An impassioned call to action to Americans from all walks of life to restore the checks and balances and our time-honored protections against abuses of power outlined by our Founding Fathers.

Naomi Wolf’s most recent books include the New York Times bestsellers Vagina, The End of America, and Give Me Liberty, in addition to the landmark bestseller The Beauty Myth. A former Rhodes Scholar, she completed a doctorate in English language and literature from the University of Oxford in 2015, was a research fellow at Barnard College and the University of Oxford, and taught rhetoric at the George Washington University and Victorian studies at Stony Brook University. Wolf lives in the Hudson River Valley.

The End of America

By Naomi Wolf

Chelsea Green Publishing

Copyright © 2007 Naomi Wolf
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-933392-79-0

Chapter One

The FOUNDERS and the FRAGILITY of DEMOCRACY

But a constitution of government, once changed from freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever. John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams, July 7, 1775

To U. S. citizens in the year 2007, the very title of this book should be absurd. It is unthinkable to most of us that there could ever be an "end of America" in the metaphorical sense. But it is when memories are faint about coercive tactics that worked to control people in the past that people can be more easily controlled in the present.

When I say that the Bush administration has used tactics that echo certain tactics from the past, I am making a conservative argument. You will have to look at the echoes I note and decide for yourself what to make of them. We know that Karl Rove seeks the goal of a permanent majority. A permanent majority is easier to solidify for the future if democracy's traditional challenges to power are weakened or silenced.

I won't insult Republicans by calling this goal a "permanent Republican majority," although Rove calls it by that name. Most Americans-Republican, Independent, or Democrat-are patriots and believe in the Founders' vision. I have to assume that one reason for this assault on democracy is to secure the "permanent majority" status of a far smaller group, or rather of several smaller groups, driven by motives of power and money: the great power represented by access to an executive that is driving an agenda unthreatened by the people's will, and the vast amount of money that has begun to flow from a condition of uninterrupted domestic surveillance and open-ended foreign hostilities.

Authoritarianism, Fascism, Totalitarianism: Some Definitions

Are any of these terms legitimate for this discussion?

I have made a deliberate choice in using the terms fascist tactics and fascist shift when I describe some events in America now. I stand by my choice. I am not being heated or even rhetorical; I am being technical.

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.

Totalitarianism, of course, is the blackest state. Mussolini adopted the term totalitarian to describe his own regime. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt writes of the post-World War I era and the "undermining of parliamentary government," succeeded by "all sorts of new tyrannies, Fascist and semi-Fascist, one-party and military dictatorships," and culminating at last in "the seemingly firm establishment of totalitarian governments resting on mass support" in Russia and in Germany.

Arendt sees Germany and Italy as variations on the same model of totalitarianism. She defines totalitarianism as a mass movement with a leadership that requires "total domination of the individual." A totalitarian leader, in her view, faces no opposition-it has gone quiet-and he can unleash terror without himself being afraid.

Fascism is a word whose definition political scientists (and even fascists themselves) do not entirely agree upon. Though Mussolini coined this term (from the dual rods, or fasces, carried by officials in ancient Rome), some Nazis did not see the Italians as being tough enough to qualify as true fascists. Umberto Eco wrote of latter-day "Ur-Fascists" and other critics have described "neo-Fascists" or "sub-fascists" when they refer to more recent violent dictatorships that use state terror and other kinds of control to subordinate the population and crush democratic impulses-notably in Latin America. The Columbia Encyclopedia defines fascism as a "philosophy of government that glorifies the state and nation and assigns to the state control over every aspect of national life.... Its essentially vague and emotional nature facilitates the development of unique national varieties, whose leaders often deny indignantly that they are fascists at all."

Throughout this letter of warning, I will use the term "a fascist shift." It is a wording that describes a process. Both Italian and German fascisms came to power legally and incrementally in functioning democracies; both used legislation, cultural pressure, and baseless imprisonment and torture, progressively to consolidate power. Both directed state terror to subordinate and control the individual, whether the individual supported the regime inwardly or not. Both were rabidly antidemocratic, not as a side sentiment but as the basis of their ideologies; and yet both aggressively used the law to pervert and subvert the law.

This process is what I mean when I refer to "fascist shift." Two aspects of most definitions of fascism are relevant here: Fascist refers to a militaristic system that is opposed to democracy and seeks, ideologically and practically, to crush it. And fascism uses state terror against the individual to do this. When I talk about a "fascist shift" in America, I am talking about an antidemocratic ideology that uses the threat of violence against the individual in order to subdue the institutions of civil society, so that they in turn can be subordinated to the power of the state.

This fascist shift has proven compact, effective, and exportable, long after these two regimes met their end in World War II. If it is too emotionally overwhelming to think of Italy and Germany, you can consider the more recent fates of Indonesia, Nicaragua, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Guatemala, all of which suffered widespread state terror and the activation of many of the ten steps that I describe, as leaders sought to subdue the people. A fascist shift brings about a violent dictatorship in a context where democracy could have taken the nation toward freedom.

Some critics responding to an essay I wrote laying out the spine of this argument were more comfortable with the term authoritarian than with fascist. A number of U.S. writers have used "authoritarian" to describe the Bush administration. Authoritarian, in contrast-the term Joe Conason uses, for example, in his prescient book It Can Happen Here-means that one branch of government has seized power from the others. (The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines it as "favouring, encouraging, or enforcing strict obedience to authority, as opposed to individual freedom....") Conason's argument is entirely right for where we are at this point: in July of 2007, America actually already has an executive who is disregarding the restraints of the two other branches of government.

But authoritarianism has many guises, and some are relatively livable for most people. For instance, you can have a military leadership in an authoritarian system, but you can have fairly independent courts and a fairly independent press. Indeed, people can see authoritarianism as rather attractive in what they understand to be a time of national emergency. Authoritarianism can be downright cozy compared to some alternatives. The grave danger in America is...