Naomi Wolf
Naomi Wolf believes the end of America is near, and that only young people can restore the Founders’ vision.
By Rob Anderson
February 9, 2008
Feminist, author, and critic Naomi Wolf. (Photo courtesy Chelsea Green Publishing)
Naomi Wolf—critic, feminist, and author—never shies away from a controversial argument. In her latest book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, she argues that the United States is moving toward a totalitarian state, and that we must take drastic measures now to restore the vision of America set out by the Founders. Wolf gained wide notoriety after publishing her first book, The Beauty Myth, which is regarded by many as one of the classic texts of late-20th century feminism.
Campus Progress spoke with Wolf from her home in New York City about the state of youth activism, how her generation screwed up America, and why the United States today resembles Germany in 1930.
Campus Progress: You and I recently sparred in the Washington Post over the role of young people in the U.S. political process. You argued that young people today don’t understand civics and that we aren't really engaged enough in politics. How did you come to that conclusion?
Wolf: I should have said, if I didn't, many young people. Not everybody. I spend a lot of time traveling and speaking on college campuses and I'm often distressed that young people in the audiences are exactly who we would want to have lead us—committed, idealistic, passionate, totally caring, and full of fire. But when I say, "Okay, well, why don't you take all of that beautiful energy and do 'x'?" they often don't realize that they can.
But you have to admit that there are a lot of young people who are getting involved in politics these days. You don't think they represent enough of a movement to actually make an impact?
My whole message is that every single person makes a difference, that every single person has the capacity to send out a ripple effect to make all the difference. So of course it makes a difference, and it should be celebrated. I certainly should have spent some time in the piece saying, "And yet there are these young people engaging in committed activism." But they're not the problem.
We need millions and millions of young people involved. It's got to be more of a common general assumption rather than the activity of people who are at the margins. On every campus there are activists. On every campus there are people who are committed and really well informed. But again and again I see them either relegated or self selecting at the margins of campus life and not at the center of campus life. What I'd like to see is fraternities and sororities doing freedom rides to round up voters instead of the kids who are always going to be there.
I have a hard time envisioning frat boys and sorority sisters doing that.
That's my concern, and here's why: Historically, in the great student movements—like in Prague in 1968, in Mexico City in 1968, in the '60s in the United States—it was the people who were sitting around talking about the stock market or beer or fashion [who were getting involved]. These same people today should also be talking about revolution.
Do you think my generation is less active than your generation was?
Well, my generation wasn't very active. I'm 45, so I was a baby in the '60s. No one was budging on college campuses in the '80s. We were worse than you guys. We were much worse.
Do you think your generation's inactivity helped conservatives come to power in the '80s?
You don't have to mince words. What you mean is: Did we fuck up? Did we ruin everything?
That's what I'm asking.
This is exactly the kind of conversation that has to happen. You guys have to say, “You 40-ish people fucked it all up. You sat around, you did nothing but build your stock profile. Meanwhile, the environment is burning up and the social network has been frayed.” You guys have to say things like that.
Ok, then: I think your generation fucked up. The political energy of the late '70s and '80s was funneled into the Reagan revolution—a movement that allowed a leader to use race and ideology to divide Americans instead of bringing us together.
That’s because conservatives were organized. Those of us who were trying were trying really hard, but we were the pathetic left as always and we didn’t have the money and the think tanks and the infrastructure.
But that has changed now. There's a real sense that progressive young people are organizing and influencing the debate. We are both critiquing the system and becoming part of it.
But even when you guys are out there doing all the right things—putting pressure on Congress, organizing, driving grassroots campaigns, raising money—your analysis is nihilistic. I would like to hear a more optimistic analysis, one that descends from the Civil Rights movement or the women’s movement. Those were hopeful movements for social change.
We haven’t had the chance to present a positive vision for the country because we have spent the last seven years fighting the Bush administration.
No disrespect, but people in great movements for social justice all over the world have faced much worse than what you guys are facing. People in the Civil Rights movement faced beatings, lynchings, hoses, dogs, systemic discrimination, and no access to the vote. But their vision and their articulation of that vision was incredibly, profoundly hopeful. They had faith in it, they could see it, and that was inspiring to people. They kept their own morale up. They kept their eyes on the prize.
We don’t have our eyes on the prize anymore. There is no prize. We haven’t articulated a prize. People are engaged out of despair rather than out of hope. You just don’t get as much good work out of people this way. You don’t get as many adherents. You don’t get people falling in love and making beautiful music—all the things that a real revolution needs.
Do you think you articulate a positive vision in your new book, The End of America?
Oh, no. It's a horrific abyss! But I am invoking a positive vision, the Founders’ vision. I really do believe that the Founder’s vision, this great 18th century ideal of liberty, is the same kind of seed of hope for justice and equality that transmuted itself in the abolition movement, and that renewed itself in the anti-child labor movement and the movement for women’s rights and the anti-war movement. It is all the same vision. It is always hopeful, and I think we need that again.
What was your goal in calling the book The End of America? It's controversial, at least.
Well, I don’t mean the end of the landmass. I mean the end of the idea of America. When America ends it will be a nation, but it [will be] a nation more like Pakistan and Morocco than like France and Britain. It is an America that is no longer like the America that the Founders set out to build. It is an America without liberty, essentially.
Do you think that the end of the idea of America has already come, or is it yet to come?
The news changes that answer everyday. If we fight back, we save America. If we don’t fight back, the end has already come. On paper, a coup has already taken place. It has been activated fully on the ground.
Tomorrow the president has the power to declare martial law without alerting Congress, to federalize the National Guard, to postpone elections, and to put enemy combatants in solitary confinement for three years for no reason. They could do the same to me. If the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act (Senate Bill 1959) passes, this conversation will be a criminal act.
So is that why you decided to write the book now?
It was actually last summer that I began to become very uncomfortably aware that I was seeing a lot of echoes of a time that I know in my bones because I'm Jewish. People are burning things. People are derailing academic careers because of their ideals. People are using phrases like “homeland” and embedding journalists.
I have a friend who is a Holocaust survivor’s daughter. She kept telling me when we discussed news events that they had done similar things in Germany. Of course, she didn’t mean the later years, she meant the early years of 1930 to 1933, when Germany was still a parliamentary democracy. There was a small group of people who were legally putting pressure on a democratic system to subvert the rule of law. And they did so with the consent of a parliament that was not a Nazi parliament. So she forced me to read a bunch of histories. When I did, I realized that I couldn’t ignore the fact that there are basically ten things that a “would-be dictator” always does in seeking to crush a democracy. [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"; and subvert the rule of law.] Those are the same ten things for would-be dictators on the left or the right, the same ten things in the seven countries and eras I studied.
So have these ten steps already occurred in the United States today?
They have already happened. They have already been set in motion. The string hasn’t been pulled, which is the turning point in every closing society when two or three of the steps are ramped up simultaneously and democracy can’t heal itself. For instance, if tomorrow half the journalists at the Washington Post were prosecuted under the Espionage Act, and Greg Palast was named an enemy combatant and put on a navy brig, and Blackwater was called out to help the TSA vet people on the watch list at Newark [airport]—that would be one kind of escalation.
And all of these are legally possible right now. This is how Stalin did it, Hitler did it, and Mussolini did it. These are very dangerous times.
Do you think this could realistically happen, though? Could the United States devolve into a totalitarian state without an uprising?
It is happening. People at Blackwater are studying protests in midtown Manhattan because their business plan calls for them to expand into domestic security.
They built a new presence in Illinois. They are trying to build a new presence in San Diego. The prosecution of journalists is at an all time high in the United States.
I am on the watch list. Every time I take a plane, I get called aside and get an extra searching. When I went to speak at a conference in Massachusetts a few weeks ago, the keynote, an environmentalist, was late because the TSA agents had physically taken him off the plane. When I was in Australia, I interviewed the former head of Greenpeace International who said she was held for five hours at LAX. They wouldn’t let her have a lawyer. She asked why she was being detained. They said, "This isn’t detention. Detention is when we take you to the cells out back and lock you up."
There are interrogation cells in U.S. airports. People are dying in custody of Taser wounds, while the state is saying they got tangled up in their handcuffs. These are the kind of the things you hear in a police state. Students are being Tasered for asking questions. Two-hundred and fifty people have died from Tasering.
It seems like most of these authoritarian actions are tied very much to the Bush administration. Could all of your concerns dissipate once a new president is elected?
No, absolutely not. That is, respectively, very naïve. And we have to snap ourselves out of that wishful thinking. Just like the assumption that we are going to have a free and accountable election is very naïve, given the historical record. History shows that anyone can be tempted, that anyone can become a monster if they have the power to lock up the opposition. Democracy is hard and imprisoning the opposition is easy.
Your argument is very easy to caricature. Some might say it's a bit farfetched.
It is actually quite difficult to caricature it if I can have three or four sentences, because the examples are so powerful and irrefutable. I am not saying rhetorically that these people are Nazis. I am saying very technically that in 1933, Goebbel purged the Civil Service. In April of 2006, the U.S. attorneys were purged. In Goebbel’s time, they embedded journalists. We embed journalists. They unload the coffins at night. We unload the coffins at night. They had a constitutional parliament that passed the Enabling Acts [of 1933] that allowed the state to spy on people, to open their mail, to open their telegrams. So do we. They gutted their constitution because they were told they would be unpatriotic if they didn’t in the wake of a terrorist attack.
You can draw your own conclusions, but I am sticking to the facts. It’s such a mass of evidence that I have been pleasantly surprised that people haven’t been able to rebut it as far as I know, or mock it too effectively.
Did you think you were making a risky argument as you were writing the book?
Of course, but I knew that the evidence supported the argument. If you read memoirs of people like you and me from 1931, they were having conversations like this. But they were concluding that “Surely it will pass, people will come to their senses." But then it did and the point of no return was reached. I hope and pray that we will not make the same mistake.
So how will we be able to recognize if the tide has turned, if our society has fundamentally shifted and we can’t turn back?
We are just about there. I keep going back to the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act. If this bill passes, you and I could be rounded up tomorrow as terrorists. So when we will know it’s very, very, very dire? When that bill passes.
Rob Anderson is the Editor of Campus Progress.
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Comments
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I have never seen so much crap in one place at the same time. Lady, you are certifiable
— Dave Z - Feb 15, 10:51 AM - #Naomi – You are a True Patriot. Thank you for speaking the truth and calling people to action. We are on the verge of witnessing the end of America, and people such as yourself and a few Patriots in Congress such as Wexler, Kucinich, Baldwin and Feingold are standing up to save the Constitution.
— Darrell Koerner - Feb 15, 11:18 AM - #Dave Z,
— matt - Feb 15, 11:28 AM - #if you think it’s so much crap, why do people like you troll this website? Are you, like the priest in that famous holocaust poem, just waiting for there to be none left to speak up for you?
This threat is very real. You only have to read the Project for a New American century web page to know that democracy is not the top priority of those in power right now.
Dave, you’re the certifiable one. Perhaps a blinded one at that. She lays out the documentation of what she asserts beautifully, and every bit of it is true. You better hope you don’t get caught up in it. I don’t care for Ms. Wolf’s writing, but she nailed it on this one.
