BOOK REVIEW

Spreading Democracy Abroad while Killing it at Home

Book Review: Naomi Wolf’s, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

In the tradition of many U.S. presidents, George W. Bush has adopted the rhetoric of democracy, casting himself as its defender and most zealous proponent. Following the attacks of September 11, leading up to the invasion of Iraq, and throughout the occupation, Bush has painted the struggle of the 21st century as a struggle to fight for and defend democracy. To American citizens, he claims we are fighting to defend our democratic ideals. To the rest of the world, he claims we are fighting so that they may share the bounty of these ideals. In short, Bush claims he is realizing the ideals of democracy, “God’s gift to all mankind.”

But, not everyone is convinced.

Naomi Wolf’s latest book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, has a startling message: The Bush administration is driving America toward neo-fascism. It will not look like Hitler’s Germany, she contends, and it will not happen overnight. But it is happening. We are, the book warns, living amid a fascist shift.

Now such a contentious claim has got to be well supported by contextual historical precedents so as not to seem hollow. It must also be carefully worded so as not to assume the “wacko” label stuck to conspiracy theorists who juxtapose Bush’s face with Hitler’s. The End of America meets these criteria. Naomi Wolf juxtaposes current events with events that occurred during the reign of totalitarian regimes; she stays clear of the pitfalls of polemical writings and envelops her argument in a broad, though at times cursory, historical analysis.

Wolf says the eerie similarities between the events following 9/11 and events that have led open democratic societies toward totalitarian dictatorships in the past prodded her into writing the book. Frightened by newspaper articles detailing government intrusion on civil liberties such as habeas corpus and due process, government sanctioned torture, the stifling of dissent, and the restructuring – if not neutering – of the American judiciary system, Wolf recalls feeling a sense of detached nostalgia: “What was it about the image of a mob of young men dressed in identical shirts, shouting at poll workers outside of a voting center in Florida during the 2000 recount, that looked familiar?” (6)

And so she hit the books. Surveying the literature of dictators of all stripes – from Mussolini, Hitler, and Pinochet to Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Castro – and the literature of historians and political scientists, she found that, despite obvious ideological differences among the numerous dictatorships that have existed over the past century, almost every one came into being through a gradual, asymmetric ten step process.

The ten steps, which serve as the titles to ten of the book’s eleven chapters (not including the introduction and conclusion), are as follows: Invoke an External and Internal Threat; Establish Secret Prisons; Develop a Paramilitary Force; Surveil Ordinary Citizens; Infiltrate Citizens’ Groups; Arbitrarily Detain and Release Citizens; Target Key Individuals; Restrict the Press; Cast Criticism as “Espionage” and Dissent as “Treason”; Subvert the Rule of Law. Anyone who has been following the news with little more than average interest could probably name a few cases that fit into most of these categories.

But the difficult question is: could this be said of any snapshot of American history? Naomi herself admits that America has flirted with fascism, or, at least, has had attacks on its democratic ideals before, such as the Alien and Sedition Acts as early as 1798, and the admirers of Hitler and Mussolini in the 1920’s and 30’s like Charles Lindberg, who had a powerful voice in American society. So is this warning to young patriots just another hysterical overreaction, another alarmist’s unwarranted cry? Because, after all, this is America, and such a thing as “fascism” could never take hold here, could it?

As Wolf describes each of the ten steps and compares their historical antecedents to contemporary events, she takes great pains to rebut the “it can’t happen here!” cliché, which, if what she claims is true even in the slightest, must be viewed as a deleterious neurosis. Her aim is to unfasten the reader’s love of country from an obsequious devotion to its leaders, particularly the ones in the White House today. Moreover, Wolf makes clear that the insidiously gradual process of a fascist shift occurs under seemingly justified conditions, which, for longer than one thinks, appear indistinct – or only a little different – from the blissful past.

That is until it reaches a tipping point, and by then it’s too late for citizens to defend or fight for their treasured democratic ideals.

“This would not be Munich in 1938, but it would be an America with another kind of culture than the one we have taken as our birthright: a culture in which the pendulum still exists, but the people’s will cannot move it more than slightly.” The “pendulum” is the symbolic representation of the countervailing forces occasioned by the checks and balances embedded in democratic institutions. The process Wolf calls a fascist shift is defined as “an antidemocratic ideology that uses the threat of violence against the individual in order to subdue the institutions of civil society, so that they in turn can be subordinated to the power of the state.” (21) The Bush administration, Wolf asserts, has set the ten steps in motion and, despite the Democrats’ victory in the Congressional elections of 2006, will continue to push them forward until the shift snowballs and the pendulum can be swung no longer – by anyone but the state under Republican control.

Perhaps the most shocking revelation in the book is a description of the “U.S. Fiscal Year 2007 Defense Authorization Bill,” which Wolf summarizes as giving the U.S. military the power to “intervene on behalf of the State whenever there [is] a threat to the state [sic].” (146) This bill could easily be defended as a remedy to the slow response of the Federal and State governments to resolve disagreements over Posse Comitatus during the Katrina disaster. However, it also, Wolf writes, provides the president with the “legal infrastructure…that could support a ‘paper’ coup – a more civilized, more marketable version of a real crackdown” – real crackdown, meaning those we’ve recently seen in Pakistan and Myanmar. Furthermore, she writes:

When the president invokes section 333, he may expand his power to declare martial law and take charge of the National Guard troops without the permission of a governor when ‘public order’ has been lost; he can send these troops out into our streets at his direction – overriding local law enforcement authorities – during a national disaster epidemic, serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or “other condition”… The president can send what has become his or her army, not the people’s, into our nation’s streets and not just this president, but any president in the future may do this.” (146, 147) [Bold mine]

The book’s tone is passionate and pleading – in the style of an eighteenth century political pamphlet – and sounds as if the urgency of the matter made the author rush when writing, an impression one gets from the more than a few typos and at times sloppy writing.

Nonetheless, The End of America, far from being an hysterical wolf cry, is most likely going to be seen by future generations as a prescient call for a citizens’ awakening. With numerous quotations from and appeals to this nation’s founding fathers, the book reminds us of just how unique our system of government is – and how much of its power and beauty is predicated on its citizens’ cynicism and skepticism toward their fallible leaders. Whether or not you believe George Bush when he claims the mantle of democracy, and whether or not Naomi Wolf has overstated her case, we should all agree that it is our duty as citizens – American or other – to demand accountability from our government; to educate ourselves about our government’s actions; and to stand up when our democratic ideals are under attack – from without or from within.