Use and Abuse of Power - Positive and Negative
Book review of On Power
by Mark R. Levin (2025)
Mark Levin's new book, On Power, discusses how political power originates and how it can be abused. It's relatively short and very readable book. The book illustrates the historical underpinnings of power and liberty. It clarifies how one of the major issues in America - and in the West - today is overextension of political power.
Power corresponds with liberty. Too much liberty results in anarchy, while too little results in tyranny. Levin points out that a perpetual problem with power is that it metastasizes. Democracies continuously struggle against the centralization of power. Levin writes:
… there are democracies that have lasted several centuries, but in the end, they have all succumbed to the steady increase in the centralization of power and a decline in individual and societal liberty. Sadly, this appears to be the nature of things.
Of course, things are much worse for the 70 percent of the world's population who live under brutal autocratic regimes who exercise negative power.
Negative Power
Power can be categorized as negative or positive. Levin uses common-sense definitions of negative and positive power, writing that:
Negative power is power that is exercised by force or other less obvious coercive means. Among its purposes is to limit individual identity, sovereignty, and liberty.
He explains that:
… in a democracy negative power typically takes the form of a steadily increasing centralization of authority that starts slowly but eventually spreads more quickly to cover all corners of the nation, moving closer toward a quasi-autocratic model.
Positive Power
Positive power derives from natural rights. Levin states that with power properly understood and exercised:
The people are the sovereign, not the governing authority, and importantly, the belief in God-given eternal truths, natural law, and unalienable rights is the basis of a moral and virtuous society that transcends any ruling class.
Levin points out that universal truths are understood and ingrained in human consciousness throughout the world. They are expressed in free societies and are known to be true even by those who are oppressed. He observes that:
Therefore, positive power originates not from mankind's hand or mind... but its origin is transcendent and inherent.
America was born from the fusion of faith and enlightenment. Our Founders understood the nature of positive power, and that governments are formed to protect inherent natural rights.
As Hillsdale College president Dr. Larry Arnn explains:
[e]ach individual is born with unalienable rights. Individuals come together to form peoples [a civil society], and each people has a natural standing to a separate and equal station. No man may be governed except by his consent. No people may be governed except by its consent.
Levin writes that with this understanding:
the Constitution was established for the explicit intent of defending against the failed experiences of past republics, such as Athens and Rome, as well as the tyranny of the monarchy, such as Britain, or the mob, such as the French Revolution.
The modern threat of power
Levin describes that a pressing threat to our Republic comes from new progressivism - a form of European totalitarianism - that he previously termed American Marxism.
He notes that Austrian American economist Ludwig von Mises observed that one of the worst tyrannies of all, Marxism, has become part of the West’s psyche. Mises wrote:
To a considerable extent, without knowing it, many people are philosophical Marxists, although they use different names for their philosophical ideas.
Levin observes that:
For the American Marxist, the means is the relentless war on the nation’s founding and Founders, American history, the Constitution and the law, freedom of speech, the family, the culture, faith, the economic system (capitalism), and more. It is a real and focused whole-of-society counterrevolution.
He continues:
Power - and its abuse - forge history. As Mark Levin emphasizes throughout his interesting and informative book, strong, functional, and lasting societies are based on consent, not coercion.
Addendum: Negative vs. Positive Rights
Levin discusses negative and positive power in his book. Negative and positive rights are a different concept.
Negative rights, such as freedom of speech, are inherent, natural rights. Positive rights, such as "public" government education, are those granted by others or by government. A government that transitions from protecting natural, negative, rights to arbitrarily granting positive rights is fundamentally at odds with the nation that America's framers established.
The GovFacts article, Negative vs. Positive Rights, explains that:
Political philosophers divide rights into two categories. Negative rights are "freedom from" rights. They require others to leave you alone. Positive rights are "freedom to" rights. They require someone else to provide something for you...
The terms don’t suggest value judgments. "Negative" doesn't mean bad, and "positive" doesn't mean good. They simply describe the type of obligation each right creates...
The U.S. Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, primarily enshrines negative rights. Its text and judicial interpretation reveal a framework designed to limit government power rather than command government action... The first ten amendments are overwhelmingly framed as government prohibitions...
Understanding this philosophical divide helps explain why political conversations often seem to involve people speaking different languages. They frequently are—the language of negative liberty versus positive liberty, individual autonomy versus social solidarity, protection versus provision.
Related
Book: American Marxism, by Mark R. Levin (2021).
Book: The Democrat Party Hates America, by Mark R. Levin (2023).
Marxism - The Threat Within America.
Progressivism's Fatal Flaw: Rejecting America, by Joseph Ford Cotto, American Thinker, 25 August 2025:
Progressivism has been tried, tested, and repeatedly found wanting. No matter how many times left-leaning intellectuals or activists insist they can "get it right this time," the ideology remains self-destructive because it rejects the very principles on which America was built. Progressivism is not only contrary to American heritage but fundamentally incompatible with the nation’s present and past...
Progressives discarded the Declaration's bedrock principle that rights are unchanging and naturally ordained. Instead, they embraced the notion that rights are relative, malleable, and defined by government. By doing so, they opened the door to government not as the protector of liberty, but as the bestower of temporary privileges...
Levin: The Word Power Is Essential To Understanding Americanism, Marxism, 25 August 2025: