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A Conservative Pundit Speaks out on Immigration SUMMER 2009 THE SOCIAL CON T RAC T A Conservative Pundit Speaks Out on Immigration REVIEWED BY PAUL NACHMAN ark Levin’s recent book, Liberty who served in the Reagan administration. He is and Tyranny: A Conservative a Conservative (always spelled in his book with a Manifesto, is about the counter- capital “C”) in pitched confrontation with “Modern revolution, starting with Frank- Liberals”: lin Roosevelt’s administration, The Modern Liberal believes in the su- Magainst the republic established by the founding premacy of the state, thereby rejecting generation and about Levin’s prescriptions to re- the principles of the [Declaration of In- claim that republic. Among the chapters detailing dependence] and the order of the civil specific aspects of the counterrevolution, Levin’s society, in whole or part. For the Mod- splendid one on immigration’s contribution to the ern Liberal, the individual’s imperfection ongoing destruction should especially interest read- and personal pursuits impede the objec- ers of The Social Contract. tive of a utopian state.... Modern Liberal- Levin understands deeply our immigration re- ism promotes what...de Tocqueville de- gime and its consequences—at one point he writes scribed as “soft tyranny,” which becomes “The evidence of civil society’s degradation [un- increasingly more oppressive, potentially der mass immigration] cannot be ignored”—so the leading to a hard tyranny (some form of chapter wastes no time wallowing in the lame and totalitarianism). weary sentiments that are usually served up, by both the left and some on the right, in discussions To avoid confusion with the classical meaning of immigration. Indeed, this of “liberal,” which is “oppo- site of authoritarian,” Levin 28-page chapter (considered Liberty and Tyranny in detail below) is also an subsequently uses “Statist” A Conservative Manifesto instead of “Modern Liberal.” excellent, stand-alone essay by Mark Levin about our immigration mad- (Of course, many of Levin’s Threshold Editions: New York, NY, 2009 Statists call themselves “pro- ness that you can give to in- 256 pp., $25 terested fellow citizens who gressives,” which I find an might not be ready to tackle annoyingly smug self-appel- the 250 pages of Mark Krikorian’s definitive The lation.) New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Il- What drives Statists? While Levin certainly legal.1 discusses this, I think David Horowitz has put it Levin, currently a talk-radio host, is a lawyer more memorably. (Horowitz was an icon of the left whose personal experiences with the Black Panthers Paul Nachman, Ph.D., earned his doctorate in in Oakland, CA drove him to second thoughts and 2 radio astronomy at the University of Chicago to an ultimate destination as a stalwart of the right. ) (1978). Since then he has worked on lasers and Here’s one of Horowitz’s stabs at the subject: optical physics in academia and in the aerospace If you’re on the left, you believe in an industry. Nachman now “does physics for fun”at earthly redemption of one sort or another. Montana State University in Bozeman. He can be You regard yourself as a social redeemer. reached at [email protected]. You see the problems of the world, social 134 SUMMER 2009 THE SOCIAL CON T RAC T problems, as the result of bad institutions learn it from the court.”4 that can be changed, and you believe that For Statists, a seminal document in the implicit there can be a world with no racism, no supplanting of the Constitution is Roosevelt’s pro- sexism, no homophobia, no Islamopho- posed “Second Bill of Rights,” which was part of bia, no poverty, no war, etc. This is re- his 1944 State of the Union speech. Such “rights” ally as close to the kingdom of heaven on that depend upon the workings of a robust econom- earth as you can get. That’s conceptually ic system are a far cry from the negative liberties what the left’s revolutionary fantasy— its (i.e., what the government can’t do to you) con- fantasy of “social justice”—is about. It’s tained in the actual 1791 Bill of Rights. Levin ar- an escape from the existential reality that gues, “This is tyranny’s disguise. These are not we all face, which is a world full of mis- rights. They are the Statist’s false promise of utopi- ery and suffering. Which is what it has anism, which the Statist uses to justify all trespass- always been and—unless we re-engineer es on the individ- mankind genetically—always will be.3 ual’s private prop- Levin writes that Statists began their redemp- erty. Liberty and tion (to use Horowitz’s word) of the Founders’ re- private property public during the Great Depression “through an ar- go hand in hand.... ray of federal projects, entitlements, taxes, and reg- The ‘Second Bill ulations known as the New Deal, [breaching] the of Rights’ and its Constitution’s firewalls.... [The federal government] legal and policy used