In the News

Naomi Wolf, author, political journalist and cofounder of DailyClout: ‘Trump didn’t do this. You did this. Your own inaction brought us exactly here’

The first 100 days of President Donald Trump: how has my life changed? First of all, there was the mourning period. Not for me, but for my fellow citizens. I was just mad. And I wasn’t even maddest at the Trump voters. I understood that the critical battle lines now are not left versus right, but the 1% neoliberal globalisers making off with all of the loot and disembowelling the middle class. So when I saw the campaign, I knew that in the US, just as in the UK, a candidate who said anything at all about people forgotten in the neoliberal race would have a solid chance.

No – I was mad at my own leftwing tribe. All of January, people on the left would confront me with dazed, grief-stricken expressions, as if they had just emerged from a multi-car pileup on a foggy highway. “How could this have happened? What will we do?” I couldn’t even bear to participate in those conversations. Finally I started explaining my rage to my closest friends.

I had been screaming about the possibility of this very moment for eight years, since I published a piece in the Guardian titled “Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps” and wrote a book based on it, called The End of America (2007). Under George Bush Jr, the left had been very receptive to the book’s message about how democracies are undermined by the classic tactics of would-be authoritarians.

But once Obama was elected – “one of ours” – I had to spend the next eight years yelling like a haunted Cassandra, to a room the left had abandoned. I had yelled myself hoarse for eight years under Obama about what it would mean for us to sit still while Obama sent drones in to take out US citizens in extrajudicial killings; what it would mean for us to sit still while he passed the 2012 National Defence Authorisation Act that let any president hold citizens for ever without charge or trial; what it would mean for us to sit still while he allowed NSA surveillance, allowed Guantánamo to stay open, and allowed hyped terrorism stories to hijack the constitution and turn the US into what finally even Robert F Kennedy Jr was calling a national security surveillance state.

For eight years, under Obama, my audiences were libertarian cowboys and red-state truckers; members of the military and police forces, who were appalled by what they were witnessing; and even conservatives, worried about our legacy of freedom. My usual audience, the shoppers at Whole Foods and drivers of hybrid cars, the educated left, my people, sat smugly at home while the very pillars of American democracy were being systematically chipped away. They were watching Downton Abbey and tending their heirloom tomato patches on weekends in the Hudson Valley, because everything was OK; yeah, he may OK drone strikes, but they can’t be that bad, since he was one of “ours” – a handsome, eloquent African American, a former community organiser – in the Oval Office. Seduced by the image of a charming black man on Air Force One who talked about “change” – a white woman in a pantsuit (though highly paid by Goldman Sachs) talking about “that highest, hardest glass ceiling” – the left slumbered while US democracy was undone brick by brick by brick.

So my feeling, the first inaugural month of 2017, as the left sat shiva, was: now you are worried? Now you want action? Now that the separation of powers is a joke and the constitution has collapsed around your ears, you point a finger at Trump and say, “Sudden Catastrophe?”

He didn’t do this. You did this.

Your own inaction and willingness to be seduced by two-bit identity politics labels, without actually doing the hard work of being patriots and defending the actual constitution – brought us exactly, exactly here.

I had sought for eight years to explain to my own people, to no avail, this: it is not that important who sits in the White House if the structures of democracy are strong. If the structures of democracy are strong – you can have a madman or madwoman for four years or even eight, and then he or she is gone, and the nation’s freedoms live.

But if you take an eight-year nap snoozing through a systematic dismantling of the structures of democracy – freedoms of speech; independence of the press; separation of powers; fourth amendment rights to privacy; and allow the suspension of due process under the guise of “fighting the war on terror” – hell yeah, some day you will wake up and there will be a crazy man or a strongman in the White House and then nothing you do or say will make a difference any more.

So yeah, Month One: I had nightly glasses of red wine to dull my rage at my own feeble delusional kind, and avoided the collective liberal “mourning conversation”.

Month Two: February was the month of OMG! Or else, WTF! I was part of it too, as Pres Trump’s new-to-us-all methods of exploding Twitter bombs, engaging in scary political theatre, committing daily acts of apparent, um, economic treason, and doing it all at a bewilderingly fast pace, demanded a learning curve from us all. It was a sense of chaos, destabilisation. OMG! He issued a travel ban. OMG! People are held en masse at Newark – New York City taxi drivers are boycotting the airport because of the ban! OMG, Uber is profiting on picking up those rides! OMG, now we have to boycott Uber! WTF! He is rounding up immigrants! OMG – he is separating families at the border! WTF – did Kellyanne Conway just promote Ivanka Trump’s clothing line? Isn’t that illegal? WTF! Are Chinese influence-mongers really lining up at Mar-a-Lago to ingratiate themselves with the president’s son-in-law? WTF – stripping the EPA of any budget to keep the air and water clean? OMG – did he just say he doesn’t believe in global warming? There was a stream of statelier edits from Congress, as the nation’s “WTF?” reaction evolved into: can he really do that? Ben Cardin, the Democratic senator for Maryland, proposed a Senate resolution that Pres Trump obey the emoluments clause of the constitution, which forbids bribery (Trump had refused to put his holdings in a blind trust). States began to pass laws, such as those protection sanctuary cities, to fight back against measures that Trump was taking federally. My day-to-day life was spent at our tech company, DailyClout, training a group of young people to write about legislation, Congress and statehouses, and putting out news stories, blogs and opinion pieces following these developments. DailyClout is incubated in a cool space in Manhattan called Civic Hall, which is funded by Microsoft, Google and Omidyar Networks, where we are surrounded by others – mostly idealistic millennials – who are also building exciting new tools for new kinds of civic engagement.

