Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism - New Edition

by Sheldon S. Wolin, Chris Hedges (Introduction)

Democracy is struggling in America--by now this statement is almost clich�. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"?


Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level.



Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come. Now with a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, Democracy Incorporated remains an essential work for understanding the state of democracy in America.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, Economics, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Sheldon Sanford Wolin was an American political theorist and writer on contemporary politics. A political theorist for fifty years, Wolin became Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, where he taught from 1973 to 1987.

Reviews

[notgettingenough]

This thread is continued here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...


7 March 2014. People are campaigning against Amazon for the many ruinous ways they affect our community. http://www.thebookseller.com/news/liv...

Updated 18 August 2013 I don't know why this is hard to understand, but when you are buying from Amazon, you are making a statement that you think people should exist like this:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672939/t...

instead of like this:

http://www.thisissurreytoday.co.uk/He...

Not only are you happy to treat people like that, but you are happy with the rest of the consequences, which will come back to haunt you.


Updated 4 August 2013: I get asked how to avoid buying from Amazon: http://pioneerbooks.wordpress.com/201...

Update 28 July 2013: Wow. I received a personal email from Amazon today, some guy called Otis. I thought I should share it with you:

On behalf of the Goodreads team, I want to say thank you. You’re in the top 1% of reviewers on Goodreads! Your many thoughtful book reviews help make us a vibrant place for book lovers.
And our community has been growing! We now number more than 20 million members on Goodreads.
Every day readers from all over the world are connecting over a love of books. And our 25 million reviews – including yours – are a big part of that conversation.
Thank you for your support of Goodreads, and keep reading! I’m looking forward to seeing what you think of your next book!
--Otis

It ends with an exhortation to share this mail on facebook and twitter.

So, I just wanted to say hey, Otis, I'm glad you're lovin' my thoughtful reviews and hanging out for the next one. You must be some busy dude beavering away, reading all those reviews. I'm so happy that my community is now full of bots and people who have no books to mention whatsoever but want to shag me. It's great. Communities should be huge. MEGA huge. What would be the point of goodreads if it were just a small community of people who love books. And yeah, sure thing, I'll join facebook and twitter right now to continue to do your work for you. No wonder Amazon so wanted to buy you, goodreads is quite the superior business model, getting all those people to do all your work for zero pay.

By the way, the usual spurious use of statistics. What the fuck does being in the top 1% of reviewers mean? Not that I want to know, I just want to point out that it is a piece of bullshit.

Update 19 July 2013: One of the things I find fascinating is to discover that there are people on goodreads who think it is perfectly dandy that Amazon doesn't pay the tax it should. I guess in a way they could argue they are happy to pay higher tax rates themselves in order to support this idea. Unfortunately, it is only big companies, and especially multinationals who are able to implement this approach. So, it isn't just the amazon supporters who are paying the extra tax to make up for what Amazon avoids. It is also people who do not wish to support Amazon. One of the points that has been made lately is that small business have no way of avoiding tax. Booksellers have been discussing the idea of becoming a huge corporate body in order to avail themselves of the possibilities, but the fact is who wants to do that? We live in a society. Tax is part of that. It seems to me it is sociopathic to try to avoid this part of social life.

In the UK people have been trying to do something from the bottom up to enforce the payment of tax by Amazon. This has led to a petition signed by 170,000 people presented to parliament. The following is part of the speech that accompanied it.

Chris White (Warwick and Leamington) (Con):....

However, this avoidance is not without its victims. It is businesses such as Warwick Books in my constituency and ordinary people who pick up the bill. Through this creative tax planning, the burden of taxation is shifted on to individuals and businesses that do not have the resources to spend on reducing their tax bill and on hiring expensive accountants to find loopholes in tax law.

I understand that there are some who believe that businesses have a moral duty to pay only the absolute minimum of tax that they are legally obliged to pay, but I cannot believe that that is the case. Businesses, even multinational companies, are still members of society. They benefit from a strong education system, a functioning health care system, decent roads, a transport infrastructure, the police and our armed forces. The reason we raise taxes is in order to produce public goods. We can argue whether the Government spend that money wisely, or whether the Government should provide this or that service, but that is the basic principle behind taxation.

Businesses have a moral responsibility to play a full part in our society, and structuring their businesses in order to avoid taxation and to make it harder for tax authorities to monitor their business is not fulfilling that responsibility. Voluntarily paying tax is not a long-term solution to this issue. What is needed is for multinational companies to take responsibility for their actions and respect the fact that they need to structure their businesses to reflect the way they are operated, rather than merely to avoid that taxation.....

Many of these companies depend on individuals and businesses buying their services, but as they avoid taxation, the Government have to find this revenue from other sources, reducing the profits and incomes of others and leaving them with less to spend on other goods and services. The regulatory arms race between multinational companies and states seeking to raise revenue is also distracting. It is distracting the corporations from focusing on productivity and creativity, and one wonders what marvels or products might have been created if multi- nationals had put the effort they put into avoiding tax into developing new ideas, services and products....

The sheer mechanics of the situation make it clear that action purely from the Government is unlikely to be the solution to the problem. There are hundreds of thousands of multinational companies, and only a handful of tax regimes capable of monitoring their information. It is always a game of catch-up, and while reforming tax codes and greater enforcement may help, they will not reach the nub of the problem. That is why I believe that we need to focus on the culture in international business, on the structure of these businesses and the codes of conduct they abide by. Fundamentally, businesses are staffed by people, and if we put in place the right frameworks, I believe that we can appeal to the better angels of their nature. This is the only long-term solution.

This isn't rocket science. Paying tax is a moral duty. Moral for human beings, moral for businesses. The simple way for businesses to understand this is to boycott them unless they behave in the right way. It isn't a game. It isn't about what you can get away with.


Update 18 May 2013: a word of reassurance for Amazon supporters.

Amazon supporters in the UK may have been alarmed to discover that Amazon found it could not avoid paying 2.4M in tax last year on sales of over 4B. But rest assured, the British government found a way of offloading the money it is saving in austerity measures - you know, taking money away from social services and libraries and public transport and so on - it gave slightly more BACK to Amazon in subsidies.




More on why you should avoid Amazon.

If you support Amazon, you know, go with the flow, take what’s good for you, as Tabasco and Paul Bryant think is the right thing to do, these are some other practices you are supporting:

Censorship by Amazon such as the removal of wikileaks from their Cloud.

Amazon campaigns designed to exploit small businesses until they are able to kill it completely: Amazon actively and explicitly advises people to go into shops to see what they want to buy, touch it, talk to a sales person about it etc and then buy it from Amazon. I’m not just blaming Amazon for this, people don’t have to go along with it. But they did and do. Please be advised that where you sit in my ranking of the world is scum.

Censorship of books. This one is both alarming and hilarious and results from the modern mentality of people wanting to get everything for nothing. ‘Hey, this is SO great. You get on Amazon, you buy self-published books and they are SO cheap.’ Then the complaints start coming in when people pay small amounts of money for crap. It’s a small amount of money because the writers have cut out the people who used to turn their writing into something publishable. So Amazon started to employ people for whom English is not their first language (this is my understanding), doubtless paying them the fair wage that all your good supporters of Amazon care about so much, and got them to start going through these self-published books and pulling them off Amazon lists, informing the writers that they had to be brought up to a publishable standard. How interesting that Amazon is now the world opinion on what that is. Laughably, some people pulled were well-established and credentialed writers who used language in the ways they pleased….not what these censors had learned in high-school English classes, however. Not that the writers are laughing, but hey, go with the flow, right, boys. What do you care if Amazon employees re-write the books you buy for next to nothing on Amazon.

I particularly like this story as a person who has spent quite a lot of my life not only writing, but also editing, type-setting etc. By all means buy books that aren’t edited by people with an appropriate command of the English language, by all means buy books from people who have no idea how to design and type-set a book. But what’s with complaining when you get an illiterate awful looking .pdf that somebody’s friends did a Twitter promotion for? What’s THAT all about?!!