taxation not merely to fund constitutionally le- progeny require gitimate governmental activities, but also to redis- the individual to tribute wealth,... set prices and production limits, surrender control create huge public works programs, and establish of his fate to the pension and unemployment programs.” The only government.” effective opposition to these initiatives collapsed I think Levin when, under Roosevelt’s 1937 threat to pack the Su- is on the mark here, preme Court with additional justices sympathetic to but why can’t the his efforts, the newly intimidated Court began de- “Statists” see this? votedly following the election returns. Likely Levin would respond with a point from his Levin doesn’t say so, but there surely had been introductory chapter: Liberty’s workings and eco- matters of moment earlier during American histo- nomic fruitfulness in American society often make ry in which the national government winked at the “[liberty’s] manifestations elusive or invisible to Constitution. The Louisiana Purchase and the es- those born into it. Even if liberty is acknowledged, tablishment of national parks come to mind. Prob- it is often taken for granted and its permanence as- ably all of us regard these events with approval and sumed.” Such taken-for-granted-ness is described appreciation, but I don’t think we’ll find them au- implicitly in another quote from Horowitz: thorized within our founding documents. [S]ocialism could never have worked be- What’s different, starting with Roosevelt’s cause it is based on false premises about administration, is how systematic and pervasive human psychology and society, and our—and the justices’—disregard of the Constitu- gross ignorance of human economy. In tion has become. As Robert Bork recently said, “I the vast library of socialist theory (and refuse to teach constitutional law, because it’s so in all of Marx’s compendious works), obviously politics and not law. The incoherence of there is hardly a chapter devoted to the some of those opinions is astounding. If you want creation of wealth—to what will cause to know what the Constitution means, you will not human beings to work and to innovate, 135 SUMMER 2009 THE SOCIAL CON T RAC T and to what will make their efforts ef- Regarding the Constitution itself, the Conser- ficient. Socialism...is about dividing up vative will seek “to divine the Constitution’s mean- what others have created. Consequently, ing from its words and their historical context, in- socialist economies don’t work; they cluding a variety of original sources—records of create poverty instead of wealth. This is public debates, diaries, correspondence, notes, unarguable historical fact now, but that etc.” Sometimes this won’t suffice to steer us to a has not prompted the left to have second unique answer, as Levin acknowledges. (Indeed, thoughts.5 in 1791, Constitution writers and signers Hamil- ton and Madison clashed with each other about the In contrast to Statists’ mania for equality of constitutionality of Hamilton’s proposed national economic outcomes and for crowbarring “rights” bank!) But, he argues, this procedure, carried out to such equality into the Constitution, what moves in good faith, is the only supportable one. Levin’s “Conservatives”? The answer is distributed (In contrast to the Conservative’s approach, throughout his book, so it can’t be condensed into a Levin excoriates the astonishing recent tendency mere few paragraphs here, but I’ll mention several of some Supreme Court justices to use foreign laws salient points. in the Constitution’s interpretation.7 This is a fron- Levin tells us that Conservatives don’t ada- tal assault on the rule of law as it has always been mantly reject “change,” since, to quote Levin quot- understood in the American polity and, in its ar- ing Edmund Burke, “[A] state without the means bitrariness, certainly falls under Levin’s rubric of of some change is without the means of its conser- “tyranny.”) vation.” But change should be incremental modi- Summing up at one point toward the end of the fications to an existing order (that, in many ways, book, Levin tells us, “The Conservative believes works) instead of change that makes the world that the moral imperative of all public policy must anew and, in so doing, aims to sweep away all the be the preservation and improvement of American sorrows of the past: society.” For Burke, change as reform was intend- Thus we come to immigration. ed to preserve and improve the basic in- Levin seems to get off on the wrong foot with stitutions of the state. Change as innova- the cringe-inducing concession that the U.S. is a tion was destructive as a radical depar- “nation of immigrants,” but he immediately refo- ture from the past and the substitution of cuses: “to say this is a nation of immigrants is to existing institutions of the state with po- say every nation is a nation of immigrants...
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