Mark Levin's new book 'Liberty & Tyranny' is a timely bestseller

Mark Levin: author, radio host

Here’s the most unoriginal comment you’ll read all day:

Mark Levin the Author is nothing like Mark Levin the Talk  Radio Host.

In-the-know conservative reviewers of Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto all say the same thing: the Mark Levin you’re used to hearing (or tuning out) on radio – who harshly yells “Shut up, you dummy!” at callers, and comes off as a slightly saner version of Michael Savage – is nowhere to be found between the covers of his blockbuster book.  

Instead, Levin is channeling the old fashioned language of conservative icons like Burke and Kirk, Buckley and Chambers, and the stirring, majestic cadences of the Founders and The Federalist.

Liberty & Tyranny is actually a stylistically more challenging read than Conscience of a Conservative (1960), the last book widely touted as a popular (but note: not necessarily populist) conservative manifesto.

This passage early on in Liberty & Tyranny is a typical example of Levin’s style throughout:

“The Statist veils his pursuits in moral indignation, intoning in high dudgeon the injustices and inequities of liberty and life itself, for which only he can provide justice and bring a righteous resolution. And when the resolution proves elusive, as it undoubtedly does (...) the Statist demands even more authority to wring out the imperfections of mankind’s existence. Unconstrained by constitutional prohibitions, what is left to limit the Statist’s ambitions but his own moral compass, which has already led him astray?”

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a man (and it is invariably a man) who tries to write like that is a geek and a crank who isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, for whom “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”, and the results are cringe worthy. But incredibly, Levin pulls it off.

And Levin’s apparent confidence that “dumbing down” his message for our supposedly “stupider” times has paid off. Folks have lined up for hours at Levin’s book signings. It doesn’t hurt that Liberty & Tyranny was released just before the Tea Party movement took off; those activists are Levin’s readers and listeners, as became apparent during that disastrous CNN reporter’s encounter with one Tea Party attendee, who, it’s safe to guess, got his Lincoln stuff from pages 93-94 of Levin’s book.

Like the book's style, the content of Liberty & Tyranny is really nothing new, either. And that's a good thing. It IS a book about conservatism after all -- a philosophy that insists "there is nothing new under the sun" and that novelty can be deeply dangerous. This book provides as good a solid, short, modern, comprehensive yet comprehensible intro to Conservatism 101 as you'll find today.

The book is brimming with great “argument winning” facts (which, in another edition, would be better presented as sidebars to make them easier to spot.) This also makes for depressing reading. I felt suffocated by all the statistics about government waste and liberal fraud.

Liberty & Tyranny is more infuriating than inspirational, therefore. However, the fact that millions of readers have taken the book to heart most certainly is.

At this point, Levin’s Liberty & Tyranny is one of those books all American conservatives now have to read, whether they want to or not, because it has struck a nerve with enough readers to hit #1 on Amazon.com and stay there for weeks.

Will Liberty & Tyranny have a lasting impact? Obviously, it is too soon to tell. For now, Levin has helped restore the passion, patriotism and sense of purpose of countless ordinary Americans in truly trying times.

Liberty & Tyranny will help thousands “get through” the Obama era. Whether the book will help them overturn it and triumph over it remains to be seen.