Amazon Turk, crowd-sourcing, which some of you will know about. You get a group of people to do work for you, ranging from unskilled to highly skilled, ranging in pay offered from nothing (seriously) to whatever you think is appropriate. I am involved with a uni group in Geneva who has been using this to gather data for their research. A little while ago they got a message from Amazon saying that they were in violation of their agreement for asking workers to download an app. Interesting in itself – why WOULD this be illegal? One would think it is a free market place, you put a sign up saying $x/hour, download a program to speak French in your phone and do ‘y’. Next workers would decide whether they wish do to this. But no, for whatever reason, it is illegal. Being a uni group, spread around the world, it took them a while to figure out what to do about this. Meanwhile, Amazon wrote to them, closed their account for ever with no possibility of recourse to any higher authority AND confiscated all the money in their account. That’s pretty interesting, wouldn’t you say? Amazon tells you that you are doing something illegal, closes you down and takes all your money whilst giving you no right to appeal, discussion, NOTHING. Not that they didn’t try writing to support to discuss it further. A handy way for Amazon to make a few extra bucks, wouldn't you say? I'm gobsmacked that this is legal.

For those going with the flow, skip this, as you won’t care…., but some of you may not know that after goodreads had a sort of tactical falling out with Amazon where we all thought goodreads was on the right side, goodreads enlisted even more people than usual to do their unpaid librarian’s work on the site. Indeed, I sat next to Manny as he spent some hours now and then putting lots of book information back onto the site as part of his attempt to help. Not that he did a lot of work, but I surely do feel sorry for all the ‘librarians’ of goodreads who have done all this unpaid thankless work, thinking that it was because a few nice computer dorks who like reading needed help setting up their site. And I challenge Paul in his idea that ALL these sorts of things are started up by people expecting to make a huge amount of money whilst getting most people to work for nothing and that we should all know and expect that. I don’t know it. I am on various sites that I don’t think are like this at all. Why should the internet be any different from businesses in general? There are some that are set up for greed. There are lots set up for love. I think people believed goodreads was one of the latter….but it turns out it wasn’t.

What I am at a complete loss to understand is that to me, speaking as a historian, it is so obvious that what is happening with Amazon is close to some horrific science fiction story somebody like Orwell or Bradbury would write and we all would be reading thinking, hey, we're gonna make sure THAT never happens. But it is. And you all don't get it.

---------------------------------------

This, I expect IS the last actual new text I will put on Amazon as I remove my reviews. You can find it at my blog:

http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpres...

but since so many people have asked me how to buy books and avoid Amazon, I will spell it out here too.

How to buy books and avoid Amazon. If you don’t yet understand the many reasons you should avoid having anything to do with Amazon, please hop online, it won’t be hard to find some links.

1 If it isn’t too late, if it hasn’t closed down yet, visit your local bookstore. Buy books they have in stock. Ask them to order books for you. Be happy to have had a nice walk, a browse in a shop stocked by people who care, be happy to talk to a human being in the flesh. Understand that paying them extra is what you have to do unless you want your books to be shipped to you from a migrant undercutting the local workforce whilst housed in some sort of camp guarded by dogs. You probably wouldn’t want to have to do your job like that – whether you be a teacher, an accountant or a street sweeper – and neither should a bookseller have to live like that. Do your local streets look better if they have book shops and bric a brac shops, clothes shops, butchers, bakers and green grocers? Or do they look better if your local streets are full of nothing but OxFam shops and supermarkets whilst Amazon hides somewhere you can’t see it, waiting for you to press the button.

2. Buying online. Secondhand books. My business was part of the movement at the time that established ABE as the biggest of the databases that exist now. These are collectives of secondhand booksellers who joined forces so that the customer could go to one place and see and compare what was available from them. Some of them have real shops as well, some don’t. We haven’t had a shop since the late 1970s, but that’s a story for another time.

My business is still on ABE even though it has been taken over by Amazon. Why? Partly because we find that we would have to close down without being on ABE, but also because although Amazon now owns the company we built up in the same way goodreads members decided to put their weight behind that particular company, it hasn’t resulted in any changes at all that we are aware of. Certainly not for us. We are still a large number of independent booksellers just as before. We still all independently pay our tax. I know we pay every cent we owe not only legally but also morally. As my father who started the business, once said to a new accountant: ‘Don’t tell us how to avoid our tax. We live in a society. Somebody has to pay tax.’ Yes, we are on the poor side. 

However, whereas our moral weight used to be in support of ABE, it no longer is. We are part of other databases too, which aren’t owned by Amazon. I most highly recommend www.biblio.com which is a very friendly institution still on the side of both the bookseller and the book buyer. For Australians, at least, there is also www.booksandcollectibles.com.au which is a very basic site, no frills, but lots of people love it for that. Both these sites are large databases of big groups of booksellers. From any of these you will also get links to individual sellers and their sites – we have a site and a blog, for example.

I would beg you to go to secondhand booksellers rather than Oxfam, which with various unfair advantages, is aggressively and hostilely competing with booksellers. Again. If you buy from your local bookseller, you are giving money to the person who will buy meat from your butcher, clothes from your clothes shop, eat in your restaurant, pay for their kid’s music lessons. If you want to live in a community, support the community. If you want to live in a wasteland, shop at Oxfam.

May I add another complication. All sites like biblio and ABE start off with high standards, you have to demonstrate in some way that you are a bookseller of repute, because it is by their thus established good name that they are able to start letting in all and sundry without any standards. So, there are lots of sellers on all these sites now which aren’t what I think of as genuine booksellers. They will have vague descriptions of books up like ‘may have marks’ or ‘this item may ship from our warehouse in Sydney or in London or in NY’. Booksellers are little people. They don’t have warehouses all over the world stocking millions of books. They can see their books, they know what they look like, each book is a precise entity. They are like us, we have about 45,000 books listed on line with maybe another 50,000 we are struggling to get through to list. Personally I try to buy from ‘real’ booksellers. I also avoid the ones who tell you that they are employing sheltered workshop people which is why you should buy from them, or that they give 5% of each order to charity. P-leeease.

3) Buying online. New books. Quite the saddest moment in my book buying life recently was discovering that The Book Depository is now owned by Amazon. It was the leading competitor. As you will be aware, there is an organisation in the UK that makes sure big companies like Amazon don’t swallow up the competition. However, that organisation works in support of Amazon by letting them take over at a time when they can argue it isn’t fundamental to the industry. So, Amazon waits. If (say) The Book Depository stays really small, it ignores it. If it starts becoming a meaningful competitor it buys it before it gets so big that the powers that be won’t let it be swallowed up. That was the argument that led to the ruling that permitted Amazon to buy The Book Depository.

To be fair, realising that there are various ways of being owned by Amazon, I started a written discussion with The Book Depository to find out if they are still paying their taxes as they did, ie in the UK and in an (one hopes) honest way. I never received a frank answer to this. That has me now at a point where I have decided to stop buying from The Book Depository, even though it is with a heavy heart: living in a non-English speaking country it is relatively hard to buy books in English. BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE. We do have a couple of new bookshops here which stock English books, one of which is specifically and only English. I love it being there and I hate the thought that it is going to close down sooner (or later) because we all want to save a few bucks by buying online.

[John David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sheldon Wolin begins his book by looking at the effects that September 11, 2001 had on the public, and especially how those effects were refracted though the media. He suggests that the reaction was practically singular and unanimous: popular opinion was consolidated through media apparatus, dissident voices were marginalized or silenced, and fear of a distant, unknown enemy (the ubiquitous “Islamic terrorist”) was encouraged. After 9/11, the miasma of terror created the perfect foil for the construction of a permanent state of fear, which the government used for a reason to use military tribunals, and indefinitely suspend prisoners. All the while the military and its surrogates became increasing privatized by corporate hegemons in the name of “protecting the free market.” Suddenly we had a “global foe, without contours or boundaries, shrouded in secrecy” (p. 40). How did this happen?

Wolin suggests that, at the heart of American governance, are two countervailing forces. The “constitutional imaginary” (embodied by popular elections, legal authorization, etc.) – so named because it is the predominant logic of the Constitution – “prescribes the means by which power is legitimated, accountable, and constrained. It emphasizes stability and limits” (p. 19). The power imaginary, however, “seeks constantly to expand present capabilities.” Wolin suggests that the power imaginary began with Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, but expanded disproportionately with the inception of the Cold War. The constitutional and power imaginaries may seem mutually exclusive, but they co-exist uneasily within our ersatz American democracy.

