Mark Levin’s speech at the Reagan Library on Friday, March 5, 2010, was exactly what I anticipated: intelligent and unapologetically conservative, with just the right amount of comedy. Simply put, he made Ronald Reagan proud.
Levin began with a little bit of funny: “I don’t have any teleprompters. I don’t have any chalkboards, either. And I love Sarah Palin, but I’m not writing on any body parts, either. Old-fashioned paper, right here.”
He went on to disclose that he embarked on the sixteen-month journey to complete Liberty and Tyranny because “…I felt that conservatism needed to better explain itself and it needed to be better promoted.” He spoke out against pseudo-conservatives and big government agendas, affirming that “The era of Reagan is alive and well in the cities, towns, and villages across America…”
Levin discussed the commitment of conservatives to maintaining and improving a civil society, in which liberty finds a rightful home and tyranny is appropriately unwelcome. He defended the label “statist,” rather than “progressive,” for the Obamanesque left because “…there’s nothing progressive about a regressive ideology…”
Levin examined the statist’s rejection of the Declaration of Independence in favor of a utopia in which citizens are subservient to the state. He did a fantastic job of articulating the distinction between the equality our Founding Fathers spoke of and the equality advocated by the statist, the latter of which is manifested by Obama’s redistributive ideology.
Levin upheld the integrity of our Constitution, rejecting a living, breathing interpretation: “We don’t have living and breathing mortgage agreements. And we don’t have a living and breathing Constitution, either.” He defended the notion that “The Supreme Court had to fundamentally alter the Constitution to accommodate FDR’s agenda…” and praised America’s free market system as a “mutable and dynamic” arena in which individuals of all shapes and sizes, colors and backgrounds, have the opportunity to flourish by way of personal commitment, creativity, and ingenuity.
Levin’s assessment that Obama, Pelosi, and Reid “…have no respect for the will of the people who, now on full alert, have demanded that they stop” was dead on, particularly in light of Obama’s March 3, 2010, health care address. Levin’s statistical revelations regarding Obama’s unprecedented spending and deficits were juxtaposed to Ronald Reagan’s Kemp-Roth bill, which yielded productivity and prosperity by virtue of tax cuts and incentives for investment. Levin summed it up with this: “In other words, you don’t choke the golden goose to death if you want those golden eggs.” Well put.
Levin touched on Obama’s health care bill and cap-and-tax proposal by hitting on the key underlying agenda of both, a “soft tyranny” that would bind the individual to the state, creating a dependency on—and accountability to—the state. His assertion that “Conservatism is the only antidote to statism…” was on the money.
Levin closed with the same Reagan quotation that he cited at the end of Liberty and Tyranny, one which merits repeating: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.” Amen to that.
Thank you to Mark Levin for calling it like you see it. And for continuing to take on policies that threaten the founding fabric of our country and its exceptionalism.
Keep doing what you do.
Jedediah Bila is a conservative columnist and commentator living in New York City. For more information on Jedediah, please visit http://jedediahbila.com/.