January 11, 2010 by Webmaster
With the urgency of Thomas Paine, Naomi Wolf issues a warning to a young patriot that democracy is fragile.
That the democracy he expects to inherit is in the process of being altered forever. Wolf identifies the ten steps that must be taken to shut down democracy. She shows how those steps were implemented in dictatorships around the world and where America is in the process of meeting each of those steps. We take our liberty for granted.
We think it eternal, unchanging. But our founders would be shocked, they would think us naive. They knew the abuses of the Crown. They knew how easily freedom could be lost. How natural tyranny is for a leader. They had fled repressive societies to come to America. They had first hand experience with criminalized speech, arbitrary arrests, show trials, state sanctioned torture and murder.
This is why they spent so much time on the system they put in place to protect our liberty. They put in real checks and balances to restrain each branch of government to prevent them from stripping our personal liberty. We think, this is America, it can’t happen here. We have lawyers, scholars, activists, and politicians—experts on the constitution to protect our rights. But the founders did not intend for us to contract out the job to professionals, people with their own agenda, they expected the people, ordinary people, like you and me to govern ourselves; a government of the people, for the people and by the people.
Wolf notes that, “Americans tend to see democracy and fascism as all-or-nothing categories. But it isn’t the case that there is a pure, static ‘democracy’ in the white squares of a chessboard and a pure, static, ‘fascism’ in the black squares. Rather there is a range of authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, and varieties of fascist state, just as there are stronger and weaker democracies—and waxing and waning democracies. There are many shades of gray on the spectrum from an open to a closed society.”
Talk by Naomi Wolf author of "The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot" given October 11, 2007 at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus.
