Sheldon Wolin Quotes

Athens showed and the United States of the twenty-first century confirmed, imperialism undercuts democracy by furthering inequalities among its citizens.

Fascist and Nazi totalitarianism was made possible by the methodical transformation of passive citizens into ardent followers, uncomplaining patriots, willing executioners, and, finally, cannon fodder.

Modern Western empires are different from empires of old as well as the Soviet empire of yesterday in one important respect: they combine a democratic political system at home with despotism abroad. Even in the German case, as Sheldon Wolin reminds us, Nazi terror was not applied to the population generally. So long as democracy is a living reality at home, democratic empires are potentially self-correcting.

Antidemocracy, executive predominance, and elite rule are basic elements of inverted totalitarianism. Antidemocracy does not take the form of overt attacks upon the idea of government by the people. Instead, politically it means encouraging what I have earlier dubbed “civic demobilization,” conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy. The intense pace of work and the extended working day, combined with job insecurity, is a formula for political demobilization, for privatizing the citizenry. It works indirectly. Citizens are encouraged to distrust their government and politicians; to concentrate upon their own interests; to begrudge their taxes; and to exchange active involvement for symbolic gratifications of patriotism, collective self-righteousness, and military prowess. Above all, depoliticization is promoted through society’s being enveloped in an atmosphere of collective fear and of individual powerlessness: fear of terrorists, loss of jobs, the uncertainties of pension plans, soaring health costs, and rising educational expenses.

One of the striking effects of imperialism upon Athenian democracy was a hardening and increasing ruthlessness of the citizens.

democracy is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs. What is at stake in democratic politics is whether ordinary men and women can recognize that their concerns are best protected and cultivated under a regime whose actions are governed by principles of commonality, equality, and fairness, a regime in which taking part in politics becomes a way of staking out and sharing in a common life and its forms of self-fulfillment. Democracy is not about bowling together but about managing together those powers that immediately and significantly affect the lives and circumstances of others and one’s self.

The citizen is irrelevant. He or she is nothing more than a spectator, allowed to vote and then forgotten once the carnival of elections ends and corporations and their lobbyists get back to the business of ruling.

Almost every product promises to change your life: it will make you more beautiful, cleaner, more sexually alluring, and more successful. Born again, as it were. The messages contain promises about the future, unfailingly optimistic, exaggerating, miracle-promising—the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face. The virtual reality of the advertiser and the “good news” of the evangelist complement each other, a match made in heaven.

Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler did not just invent their personae; they literally built the organizations of their respective dictatorships. Each system was inseparable from its Führer, or Duce. Inverted totalitarianism follows an entirely different course: the leader is not the architect of the system but its product.

The victor will not be asked later whether he had spoken the truth or not. —Adolf Hitler

The Republican Party is not, as advertised, conservative but radically oligarchical. Programmatically it exists to advance corporate economic and political interests, and to protect and promote inequalities of opportunity and wealth.

The nationalistic, patriotic, and “originalist” ideology being hawked by Republicans promotes a myth of national unity, consensus, that obscures real cleavages in order to substitute synthetic ones (“the culture wars,” school vouchers, abortion) that leave power relationships unchallenged.

Cultural wars might seem an indication of strong political involvements. Actually they are a substitute. The notoriety they receive from the media and from politicians eager to take firm stands on nonsubstantive issues serves to distract attention and contribute to a cant politics of the inconsequential

Military and corporate structures are hierarchical, complex, and arcane. Both science and technology employ an esoteric language familiar mainly to the initiates, while military-speak is a language unto itself. Democracy, whose culture extols the common and shared, is alien to all of these practices and their modes of communication.

In matters of public policy and governmental decision making, lobbying demonstrates how little the actions of the electorate matter. The proliferation of Washington lobbyists, who now number in the thousands, is indicative of a radical change in the meaning of who and what are being represented, and indicative also of the final defeat of majority rule.

In the United States the rise of an extreme and highly ideological Right was driven by an unrelenting assault on liberals, portraying them as both “hating America” and hostile to business,

Yet the fact is that the most serious incursions into the political and civil liberties, for example, have come not from tyrannical majorities representative of the poor, the needy, or the struggling middle classes but from the representatives of elites, the Justice Department, legislators, judges, police, prosecutors, and media, which, with some honorable exceptions, play sycophant to the powerful. The

Plato’s justification of elite rule is set out in his famous Allegory of the Cave.11 It contrasts the unreality of the images by which the Many live and the true reality that only the Few can approximate.

