.
HANNITY: You don’t think it means anything?
LEVIN: When you win in Iowa by 6 votes or 8 votes, Gerald Ford won Iowa and he won New Hampshire and lost the presidency. Why does any of this matter?
HANNITY: Let me dovetail this into the book. Without getting into all the details right now, you actually make the case in this book that we live in a post-constitutional America. You have a whole chapter on that. What does that mean?
LEVIN: It means that much of what the federal government does is not authorized by the constitution. Now, when you say that, you get political responses like, you want to do away with this and you want to do away with that?
I’m not talking about that. I’m saying much of what goes on in the federal government — although I would like to do away with most of it. Much of what goes on in the federal government has no constitutional basis whatsoever.
This was part of a scheme, real scheme hatched by a number of leftists about a century ago. And you know them. Woodrow Wilson. He didn’t make any bones about his contempt for the declaration and individualism and that’s what this is, an attack on the individual.
He made no bones about his contempt for the constitution. Woodward Wilson said in a speech before he became president that the government is like a body. You can’t have one organ working against the other.
In other words, you can’t have separation of powers. So he spent his presidency, as did subsequent Democrats, trying to evade the constitution or rewrite it. FDR, of course, did the same thing.
FDR attacked the constitution. And Cass Sunstein, who now works for Obama, he made the point that we now live under FDR’s constitution. You know what that means? A powerful centralized government, exactly what the framers of the constitution rejected.
HANNITY: You talk about the sub title, the making of America. You end the book with this question. So my fellow countrymen, what do you choose, Ameritopia or America? Is America that close of a crossroads that the America that we grew up knowing, loving, cherishing, the one that talked about the individual and freedom and responsibility is likely gone?
LEVIN: Ameritopia is here. The question is how far are we going to go with this? We are not a truly constitutional republic anymore. The states have no limited power, but yet it was the other way around.
We are not a representative republic really in the true sense anymore. We have this massive administrative state with, you know, hundreds of thousands if not several million bureaucrats who are making laws and issuing them every day, 80,000 pages last year.
So that’s not a representative republic. So what are we? We are a nation that has heavy centralized you power. It’s getting more centralized by the day. Every so-called reform is said to require more government, more bureaucracy, and more taxation in pursuit of what?
HANNITY: You quote Reagan, you know, the freedoms just one general away from extinction. You quote Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin after the constitutional convention was wrapping up actually predicted that this experiment would end.
LEVIN: For a time. He said, and I paraphrase, the American people will follow this constitution for a time. But then I’m paraphrasing, they will determine whether they want to live free or they want to live in a despotism. Can I have I have the football please?
HANNITY: Yes, you want the football here.
LEVIN: Yes, thank you.
HANNITY: We did something, the way you set the book one up. We are going to explain it to everybody when we get back. We will get more of your thoughts in the election. We will continue with the great one. By the way, his book, “Ameritopia.” It’s on Amazon as of today and in bookstores around the country. As we continue on HANNITY.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HANNITY: As we continue with the great one, Mark Levin and his brand new book, “Ameritopia, The Making of America.” It’s in stores today. You do something amazing in this book. You break it into three parts.
And you start out with Utopianism, and go through and this is where you do all the hard work and all the leg work because you read all of these guys. You talk specifically about Plato, about Thomas Moore, Thomas Hobbs, you talk about Karl Marx.
And you explain, you pulled out of their works the relevant portions that really are relevant to today’s society and how there’s always been an underlying philosophy there can be this great utopia. Explain this.
LEVIN: Well, what is it that animates people that attracts them to be attracted a philosophy that destroys them. I mean, utopianism is what under girths the push for statism, these massive promises of a paradise of equality, of wealth creation.
If you will only surrender more of your liberties and surrender more of your private property, in other words, surrender yourself, your humanity to basically a handful of master minds.
And you have to ask yourselves where do the master minds get their information from? Why are they so smart? How do you become a community rabble rouser and suddenly can run every aspect of society, the answer is you can’t.
They have to try and persuade people that they can and what they use and the reason I use the great philosophers, even though these works that they wrote are horrific. The reason I use them is because take Plato. He creates a cast system. He calls it an ideal perfect society tries it twice and then fails.
Take Thomas Moore. He creates utopia and he invents the word, what is it? It’s radical egalitarianism to communism. Take Thomas Hobbs. What does he create, among other things? He creates an all powerful sovereign and the rest of the people are subjects. And then you have Marx and the worker’s paradise.
HANNITY: I’ve said this to you before, the other day I said I got the book back in early November and I’ve read now twice, and literally there are very few books that I read where every sentence, you and I could spend 10 minutes on.
We will only have time for a broad overview. Isn’t one of the reasons maybe it’s appealing to people because there’s the sense of, don’t worry. We will take care of you, the caretaker state. There’s a sense of relief that somebody else will do it. Is that part of the appeal of it?
LEVIN: It is. People want a heaven on earth. People want to be told they can get something for nothing. It’s very complicated. We have people in this society who are malcontents, who have concluded that they aren’t the problem but society is the problem.
And they demand society should change. We have other people in the society that have benefited enormously from liberty and property rights, but yet they go along with it because they want to be part of it.