Wolin uses these concepts to build an idea that he looks throughout the entire book – that of “inverted totalitarianism,” which is what he claims America is. To understand what he is doing here, it is important to look at how classical totalitarianism (that of Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini) functioned. These worked through

- the subversion and eventual destruction of legislative, governmental, and bureaucratic avenues
- single-party control of the state through the presence of a charismatic leader
- boasts of its totalitarian character and attempts to actively rally the people behind state propaganda
- excites the populace into a frisson over something (racial superiority, anti-Semitism)

If you turn these on their head, you get what Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism. He defines this as “a new type of political system, seemingly one riven by abstract totalizing powers, not by person 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.” (p. 44) It has, among others, the following properties:

- instead of subverting traditional democratic channels, it utilizes them to achieve its predetermined ends
- denies its totalitarian nature
- pacifies, stunts, and retards popular mobility
- operates via the impression of a multi-party state (Democratic/Republican) with the illusion of at least two different sets of political ideals with a conspicuous lack of the aforementioned charismatic leader

These are just the barest of bones of Wolin’s argument. He includes a through intellectual genealogy of how he thinks we have placed more and more of an emphasis on the power imaginary, with insightful examinations of Hobbes, Machiavelli, Leo Strauss, and Plato. He also spends a lot of time looking at how the deliberate consolidation of media and corporate power within the United States has made this coup much easier.

I found the idiom of inverted totalitarianism an interesting one for looking at contemporary American democracy, even though it has its weaknesses. It is one of the few books on the subject that I have read that is just as considerate of twenty-first century American history as it is of classical political theory, and it strikes a beautiful balance. This is the best kind of critical theory in that it puts into lucid language what many people have suspected. Sometimes it just takes someone from Princeton to articulate it this well.

[notgettingenough]

I'd forgotten the discussion that went on in 2013 when I first posted about this. I was not exactly way off in describing what was happening and would happen. This is a continuation of stuff about Amazon. It starts here.

Update 4/9/2020 This report Eyes Everywhere: Amazon's Surveillance Infrastructure and Revitalizing Worker Power explains the working conditions of those who fulfill the orders you make for books bought from Amazon, if that is where you buy your books. It explains why the book you buy from them is a couple of bucks cheaper than if you bought it from you local shop instead.



Ursula Le Guin in the NYT today 29 September 2014

“We’re talking about censorship: deliberately making a book hard or impossible to get, ‘disappearing’ an author,” Ms. Le Guin wrote in an email. “Governments use censorship for moral and political ends, justifiable or not. Amazon is using censorship to gain total market control so they can dictate to publishers what they can publish, to authors what they can write, to readers what they can buy. This is more than unjustifiable, it is intolerable.”

I understand that lots of goodreaders don't care about the working conditions of the lowly Amazon employees, or whether their own tax bill is higher because it has to pay for Amazon's failure to pay tax or....

but to the extent that goodreaders care about censorship, is it only that they care if their own reviews are censored? Do they care about censorship generally? I hope so!

[Maru Kun]

This now viral news story on an overbooked passenger (allegedly a doctor) being violently removed from his seat and dragged down the aisle of the plane by the Chicago Police in order to make room for UA employees and save a few hundred dollars in compensation makes me think that it's time to get a copy of this book. Also on CNN

[Ian Beardsell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I found the writing style somewhat academic and obtuse at times, I still must give this book 4 stars due to the sheer importance of what Sheldon Wolin is saying. Hopefully I am not dreadfully misinterpreting his message, but Wolin believes that the current state of American Democracy has much in common with totalitarianism.

I do not mean the totalitarianism of brown shirts and Nazi dictators pushing their tanks through neighboring countries in a struggle-to-the-death with inferior races for lebensraum. Nor is it a government system where all labor and corporate energy are applied to the betterment (or survival) of the nation and its folk. No. "Inverted totalitarianism" is more subtle and works slightly differently than that. Wolin's specter inverts public and national government institutions to the service of the corporate economy. In both styles of totalitarianism, however, democracy is thrown out the window.

I found many of the author's examples and descriptions of our current state of democracy very much in line with what Noam Chomsky has written about for years. In essence, our democratic institutions have become subservient to the economic elites of our age, the large corporations. Our public institutions no longer serve the people but the needs of the economy, regardless of whether that serves the interests and rights of individuals.

Much like Chomsky, Wolin points out that the elites, originally in the form of gentlemen landholders of the 18th Century, have walked a tight balance of both accepting the overall notions of democracy (voting rights, liberty of religion and speech, etc) while keeping the reigns fairly tight so that the masses don't expect too much. America's founding fathers were okay with all men of all means voting once every four years, but elites should really do the heavy political lifting. The idea of women, or, heaven-forbid, brown people being able to vote was plain insanity. Over the years, we may have seen minor changes such as universal voting, but the same essential idea still applies: keep the rabble away from key decision making. Distract them with professional sports, gambling, or even better, keep them so busy struggling to survive on low wages that the general population will rarely have the time or inclination to get politically involved to promote their own interests. If someone progressive (a true believer of the demos), starts to get too closely involved, they will surely be filtered out along the way. This was the original thinking of the Electoral College, by the way. There needed to be some way for the elites to overrule the "democratic mob" who may make a rash, ill-informed decision in electing a president.

Speaking of ill-informed decisions from which the Electoral College was supposed to protect democracy, it is interesting that Wolin wrote this book before the election of President Trump. He was instead writing at the end of the George W. Bush presidency, but so much of his commentary is a perfect predictor of Trumpism: the distraction of the public from accurate information with "alternative facts", the show-business of a reality TV personalities, the dumbing-down of discourse, and of course, the creation of wedge issues so that the demos never gets together to work on their common problems.

Although Wolin spoke of the Bush Administration's lies about the need to pre-emptively invade Iraq due to its collection of WMD primed for use against the USA and its regional allies, the following quote fits even better with current circumstances.

In a preliminary way lying can be defined as the deliberation misrepresentation of actuality and the substitution of a constructed "reality." [Cue Kellyanne Conway.] The problem today is that lying is not an isolated phenomenon but characteristic of a culture where exaggeration and inflated claims are commonplace occurrences. For more than a century the public has been shaped by a relentless culture of advertising and its exaggerations, false claims, and fantasies--all aimed at influencing and directing the behavior in the premeditated ways chosen by the advertiser. The techniques developed for the marketplace have been adapted by the 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.

I like how in the preceding quote Wolin infers that the democratic ecology is essentially being "polluted". A few pages later he explicitly states how the institutions of the public good are being savaged, much like our current physical environment, whereas they should be protected, "an inheritance to be cared for and passed on", for future generations. What an interesting thought! I certainly feel that the current impeachment process has the power to corrupt the American political ecology for some time. Possibly, and sadly, for forever.

And what does Wolin say is the solution to this pollution of democracy? Perhaps the first thing is to be aware that democracy has always been very fragile, and if you want to keep it, you need to actively engage in it. The public needs to be aware of how they are being played. Specifically, though, Wolin believes that the local scene is possibly the best place to start attempting to take back democracy and save its institutions- or at least its practice. Small, local communities have obvious points of common ground in which smaller actors can better practice the aspects of building consensus, voicing opinions, and coming to agreements without being trampled by high-budget spin doctors and split into dozens of minute factions. With practice at the local level, hopefully this can be scaled upwards, or perhaps, local regulations can supersede federal guidelines making them less relevant. At least the practice of democracy somewhere will prevent it from disappearing all together.

[Tobias · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, but in all honesty it was a slog to the very end. It was incredibly repetitive, laden with footnotes to newspaper articles and glib references — it would have been much better as a long magazine article (which it may well have been originally). I also think Wolin was too focused on coining phrases than on providing coherent analysis. That said, I agree with his fundamental thesis: American democracy is increasingly "managed democracy." Citizens are encouraged to be apathetic or distracted or otherwise disengaged from political life, elites are pretty much capable of doing whatever they want between elections (and are rarely if ever punished when they screw up), and there is little daylight between big business and government, even after the Great Recession. His argument that this is somehow a new system of government is undermined by his extensive discussion of the anti-democratic tendencies of the American Founding. If anything, he has shown how tension between democracy and republicanism fluctuates over time, and that we're in a particularly strong republican (or anti-democratic) period. The question is whether the American people are capable of pushing back against republican elitism — that could be what's different about the present, unfortunately. Another problem is that I think Wolin mistakenly attributes far too much intentionality to the emergence of "managed democracy," to the extent that his account verges on conspiracy theory. Even if the system functions as Wolin describes, it is another matter entirely to attribute the system to the intentions of scheming elites.

