The author examines other dictatorships around the world, especially those that grew out of democracy like fascist Italy and Nazi Germany - not implying that our country was Nazi Germany, but just looking at the ways in which democracy can be subverted in a very short period of time. Nearly all, if not all, of those tools still remain in place, and can be picked up at any time by a president who lacks integrity and desires absolute power. The author does a good job of laying that out, of examining the various tools that Congress and the people willingly handed over to a president who has been gaining power for at least a century. Many of us weren't sure what it all meant. Most of this happened unnoticed, some of it even in the middle of the night, and only such as were political junkies even knew it happened. It would be easy to dismiss that idea when the Obama years seemed so much more democratic (but were they?), but now that we are entering the countdown to 2020 with another budding fascist in the White House, it is frightening to look back on the things Congress was doing to give away their power to the president, and in some cases, power that no one is supposed to have because the Constitution forbids it. The book was written during the closing years of the Bush 43 administration, amid the writer's concern that we were moving toward fascism. Some of the errors here were so blatant a third grader could have spotted them. I'm beginning to realize that Chelsea Green does not do a good job of editing books. Okay, I'll get it out of the way right up front. It combines a wide host of partners, united in their belief that when it comes to the Constitution, we are neither conservative nor liberal we are all Americans. The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot is the centerpiece to the American Freedom Agenda, a nonpartisan organization of which Naomi Wolf is a founding board member and which asks all Americans to support a "Freedom Pledge" to support only candidates who favor restoring the pillars of American liberty. Wolf outlines in this citizen call to action-which is reminiscent of Thomas Paine's revered Common Sense-the real threats to our civil liberties that exist and explains how by working together we can stop the growing threat. Naomi Wolf's latest work, The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, exposes how the escalation of executive power has eroded these core values and systems, limiting Congress's ability to make laws and our courts' power to interpret them-a scenario that our Founding Fathers foresaw and warned against. Our Constitution was built around these principles, protecting civil liberties and developing a careful system of checks and balances that protected our freedom from tyranny. The Founding Fathers believed that the proper goal of the State was to make men and women free to develop their faculties and to pursue virtue and wisdom.
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