— Caitlain - Feb 16, 08:01 PM - #I wrote a letter to the editor (St Petersburg Times) several weeks ago based on my own limited knowledge of of the history of Germanys’ ascent into totalitarian Nazism. The gist of my comment was that having followed this administrations’ actions, mainly their utter contempt of our Constitution & Bill Of Rights, we should not be too surprised if before a new administration can take the reigns of power, this current current group of criminals takes the extroidinary steps to create an emergency and declare martial law. Further they would claim executive powers and declare the election null & void. “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”- George Santyana
— David Childress - Feb 21, 04:10 PM - #I know – my spelling and diction sucks. Here’s the revised comment:
— David Childress - Feb 21, 04:59 PM - #I wrote a letter to the editor (St Petersburg Times) several weeks ago based on my own limited knowledge of the history of Germanys’ ascent into totalitarian Nazism. The gist of my comment was that having followed this administrations’ actions, mainly their utter contempt for our Constitution & Bill Of Rights, we should not be too surprised if before a new administration can take the reigns of power, this current group of criminals takes the extraordinary steps of creating an emergency and declaring martial law. Further they would claim executive powers and declare the election null & void. “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”- George Santyana
I agree with David Childress. I fearfully believe that this administration will create another “Gulf of Tonkin” incident to justify the bombing of Iran, and declare martial law and suspending the Constitution and Bill of Rights. They have already attempted this with the complicit help of the British when they sailed in and out of Iran territorial waters until they finally were captured. Iran’s president wisely let them go unconditionally after realizing what their real purpose was, to create an excuse to attack. After that didn’t work they tried again with the “speedboat incident”. It’s only a matter of time before they find a way for Iran to react as desired. That will be the impetus for declaring a national emergency, suspending the presidential election and our civil rights. Blackwater will be patrolling the streets of America, shooting “suspicious” characters as they did after Katrina in New Orleans. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
— David Stetler - Feb 22, 09:14 AM - #Please get involved to help, not to promote propaganda like Socialist-Communist agenda.
1. Fairtax.org give americans back there money & cut Government spending & Government programs, That socialize debt, and privatize profit.
2. Stop Illegal immigration. Mexico is a narco state that engages in the poison of our children, Fathers, Mothers, ect..
3. New Contracts with Nafta! How can Americans save money, Invest, buy Homes ect… if they dont have jobs?
4. Impose amendments to existing laws “Regarding 401k plans” The Principle should be able to set up a mutual fund account with their private bank be able to choose what mutual fund to invest in, and have their employer send the matching funds to that bank. ‘Now, you have to pick whatever mutual funds employers choose for you in the cmpany plan, most of them are bad mutual funds.
I could go on with idea after idea that the United States of America should implement.
Intelligence is a gift. people decyfer information differently thats why you must paint the path with gold so all can see.
Build less prisons, Stop bailing out corporations use the funds for superior education for all. All children should love school! Double counselors, after school tudering, after school exercise and fitness programs, better food, ect..
There was an old man standing on top of a mountain looking down at a young crowd “‘he wept for he knew he sold his soul for greed” The youngsters looking up were jealous with envy for they knew the old man concord the mountain before them. In the end the old man died taking with him a secret he finally realized? “love moves mountains”.
— HON. JOHN A. KOCIUBA - Jul 8, 11:43 AM - #I read these interviews and these comments with some bemusement because of my very clear memories from 1992 of all the hysterical rants saying that George H.W. Bush was going to create a police state. It didn’t happen then and it ain’t gonna happen now.
What’s the saying? “Fascism is always descending on America but landing in Europe.”
— Fred - Oct 8, 11:10 AM - #You make some valid points, but I think that you are not cognizant of the facts that our freedoms and rights are based on our right to our own property. When any government usurps that right through taxation and legislation, it can dictate anything. So, while you are correct in some of your concerns, you should be equally concerned about the expansion of government programs and taxation. Fascism and Socialism are two sides of the same coin; i.e., both take away individual freedom – the basis of our constitution. You also seem to be overlooking the fact that we do have enemies and no matter what you may believe, we have enemies that want to do away with us because of their religion. If you don’t believe that, you haven’t educated yourself. The religious zealots in our country are a pain, but they don’t bomb people and fly airplanes into buildings. Still, though, I do appreciate some of your points.
— JudyK - Oct 15, 05:29 PM - #