Month Three: in March, we all began to see a massive grassroots “resistance”. I personally don’t like that term, because you use that term to fight a completed fascist takeover; it gives democracy’s opponents too much power; right now we have a battered democracy on life support that needs defending from those who wish to pull the plug.

March was the month that dozens of new entities devoted to mobilising citizen action emerged from the collective shock. There were so many forms of new organising and funding: online candidate training seminars to Knight Foundation grants for new tools to get public and municipal records to people. Existing “civic tech” sites such as PopVox and Countable were joined in March by a slew of new tools and sites put together by this powerful wave of activism. Our collective missions got boosted with jet fuel by the huge burst in ordinary citizens wanting and needing to take action. New platforms ranged from 5 Calls – which came out of the experience of volunteers in the Clinton campaign and which sends you political action steps to take in five phone calls – to DailyAction, a similar service, which emerged out of Creative Majority, a Pac that supports Democratic candidates, and USAFacts, set up by Steve Ballmer, formerly of Microsoft, which compiles and crunches federal, state and local data from government sources. My own life mission didn’t reorient, since I had cofounded DailyClout’s platform in 2010. But use of our civic engagement tools skyrocketed. Our first product, called BillCam, lets you search a database of live state and federal bills, then pop a live bill into your blog or news articles; it lets you interact with the bills in real time and share them socially. We also created RSS feeds to stream live state and federal legislation right into the websites of local, regional and national news sites, and the websites of elected officials. In March we boosted our blog stream and videos covering new state and federal legislation, and started to report on what people could do locally to push forward their issues. Our sites on social media grew by triple and quadruple digits.

I presented these tools in March to news outlets and candidates and campaigns around the country – from Maine to Ohio to Oregon. I felt as if I was rediscovering my own nation, as the people in it were rediscovering belatedly how precious and fragile democracy was, and how much it depends on an informed citizenship. We were invited to demo it in a senate office; we visited Congress too, for our first exclusive interview, with Representative French Hill of Arkansas; I had never before been inside the Senate office building, or the Congress’s Longworth House Office Building. It was uplifting and moving to me. I also saw that elected officials worried about democracy, and wanting to empower real citizens, existed on both sides of the aisle.

We got our widget embedding live bills into news outlets totalling 160 million readers. In Q1 of 2017, 113,000 people searched BillCam to look at bills that would affect them – that they could now affect in turn. There are still shocking days – missiles to Syria, gunboats to North Korea – but we stay focused.

An amazing thing happened in March. The distinguished technologist George Polisner –who quit his senior-level role at Oracle in a public letter, covered widely in the US press, in which he demurred from Oracle’s CEO’s intention of “working with President Trump” – had started “ Civ.Works, a social platform, privacy protected so citizens can organise without fear of a corporate-buyout Big Brother. Polisner and DailyClout joined forces in March. We’re working to combine Civ.Works’ power of organising with the power of DailyClout’s streaming digital updates via RSS feeds, blogs and video, about local and federal legislation. No wonder I feel excited about the future.

Am I happy about the present? I feel incredibly energised, hopeful and certain that if enough citizens, in our democracy and worldwide, wake up (as they are) and are able to get hold of real tools to use democracy – and those best-case tools are now digital and link to social and digital media – we can indeed be in the midst of what another president called “a new birth of freedom”. Where I live, every day, on the frontlines of this digital revolution, there is every reason to feel in spired. That doesn’t mean I am “happy” about where the nation is – I am extremely scared, just as I am scared about the future of Europe in a parallel assault on its democracies.

But the biggest threat in the US or the UK isn’t one political party or candidate. It is people’s ignorance about their own democracies and their till-now lack of real-life tools to protect them. DailyClout UK and DailyClout EU are next on our list of planned launches: the UK legislative database is totally unsearchable, and the UK Parliament’s own website ends in dead links when you try to find actual legislation. The EU website tells you with difficulty what bills have passed but doesn’t show you what is coming up, when you might possibly take action – it offers a feed of pointless press releases instead. This lack of legislative transparency and usability had a lot to do, I believe, with the Brexit vote.

Months Four, Five and Six will see more and more of these tools – from dozens of T-shirt-clad bespectacled tech revolutionaries, coming online. Geeks are the new patriots, and code is the new “shot heard round the world”.