Mark Levin is Wrong.

I am a fan of Mark Levin so I hope he can forgive me for this blog.  Congratulations on your book and your New Found celebrity.  Thank you for picking up the term “Islam-o-Nazi” from me after I educationally trolled you on Twitter.  Much of what you know about the danger of Islamism you most likely learned from me even if you heard those ideas from others.  You see I created the Ban Sharia brand in 2014 and while I haven’t made a single dollar from it I have lost almost everything because of it including a 12 year long career with Whole Foods because of my online advocacy.  I am glad that you finally got on the Trump Train in some manner.  I was on the Trump Train before it existed.  I helped create the “Trump Train.” 

For the past week I have heard you repeatedly otherizing Jean-Jacques Rousseau as being part of the other side, or Liberal Progressives.  Every time I hear you say this I cringe.  I ask myself, “What the hell is he talking about?  Has he ever read the Social Contract?  Rousseau was obviously an influence on the Founding Fathers.”  I have come to the conclusion that you never directly studied Rousseau or you were indoctrinated into a hatred of him by a teacher.  Or maybe he said something that irked you and you disregarded all of his philosophy because of your issues.  Perhaps it was when he said this:

“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine’, and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

A single statement misunderstood doesn’t characterize a person and condemn all of the good they might do or might have done.  I am sure you will agree.  

You keep insisting Rousseau was a big government statist without rationalizing how he was also an architect of the French Revolution.  He was the favorite philosopher of the Jacobins who were anti-royalists and Republicans.  You refer to the Declaration of Independence as though Jean-Jacques Rousseau weren’t a major inspiration for it’s drafting.  

You ignore his being ejected from France because of his Freedom of Speech and Voltaire’s defense of him.  

“…so that it will always be willing to sacrifice the Government to the People and not the People to the Government.” ~Rousseau

You defer to Aristotle after whom the term Aristocracy was coined which might be a rhetorical tautology of a Representative Democracy or a Republic.  But you ignore the fact that when Rousseau said:

…the bequeathing of Power together with Property by fathers to their children made families Patrician and so made Government hereditary.  

You ignore Plato’s five regimes and the possibility that this might be how the Rule by the Philosopher King’s descends into oligarchy.  While bifurcating between the Philosophy of America & Jean-Jacques Rousseau you conflate Americanism with some manner of Anarchy (Anarcho-Capitalist, maybe?).  Anarchy comes from a form of Democracy in which all people’s contradictory values are equal and the government is impotent.  On the other hand the Philosopher Kings should be forced to compete on a level playing field regardless of class or status in order to keep their rule legitimate.  The difference between the two is the Philosopher Kings demonstrate their Authority under a Meritocracy of Reason & Results.  I hear you throwing out a lot of Word Salad and sometimes I wonder if you really know what you are talking about or if you are some manner of History Revisionist bearing a grudge against Jean-Jacques Rousseau and trying to assassinate his reputation. 

You appear to have completely misunderstood the relationship between the individual, the general will, the government, and the Sovereign.  It is the Citizens that create the General Will which informs the constitution that is enforced by the government.  He says that the General Will is sovereign but that the Government mistakes itself for the Sovereign.  It is what the Citizens can agree upon among themselves.  This contract has Rights & Responsibilities and you don’t get one without the other.  If a foreigner immigrates to our land to avail themselves of our quality of life but they don’t want to respect our virtues THEN they must be “Forced to be Free”.  

I like you Mark Levin.  I know that you are a sensitive guy.  But you are dead wrong about Jean-Jacques Rousseau and you should correct yourself before you end up looking too foolish.  Much of what he wrote is brilliant.  I am a capitalist too but I want to compete on a level playing field, a meritocracy of Reason & Results regardless of Status.  I have observed that Crony Capitalists quite frequently salt the field behind them.  Maybe that is what you are doing?