OPINION:
The great composer Wagner’s work was once described as a cannon smothered in flowers. Wagner was controversial but also brilliant.
So is Mark Levin. He is brilliant and controversial by design. All people of positive influence — who espouse great ideas, who push the envelope — are controversial, especially those on the right.
The brilliant painter Edward Hopper was described as controversial because he hated President Franklin Roosevelt’s high taxes.
President Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley were all described as controversial at some time in their lives. But all made life in America better. Americans still bask in the warmth of their brilliance.
Mark and I met when we were working in Washington in the Reagan years, and we’ve been friends ever since. We’ve both moved on, he as a highly successful radio host, bestselling author and public intellectual.
And Mark has done it again with his new book! But then again, Mark always does it again. Bright people make it a habit of repeating their successes. He makes book writing look easy. And this might be the best and most important book of the 10 he’s written — all New York Times bestsellers, by the way.
I am speaking, of course, about his new book, “The Democrat Party Hates America,” already a bestseller. The use of the word “Democrat” in the title is key.
For the Democratic Party is no longer Democratic. “Democratic” means to help the common people.
Democratic is derived from the mid-16th century from the French word democratique, by way of the medieval Latin from Greek demokratikos, from demokratia. This means nothing to current leftists. They don’t give a damn about people except to use them and enslave them.
The Democratic Party was for many years the party of slavery and Jim Crow. Later, it was the party that opposed universal suffrage. The party is ultimately about helping the members of the Inner Party and lying to the rest of us. It is a toxic danger to citizens. Toxic liberalism is a crime.
Killing babies, confiscatory tax policy, state-sponsored and warrantless surveillance, allowing millions of people to cross our borders illegally. The list is endless. The bottom line is that if you are a liberal, you are a criminal. If you support liberal policies, you are an accessory to a crime.
Of course, the lightweight and decrepit President Biden gets smacked around quite a bit by Mark, as it should be. Real historians will have to create a new category of worst presidents just for him.
The book is fascinating, but as a historian I found especially interesting the section on how a group of left-wing historians advised the “moderate” candidate Joe Biden to go big in his plans for his presidency. Historians who have no practical experience should never give political advice.
My advantage over them as a historian is I came up through ideology, issues and politics long before I began writing books. In other words, like Mark, I had real-world experience before I started to write.
As Mark explains in “The Democrat Party Hates America,” these leftist historians all came out of the comfortable leftist salons of the academy. They never met a payroll, rolled up their sleeves, got their hands dirty or lifted a tool to earn a living. They have no practical knowledge of how the real world works, and hence they look at the world through rose-colored glasses.
As Woody Allen’s character in his film “Annie Hall” said, intellectuals “prove that you can be absolutely brilliant and have no idea what’s going on.”
The truth of the matter, though, is that we, as American conservatives, are the true intellectuals. An American conservative wakes up in the morning and thinks about how to expand freedom. A liberal wakes up in the morning and emotes how he can control people.
Conservatism is intellectualism. Collectivism is emotionalism. Hence, Mark writes that individualism has been supplanted by groupism and that liberals are embarking on “the remaking of man’s nature.”
Truer words were never penned. And let’s face it: Our ideas are better than their ideas.
This is not a book to be flung away. “The Democrat Party Hates America” is a book to be read, cited, and quoted from.
But most important, this book is a clarion call for God-fearing Americans to wake from their long slumber and throw liberals onto the ash heap of history where they belong.
Don’t walk — sprint — to your nearest bookstore and buy this fascinating book.
• Craig Shirley is a conservative American political consultant and the author of four books on President Ronald Reagan.
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THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HATES AMERICA
By Mark Levin
Sept. 19, 2023
Threshold Editions; 400 pages, $17.61
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