[Ossian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Do not go into this book expecting it to be an accessible analysis of modern US political systems. It is not. It is a university-level text full of jargon and with the expectation of prior knowledge on the part of readers. I also found it to be very repetitive and written in a dull style. While I agree with most if not all Wolin's points about the nature of modern US "democracy", I also do not think this book is the best resource for that discussion. Further, despite the regular references to Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, never does the book turn to an examination of racialized violence within the States. Racial tension is mentioned once or twice, but largely the problem of systematic white supremacy is painted as over and done with when it very much is not. This point could only have strengthened the argument of the book and would have made for a more engaging and thorough read, with potential for the analysis of totalitarianism in connection to ethnic or racial Othering. There was certainly room for such a discussion, given the aforementioned repetitiveness of the book. Overall, I did not gain much from this read and I'm mostly glad it's done so I can add it to my yearly book challenge.

[Asa · Rating 5 out of 5]

He should have taken it one step further and admit we already live in a totalitarian society. But excellently researched and who can blame him for balking at the admittance, because he would probably be ridiculed in the academic ranks.

[Gordon Hilgers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of course, there are plenty of books on the best seller lists that track and analyze American politics from the standpoint of current events, but far fewer that really dig deep into how the paradigms surrounding democracy in America are changing us and how we relate to government itself. Sheldon S. Wolin's "Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism" is not only an important book but something those who definitely feel the tremblings and perceive distortions between what we are told we believe and what is really happening should explore.

Wolin's take is an interesting take, for he looks at democracy in America's most serious threat since the apparent death of revolutionary Communism, none other than the expansive force of our economic sector. Whether one is to go so far as to look into the issues Wolin raises in terms of what might be called "revolutionary Capitalism", or is more prone to see not so much a threat as a challenge, it should be obvious to all that where the money is is where the power is.

When economic forces overwhelm democratic values, Wolin calls this "inverted totalitarianism", a situation in which it costs millions simply to run for office, and once in office, even the President has to listen to the pestering nuisances of massive lobbying efforts that throw the concerns of the polity under the bus in favor of gaining advantages for "special interests".

We are taught to believe democratic values reign supreme, but when we begin to notice that values such as justice, equality and fairness take second place to values such as power, profit and endless expansion, it is a little easier to see why groups like the Tea Party would complain that we're not following the Constitution to the letter even as they advocate what is in essence giving the commercial sector the freedom to be above the law. It is even easier to see why, for example, the New York Police Department would pepper-spray Occupy protesters for "blocking the sidewalk" or "filming an arrest" while the law enforcement community insists it should have the power to monitor our telephone calls, our Internet activity and place video cameras literally everywhere--all while proclaiming that nothing is wrong with this picture.

Wolin's book is thoughtful, well thought through and insistently prescient, especially when we begin to wake-up to the fact that Orwell's 1984 is here.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

RIP


"Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism"
By Chris Hedges
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/s...

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.”

[Steve Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best analysis I've read explaining the political situation in America at the time it was written (2008).

It's a shame that Wolin is no longer around to address subsequent events. How would he interpret, for instance, the recent resurgence of classic totalitarianism, and what does it mean for the future of the inverted totalitarianism model he develops?

[Jeff Brailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite the fact the theory set forth by the author describes what I have believed for some time has happened to my country, the journey he takes the reader on to defend his premise is very disconcerting indeed. From the beginning of the book, he compares The Triumph of Will, a pro-Nazi propaganda film of the 1930s with the May 1, 2003 performance by President Bush on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln beneath the backdrop of a huge banner reading "Mission Accomplished."

The author is careful not to actually compare Bush to Hitler, but he does introduce the concept of "Inverted Totalitarianism." His theory is the Bush regime's politics and style of governing mirrors the totalitarianism of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. Wolin goes on to aver this new style of totalitarianism could very well be an "epitaph for democracy in America."

The book points out that "Fascism is the product of democracy gone wrong, that had working constitutional systems which they gave up voluntarily." Wolin says recent studies have argued that "democracy has contributed importantly to the rise of Nazis and Fascists, and even served as a preparation." The same citizenry which democracy had created, proceeded to vote into power and then support movements openly pledged to destroy democracy and constitutionalism.

Bush's response to 9/11, in a very real way, caused thye perversion of America's democracy. "...Elements of invereted totalitarianism could not crystallize in the absence of a stimulus that would rouse the apathetic just enough to gain their support and obedience," says Wolin, "The threat of terrorism supplied that demand."

The Bush Administration used a document called The National Security Strategy of the United States (NSS), issued in 2002, to declare the president's intention to "reshape the current world and define the new one -- 'In the new world we have entered, 'it declared grandly, 'the only path to safety is the path of action.'" Wolin says at that instant, a new world [order?] had been born and the old world had been superceded.

This new doctrine was "an attempt to reshape the existing political system by enlarging the powers of the executive branch of government, including the military and policy functions, while reducing the legal protections of citizens."

Wolin explains how Bush used the elements of fear and power to "promote an awesome concentration of state power and authority" by representing that outcome as the product of popular consent. He made the only other alternative out to be chaos. Terrorism became Bush's boogeyman and scapegoat all rolled into one.

Wolin states "[Iraq] was fated to be selected as a testing ground..." In the NSS, "unilaterally, the United States declares it is justified in reconstructing the infrastructure of other societies." First, we subjected Iraq to awesome destruction, then after we destroyed the nation we went to work to try to reconstruct it into the an Islamic democracy.

What Wolin doesn't mention and may be the biggest wrong in the entire Iraq debacle: It was the American CIA that originally put Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party in power in Iraq, in the late 1940s. I guess you could say we built it, we broke it, now we are going to try to fix it.

Other evidences of the inverted totalitarian nature of what our republic has become is the belief that preemptive wars are alright, America can violate treaties and ignore international law. Wolin calls this the Superpower mentality.

The author accurately points out the Iraq War had its origins not in Southeast Asia but in Florida "where power without legitimacy was first envisioned. That was when power brokers found out that, if sufficiently determined, they could overcome the inhibitions of democratic constitutionalism." Perhaps if Al Gore had won the election of 2000, America might still be a democracy.

Democracy, Inc. is a serious and important work that can only contribute to our understanding of how and why the Republican Party has hijacked our country. The author holds out little hope that we can convert our country back into a democracy from the inverted totalitarian state it has become. I'll be damned if I vote for a Republican this year!

[Noel Aldebol · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not major in political science, and yet after having read this book deliberately, reading the footnotes, and looking up the references therein I feel like Sheldon Wolin has provided an educations worth a few semesters.

He makes an excellent presentation of the transformations we have undergone and the silent nature ( in public discourse ) of the executions.

Sheldon is a master at using the best words to express his ideas. I had to look up a lot of words, and thankfully I had my Kindle version of this book, so I had dictionaries and Wikipedia at my fingertips.

In the course of presenting his thesis, Sheldon provides a master crash course of the history of our democratic involvement, or, to be more exact, the demos' struggles and efforts for their inclusion in politics and for the realization of a democratic political process, and their struggles against the elites in order to claim an equal voice in the political power and process.

Finally, Sheldon Wolin presents his thesis with more than enough evidence supporting that we indeed are in an inverted totalitarian system.

[noblethumos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism is a book written by Sheldon S. Wolin, an American political theorist and academic. The book was published in 2008 and is a critique of the state of democracy in the United States and other Western countries. In Democracy Incorporated, Wolin argues that democracy is being undermined by the rise of corporate power and the concentration of wealth and influence in the hands of a small elite. He suggests that this process has led to the emergence of a new form of political system, which he calls "inverted totalitarianism," in which the appearance of democracy is maintained, but real power is exercised by a small group of elites who control the political system and manipulate public opinion. Wolin also discusses the potential consequences of this development for democracy and suggests that it is up to the people to reclaim their power and restore democracy to its rightful place. Democracy Incorporated is considered an important work of political thought and is widely regarded as a powerful critique of the state of democracy in the modern world.