Lying is more than deception; the liar wants the unreal to be accepted as actuality, so he sets about to establish as true what is not actually the case, not really real. A lie by a public authority is meant to be accepted by the public as an “official” truth concerning the “real world.” At bottom, lying is the expression of a will to power. My power is increased if you accept “a picture of the world which is a product of my will.

An antidemocratic party tries to prevent the formation of an active, participatory demos—it distrusts popular demonstrations—and is deeply antiegalitarian. An illiberal party, it considers “rules” less as restraints than as annoyances to be circumvented. It exploits the vulnerabilities of a two-party system with the aim of reshaping it into a more or less permanent undemocratic and illiberal system. The Republican Party is not, as advertised, conservative but radically oligarchical.

Political involvement is reduced to minimal, anodyne terms: “People everywhere want to say what they think; choose who will govern them; worship as they please; educate their children—male and female; own property; and enjoy the benefits of their labor.

While all empires aim at the exploitation of the peoples and territories they control, the United States is an empire of a novel kind. Unlike other empires it rarely rules directly or occupies foreign territory for long, although it may retain bases or “lily pads.” Its power is “projected” at irregular intervals over other societies rather than institutionalized in them. Its rule tends to be indirect, to take the form of “influence,” bribes, or “pressure.” Its principal concerns are military and economic (i.e., access to bases, markets, and oil).

An artful combination of propaganda flattered the mass, exploited its antipolitical sentiments, warned it of dangerous enemies foreign and domestic, and applied forms of intimidation to create a climate of fear and an insecure populace, one receptive to being led. The same citizenry, which democracy had created, proceeded to vote into power and then support movements openly pledged to destroy democracy and constitutionalism. Thus a democracy may fail and give way to antidemocracy that, in turn, supplies a populace—and a “democratic” postulate—congenial to a totalitarian regime.

Inverted totalitarianism follows a different route. Instead of pursuing unanimity, it encourages divisiveness; instead of rule by a single master race, it promotes predomination—that is, rule by diverse powers which have found it in their interests to combine while retaining their separate identities.

During the 1990s politicians of both parties educated the populace in antigovernment ideas. Democrats and Republicans alike then raced to see who could propose the most drastic cutbacks in social welfare programs. Government that had prided itself on serving the Many was dismantled in favor of “a leaner government.

Paradoxically, liberalism and its historical party, the Democrats, are conservative, not by choice but by virtue of the radical character of the Republicans. At the historical moment when the citizenry is strongly antipolitical and responds to immaterial “values,” the Democrats, in order to preserve a semblance of a political identity, are forced into a conservatism. Out of desperation rather than conviction, they struggle halfheartedly to preserve the remains of their past achievements of social welfare, public education, government regulation of the economy, racial equality, and the defense of trade unions and civil liberties.

The techniques developed for the marketplace have been adapted by political consultants and their media experts. The result has been the pollution of the ecology of politics by the inauthentic politics of misrepresentative government, claiming to be what it is not, compassionate and conservative, god-fearing and moral.

If democracy is about participating in self-government, its first requirement is a supportive culture, a complex of beliefs, values, and practices that nurture equality, cooperation, and freedom. A rarely discussed but crucial need of a self-governing society is that the members and those they elect to office tell the truth.

FDR and most of his closest advisers believed that the aim of the New Deal was to save the capitalist system from unreconstructed capitalists. Government regulation, instead of being the enemy of capitalism, was conceived as the means of saving it by promoting employment, decent wages, education, and a cushion against the cyclical swings endemic to capitalism.

In both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections Bush’s minions employed tactics that revealed a chain of corruption extending from local officials to the highest court, all with the intention of thwarting the popular will.25 The long-run consequences may prove more significant than the clouded elections: a popular distrust of the significance of elections themselves.

Following the invasion of April 2003 and the rapid defeat of an army that mostly disappeared, the United States and its allies found their forces, as well as the Iraqi population, under continuous attack by an enemy whose exact identity seemed elusive. While failing to link Saddam and terrorists, the United States succeeded in provoking the very terrorism that it had failed to find.

