Slaying Leviathan

Ned Ryun has written a new book, American Leviathan, and I was fortunate to get my hands on an advance copy.

If you don’t know Ned, he’s the founder of American Majority and Voter Gravity, grassroots organizations that specialize in fighting the culture war at the local level and electing America First conservatives.  On cable news channels and in his writing, he’s an eloquent defender of the Constitution, limited government, and the American Republic as the Founding Fathers intended.  I highly recommend that you read American Leviathan and share it with friends — especially friends who struggle to see clearly the stakes of the ideological war now raging. How Not to Age: The Sc... Greger M.D. FACLM, Mi... Check Amazon for Pricing.

How did we get to this point in time, when American leaders broadly repudiate the principles behind the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and an unaccountable, unconstitutional bureaucracy rules over the American people?  How is it that both major political parties routinely ignore the will of voters and seem beholden to the administrative state?  Why do prominent politicians — from Dick Cheney and Mitt Romney to Kamala Harris and Barack Obama — express an almost religious devotion to expansive government when our country was founded upon an inherent distrust of government power and a commitment to see such power forever chained?  Why have the most prestigious news organs rejected free speech, embraced censorship, and become little more than propagandistic parrots for the State?  It’s a long story, but it’s a story that must be understood in order for the American people to see with clear eyes what they’re actually fighting.

In American Leviathan, Ryun succeeds by making what is complicated quite comprehensible.  He takes a century and a half of mostly forgotten history and political debate and boils down all the sordidness into a digestible, if unpleasant, meal.  He traces the origin of the administrative state to a group of American intellectuals who were fascinated with Hegel’s philosophical defense of authoritarianism and the absolute power of the Prussian king.  He pinpoints the rise of the Uniparty in the overlapping policy preferences of leading Republicans, Democrats, and socialists at the beginning of the twentieth century.  He recounts how progressive Republicans, such as Robert La Follette and Teddy Roosevelt, advocated for radical expansion of government and rejection of long-respected constitutional constraints that mirrored many of the wishes of progressive Democrats, such as Woodrow Wilson and The New Republic founder Herbert Croly.  Together, these various thought leaders (at times hostile to one another as they advanced similar goals) initiated what Ryun calls a “Progressive Statist movement” demanding a fundamental transformation of the American system of government and the elevation of the State at the expense of Americans’ individual liberties. The Politically Incorr... Thomas E. Woods Jr. Best Price: $1.51 Buy New $8.71 (as of 06:15 UTC - Details)

Ryun defines the administrative state, the national security state, and the Deep State as distinct entities reflecting varying degrees of power, privilege, secretiveness, and incompetence, but he recognizes all of these unelected factions as parts of the same beast: the Leviathan.  With that appellation, he refers to the political treatise Leviathan, from seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whose inclination toward a strong, centralized government emerged during the chaos of the English Civil Wars.  In the Old Testament, Leviathan is a sea serpent and demon associated with the sin of envy.  The monster eats the souls of those who are damned because they remain too attached to the material world to reach God’s realm and receive His grace.  Although the biblical Leviathan epitomizes chaos, Hobbes used the idea of a terrifying creature composed of myriad souls as a metaphor for an all-powerful State constantly shaping citizens and feeding from their individual energies.  The frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan shows a monarch clutching the symbols of earthly power in one hand and spiritual power in the other.  The monarch’s body is formed from hundreds of faceless individuals who, through their actions to support the king, embody the State.  At the top of the illustration is a Latin quote describing Leviathan from the Book of Job: “There is no power on earth to be compared to him.”  It is in this sense that Ryun describes the American Leviathan.

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