GPT

[Leigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although this book was written during the Iraq war and the era of George Bush I, the author actually discusses the current political situation only slightly but concentrates more on a deeper historical look at democracy itself and how it's never been truly achieved. The "inverted totalitarianism" thesis comes from his criticism of American democracy in the last 30 years, and he contrasts his views with "classic totalitarianism" such as that of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. An excellent read (for politics and history nerds)

[Jason von Meding · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Inverted totalitarianism" and "managed democracy". A brilliant read.

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sheldon Wolin argues that America has sacrificed democracy for a managed state, dominated by the wealthy, by corporations and by a corrupt and reckless political elite. He describes this as, in effect, a form of totalitarianism and discusses the differences between the American model and that of Nazi Germany. In doing so he fails to give a reasonable history of totalitarianism itself - which arguably has its origins in WWI Britain and America, and in the public relations industry born out of that period, models which Germany explicitly emulated. He fails to justify breaking Godwin's Law, because his analogy with Nazi Germany is fruitless and he is arguing in any case that America is totally different, without recognizing America's role as an early and longstanding exemplar of how to get totalitarianism right. He fails to grasp that many of his arguments will appeal to the Right in America rather than the Left. He is so clearly preoccupied with the administration of Bush II (and Cheney) that he understates the extent to which the problems he describes are bipartisan. Assuming that we all know our history neglects the reality that history has many versions; we need better context. For instance, I would have liked more information about Leo Strauss. In general, the book is a topical (and now dated) rant, filled with superb material for a better book, lacking in structure, failing to build up the essential evidence base and failing to offer much in the way of a useful action plan. I am sure the book served a purpose when published and it has lots of good stuff but we need a more coherent statement of the arguments.

To identify the antecedents of inverted totalitarianism, we must bear in mind that throughout much of the past century the American political system was repeatedly subject to the strains and pressures of war. During the twentieth century, war became normalised. [p105]

Wars, especially undeclared ones, invariably boost the powers and status of the president as commander in chief. Just as surely war presses Congress and the courts to “defer” to the wishes and judgement of the chief executive. A president, however feckless or unimposing, is transformed, rendered larger than life. He becomes the supreme commander, the unchallengeable leader and the nation incarnate. [p105]

[World War II required “total mobilization,” the creation of a “Home Front.”] “Strikingly, in the post-1945 wars, whether hot or cold, warfare became normal, incorporated into ordinary life without transforming it.” [p106]

The relationship between democratic decline and the [concentration of] media ownership is illustrated in the contrast between the attention paid by Washington and the national media to the sixties’ protest movements against the Vietnam War and, four decades later, the virtual blackout of the protests against the invasion of Iraq. [p107] ...The current censorship of popular protest against Superpower and empire serves to isolate democratic resistance, to insulate society from hearing dissonant voices, and to hurry the process of depoliticisation. [p108]

While the war on terrorism induces feelings of helplessness and a natural tendency to look toward the government, to trust it, the domestic message of distrust of government produces alienation from government. The people are not transformed into a manipulable mass shouting “Sieg Heil.” Instead, they are discouraged, inclined to abdicate a political role, yet patriotically trusting of the “wartime” leaders. The domestic message says that the citizenry should distrust its own elected government, thereby denying themselves the very instrument that democracy is supposed to make available to them. A democracy that is persuaded to distrust itself, to applaud the rhetoric of “get government off your backs,” “it’s your money being wasted,” and “you should decide how to spend it” renounces the means of its own efficacy in favour of laissez-faire politics, an anti-egalitarian politics, where, as in the market, the strongest powers prevail. What is revealed, or rather confirmed, is that the consummated union of corporate power and governmental power heralds the American version of a total system. [pp110,1]

A closely divided electorate and a Congress with narrow majorities are also conducive to fanning cultural wars. The point about disputes on such topics as the value of sexual abstinence, the role of religious charities in state funded activities, the question of gay marriage, and the like, is that they are not framed to be resolved. Their political function is to divide the citizenry while obscuring class differences and diverting the voters’ attention from the social and economic concerns of the general populace. 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. [pp111/2]

"The archaist, whether political or religious, has a fondness for singling out privileged moments in the past when a transcendent truth was revealed, typically through an inspired leader, a Jesus, a Moses or a Founding Father. The odd-couple of Superpower is an alliance that finds reactionary, backward looking archaic forces (economic, religious and political) allied with forward looking forces of radical change (corporate leaders, technological innovators, scientists) whose efforts contribute to steadily distancing contemporary society from its past. … The American zest for change coexists with fervent political and religious convictions that bind the identity of believers to two “fundamentals”, the texts of the constitution and the Bible and their status as unchanging and universal truths…[p118]

"...An archaic belief is one that flourished in the past and carries identifiable marks of that past, but unlike a relic, it is operative, employed rather than simply preserved…[p118]

"...The archaist is convinced that his core beliefs are superior to rival beliefs and are true because unchanging. The archaist is also a proselytizer who promises that if unbelievers will adopt the true faith, they too can be ‘born again’, transformed. Archaic truths are powerful then because they are transforming truths. They save the true believer not only from error but from the consequences of errors that can corrupt existence and ultimately decide the fate of one’s soul. [p118]

"...Another version of archaism is political and equally fundamentalist. In the narrative of the political archaist the United States was blessed with a once-for-all-time, fixed ideal form, an original Constitution of government created by the Founding Fathers in 1787. In that view, the original constitution is the political counterpart fo the Bible, the fundamental text, unchanging, to be applied – not “interpreted” by “activist judges”. As the political fundamentalists see it, except for the Edenic era of Ronald Reagan, the form of government decreed by the Constitution has been under siege by the “liberal media” and liberal administrations abetted by their minions in Congress and judges who “legislate” instead of “following the letter” of constitutional scripture. The nation is perceived as a wayward sinner who frequently wanders from the straight and narrow and needs to be sobered, returned to its sacred text, its Word. The vision of an idealized original constitution rarely, if ever, includes the kind of participatory democracy that Tocqueville celebrated. Instead, archaism tends to support republicanism rather than democracy, that is, a system in which the responsibility for saving the Many devolves upon a selfless elite, an elect although not necessarily elected…[p118]

...Surprisingly, archaism surfaces where we might least expect to see it, in the economic theory of the free market. The proponents of that theory have been prominent in Republican administrations ever since the Reagan presidency. They have contributed to the general distrust of governmental “intervention” in the economy and hostility to governmental social programmes. The 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.
A mediaeval aphorism summed up the traditional idea of the political: “that which touches all should be approved by all.” [p138]

James Madison declaimed: “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would have still been a mob.” [p151]

To describe the United States as an imperial Superpower is to say that elements of domination are inescapably present in the power relations between the United States and the rest of the world, and that empire’s superior – inferior relationship necessarily means a politics among unequals. … the consequences of empire are evident in domestic politics: in military expenditure, subsidies to globalising corporations, mounting deficits and the decimation of social programs and environmental safeguards….The effects of empire are not solely registered abroad, externalized...[pp192,3]

According to the liberal theory fashionable among academics, the ideal role of the generality of citizens in a democracy is to “deliberate,” that is, discuss rationally and civilly the important political questions of the day. However appealing or remote that ideal may seem, in the reality of the war between imperialism and terrorism, the contemporary citizen, far from being invited to a discussion is, as never before, being manipulated by ‘managed care’ and by the managers of fear. … From one direction the citizen is assailed by fears of terrorism, not knowing when or how terrorists might strike; a fear that the citizen cannot “fight” against has been amplified by fears of natural disasters (tsunamis, hurricanes), of invasions by illegal immigrants and by epidemics (Asian Flu, avian flu) for which...the .. response of the citizens is to look to government for protection and to defer to official judgements. Yet the same citizen … has had it drummed in that “big government” is the enemy who threatens to take away his money and his freedom. The citizen is left with no political ally responsive to his economic fears. Unlike classical totalitarianism, which boasted of the unanimity of its citizens, inverted totalitarianism thrives on ambivalence and the uncertainty it breeds. [p198]