The vast majority of mankind remain imprisoned in the cave and incapable of grasping the true nature of things. Their best hope is to accept the power of those versed in the true philosophy. Plato darkly concludes: by nature the masses prefer an illusory reality, and so they may turn on the philosopher, making him a martyr to the truth. Thus the masses fear the truth, and their instinct is to cling to the unreal.12

By striking at welfare programs and unemployment benefits, blocking a national health care system, and making threatening gestures toward pension plans and social security, not only did this politics cripple social democracy, but in the process it undermined political democracy, the one political system that depends upon those who work. It might be recalled that the totalitarian regimes of Soviet Russia and Germany each instituted a strong network of social services; inverted totalitarianism seeks to dismantle or significantly reduce them, thereby throwing individuals back on their own resources, reducing their power. How far that power is being reduced can be gauged by the response of businesses to the lack of national health care and guarantees for pension systems. They have cut pensions and health care benefits while lavishing huge bonuses upon departing executives.

Straussian ideology outfits its adherents not with specific policies but rather with grandiose ambitions, like “democratizing” the Middle East. The achievement of bringing Straussism to bear upon political actualities belongs unquestionably to Harvey Mansfield, Jr. Mansfield has sought to demonstrate, not so much how, but why power and virtue should be combined so that politics can again be a great stage for heroic action and noble deeds.

the political significance of deregulation, of withdrawing public power and, in effect, renouncing it as an instrument for dealing with the political, social, and human consequences of a market economy. Deregulation changes the character of domestic politics. In effect, it declares that in a democracy the demos is to be denied the use of state power. It weakens the unaffluent constituencies that have a vital stake in preserving and expanding government social programs.

These unprecedented powers and the scales they can command appear as especially favorable to elitism, to the quick-witted and manipulative, but uncongenial to democratic values and deliberative practices. These new tempos make for strange bedfellows. Thus modern technology and communications represent the means of “hurrying time” in the sense that less time is required to achieve a desired end—for instance, a Wall Street speculator can communicate instantly with a Shanghai banker.

Mansfield depicts an ideal political world where the “executive” dominates the political system, not a political system understood in terms of checks and balances or responsibility to the citizenry, but one inspired in almost equal parts by an ideal of monarchy, a patriot king, and a dismissive contempt for democracy.28 Mansfield’s “prince” is not conceived either as an official whose principal responsibility is to execute the laws passed by the legislative power or as “the people’s tribune.

Hobbes reasoned that if individuals were protected in their interests and positively encouraged by the state to pursue them wholeheartedly, subject only to laws designed to safeguard them from the unlawful acts of others, then they would soon recognize that political participation was superfluous, expendable, not a rational choice. Hobbes’s crucial assumption was that absolute power absolutely depended not just on fear, but on passivity. Civic indifference was thus elevated to a form of rational virtue,

The other element characterizing his administration was a presidential entourage that included hard-nosed, ideological zealots and operatives from the corporate world and the public opinion industry. These agents were intent on expanding the powers of the president, reducing governmental oversight of the economy, overriding environmental safeguards,23 and dismantling welfare programs; simultaneously they expended vast sums in order to build up a military sufficiently intimidating to stare down an “evil empire,” causing it to collapse, exhausted, unable to compete,

In the face of declining political involvement by ordinary citizens, democracy becomes dangerously empty and not only receptive to antipolitical appeals to blind patriotism, fear, and demagoguery but comfortable with a political culture where lying, misrepresentation, and deception have become normal practice. It is only mildly hyperbolic to characterize lying as a crime against reality. Lying goes to the heart of the never-ending questions, what is the world really like? what is in fact happening? Accepting something as true is not the same as agreeing that it is.

The Reagan formula featured a president with little comprehension of, indeed little interest in, most of the major issues of the day but with an actor’s skill in assuming a symbolic role, that of quasi-monarch. That same formula also aimed at replacing the idea of an engaged and informed citizenry with that of an audience which, fearful of nuclear war and Soviet aggression, welcomed a leader who could be trusted to protect and reassure them of their virtue by retelling familiar myths about national greatness, piety, and generosity. It was demagoguery adapted to the cinematic age: he played the leader while “we the people” relapsed into a predemotic state.