HANNITY: But then you look on the other side of this, part two, Americanism. You look at guys like John Lock and the influence he had on our founders, and Montescue and the influence on our framers.
And again, you extract all of the relevant writings and teachings of these guys. Lock had a huge impact philosophically on our founders. Montescue, a huge impact on our framers, the whole issue of separation, right, three branches of government.
LEVIN: That’s right.
HANNITY: So you really tie it together. This ideological war, how is it relevant to what we are seeing debated today?
LEVIN: It’s totally relevant, which is why I wrote the book and did it the way we did it. We need to understand. You know, the founders didn’t wake up one day and say, you know what, I believe in natural law, I believe in individual sovereignty.
You know what, I believe in divided branches. I believe in sovereign government. We have been the targets of such a dumbing-down process by the media, by the politicians, that I feel it’s time to re-educate ourselves.
What is the American spirit? What is the heritage? And if we don’t discuss what undergirds the declaration, the constitution, and on the other hand what Obama is did, what FDR did and Wilson did, what they’re doing is tyranny of hundreds of thousands of years old and these things need to be explained.
HANNITY: Because it’s fascinating because I read the excerpts you pull from Plato and Hobbs and Marx, it sounds a lot like the modern Democratic Party. When I listen to really smart conservatives that really understand limited government, the individual, individualism, you know, I hear Locke.
I hear the people that you quote on the other side of it. So it seems extraordinary relevant. There was a funny line in it. Our friend Jedediah Bila wrote it in her review of your book, we are smart enough to pick our own leaders, but we aren’t smart enough to pick our own light bulb.
LEVIN: That’s in the book.
HANNITY: Yes, or put salt on the table if you go to a restaurant in New York.
LEVIN: Well, because what people need to understand is, Locke, Hobbs, Jefferson, many others talk about the fact you be can elect your own tyrants.
HANNITY: I always wondered about that.
LEVIN: And you can have a congress of tyrants and people pile law upon law and created these administrative states that operate on their own. You keep electing them, but they keep empowering themselves.
HANNITY: All right, what is the future of America and how important is this election, and which America will we ultimately decide that we are going to go down which road? We will continue with the great one. Do you want to throw this out?
LEVIN: Sure. Where do I throw it?
HANNITY: Throw it to him right over there.
LEVIN: OK, you know where you hit me with this thing?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HANNITY: As we continue on HANNITY with the great one, we call you and Russ calls you Levin.
LEVIN: And liberals call me the great big one, but go right ahead.
HANNITY: Author of the brand new book, just out today, “Ameritopia, The Making of America.”
LEVIN: I was going to write a book on liberalism. Just liberals called it “Ameridopia.”
HANNITY: “Ameridopia.” Well, in many ways, so you have these two visions and you got the philosophical underpinnings of both, the Utopianism and Americanism. You have very distinct competing differences.
One believes in the individual, one believes in freedom and one believes the state should run basically everything. Explain what is at stake in this election from your perspective as you went through and studied for over a year, all of these philosophers, read all of their writings. And how do you see this is relevant to this election?
LEVIN: Well, it’s relevant to this election because the only thing that really stands between us and this ultimate tyranny is the people. It’s not the politicians, it’s us. We have to decide how we want to live.
This is our country, this is our government and we are — we’ve been given a blessed gift, liberty, a magnificent declaration of dependence, a magnificent constitution. That is under constant assault by these figures because these are the obstacles to their power.
Obama even talks about it. You know what, Senate, you are in recess. I’m making these appointments. You know what? I don’t want all my staff confirmed. I am going to appoint a czar. You know what? I just got this law, I like part of it. I don’t like part of it. And look how casually we accept these things as a society.
HANNITY: You talk about this. You talk about the gradualism. This isn’t happening by revolution.
LEVIN: No.
HANNITY: You know, it’s not one day. You say gradualism is the morale equivalent of soft tyranny. You describe it in the book.
LEVIN: Yes, we get into this. You know, democracy in America is actually two books, one in 1835 and one in 1840. What I try to do in this book so I don’t scare people away is these are heavy topics that I try to put in plain English and try to relate them to modern day.
And what he talks about is America is so different from Europe. You know, in Europe, this is way back when, in Europe the administrative state is involved in everything. In America it’s there, but it’s innocuous.
While we are transitioning, I would ask the people who are watching this program, not what doesn’t the government — what does the government regulate, what doesn’t the government regulate?
Look around your homes and so forth. The question is this, since we are so (inaudible) from the constitution since Congress thinks it can pass laws compelling us to purchase things, since the EPA thinks it can consider issuing a regulation regulating dust, and I can go on and on, regulating toilets and open your medicine cabinet, it’s all regulated.
Look around your kitchen, it’s all regulated. The question is where does it end? I can show our opponents the constitution. What can they show me? Nothing, because the constant push for control over the individual and the stealing of the individual’s labor.
HANNITY: Yes. You know, you do the heavy lifting. Most people don’t have the time to really study Plato and Hobbs and Moore and Marx or, on the other hand, Locke on the Americanism, Montescue. You do it. You make it relevant to today. This is going to be a modern day masterpiece. I think it’s your best book yet.
LEVIN: Appreciate that, buddy.
HANNITY: Will you come out of your bunker one day?
LEVIN: Sure. I’ll be here two or three years from now.
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