The ambivalent citizen: where is the power located that can be trusted to protect him and her but not to tax them? And what kind of politics would support that kind of power? The answer: a form of antipolitics that reflects a distaste, bordering on intolerance, for frank discussion of inequalities, class differences, the persisting problems of racism, climate change, or the consequences of imperialism. Antipolitics is expressed as patriotism, antiterrorism, militarism – subjects that brook little or no disagreements, provoking fervour while stifling thought. Ambivalence is temporarily suspended before a patriotic power “above” politics, one represented by the armed forces, symbols of heroism, antimaterialism, sacrifice for others, force purified by a righteous cause. Big government may be the problem; big military is the solution. [p198]

The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working class, anticorporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no opposition party working actively on their behalf.... The character of the Republican Party reflects a profound change: radicalism has shifted its location and meaning. ... 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 radicalising 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. [p206]

...is the United States the model democracy or a highly equivocal one? …That our system is democratic is more of an unquestioned assumption than a matter of public discussion and so we ignore the extent to which antidemocratic elements have become systemic, integral, not aberrant. The evidence is there: in widening income disparities and class distinctions, polarized educational systems (elite institutions with billionaire endowments versus struggling public schools and universities), health care that is denied to millions, national political institutions controlled by wealth and corporate power. While these contrasts are frequently bemoaned, they are rarely considered as cumulative and, rarer still, as evidence of an antidemocratic regime. [p212]

To claim that antidemocracy is a regime means expanding the meaning of democracy so that it is not confined to political matters but applies as well to social, cultural and economic relationships. If if it is objected that this stretches the meaning of democracy beyond what it can reasonably bear, my response is this: not to do so implies that democracy can operate despite the inequalities of power and life circumstances embedded in all of these relationships. [p212/3]

An inverted totalitarian regime, precisely because of its inverted character, emerges, not as an abrupt regime change or dramatic rupture but as evolutionary, as evolving out of a continuing and increasingly unequal struggle between an unrealized democracy and an antidemocracy that dares not speak its name. Consequently while we recognize familiar elements of the system – popular elections, free political parties, the three branches of government, a bill of rights – if we re-cognize, invert, we see its actual operations as different from its formal structure. … For example, the privatization of public functions is an expression of the revolutionary dynamic of capitalism, of its aggrandizing bent. Capital brings its own culture of competitiveness, hierarchy, self interest. Each instance of the private inroads into public functions extends the power of capital over society… From a democratic perspective the effects of privatization are counter-revolutionary; but from a capitalist viewpoint they are revolutionary. [p213]

The point is not whether the Founders had a totalitarian vision, but rather what forms of power they were bent on encouraging and what forms they were determined to check. What did they hope for and what did they fear?
The main hope of the Founders was to establish a strong central government, not one hobbled at every turn by an intrusive citizenry or challenged by several “sovereign” states. They professed to be choosing a republic, but it is closer to the truth to say that they were focused upon establishing a system of national power to replace what they considered the hopelessly ineffectual system of decentralized powers under the articles of Confederation.
The new system, with its emphasis upon a strong executive, an indirectly elected Senate composed (it was hoped) of the educated and wealthy, and an appointed Supreme Court also represented the fears of the Founders. Theirs was a counter-revolution against not only the system of politics that had led to the revolution against Britain but against democratic tendencies and populist outbreaks that had persisted from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth.
[p225]

The history of the revolution that most Americans are taught emphasizes the role of selfless generals, patrician leaders – in short, an elite. However, thanks to the efforts of some historians, we are now able to learn about the extraordinary political activities of working class members, small farmers, women, slaves and Indians during the period from roughly 1690 throughout most of the following century. It took several forms: street protests and demonstrations, attacks on official residences, petitions, mass meetings, pamphlets and newspaper articles… Democracy, in this early meaning, stood for a politics of redress, for common action to alleviate the sharp inequalities of wealth and power that enabled the more affluent and educated to monopolize governance. It was of course a fugitive democracy, given to moments of frustration, rage and violence that inspired the dominant classes to describe the people as “tumultuous.” That “turbulence” was in effect the demotic forms of political dynamics. It drew its strength from sheer numbers, but also from the indispensable role of artisans, labourers, small farmers and merchants not only in the economy but as common soldiers and sailors in the military. Except for periods of unemployment, those who protested, marched, organized or propagandised had neither leisure time nor the resources to sustain their own dynamic. [p227]

As Hamilton wrote, “When occasions present themselves in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of their interests, to withstand the temporary delusions, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection.” Thus the people, like wayward minors, needed “guardians” - not executors of their will but interpreters of their true interests…. An elite with sufficient leisure to devote itself to governing and schooled in what Hamilton called the “science of politics.” [230]

The “disaggregated majority” is fabricated to endorse a candidate or a party for reasons that typically pay only lip service to the basic needs of most citizens (health, education, non toxic environment, living wages), even less to the disparities in political power between ordinary citizens and well financed interests. Its speciousness is the political counterpart to products that promise beauty, health, relief of pain, and an end to erectile dysfunction.” [p231]

...the religiously obedient Catholic worker, the evangelical African American, the church- and family-oriented Hispanic, the struggling white family with a son in the military because he aspired to go to college, all vote for the party trumpeting values that impose virtually no cost on its affluent and corporate beneficiaries and their heirs. [p231]

If …. we were to list some obvious preliminary actions that re democratisation would require, then ..examples [would include]: rolling back the empire, rolling back the practices of managed democracy, returning to the idea and practices of international cooperation rather than the dogmas of globalisation and pre-emptive strikes, restoring and strengthening environmental protections, reinvigorating populist politics, undoing the damage to our system of individual rights, restoring the institutions of an independent judiciary, separation of powers, and checks and balances, reinstating the integrity of the independent regulatory agencies and of scientific advisory processes, reviving a representative system responsive to popular needs for health care, education, guaranteed pensions and an honourable minimum wage, restoring government regulatory authority over the economy and rolling back the distortions of a tax code that toadies to the wealthy and corporate power. [p274]

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting ideas in here, but the book is an absolute mess and frequently a disorganized rant. I staggered to the finish line, intensely irritated at what probably should have been an article. How many times did he need to lament the manipulation of intelligence that preceded the Iraq War, the Machiavellianism of elites, and a host of left-wing talking points? About 2/3 of the book is just ranting about these kinds of things, and there's tons of repetition as well as annoying habits like calling the Bush presidents George 1st and George 2nd. Cheap shots like that abound in this book. Even worse is the fact that the book has almost no argumentative flow, and most of the chapters don't serve a clear and distinct purpose. In many ways this is a model for how not to write a book. I think those who complain about no one reading Wolin should start by thinking about how much of a slog he is to read.

I didn't really agree with the argument, but the reason I'm giving this 2 stars instead of 1 is because some of the core ideas are worth wrestling with. Inverted totalitarianism is basically incoherent, as the US political system in almost no way resembles totalitarianism; plus, Wolin doesn't define this concept clearly. What it is supposed to mean is that unlike in a unitary totalitarian state, in our system key nodes of power (gov't, media, business) have basically become a coordinating body for all of society in a way that leaves the shell of democracy but not the substance. He vastly overstates the unity of the "ruling class" and understates the unpredictability of the parties and the electorate; of course, this was before Trump. The concept of the "superpower" was likewise unoriginal and uninteresting, although I agreed with his general point that an imperial foreign policy corrodes democracy at home.

More interesting was the concept of managed democracy, wherein the power of elites, especially business, to shape who runs for office and who wins while demobilizing the citizenry and convincing them that voting is the sine qua non of citizenship leaves a version of democracy that is so elite-driven as to be essentially undemocratic. I think the concept is interesting, although WOlin really just rants and doesn't offer much evidence for this. He makes some potentially compelling comparisons to founding figures like Madison and Hamilton who sought way to control or filter the power of the people in the gov't structures they set up, but as usual Wolin lacked the discipline to carry this comparison through. Frustratingly, the comparison exists in at least 3 different sections of the book, which makes it hard to follow.