The character of the Republican Party reflects a profound change: radicalism has shifted its location and meaning. Formerly it was associated with the Left and with the use of political power to lift the standard of living and life prospects of the lower classes, of those who were disadvantaged under current distributive principles. Radicalism is now the property of those who, quaintly, call themselves “conservatives” and are called such by media commentators. In fact, pseudoconservatism is in charge of and owns the radicalizing powers that are dramatically changing, in some cases revolutionizing, the conditions of human life, of economy, politics, foreign policy, education, and the prospects of the planet. It is hard to imagine any power more radical in its determination to undo the social gains of the past century.

Antidemocracy, executive predominance, and elite rule are basic elements of inverted totalitarianism. Antidemocracy does not take the form of overt attacks upon the idea of government by the people. Instead, politically it means encouraging what I have earlier dubbed “civic demobilization,” conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy. The intense pace of work and the extended working day, combined with job insecurity, is a formula for political demobilization, for privatizing the citizenry. It works indirectly. Citizens are encouraged to distrust their government and politicians; to concentrate upon their own interests; to begrudge their taxes; and to exchange active involvement for symbolic gratifications of patriotism, collective self-righteousness, and military prowess. Above all, depoliticization is promoted through society’s being enveloped in an atmosphere of collective fear and of individual powerlessness: fear of terrorists, loss of jobs, the uncertainties of pension plans, soaring health costs, and rising educational expenses.

Here it is necessary to bring to the fore a major and highly revealing difference, at least in the common sense pervading our historical conjuncture, between the idea of communism and that of democracy. It is sometimes said of communism that it was, in fact, a good idea on paper, but that the reality was a veritable catastrophe. One thereby highlights a discrepancy between political theory and historical reality by insisting on the fact that the idea of communism is perhaps quite simply not realizable. One sometimes adds for good measure that it was precisely faith in the communist idea—a faith that lies beyond the reach of the manifest evidence of concrete experience—that led to the totalitarian turn of actually existing communism. Yet on the other hand, when one speaks of democracy, this type of criticism is no longer operative. One frequently admits that contemporary institutions are not perfect, that actually existing democracy has insufficiencies, that there is still progress to be made, that there is a democratic deficit, or that democracy quite simply remains to come. But despite all the setbacks and all the limitations of contemporary practices, people shout themselves hoarse proclaiming that it is a good idea, or even that it is the sole and unique Idea. In one instance, reality takes precedence over the idea; in the other, the idea gains the upper hand over reality. At base, the same operation is at work, which is a comparison between an ideal system and its historical institution. Yet a revealing discrepancy manifests itself in the criteria of evaluation. In the case of communism, history is capable of refuting the idea, whereas for democracy the idea transcends historical reality and orients it toward something that is perhaps always to come. Whatever the case may be, it is impossible to call into question the democratic idea, for it hovers well above concrete practices. Towering over the real, democratic discourse thereby functions as a pseudo-science, which is to say a discourse that is beyond the reach of material refutations. Illustrating another surreptitious recuperation of vulgar Marxism, faith in the idea—this time democratic—can never be refuted by experience. If this sort of belief was what sustained the misdeeds of Soviet bureaucracy, should not one expect that the liberal recuperation would come full circle and that the icon of democracy would come to allow innumerable “anti-democratic abuses,” and even the development of what Sheldon Wolin has called “inverted totalitarianism”?

Un ejemplo muy influyente de eso fue el uso que Sheldon Wolin hizo de Kuhn para cuestionar la supuesta objetividad de la tendencia «conductista» en las ciencias políticas, una disciplina que se decía seguidora del mismo camino metodológico de las ciencias físicas. «Hasta cierto punto», dijo Wolin, lo que importa no es cuál es el verdadero paradigma, sino cuál es el que tiene que implantarse».

by the fact of his own election, that audacity does not appear to challenge the system of power which has brought the nation an endless war, bankruptcy, recession, and high unemployment. Change aplenty and all feeding the drift toward the system described in the pages that follow. July 2009 Preface As a preliminary I want to emphasize certain aspects of the approach taken in this volume in order to avoid possible misunderstandings. Although the concept of totalitarianism is central to what follows, my thesis is not that the current American political system is an inspired replica of Nazi Germany’s or George W. Bush of Hitler.1 References to Hitler’s Germany are introduced to remind the reader of the benchmarks in a system of power that was invasive abroad, justified preemptive war as a matter of official doctrine, and repressed all opposition at home—a system that was cruel and racist in principle and practice, deeply ideological, and openly bent on world domination. Those benchmarks are introduced to illuminate tendencies

The market was now the site of great powers: powers that determined prices, wages, patterns of consumption, the well-being or poverty of individuals, the fate of entire neighborhoods, cities, states, and nations. Several of the larger corporations possess wealth rivaling or exceeding that of many of the smaller nations of the world. The power of great corporations underwent further change toward the end of the twentieth century when corporate power conjoined with state power. The “market” ceased to be an entity distinct from, and contrasting with, state power, becoming its extension—and vice versa, becoming the “hidden hand” in “public” policies.

