Naomi Wolf: "Bush made his white constituency feel good about themselves, but no longer. Citizens are rediscovering democracy "
I do feel hopeful: everywhere I go, I hear disgust at our long drunken lurch through recent history give way to a renewed interest among ordinary people in activism, in justice, in what we used to understand as citizenship. I am less concerned about whether this results in a Democratic or Republican victory at mid-term elections than I am in whether we get to be a democracy again.
I am seeing Americans across party lines look again at what made us for so long, a moral force in the world - our judiciary, our until recently free press, our almost-retired belief in the equality of all - and think, yes, that is who we are. That is what makes us able to face ourselves in the mirror of news events. That is what made the US great, when it was great - not armies, not penal colonies, not a licence to terrify the world.
Bush will never recover his swagger in our eyes: he was our dealer. What remains to be seen is whether we will turn again to the next good drug to come along, with the next charismatic pusher - or whether Katrina's real legacy will lead us to do the hard work of reclaiming a civil society rooted in reality. My bet is on the latter.
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