Tbh, this book is murder to read, and I'd avoid it if at all possible. There are better left-wing polemics out there as well as better histories of the themes of corporate influence in politics (Jane Mayer). Wolin needed a savage editor to hack this mess into shape and spare us this pretty bad book.

[Paul O'Leary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Do you believe Goldman Sachs is running the country? If so, this book may be for you. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism epitomizes the type of political, mainstream books that appeared in 2008: anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-capitalism etc; except the author, Sheldon Wolin, penetrated deeper into the morass of the times and explained why US politics was impoverished. If one looked at the surface of things one might think there was a lot wrong that needed changing, thus all the anti- sentiments of the times. Wolin's analysis demonstrates that the real truth is that everything is working out just as one should expect, and if you value politics as a participant in the greatest democracy in the world this is simply horrible.

I've felt for a long time that the politics of the future will be dominated by new methods of human management. Wolin believes this future is already upon us and we're governed by an inverted totalitarianism in which powerful corporations have captured the workings of government at the expense of the taxpayer, voter, & employee. In the past a totalitarian government would mobilize the masses through the use of a political myth, today our government uses the myth to demobilize the masses politically and accept their fate(s) passively. This is the democratic myth that voters shape and legitimize their own government. Wolin disabuses the reader as to the reality of this constructed "imaginary". In truth, lobbyists outweigh whatever influence random voters may exert on their elected officials, while voters have been shown where they stand, according to Wolin, in the 2000 presidential election. He mischievously points out the irony of a government which exports its packaged "Democracy" abroad as foreign policy against its disabling of democracy at home as domestic policy. The flow of personnel, however, consummate the marriage between the private and public sectors producing a hybrid offspring, what Wolin refers to as Superpower. Efficiency managers travel back and forth from businesses to government, and savvy experts from government to business. Capitalistic approaches to expansion and profit producing are infused in the functioning of government, while businesses learn how to co-opt public resources, including military. Technology and rapid communication allow government/businesses to present a public with fait accompli spectacles which remove the process of discussion and debate from the public at large. The public is reduced to helplessness as it witnesses, but always finds itself commenting after the fact. Also interesting is Wolin's comparison of the political party in this age with the mass parties of the past. Rather than galvanize membership, today's party requires a coterie of "zealots", generous donors, and an expanse of client/viewers. Wolin is anti-Bush, but he makes certain the reader understands that Bush is merely an apt frontman for the Superpower which is American business/government. Other than that, one could surmise, Bush hating is pointless and merely distracts from the real problem(s).

That leaves Wolin with the question: what is one to do about the real problem? This is what earns the book only three stars. Wolin's ideas are sparse, unconvincing, and generally unoriginal. In response to America's military aggressiveness Wolin suggests everyone serve a period in the armed services, the idea being that rich folk will think twice before sending their own children off to war. There is nobility to this idea, Wolin himself served in WW2 I believe, but for the wealthy this merely means placing their children carefully so that their children would only be inconvenienced rather than endangered. Vietnam vet John Kerry serves as example. As to politics Wolin is surprisingly quietist. The amalgam of business and government is too powerful to combat head on by the masses. Like Trotsky, he appears to believe they/we simply lack the stamina, or the time, for the lengthy political confrontation. Also, as either employees or clients, the individual has something real to lose, thus the needs of life help buttress the political myth and its acceptance. Wolin suggests that politics is best recovered at the local levels and expanded from these modest conquests. Political action serves as the springboard toward any future gains in recovering individual political power. Acceptance of myth is eschewed for debate and deliberation. One might think that the "Occupy" movement might indicate an approach to political reclamation that Wolin would approve of, yet that movement demonstrates all the problems with just such an approach. Devoid of a galvanizing myth, the Occupy movement appeared loose, undirected and leaderless. Much was discussed, undoubtedly, within the movement, but the media was ineffectively utilized. The viewing audience became aware that those of the Occupy movement were abstractly against poverty, abstractly against big business, and abstractly against going home. The powers concerned, if you could so say, only had to wait until the viewing audience grew tired of the show, at which point the police could be brought in to cancel it. Wolin talks the "small is beautiful" when applied to politics, drawing from the history of the Ancient Greek demos. Unfortunately, any offered solution that wouldn't slow down, much less hinder a Robert Moses lacks hope for restraining today's modern alliance of government & business. Also, Wolin attacks abstract values that conservatives hold dear, though contradictory they may be; however, an "imaginary" constructed of progressive democratic values is embraced like a couple on honeymoon. Not mentioned, though, is the possibility of using the media against Superpower itself. This book was written before the all-pervasiveness of social networks. Therefore, the possibility of utilizing media as a method of attack rather than coordination, like the fascist with his phone, creates the chance of sending messages across the globe which can promote debate, deliberation and awareness as easily as doctrine, ideology or command. The individual need not feel helpless as to expressing himself or "being heard" as long as he has access to a laptop or smart phone. This is actually the interesting thing about our age: technology that big business creates can be effectively used against it. A video going viral can change what & how businesses and governments do. If today is the age of managed democracy, it is also the age when the partisan and the revolution can & will most definitely be televised.

[Paula · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is probably important in that the author has coined a new term "inverted totalitarianism" that has become popular among critics of the corporate takeover of US government. It outlines the evidences of the peculiar variety of totalitarianism that has taken over our government and aspires to take over the world. In this he is clearly correct. Global corporations have such power that they have taken over the government and use US taxes to subsidize themselves and protect their interests abroad. I don't see how it is possible to deny this. The evidence is plain. This is where the book is strong. Where it is weak is in claiming that democrats (with a small d as he insists) are the solution. A general uprising of the population to shake off their corporate masters will not arise merely because this author calls for it to happen. Even hundreds of such authors demanding it will not cause it to happen. I know this, because there are more than that amount out there clamoring for it. The Occupy Movement was evidence that some small portion of the people have already responded. For a majority to rise may happen in time, when enough suffering has ensued to motivate a larger percentage of the people. By then it may be too late to make a difference when corporations have managed to heat the earth, kill our soil to cause widespread crop failures, and pollute our water to the point that it can no longer sustain life. I don't know about you, but I hope we don't have to wait until then.

[Steve Birchmore · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this after reading a below the line comment on a blog somewhere, probably Lockdownsceptics or Conservativewoman.co.uk, mentioning this book as giving insight as to the way we are governed and how government really work these days. I can't recall what the blog post was about but about the same time I read a comment on Twitter stating that during Dominic Cummings 7 hours of testimony to the Commons Health and Social Care Committee and Science and Technology Committee on the Government's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bill Gates was mentioned eight times, including advising the British Government what to do.

So this multi-billionaire, with his vast investments in 'vaccines' and mass media, including other covid-19 linked organisations such as Imperial College London, where Neil Ferguson produces his always very wrong predictions, was telling the British Government what to do. So rather than listen to the likes of say, John Ioannidis, or the many others who actually know what they are talking about, our Government instead chose to listen to a multi-billionaire with no qualifications or experience in this area, but who stands to make an awful lot of money from this 'pandemic', who is also linked to shady characters like Epstein etc. I see.

The book is mostly about American politics, in particular the Bush II years and the invasion of Iraq, but there are plenty of useful insights on how the West is run for the British reader. Some British history gets a mention in the form of the enclosures and the Putney debates.

I found it a little bit dull to start, but once it gets going its worthwhile.

Unfortunately I don't have the time or energy to write the sort of review this book deserves.

