Give Me Liberty: Handbook for American Revolutions

By Naomi Wolf

Simon and Schuster (2008)

Book Review

This book is a call to ordinary citizens to address increasing repression by government and police (what she refers to as a “fascist shift”). It’s main focus is the protections supposedly guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

Overall I found the book disappointing, in part owing to Wolfe’s failure to acknowledge the significant body of scholarship into the mechanics of drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Declaration of Independence

1. She goes along with the popular misconception that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, which contradicts significant documentary evidence that it was written by a four-man committee chaired by Benjamin Franklin – who was responsible for most of its content. See Hidden History: The Clash of the Two Americas
2. She credits John Locke for Declaration of Independence language about inalienable rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. This is also erroneous. In his Second Estate, Locke defines natural rights to “Life, Liberty and Estate (ie “land” in modern language). Franklin’s committee changed this “inalienable” right to property to an “inalienable” right to Pursuit of Happiness comes from Commentaries on the Laws of England, published by William Blackstone in 1765. Presumably Franklin’s committee didn’t go along with Locke’s view that ordinary people had an inalienable right to land.

Constitution and Bill of Rights

1) Wolfe fails to note that the Constitutional Convention held their meetings in secret, with meeting notes and minutes to be kept secret for 50 years.

2) She talks about the genius of the Bill of Rights, failing to note that the majority of America’s enfranchised voters opposed ratification of the Constitution – that its framers were forced to add the Bill of Rights to persuade 9 of the 13 state legislatures to approve it. See Hidden History of the US Constitution

3) She omits any mention of the 2001 Patriot Act, and its violation of 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. The Patriot Act enables the FBI to seek more easily obtained “intelligence” warrants (in contrast to probable cause criminal warrants) to clandestinely break in and search people’s homes. It also allows the FBI to use intelligence warrants to demand a list of books you have checked out from public libraries.

While I generally support her call for a direct democracy revolution, I disagree with her belief that this can be accomplished via electoral reform as she suggests.

Nonetheless, there were some parts of the book I found really interesting. She quotes a section from John D Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage about Republican Senator Robert Taft speaking out against the Nuremberg trials on Constitutional grounds. The US Constitution prohibits ex-post facto prosecutions (prosecution for breaking laws that didn’t exist at the time of the alleged crime).

She also offers excellent advice to protestors about wearing bullet-proof vests (available from any sporting goods store), bike helmets or hard hats, work gloves and strong hiking boots to protect themselves against police batons and tasers.

I was also impressed by Wolfe’s participation (along with other pro-choice activists) in and daylong “deliberation” with pro-life activists. To her surprise, she found she had more in common with them (mainly a deep compassion for the suffering of women and children) than with most people outside the room. She also recognized for the first time that both pro-choice and pro-life lobbyists and “professional leaders” went much farther in their demands than the membership they supposedly represented.

I totally agree with two demands at the end of the book to 1) ban all electronic voting machines and 2) establish a centralized federal electoral commission to organize and fund all federal elections