Naomi Wolf: 'Give Me Liberty'

'Get these people arrested' - Naomi Wolf



Naomi Wolf asks: Can't we be revolutionaries? We celebrate revolution every July 4th, don’t we?

...BuzzFlash: I would say to illustrate the power of demonstrations, I was very heartened that approximately 1500 women assembled a couple of weeks ago in Anchorage to reject Palin. It was started by a couple of Anchorage women having a cup of coffee and deciding that they needed to show the rest of America that many Alaskan women object to the policies of Governor Palin. It showed that a couple of ordinary Americans can have a national impact through a spontaneous protest.

Naomi Wolf: But we need to take it a step further. There is a war being conducted against American citizens. You and I talked about this a year ago in terms of my last book. We need to get ahead of the curve with outlets like BuzzFlash. But this war has escalated dramatically. Protesters and activists are being harassed and arrested and placed under surveillance. Activists are talking about their e-mail and mail being disrupted.

It’s a logical next step, once the technology has been put into place for spying on terrorists, that it will be used on activists.

At a time when the U.S. government will take over a giant chunk of the U.S. economy, you have to understand that it is a very serious and dangerous time.

And while protests like the kind in Alaska are heartening, it is important to take to the streets. Civil disobedience like the kind taken by Dr. Martin Luther King is necessary now because people are being marginalized. It is what will give people leverage.

That is why at the end of my book, there is a section on protests. Martin Luther King went to jail for disregarding a restrictive permit system. I am urging people to use all the powers that they have.

BuzzFlash: We should point out that this is a handbook. You do articulate core principles of democracy, but the largest part of the book is on how to become a “Minuteman” or “Minutewoman” in 2008. It is important to restate that protests from a dedicated group of people for a righteous cause can have an impact. We only need to look back, as you mentioned, to the Civil Rights movement to see how dramatically people who put themselves on the line in protest changed the nation.

Naomi Wolf: You’re exactly right. You’re looking at the building blocks of oppression under this administration, and the thing about tyrants is that they don’t want to relinquish power. If people are intimidated by the police suppression, silence will lead to more and more encroachment and harassment.

I am really excited by efforts to ramp up the democracy memory by the efforts I am seeing on my book tour to form spontaneous groups to defend liberty, and there are 55 action steps at the back of the book to assist their efforts. At this point, it is going to take some radical actions to launch a movement to push back. As you and I have said before, there is a rampant disregard of the rule of law by those in authority. There are more and more dangerous abuses of power.

It is going to be a very dark future if we don’t rise up. This is about what we have to cherish as Americans...


The Battle Plan

...But historians are also now documenting the stories of how in the pre-Revolutionary years, ordinary people -- farmers, free and enslaved Africans, washer-women, butchers, printers, apprentices, carpenters, penniless soldiers, artisans, wheelwrights, teachers, indentured servants -- were rising up against the king's representatives, debating the nature of liberty, fighting the war and following the warriors to support them, insisting on expanding the franchise, demanding the right to vote, compelling the more aristocratic leaders of the community to include them in deliberations about the nature of the state constitutions, and requiring transparency and accountability in the legislative process. Even enslaved Africans, those Americans most silenced by history, were not only debating in their own communities the implications or the ideas of God-given liberty that the white colonists were debating; they were also taking up arms against George III's men in hopes that the new republic would emancipate them. Some were petitioning state legislatures for their freedom; and others were even successfully bringing lawsuits against their owners, arguing in court for their inalienable rights as human beings. This is the revolutionary spirit that we must claim again for ourselves -- fast -- if we are to save the country.

When Abraham Lincoln said that our nation was "conceived in Liberty" he was not simply phrasemaking; our nation was literally "conceived" by Enlightenment ideas that were becoming more and more current, waking up greater and greater numbers of ordinary people, and finally bearing on our own founders, known and unknown, with ever-stronger pressure.

Key Enlightenment beliefs of the colonial era are these: human beings are perfectible; the right structures of society, at the heart of which is a representational government whose power derives from the consent of the governed, facilitate this continual evolution; reason is the means by which ordinary people can successfully rule themselves and attain liberty; the right to liberty is universal, God given, and part of a natural cosmic order, or "natural law"; as more and more people around the world claim their God-given right to liberty, tyranny and oppression will be pushed aside. It is worth reminding ourselves of these founding ideas at a time when they are under sustained attack.

The core ideals, the essence, of what the founders imperfectly glimpsed, are perfect. I am often asked how I can so champion the writing and accomplishments of the better-known founders. Most of them were, of course, propertied, white, and male. Critics on the left often point out their flaws in relation to the very ideals they put forward. John Adams was never comfortable with true citizen democracy. "Jefferson's writings about race reveal that he saw Africans as innately deficient in humanity and culture." When a male slave escaped from Benjamin Franklin in England, Franklin sold him back into slavery.

But the essence of the idea of liberty and equality that they codified -- an idea that was being debated and developed by men and women, black and white, of all classes in the pre-Revolutionary generation -- went further than such an idea had ever gone before. It is humanity's most radical blueprint for transformation.

More important, the idea itself carries within it the moral power to correct the contradictions in its execution that were obvious from the very birth of the new nation. An enslaved woman, Mum Bett, who became a housekeeper for the Sedgwick family of Massachussetts, successfully sued for her own emancipation using the language of the Declaration of Independence; decades later a slave, Dred Scott, argued that he was "entitled to his freedom" as a citizen and a resident of a free state. The first suffragists at the Seneca Falls Convention, intent on securing equal rights for women, used the framework of the Declaration of Independence to advance their cause. New democracies in developing nations around the world draw on our founding documents and government structure to ground their own hopes for freedom. The human beings at the helm of the new nation, whatever their limitations, were truly revolutionary. The theory of liberty born in that era, the seed of the idea, was, as I say, perfect. We should not look to other revolutions to inspire us; nothing is more transformative than our own revolution. We must neither oversentimentalize it, as the right tends to do, nor disdain it, as the left tends to do; rather we must reclaim it.

The stories I read and reread of the "spirit of 1776" led me with new faith to these conclusions: We are not to wait for others to lead. You and I are meant to take back the founders' mandate, and you and I are meant to lead. You and I must protest, you and I must confront our representatives, you and I must run for office, you and I must write the opeds, you and I must take over the battle. The founders -- the unknown as well as the well-known Americans who "conceived" the nation in liberty -- did not intend for us to delegate worrying about the Constitution to a cadre of constitutional scholars, or to leave debate to a class of professional pundits, or to leave the job of fighting for liberty to a caste of politicians. They meant for us to defend the Constitution, for us to debate the issues of the day, and for us to rise up against tyranny: the American who delivers the mail; the American who teaches our children; ordinary people...


The end of America