Pun Salad

I was dimly aware that Mark Levin is a talk-radio host, and that genre is pretty far off my radar. But both Kevin D. Williamson and Andrew C. McCarthy wrote favorably at NRO about this book. That was good enough for me to fire up an Interlibrary Loan request at the University Near Here. And (eventually) the sainted ILL staff at Dimond Library wangled a copy out of Brandeis U.

After such authoritative praise, I was surprised to find myself a little disappointed. The book is not bad. I'm in agreement with nearly everything Levin has to say here. But it's pretty standard stuff, and not likely to change minds.

Levin's project is to outline "Americanism" as he understands it, grounded in the Founders' vision, as described in the Declaration, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and elsewhere: dedicated to the timeless transcendent principles of inalienable natural rights, and limited Federalist republican government.

In opposition, we have the source of all our political woes, the Progressive movement. Starting in the late 19th and early 20th century, they too-successfully championed a politics unchained from the dead-hand constraints of the past. They especially derided the lofty language of the Declaration, and desperately sought to reinterpret the Constitution in a way that might legalize governmental plunder intrusions into previously forbidden areas.

Okay, but we know all that. But I suppose I could recommend this book to the reader who (a) doesn't know all that, and (b) is open-minded enough to learn about all that.

Levin's style employs a lot of quotes, mostly historical. They come from good guys (Locke, Jefferson, Mill, Montesquieu, Berlin, Hayek, Friedman, Coolidge, …) and bad guys (Marx, Hegel, Rousseau, Wilson, Croly, Dewey, …). There are a lot of quotes, and they are long. (Do we really need to quote all ten amendments making up the Bill of Rights? Even the Third Amendment?)

Which brings me to my biggest problem with the book: its quoting style. Levin doesn't use block-quoting for most of his lengthy quotes. (Sometimes he does, mostly he doesn't.) Often there's just a sentence or two of Levin's own words stuck in between paragraph after paragraph of (for example) the tedious pomposity of John Dewey.

Cynical me wonders: what percentage of the words in this book are actually Levin's, and how much is just copy-n-paste from his sources?

Less-cynical me says (however): that's not necessarily bad. When your sources are saying something insightful or revealing, it's best to quote to quote them fully in context.

But I'd like to see things clearly demarcated. That's what block quotes are for.