The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot - N

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The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

by NAOMI WOLF

INTRODUCTION

TEN STEPS

America was opened after the feudal mischief was spent. We began well. No inquisitions, here, no kings, no nobles…

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dear Chris:

I am writing because we have an emergency. Here are U.S. news headlines from a two-week period in the late summer of 2006:

July 22: “CIA WORKER SAYS MESSAGE ON TORTURE GOT HER FIRED.” Christine Axsmith, a computer security expert working for the CIA, said she had been fired for posting a message on a blog site on a top-secret computer network. Axsmith criticized waterboarding: “Waterboarding is torture, and torture is wrong.” Ms. Axsmith lost her job as well as her top-secret clearance, which she had held since 1993. She fears her career in intelligence is over.1

July 28: “DRAFT BILL WAIVES DUE PROCESS FOR ENEMY COMBATANTS.” The Bush administration has been working in secret on a draft bill “detailing procedures [for] bringing to trial those it captures in the war on terrorism, including some stark diversions from regular trial procedures…. Speedy trials are not required…. Hearsay information is admissible… the [military] lawyer can close the proceedings [and] can also order ‘exclusion of the defendant’ and his civilian counsel.” Those defined as “enemy combatants” and “persons who have engaged in unlawful belligerence” can be held in prison until “the cessation of hostilities,” no matter when that may be or what jail sentence they may get.2

July 29: “THE COURT UNDER SIEGE.” In June 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that denying prisoners at Guantánamo judicial safeguards violated the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law. The Supreme Court also insisted that a prisoner be allowed to be present at his own trial. In response, the White House prepared a bill that “simply revokes that right.” The New York Times editorial page warned, “It is especially frightening to see the administration use the debates over the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and domestic spying to mount a new offensive against the courts.”3

July 31: “A SLIP OF THE PEN.” U.S. lawyers issued a statement expressing alarm at the way the president was overusing “signing statements.” They argued that this was an exertion of executive power that undermined the Constitution. Said the head of the American Bar Association, “The threat to our Republic posed by presidential signing statements is both imminent and real unless immediate corrective action is taken.”4

August 2: “BLOGGER JAILED AFTER DEFYING COURT ORDERS.” A freelance blogger, Josh Wolf, 24, was jailed after he refused to turn over to investigators a video he had taken of a protest in San Francisco. Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, said that, although the jailing of American journalists was becoming more frequent, Mr. Wolf was the first American blogger she knew of to be imprisoned by federal authorities.5

August 2: “GOVERNMENT WINS ACCESS TO REPORTER PHONE RECORDS.” “A federal prosecutor may inspect the telephone records of two New York Times reporters in an effort to identify their confidential sources” according to The New York Times. A dissenting judge speculated that in the future, reporters would have to meet their sources illicitly, like drug dealers meeting contacts “in darkened doorways.”6

August 3: “STRONG-ARMING THE VOTE.” In Alabama, a federal judge took away powers over the election process from a Democratic official, Secretary of State Worley, and handed them over to a Republican governor: “[P]arty politics certainly appears to have been a driving force,” argued the Times. “The Justice Department’s request to shift Ms. Worley’s powers to Governor Riley is extraordinary.” When Worley sought redress in a court overseen by a federal judge aligned with the Bush administration, she wasn’t allowed her chosen lawyer. It was “a one-sided proceeding that felt a lot like a kangaroo court” cautioned the newspaper. She lost.7

Why am I writing this warning to you right now, in 2007? After all, we have had a congressional election giving control of the House and the Senate to Democrats. The new leaders are at work. Surely, Americans who have been worried about erosions of civil liberties, and the destruction of our system of checks and balances, can relax now: See, the system corrects itself. It is tempting to believe that the basic machinery of democracy still works fine and that any emergency threatening it has passed—or, worst case, can be corrected in the upcoming presidential election.

But the dangers are not gone; they are regrouping. In some ways they are rapidly gaining force. The big picture reveals that ten classic pressures—pressures that have been used in various times and places in the past to close down pluralistic societies—were set in motion by the Bush administration to close down our own open society. These pressures have never been put in place before in this way in this nation.

A breather is unearned; we can’t simply relax now. The laws that drive these pressures are still on the books. The people who have a vested interest in a less open society may be in a moment of formal political regrouping; but their funds are just as massive as before, their strategic thinking unchanged, and their strategy now is to regroup so that next time their majority will be permanent.8

All of us—Republicans, Democrats, Independents, American citizens—have little time to repeal the laws and roll back the forces that can bring about the end of the American system we have inherited from the Founders—a system that has protected our freedom for over 200 years.

I have written this warning because our country—the democracy our young patriots expect to inherit—is in the process of being altered forever. History has a great deal to teach us about what is happening right now—what has happened since 2001 and what could well unfold after the 2008 election. But fewer and fewer of us have read much about the history of the mid-twentieth century—or about the ways the Founders set up our freedoms to save us from the kinds of tyranny they knew could emerge in the future. High school students, college students, recent graduates, activists from all walks of life have a sense that something overwhelming has been going on. But they have lacked a primer to brief them on these themes and put the pieces together, so it is hard for them to know how urgent the situation is, let alone what they need to do.

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