Naomi Wolf has an article in today’s Washington Post tied to her new book, The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. The essay is actually a lot less leftist than the book. She deplores the civic illiteracy among young people that leaves them feeling “depressed, cynical and powerless.” And she blames influences on both left and right: the Bush administration’s portrayal of “freedom and checks and balances as threats to national security,” of course, and also the No Child Left Behind Act’s emphasis on math and reading rather than civics and history. But also, she notes, “When New Left activists of the 1960s started the antiwar and free speech student movements, they didn’t get their intellectual framework from Montesquieu or Thomas Paine: They looked to Marx, Lenin and Mao.”

Perhaps her most interesting claim is this:

Teenagers and young adults often have no clue why the United States is different from, say, Egypt or Russia; they have little idea what liberty is.

Few young Americans understand that the Second Amendment keeps their homes safe from the kind of government intrusion that other citizens suffer around the world; few realize that “due process” means that they can’t be locked up in a dungeon by the state and left to languish indefinitely.

I rather suspect that this lefty writer who has written a whole book and launched an organization to “protect and defend the Constitution from assault by any President” meant to cite the Fourth Amendment, not the Second Amendment.

But maybe I’m being cynical. Maybe Naomi Wolf knows full well that it is the Second Amendment that “keeps [our] homes safe from the kind of government intrusion that other citizens suffer around the world.” The Fourth Amendment may promise “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” But without the Second Amendment, and the well-armed citizenry it protects, how secure would our rights be? Certainly there’s no Second Amendment in Egypt or Russia, the countries she notes in contrast. The Soviet Constitution guaranteed its citizens freedom from search and seizure. But it did not guarantee the right to keep and bear arms.

So welcome, Naomi Wolf. And as the effort moves forward to protect our Fourth Amendment rights and to get Congress to remember its Article I powers, remember that there’s also an effort currently underway in the Supreme Court to protect our Second Amendment rights.