Naomi Wolf’s newest work, The End of America, is billed as a call to defend democracy. While her writing is impassioned, the book is marred by the very vague nature of what she tells us needs to be done—including some thoughts that are actually quite demoralizing—as well as some bizarre historical comparisons.
Generally, it is a mistake to leave democracy in the abstract: In a capitalist society, for example, political democracy conceals the fact that power is held by a corporate elite, by the capitalist class. Wolf does argue for democracy in general, and in some ways this is frustrating. She seems to look back to some kind of “good old days,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that there were tremendous problems even then.
Isn’t it the case that Jim Crowe terror existed in the South up through the 1960s? Isn’t it the case that women didn’t have the right to vote until the 1900s, and that racially oppressed people, women and many others have never enjoyed the full fruits of democracy, of control over their own lives? Isn’t it also the case that in our democracy, huge corporations have control over the state?
Of course that’s the case. And Naomi Wolf, with impeccable feminist credentials, knows this. But, she argues, the political democracy that does, or at least did, exist was important, and that the founders of this country were indeed revolutionaries:
In colleges with progressive curricula, the Founders are often portrayed as “dead white men,” whose vision was imperfect, who denied women and the poor civil rights, and who defined an American slave as three-fifths of a person; old guys in wigs who wrote documents…that are so obvious now they have become clichés (“…life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”).
Here’s what we’re not taught: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If youunderstand them truly now, they still are…These men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into reality…
So the Founders, by at least beginning the process of building democracy, were taking a huge step for progress, even though it would be almost another 100 years before even the abolition of slavery.
She is correct. While it is true that the term “democracy,” if used in some generic sense, may obscure more than it enlightens, any good Marxist will nonetheless tell you that it is always necessary to fight for democracy, whether under socialism or capitalism. There are forces of progress and reaction: It’s much easier to work for progress in a democratic system. For example, the Revolution itself laid the ground for the fight to abolish slavery; the principles of the American Revolution, in the world of ideas, laid the basis for the principles of the abolition of slavery.
The central premise of America is a good one: Democracy is an extremely fragile institution, and requires the active participation of its citizenry. Without this participation, anti-democratic forces are likely to take root, and bring about a “closed” society.
The book is somewhat of a list. All of the chapters, except one, are a method of subverting democracy, of closing off a society. Establish secret prisons (chapter 3), infiltrate citizen’s groups (chapter 6), restrict the press (chapter 11), and so on. The chapters themselves explain, in depth, how the Bush administration, since obtaining office, has taken each of these actions.
One of the book’s chief weaknesses is that Wolf’s rhetoric, her choice of words, is often at variance with, or at least much more extreme than, what she is trying to say.
She argues that the U.S. has been undergoing a “fascist shift.” This sounds like overheated rhetoric, but she is careful to point out that she doesn’t see Bush as equivalent to Hitler or Mussolini, or the U.S. on the verge of becoming a Nazi Germany. Instead, she argues that the changes brought about by the Bush administration are remolding our society into something that is qualitatively different than it had previously been, a society where people become scared to speak their mind. This, she argues, would mean “the end of America.”
She argues that it is easy to become numb to change over the years, and this is true. Reading the book, the list of changes the Bush administration has made becomes downright scary. Wolf lays them out in an orderly, shocking detail. But, thankfully, she doesn’t cheapen the subject by delving into the realm of hysteria. She is no raving ultra-leftist carrying an American flag with a swastika where the blue and white stars should be. However, it is this sober-minded analysis that makes what she writes all the more frightening.
Unfortunately, she undermines her work with clumsy historical analogies: She mentions Lincoln and Bush, Lenin and Stalin, East Germany and Nazi Germany, all as if they were the same, simply people or countries who limited democracy in some form or another. Looking at each of these couplets, can we really see anything more than an extremely superficial similarity? In these cases, Wolf actually does create problems by discussing democracy in general, not concretely. On the surface, there may be some similarity to Lincoln and Bush: Both suspended the writ of habeas corpus. But the difference is in the details: Lincoln did it in order to keep Washington, D.C. from being surrounded by Confederate states during the Civil War.
Aside from bizarre historical comparisons, the argument rings true: it’s up to us in the Untied States to defend our democracy from an Executive Branch attempting to rise above the Legislature and Judiciary. But what do we do? Here is another example where Wolf falls down on the job. She all but discounts the great shift of the 2006 elections, essentially says that Hillary Clinton and Bush would be the same, and even puts out an idea of hopelessness: Perhaps they simply won’t allow the elections to work as they should.
But there have been tremendous changes in the nature of politics, and what the Executive is able to do since the 2006 elections. And Wolf leaves out the tremendous movement of the American people—the labor movement, the women’s movement, the movements of immigrants and racially and nationally oppressed peoples, as well as the peace movement and others—that have been steadily growing in strength. This is the true guarantor of democracy—and progress beyond simply bringing us back to where the U.S. once was. It’s this movement that can move us forward towards as-yet-un-scaled heights.
And if the Executive is the problem, the administration that controls it, then that administration has to be replaced. This can only be done through the 2008 presidential elections. Defeating the extreme right forces in the Republican Party will put into office a more flexible, democratic-oriented administration, and, most importantly, strengthen the positions of the broad coalitions that have come together.
The main function of this book is its list format. While Wolf’s work isn’t helpful in regards to tactics, it serves as a “letter of warning” to all “young patriots” who are concerned about preserving, and deepening, the revolutionary democratic tradition of the United States.
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