Puritan GOP turns on Puritanism?

The year was 1630, and things were not going well in merry olde England. The king was corrupting the Church of England, tinting it with Catholic papism, and the Puritans were not going to put up with it any more.

And so they left, some for the Netherlands, where expatriates had been for 40 years, and, more famously, some left for the New World.

They came to America not just for religious freedom but to create a new “redeemer nation” under a theocracy. As John Winthrop put it, they came to be a unique model of Christian charity, to serve as a “city upon the hill” that would enlighten the depraved world.

They came to start the world anew and to change mankind in what can only be described as a utopian fantasy.

This quickly went to hell, and the colony they helped found became the liberal bastion of Massachusetts.

But the dream of utopianism that animated the Puritans and so many others became rooted in the American psyche and through time became distilled into one dream: the American Dream.

Shockingly, today there are those who would seek to deny this heritage and decry its effects.

In his New York Times bestseller “Ameritopia,” conservative author Mark Levin turns on utopianism and specifically what he calls statist utopianism (best understood as radical egalitarianism) as the explanation for what’s wrong with America today.

In a work endorsed by Sarah Palin and praised by Rush Limbaugh, Levin argues that it is this liberal utopianism that is the enemy of liberty and the promoter of tyranny in America, and that its continued appeal to young leftists puts this country in graver danger than anyone could imagine.

Levin couldn’t be more wrong.

For 400 years, utopianism, both the “liberal” and “conservative” varieties, has driven America forward to higher heights and to a better form of itself, and they continue to do so today.

Some, such as the Puritans’ suffocating experiment and the crazed community led by George Rapp in Harmony, Ind., have pointed the way toward a new work ethic and economic productivity.

Others, such as Fanny Wright’s Nashoba, which educated and emancipated slaves, have pointed us toward undervalued human rights and new, better forms of government even in their failure.

But if there is a finger to point at utopias that verged on tyranny, it is the former utopias, the “conservative,” not the egalitarian, utopias that threatened the liberty of their citizens.

Sure, there are examples and ideas in the literature of liberal utopias that might be considered tyrannical. The work of utopian socialist Charles Fourier comes to mind.

But I suspect that if Levin were to ask young leftists about their utopias, he would discover that nothing could be farther from the truth.

Leftist utopias are a libertarian’s paradise.

What Levin has overlooked is that unlike his staid biases, egalitarians believe it is not necessary to have an overbearing state to enforce equality of condition, and that it is the state that causes inequality.

It is people such as Levin, who claim to be on the side of liberty but want to take women’s rights to control their own body and want to continue the clear economic bias of the state in favor of the rich, who are responsible for statism and for creating the problems in America today.

Levin decries utopia as the fantasy of the left, but in doing so he ignores his own desired utopia: a utopia led by the perversions of the memory of the Founding Fathers in which all those annoying minorities would just go away.

As this is America, he is entitled to his opinion, and there is nothing more valuable than that right.

But to deny that he has his own utopia is folly that should be met by laughter — for we all have our own utopias in the United States.

After all, “utopia” might mean “no place” in Greek, but there is no place in the world like the U.S.

­— sidfletc@indiana.edu