By periodically reminding subjects of the example of his own unchecked actions and triumphs, the sovereign authority could convert fear and terror from a threat posed by foreigners into one more veiled and redirected against its own citizenry: “By this authority given him by every particular man in the commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof he is enabled to form the wills of them all, to peace at home and mutual aid against their enemies abroad.

Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them but he does not see them. . . .

Far from meekly living in a drab condition of equality, the United States is a land where success is richly rewarded, so much so that it is at least as notable for its striking inequalities as for its professions of equal rights and equality before the law. Far from being passive Americans are renowned for their drive and inventiveness. In their high energy Americans more closely resemble Hobbes’s chilling portrait of a man who cannot remain content “with moderate power” because “he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.” If, as Hobbes claimed, there “is a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death,

The lesson of Hobbes and Tocqueville can be boiled down to a brief but chilling dictum: concentrated power, whether of a Leviathan, a benevolent despotism, or a superpower, is impossible without the support of a complicitous citizenry that willingly signs on to the covenant, or acquiesces, or clicks the “mute button.

As citizens are we collaborationists? To collaborate is to cooperate; to be complicit is to be an accomplice.

Freedom and democracy, far from posing a threat to “free enterprise,” become its instrument and its justification. And rather than serving as the means for furthering the political project of democratization, the state helps to inter it. vi

Unlike the Roman Empire, and its extended citizenship, Superpower has only customers and clients, dominated markets instead of incorporated provinces. The second element is the globalizing corporation. It brings to foreign countries economic goods and services as well as the softening power of cultural influences and products.2 As these elements take hold and develop, the “homeland” is transformed, from a self-governing, predominantly inwardlooking political society into a “home base” for international economic and military strategies.

At stake are the conditions that serve forms of power antithetical to democracy. The citizenry is reduced to an electorate whose potency consists of choosing among congressional candidates who, prior to campaigning, have demonstrated their “seriousness” by successfully soliciting a million dollars or more from wealthy donors. This rite of passage ensures that the candidate is beholden to corporate power before taking office. Not surprisingly, the candidate who raises the most money will likely be the winner. The vote count becomes the expression of the contributor.

Campaign contributions are a vital tool of political management. They create a pecking order that calibrates, in strictly quantitative and objective terms, whose interests have priority.19 The amount of corruption that regularly takes place before elections means that corruption is not an anomaly but an essential element in the functioning of managed democracy.

The strategy followed by privatization’s advocates is, first, to discredit welfare functions as “socialism” and then either to sell those functions to a private bidder or to privatize a particular program. A traditional governmental function, such as education, is in process of being redefined, from a promise to make education accessible to all to an investment opportunity for venture capital.12

The managerial character of capital assumes particular significance in light of the fact that no distinct, self-conscious conservative ideology existed in the United States before the mid-twentieth century. The major exception was the Civil War era’s Southern apologists for slavery. Modern conservatism was a post–World War II invention. And when capitalism and conservatism merged in the latter part of the twentieth century,

The two constitutions—one for expansion, the other for containment—form the two sides of inverted totalitarianism.

Sheldon S. Wolin,

Superpower” stands for the projection of power outwards. It is indeterminate, impatient with restraints, and careless of boundaries as it strives to develop the capability of imposing its will at a time and place of its own choosing. It represents the antithesis of constitutional power. “Inverted totalitarianism” projects power inwards. It is not derivative from “classic totalitarianism” of the types represented by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Stalinist Russia. Those regimes were powered by revolutionary movements whose aim was to capture, reconstitute, and monopolize the power of the state. The state was conceived as the main center of power, providing the leverage necessary for the mobilization and reconstruction of society

The corporate state, Wolin told me, is “legitimated by elections it controls.” To extinguish democracy, it rewrites and distorts laws and legislation that once protected democracy. Basic rights are, in essence, revoked by judicial and legislative fiat. Courts and legislative bodies, in the service of corporate power, reinterpret laws to strip them of their original meaning in order to strengthen corporate control and abolish corporate oversight.

