Sheldon Wolin and 'Inverted Totalitarianism'. By Chris Hedges
Sheldon Wolin, our
most important contemporary political theorist, died Oct. 21 at the age of 93.
In his books “Democracy
Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted
Totalitarianism” and “Politics
and Vision,” a massive survey of Western political thought that his former
student Cornel West calls “magisterial,” Wolin lays bare the realities of our
bankrupt democracy, the causes behind the decline of American empire and the
rise of a new and terrifying configuration of corporate power he calls
“inverted totalitarianism.”
Wendy Brown,
a political science professor at UC Berkeley and another former student of
Wolin’s, said in an email to me: “Resisting the monopolies on left theory by
Marxism and on democratic theory by liberalism, Wolin developed a distinctive —
even distinctively American — analysis of the political present and of radical
democratic possibilities. He was especially prescient in theorizing the heavy
statism forging what we now call neoliberalism,
and in revealing the novel fusions of economic with political power that he
took to be poisoning democracy at its root.”
Wolin throughout his
scholarship charted the devolution of American democracy and in his last book,
“Democracy Incorporated,” details
our peculiar form of corporate totalitarianism. “One cannot point to
any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic,” he
writes in that book, “surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated
elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the
class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.”
Inverted
totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does
not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the
faceless anonymity of the corporate state. Our inverted totalitarianism pays
outward fealty to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil
liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the
iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, but it has
effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen
impotent.
“Unlike the Nazis, who made life uncertain for
the wealthy and privileged while providing social programs for the working
class and poor, inverted totalitarianism exploits the poor, reducing or
weakening health programs and social services, regimenting mass education for
an insecure workforce threatened by the importation of low-wage workers,” Wolin
writes. “Employment in a high-tech, volatile, and globalized economy is
normally as precarious as during an old-fashioned depression. 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.”
Inverted
totalitarianism, Wolin said when we met at his home in Salem, Ore., in 2014 to
film a nearly
three-hour interview, constantly “projects power upwards.” It is “the
antithesis of constitutional power.” It is designed to create instability to
keep a citizenry off balance and passive. He writes,
“Downsizing, reorganization, bubbles bursting, unions busted, quickly outdated
skills, and transfer of jobs abroad create not just fear but an economy of
fear, a system of control whose power feeds on uncertainty, yet a system that,
according to its analysts, is eminently rational.”
Inverted
totalitarianism also “perpetuates politics all the time,” Wolin said when we
spoke, “but a politics that is not political.” The endless and extravagant
election cycles, he said, are an example of politics without politics. “Instead of
participating in power,” he writes, “the virtual citizen is invited to have
‘opinions’: measurable responses to questions predesigned to elicit them.”.. read more:
