Introduction
The summer before last, I
traveled across the country talking about threats to our liberty. I
spoke and listened to groups of Americans from all walks of life. They
told me new and always harsher stories of state coercion.
What I
had called a "fascist shift" in the United States, projections I had
warned about as worst-case scenarios, was now surpassing my
imagination: in 2008, thousands of terrified, shackled illegal
immigrants were rounded up in the mass arrests which always
characterize a closing society;1 news emerged that the 9/11 report had
been based on evidence derived from the testimonies of prisoners who
had been tortured -- and the tapes that documented their torture were
missing -- leading the commissioners of the report publicly to disavow
their own findings;2 the Associated Press reported that the torture of
prisoners in U.S.-held facilities had not been the work of "a few bad
apples" but had been directed out of the White House;3 the TSA "watch
list," which had contained 45,000 names when I wrote my last book,
ballooned to 755,000 names and 20,000 were being added every month;4
Scott McClellan confirmed that the drive to war in Iraq had been based
on administration lies;5 HR 1955, legislation that would criminalize
certain kinds of political thought and speech, passed the House and
made it to the Senate;6 Blackwater, a violent paramilitary force not
answerable to the people, established presences in Illinois and North
Carolina and sought to get into border patrol activity in San Diego.7
The
White House has established, no matter who leads the nation in the
future, U.S. government spying on the emails and phone calls of
Americans -- a permanent violation of the Constitution's Fourth
Amendment.8 The last step of the ten steps to a closed society is the
subversion of the rule of law. That is happening now. What critics have
called a "paper coup" has already taken place.
Yes, the situation
is dire. But history shows that when an army of citizens, supported by
even a vestige of civil society, believes in liberty -- in the
psychological space that is "America" -- no power on earth can
ultimately suppress them.
Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that
there are two kinds of states -- "fear societies" and "free
societies."9 Understood in this light, "America" -- the state of
freedom that is under attack -- is first of all a place in the mind.
That is what we must regain now to fight back.
The two societies
make up two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of
oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and fearful of inquiry. It is
mistrustful of the self and forced to trust external authority. It is
premised on a dearth of self-respect. It is cramped. People around the
world understand that this kind of inner experience is as toxic an
environment as is a polluted waterway they are forced to drink from; it
is as insufficient a space as being compelled to sleep in a one-room
hut with seven other bodies on the floor.
In contrast, the
consciousness of freedom -- the psychology of freedom that is "America"
-- is one of expansiveness, trust of the self, and hope. It is a
consciousness of limitless inquiry. "Everything," wrote Denis Diderot,
who influenced, via Thomas Jefferson, the Revolutionary generation,
"must be examined, everything must be shaken up, without exception and
without circumspection."10 Jefferson wrote that American universities
are "based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we
are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate
any error so long as reason is left free to combat it."11 Since this
state of mind is self-trusting, it builds up in a citizen a wealth of
self-respect. "Your own reason," wrote Jefferson to his nephew, "is the
only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable not for the
rightness but the uprightness of the decision."12
After my
cross-country journey, I realized that I needed to go back and read
about the original Revolutionaries of our nation. I realized in a new
way from them that liberty is not a set of laws or a system of
government; it is not a nation or a species of patriotism. Liberty is a
state of mind before it is anything else. You can have a nation of
wealth and power, but without this state of mind -- this psychological
"America" -- you are living in a deadening consciousness; with this
state of mind, you can be in a darkened cell waiting for your torturer
to arrive and yet inhabit a chainless space as wide as the sky.
"America,"
too, is a state of mind. "Being an American" is a set of attitudes and
actions, not a nationality or a posture of reflexive loyalty. This
tribe of true "Americans" consists of people who have crossed a
personal Rubicon of a specific kind and can no longer be satisfied with
anything less than absolute liberty.
This state of mind, I
learned, has no national boundaries. The Tibetans, who, as I write
this, are marching in the face of Chinese soldiers, are acting like
members of this tribe; so did the Pakistani lawyers who recently faced
down house arrest and tear gas in their suits and judicial robes.
Nathan Hale, Patrick Henry, and Ida B. Wells, who risked their lives
for liberty, acted like "Americans." When the crusading journalist Anna
Politkovskaya insisted on reporting on war crimes in Chechnya, even
though her informing her fellow citizens led -- as she knew it well
could -- to her being gunned down on her doorstep as she went home to
her fourteen-year-old daughter, she was acting like an American.13 When
three JAG lawyers refused to sell out their detainee clients, they were
being "Americans." When Vietnam vet David Antoon risked his career to
speak out in favor of the Constitution's separation of church and
state, he was being an "American." When journalist Josh Wolf went to
jail rather than reveal a source, he was being an "American" too.
Always, everywhere, the members of this tribe are fundamentally the
same, in spite of the great deal that may divide them in terms of
clothing and religion, language and culture. But when we quietly go
about our business as our rights are plundered, when we yield to
passivity and switch on the Wii and hand over our power to a leadership
class that has no interest in our voice, we are not acting like true
Americans. Indeed, at those moments we are essentially giving up our
citizenship.
The notion that "American-ness" is a state of mind
-- a rigorous psychodynamic process or a continued personal challenge,
rather than a static point on a map or an impressive display in a
Fourth of July parade -- is not new. But we are so used to being raised
on a rhetoric of cheap patriotism -- the kind that you get to tune in
to in a feel-good way just because you were lucky enough to have been
born here and can then pretty much forget about -- that this definition
seems positively exotic. The founders understood "American-ness" in
this way, though, not at all in our way.
And today, I learned as
I traveled, we are very far from experiencing this connection to our
source. Many of us feel ourselves clouded within, cramped, baffled
obscurely from without, not in alignment with the electric source that
is liberty. So it is easy for us to rationalize always further and more
aggressive cramping and clouding; is the government spying on us?
Well...Okay...So now the telecommunications companies are asking for
retroactive immunity for their spying on us? Well...Okay...Once a
certain threshold of passivity has been crossed, it becomes easier and
easier, as Benjamin Franklin warned, to trade liberty for a false
security -- and deserve neither.
What struck me on my journey was
how powerless so many Americans felt to make change. Many citizens I
heard from felt more hopeless than did citizens of some of the poorest
and youngest democracies on the planet. Others were angrier than ever
and were speaking up and acting up with fervor. I felt that all of us
-- the hopeless and the hopeful -- needed to reconnect to our mentors,
the founders, and to remind ourselves of the blueprint for freedom they
meant us to inherit. I wrote this handbook with the faith that if
Americans take personal ownership of the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights, they can push back any darkness. The first two sections of this
refresher guide to our liberties recall what America is supposed to be;
the last third is a practical how-to for citizen leadership for a new
American Revolution.
There are concrete laws we must pass to
restore liberty and actions we must take to safeguard it. You will find
them in the last third of this handbook. But more crucial than any list
of laws or actions is our own need to rediscover our role as American
revolutionaries and to reclaim the "America" in ourselves -- in our
consciousness as free men and women.
Do we have the right to see
ourselves this way? Absolutely. Many histories of our nation's founding
focus on a small group, "a band of brothers" or "the Founding Fathers"
-- the handful of illustrious men whose names we all know. This tight
focus tends to reinforce the idea that we are the lucky recipients of
the American gift of liberty and of the republic, not ourselves its
stewards, crafters, and defenders. It prepares us to think of ourselves
as the led, not as the leaders.
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.14
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 t...