They “normalized” war. And Wolin warned that, as in all empires, they eventually will be “eviscerated by their own expansionism.” There will never be a return to democracy, he cautioned, until the unchecked power of the militarists and corporatists is dramatically curtailed. A war state cannot be a democratic state.

Weber’s asking us to step back and say what kind of political order, and the values associated with it that it promotes, are we willing to really give a lot for, including sacrifice.

Clearly, these two developments—corporate dominance and a managed electorate—point to a certain political rigidity that is reflected in perhaps the most striking aspect of the present predicament: the absence of alternatives other than variations on the theme of economic orthodoxy.

This reflects a quiet but paradigmatic change: a shift in intellectual and ideological influence from academia to think tanks, the vast majority of which were conservative and dependent upon corporate sponsorship.

Inverted totalitarianism, in contrast, while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of “private” governance represented by the modern business corporation.

In contrast, inverted totalitarianism is only in part a state-centered phenomenon. Primarily it represents the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry.

He foresaw the moral and political decay that would see a culture entranced by celebrity and reality television elect Donald Trump to the presidency. He called on us, always, to resist.

As the film draws to a close, the camera becomes riveted on a seemingly endless parade, row on row, of uniformed Nazis, shoulder to shoulder, goose-stepping in the flickering torchlight. Even today it leaves an impression of iron determination, of power poised for conquest, of power resolute, mindless, its might wrapped in myth.

The result is that citizenship, or what remains of it, is practiced amidst a continuing state of worry. Hobbes had it right: when citizens are insecure and at the same time driven by competitive aspirations, they yearn for political stability rather than civic engagement, protection rather than political involvement.

Wolin wrote that even when faced with certain defeat, all of us are called to the “awful responsibility” of the fight for justice, equality and liberty.

But, he warned, should the population—steadily stripped of its most basic rights, including the right to privacy, and increasingly impoverished and bereft of hope—become restive, inverted totalitarianism will become as brutal and violent as past totalitarian states.

When myth begins to govern decision-makers in a world where ambiguity and stubborn facts abound, the result is a disconnect between the actors and reality. They convince themselves that the forces of darkness possess weapons of mass destruction and nuclear capabilities; that their own nation is privileged by a god who inspired the Founding Fathers and the writing of the nation’s constitution; and that a class structure of great and stubborn inequalities does not exist. A grim but joyous few see portents of a world that is living out “the last days.

One consequence of the pursuit of an expansive power imaginary is the blurring of the lines separating reality from fancy and truth telling from self-deception and lying. In its imaginary, power is not so much justified as sanctified, excused by the lofty ends it proclaims, ends that commonly are antithetical to the power legitimated by the constitutional imaginary.

For almost a half century the new war was defined in starkly Manichaean terms, as an epical struggle for the fate of the world between totalitarian dictatorship promoting atheism and communism, and the freedom-loving, God-fearing capitalist democracy of the United States and its Western European allies.

During the 1950s the ideological battles were centered on “loyalty,” “subversion,” “communism,” and civil rights. While politics of the decade seemed intense, it was also narrower: socioeconomic problems were subordinated to ideological battles in which anticommunist ideologues did their best to link liberalism, the main force behind socioeconomic reform, with communism.46

National defense was declared inseparable from a strong economy. The fixation upon mobilization and rearmament inspired the gradual disappearance from the national political agenda of the regulation and control of corporations.

The traditional understanding of democracy is that it is a system by which the citizenry delegates power to the government, and hence the latter has only such powers as are delegated to it. How, and when, did the people delegate “the greatest power in the world” to their government? If the people did not have that power in the first place, where does it come from? or has there been an acquisition of powers unanticipated in the founding document or in the theory of democracy, and are such powers inherently antagonistic to the spirit and logic of both constitutionalism and democracy?

Rather, in coining the term “inverted totalitarianism” I tried to find a name for a new type of political system, seemingly one driven by abstract totalizing powers, not by personal rule, one that succeeds by encouraging political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, that relies more on “private” media than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda reinforcing the official version of events.

He is the pliant favored child of privilege, of corporate connections, a construct of public relations wizards and of party propagandists.

