I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.” The saturnine wisdom of Charles M. Schulz’s immortal Peanuts comic strip is impossible not to recall when reading Mark R. Levin’s new blockbuster, Ameritopia.1 For one thing, there is the sheer Schadenfreude of imagining how the people at the The New York Times, those notorious lovers of humankind, must have reacted upon learning that a new book by the popular conservative radio host would debut at number one on the paper’s bestseller list—the slot Levin’s last book, Liberty and Tyranny, owned for more weeks than the Gray Lady cares to remember.
Linus’s snark, more to the point, marks the scrimmage-line in the epic struggle Levin depicts. On one side stand progressives, whose professed humanitarian devotion thinly camouflages a disdain for flesh-and-blood people . . . particularly the kind who go to Tea Party rallies. To the social engineers, people are little more than laboratory specimens in statist experiments contrived to drag the benighted species toward perfection—which is to say, to subjugate people into serving the engineers’ conception of the good.
Huddled on the other side are those of a conservative cast of mind, reckoning human beings as basically worthy but incorrigibly fallible, and human interactions as infinitely complex and dynamic. In our quaint way of thinking, human nature defies grand statist schemes. To quote Karl Popper, as Levin does at the outset of Ameritopia, “Any social science which does not teach the impossibility of
