Mark Levin

(CNSNews.com) - Author and talk radio host Mark Levin said in an interview with CNSNews.com that America is “being defeated from within” by a “progressive” ideology that rejects the basic and inalterable principles of natural law and God-given rights upon which the United States of America was founded.

“What will history say of us in fifty years or a hundred years?” Levin asked in a discussion about his new book, “Rediscovering Americanism and the Tyranny of Progressivism.”

“What will they say about our generation and the next generation?” Levin asked. “Will they say nice things about us? Or will they damn us for surrendering what we were blessed with?”

In the book, Levin describes the belief in natural law that was embraced the Founding Fathers and then rejected by the “Progressive Movement” of the early 20th century. Leaders of that movement—which included both former Republican President Teddy Roosevelt and the Democratic President Woodrow Wilson—embraced instead a vision that diminished both representative government and individual liberty.

“Again and again,” Levin writes in Rediscovering Americanism, “the goal of the progressives is to unmoor the individual and society from America’s heritage with populist tirades, prodding, and indoctrination, the purpose of which is to build popular support for a muscular centralized government ruled by a self-aggrandizing intellectual elite through an extraconstitutional and autocratic administrative Leviathan.”

In his interview with CNSNews.com, Levin argued that Americans of the current era have a duty to future generations to fight on both political and intellectual battles fields to preserve American liberty.

“But we can’t surrender,” he said. “We have children, we have grandchildren. Other generations did not surrender. This is a more complicated battle. Jefferson, Joseph Story, Lincoln, Reagan, they all said if America is to be defeated it will be defeated from within.

“Well, we are being defeated from within,” said Levin. “And, so, that is why it is important that we do what the colonists did, back in those days. We talk to each other. We inform each other--as they did over the breakfast table, or dinner table, and in pubs, through pamphlets and newspapers, and that sort of thing. And we can do that. We have ways of doing that.”

In Rediscovering Americanism, Levin concedes that the ultimate outcome of this battle is unknown.

“Will we have avoided the doom of Athens and Rome?” he asks. “If we are honest with ourselves, we must agree that the outcome is unclear.”

In his interview with CNSNews.com, Levin also stressed that the struggle will not end soon.

“If we are to get this country back it is going to take a long time,” Levin said. “It is not going to happen in two days or a week. The progressives have been at this now for over a hundred years. They are resolute. One of the things that concerns me is that my fellow conservatives feel if they can’t get this thing turned around in one election, well, then, all is lost. Well, maybe it is all lost. But we got to duke it out. This is our responsibility to the next generation.”