For our purposes an inversion occurs when seemingly unrelated, even disparate starting points converge and reinforce each other.

An inversion is present when a system, such as a democracy, produces a number of significant actions ordinarily associated with its antithesis: for example, when the elected chief executive may imprison an accused without due process and sanction the use of torture while instructing the nation about the sanctity of the rule of law.

In classical totalitarian regimes it was assumed that total power demanded that the entirety of society’s institutions, practices, and beliefs had to be dictated from above and coordinated (gleichgeschaltet), that total power was achievable only through the control of everything from the top.

Managed democracy is centered on containing electoral politics; it is cool, even hostile toward social democracy beyond promoting literacy, job training, and other essentials for a society struggling to survive in the global economy. Managed democracy is democracy systematized. The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed.

Once the economy appeared to be recovering, a powerful public relations campaign was mounted. The New Deal was depicted as the creature of leftist forces bent on transforming the country’s economy.

The Cold War liberal even discovered the political utility of a civil religion. He was prepared to put aside the secularism and rationalism that, historically, had been among liberalism’s defining elements and to seek validation for liberal anticommunism abroad and at home by appealing to theology, most notably that of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism. Niebuhr was notoriously pessimistic, subscribing to a view that stressed the dark side of human nature.

Once the battle lines between communism and the “free society” were drawn, the economy became untouchable for purposes other than “strengthening” capitalism.

McCarthy was remarkable for a simple but matchless talent: he lied endlessly and spectacularly. No matter how often the lies were brought to light, he plunged on, exposing one after another alleged spy, traitor, red, or pinko, and in the process recklessly damaging or ending careers.

[F]ascism,” according to one prominent scholar of the subject, “is the product of democracies gone wrong, that had working constitutional systems which they gave up voluntarily.”14 To expand that interpretation: Hitler and Mussolini did not instantly “overthrow” parliamentary systems but, while cultivating a mass following, exploited popular elections to gain office and, once in power, proceeded to eviscerate the system of parliamentary governance, party competition, and the rule of law.15

A medieval aphorism summed up the traditional idea of the political, “that which touches all should be approved by all.

he “rules” with a kind of Gaullist grandeur, testing the constitutional limits of office, while pursuing a politics of “daring, sacrifice,” and “nobility.”30 Above all, ideally the executive stands not for programs but for “virtue.” That means, among other things, he is prepared to act in defiance of the popular will.

Superpower warfare is the real, if sardonic, version of class warfare: the less well-off fight wars instigated by the well-off, well-educated, and well-represented.

the rise of totalitarian corporate power, or what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin in Democracy Incorporated calls “inverted totalitarianism.” Inverted totalitarianism, which does not find its expression through a demagogue or charismatic leader, represents “the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry,” he writes.39 It is a dispersed, faceless power—“the rule of Nobody,” as Hannah Arendt wrote—that is expressed in the blank, terrifying anonymity of the corporate state.

Recall that an element common to most twentieth-century totalitarianisms, whether Fascist or Stalinist, was hostility toward the Left—in the United States the Left is assumed to consist solely of liberals, occasionally of “the left wing of the Democrat Party,” never of democrats.

The American political system was not born a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy. It was constructed by those who were either skeptical about democracy or hostile to it. Democratic advance proved to be slow, uphill, forever incomplete.

The roles Reagan played in his earlier career were an apprenticeship for his original contribution to American government, the creation of a “performance president” who fashioned illusion (a tough leader who had learned to throw a crisp salute) from inauthenticity (almost persuading himself that he had been present when inmates were freed from concentration camps).

Privatization of education signifies not an abstract transfer of public to private but a takeover of the means to reshape the minds of coming generations, perhaps to blend popular education and media culture so as to better manage democracy.

Unlike scientific truths, which are cumulative and frequently superseded, archaisms are fixed, impervious to evidence. What is the doctrine of “the framers’ original intent” and “constitutional originalism” but a variant of creationism and the denial of historical evolution

They have contributed importantly to the general distrust of governmental “intervention” in the economy and hostility to governmental social programs. Their intellectual genealogy can be traced directly to a particular text, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which appeared in 1776 at the outbreak of the American Revolution—a sign not to be lightly dismissed as a mere coincidence. It was written to oppose “mercantilist theories” that assigned to the state an active role in regulating and promoting economic activity