A Controversial Call to Action

by

Andi Miller

Politics, alongside religion, is one of the most polarizing topics one can discuss, and personally, I love to read about it. While my political leanings run deep and hot, I rarely discuss my politics in social venues. So what better way to enter into week three of this column than throwing that stance aside and tackling a controversial book on politics?

My first taste of Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green; $13.95) was a brief public radio interview that struck to the heart of my current interests in politics. As an academic, a book and library lover, and a fan of the free exchange of information, my first inkling of severe outrage and unrest post-9/11 was the USA PATRIOT Act. It crawled under my skin with its sanctions for governmental snooping and genuinely concerned me for it seemed the sense of privacy Americans are known to enjoy was slipping away. Indeed, Wolf’s interview six years later stoked the unrest and outrage I’ve felt since 9/11 but that subsequently died down with time and distraction.

Her name is synonymous with “third wave” feminism and progressive politics, so it’s predictable that a certain cross-section of conservative readers might turn tail and run screaming from The End of America without ever giving it a chance. While it is certainly a sizzling indictment of the Bush administration’s willingness to steadily chip away at America’s civil liberties, Wolf deftly reaches beyond partisan politics with her meticulously researched and documented offering.

Her stunning rhetorical sensitivity brings to mind the great writer Mary Wollstonecraft, author of  “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” a feminist document so full of logic and intellectual appeal that it demanded and captured the attention of intellectual men when women were fixedly stricken from the realm of “thinking.” Wolf shares in Wollstonecraft’s plight in the way that she has the spectacular ability to address and calm a resistant audience. For if any reader approaches The End of America with an open mind, I feel sure he or she would find not simply a loaded argument, but at its core a call for a return to conservative politics. Wolf’s argument is conservative in the sense that we as a society need to re-read and reconsider the plan our Founding Fathers so scrupulously laid out in the Constitution—get back to our proverbial roots.

As the cover suggests, The End of America is “a citizen’s call to action.” Modeled after Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlets, the book addresses what Wolf calls a “fascist shift” in the United States. She examines ten specific steps what occur when a leader or regime begin to close down an open society and suggests that “echoes” of the ten steps have taken place under the tenure of the Bush administration. A few of Wolf’s most effectively analyzed steps are a leader’s willingness to “invoke external and internal threat” which she directly relates to the ongoing war on terror: “establish secret prisons” which resembles the continual controversy of Guantanamo Bay; and “surveil ordinary citizens” wherein she draws links between the Patriot Act and other questionable wiretapping and sundry surveillance practices.

In each case, Wolf presents a detailed account of the step’s slow gestation and detrimental effects on standard American freedoms. By melding historical information, details of Constitutional law, legal precedents, and illustrations from historically dictatorial regimes and closed societies, she makes a convincing case for action to reclaim American civil rights.

In addition to scrupulous research and source documentation, another of Wolf’s great strengths is her ability to acknowledge the American public’s initial disbelief and knee-jerk reaction against the proposition of a weakening democracy. She continually confronts typical American passivism and a deeply held belief in democracy’s ability to regenerate without the momentum of public involvement. She insists that in these contemporary times citizens’ action is necessary to create change and maintain a strong democracy.  For instance, of the Bush administration’s steps to suspend habeas corpus and due process, Wolf writes:

Even well-informed people aren’t always sure why habeas corpus and due process in general are not expendable in a time of crisis. We forget that these processes are intimately related to our own physical safety in America. ‘Due process’ and ‘the rule of law’ are not, it turns out, dry formalities; if they remain robust, when leaders are seeking a dictatorship, they can save our lives.