[Michael Gajda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sheldon Wolin has written a classic (sure to be suppressed, ignored, or ridiculed) work which unveils how whatever resemblance of imperfect democracy we may have ever had in the USA has been clearly hi-jacked and is now regularly misrepresented and distorted by a super-elite of belligerents, greedily driven by an ideology of selfishness and narcissism, which has merged the submissive state of select "representatives" in all three branches of government, at every level, with the dominant desires, funding, and overbearing control of their corporate collaborators and masters.
The State and The Corporation are now One.
Meanwhile they pretend otherwise. But it's a lie.
And it didn't happen overnight.
The transformation and slow motion coup d'état has settled in over several decades while an increasingly passive, loyal, true-believing, and obedient populace keeps holding onto old and long held but forgotten ideals (by those in power especially) for dear life.
Wolin calls the take over "managed democracy" under the well-hidden rule of an "inverted totalitarianism".
No goose stepping brown shirts are necessary (in this scenario) to control, weaken, and dis-empower the populace.
It's been and is being done by way of a collaborative ownership class in cahoots with a corporate mainstream media, through infiltration of government at the federal, state, and judicial rankings (by the generous money lenders), which are all now in almost total submission to Wall Street, the Banks, the military establishment, and all of the big corporate guns who have funded and continue to fund the take over.
The only real democracy left in America is a "fugitive" one. Represented by all the NGO groups who work for the common good, on the fringe, and for the empowerment of the democratic individual, in a struggling attempt to hold the line against the dictatorial inversion, to try to democratize all those things that have been un-democratized, to challenge and expose the well-paid collaborators who manipulate whatever information and "news" outlets most (mostly older) Americans still rely upon. And to win democratic victories one brick at a time as we attempt to put the democratic house back in order.
And we will.
Democracy will not be returned to us through trusting the corporate state. But only through the enlightenment and then the empowerment of the "people". Through the "demos". Through the "commons" becoming empowered and confident by realizing who they (who we) are.
The raising of the consciousness and the democratic activation of one individual at a time is what needs to happen (and it is happening). Until the tipping point comes when democracy once again becomes real and alive, and strong, present, and confident enough to take the steering wheel back from the corporate and elected car-jackers who have been steering what's not theirs to steer for far too long.
It can be done. It is being done. It will be done.
But each of us must democratize ourselves and spread the energy out into the commonality, into the common field, that we all share.
We must quit buying into the corporate media distractions and the constant sales pitch that keeps so many convinced of and submitted to the fantasy that rugged, selfish, unloving, and isolated individualism is somehow a touchstone of living in a democratic society.
It's not.
It's instead a very effective way to paralyze us, through the ideology of distrust and separation. And which always seems to need an "other" to blame.
It convinces so many that the American Dream means wishful thinking ourselves into desiring to become materially rich some day, just like all those celebrity billionaires, as if that should be the goal of being alive, as long as we just keep playing along with a system that's rigged from the top on down, one that guarantees inequality. One that portrays self-interest and materialism as the twin behaviors and ideologies that we should not only believe in and idolize but should be putting into practice in our daily living habits, and which we should seek to define us, and which will someday make us as insane as a mythological America is, the one that we too often submit to and that we too often over-identify with, as great (again?).
We must embrace the ideal of doing and believing in what's best for the common good (of all creation, not just humans). And it will and must come from the bottom up (from us humans).
It is already happening.
Slowly.
But it is happening.
Take a look around.
There will be martyrs.
The powerful don't give up power easily, even if it they only lose their power by simply being ignored.
Read the book.
Get inspired.
Break through the corporate stranglehold that suppresses information and truth. And which replaces it with distractions and a manipulating corporate slight of hand. And with sacrificial lambs being slaughtered (in our name) all over the world.
There is no totalitarian, violent magic that we can't overcome if we acknowledge the corporate trickery behind a managed and fake democracy.
We can make it real.
And we will.

[Public Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

An idea as provocative as this should never be so dull... This reader thinks it was a big mistake for the author to ever apologize for his theories. It felt like a significant portion of the early going was preparing the reader for upcoming comparisons to totalitarianism. Newsflash, if someone has picked up a book that suggests that the American system has devolved into some sort of totalitarian corporate state - they are probably willing to roll with such parallels.

Unfortunately, after reading the whole book - I still can't say I am completely clear on what "inverted totalitarianism" is or how it is supposed to operate. I like the notion that somehow the American public has been turned into compliant sheep while the corporate and political elite pull all the strings - but this book does a poor job explaining how the alleged conspiracy really works.

A sterling book idea poorly executed.

[Albert Marten · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written at the end of Bush II, Wolin's book is a frightening harbinger for the coming Trump years. It's like President Obama never happened. Open the book to nearly any page and the reader will find meat for consumption. Page 261, for example, "A rarely discussed but crucial need of a self-governing society is that the members and those they elect to office tell the truth." Later on the same page, "In the face of declining political involvement by ordinary citizens, democracy becomes dangerously empty and not only receptive to anti-political appeals to blind patriotism, fear, and demagoguery but comfortable with a political culture where lying, misrepresentation, and deception have become normal practice." Welcome to the Trump Empire and Wolin describes it with horrid prescience.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent analysis of the impact of marrying capitalism to democracy. Wolin presents the seeming contradiction of an anti-democratic elitist ruling class whose existence is only possible as long as the citizenry believes they live in a genuine democracy. He demonstrates how thoroughly corrupted and dishonest our political system is. Though written in 2008, he provides an incredibly prescient take on the current political mood and what needs to happen to save democracy. I highly recommend it.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books where I wish Goodreads let us use half-stars, because I'd give it 3 1/2. I did like the book and it was filled with tons of information, stuff I never knew before. His footnotes were worthy of their own book. Having said that, it was a bit repetitive. I felt like the author was repeating the same point about inverted totalitarianism in different words. Still, it's an informative book and one that Americans would benefit by reading.

[Jeff Carpenter · Rating 4 out of 5]

His theory of "inverted totalitarianism" analyzes our predicament beautifully. I think it is a breakthrough.
His writing, however, gets more and more introspective, posing ever more detailed arguments, dissecting those arguments, and then examining the pieces from different points of view. I assume it must be engaging to the denizens of higher political theory, but, to be honest, it became too turgid for me.

[Mitchel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent intro to current US politics and the Bush years. But basic if you've read Klien, Chomsky or any other contemporary critics of power. If I could go back I prob would skip over, but maybe would recommend to a friend. I think "Rogue Nation" and others are better.

[Arianne X · Rating 5 out of 5]

Democracy Assimilated

Sheldon Wolin introduces two crucial concepts in an attempt to better understand and explain the current American political system, viz., inverted totalitarianism and managed democracy. Inverted totalitarianism is the tool by which democracy is managed.

An important legislative difference between overt and inverted totalitarianism is that in overt totalitarianism, a unified pseudo-legislature is used to affirm all executive orders, e.g., the Nazi Reichstag or the supreme Soviet of the USSR. With inverted totalitarianism, as it is in the U.S., a divided legislature is exploited by the executive to issue sweeping executive orders. Gridlock does not paralyze government, it only empowers executive authority. Sharp differences in the country persist and cannot be resolved but the executive moves forward as if a mandate exists creating an illusion of consensus, e.g., the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

The truth of the U.S. Constitution is that the founders intended the checks and balances to apply mainly to the representatives of the people in an effort to setup a strong national government. We must keep in mind that the Senate was not established to be an elective body, it was established to represent the states, not the people. Federal judges and justices are appointed and the President is indirectly elected by the Electoral College with the states as the voting entities. Only the House of Representative (one-half of one branch) was established as a body directly elected by the people in a democratic fashion. The intent was to legitimize a Platonic class of political guardians that could act in the interest of the people without necessarily carrying out the will of the people. In a sense, the U.S. Constitution was a counter-revolutionary document designed to corral the more open democratic colonial period of 1760 - 1787. The people were at ounce declared sovereign but unfit to govern. The purpose of the U.S. Constitution was to prevent the selfish and destructive interests on the many from gaining control of government, but this has only resulted in the selfish and destructive interests on the few gaining control of government. We traded the irrational politics of the many for the irrational politics of the few.

There is a glaring contradiction with the U.S. being the greatest power in the world, the sole superpower of the world or global hegemon and the idea of a constitutionally limited government. The quote often attributed to Thucydides, “the tyranny the Athenian leadership imposed on others it finally imposed on itself” shows that it is limited government, not empire, that falls first. That is, constitutional government and global superpower status are incompatible. Can a global hegemon with imperial powers abroad maintain limited powers at home? Ongoing domestic developments and history both say no. Where in the U.S. Constitution is the government delegated the totalizing power of a superpower?

Inverted totalitarianism is an evolutionary development, not a planned outcome. In other words, it is a bottom up, not a top down totalitarianism. It grows and accumulates over time from our well-rooted social traditions of individualism, self-reliance and competition and is thus seen as familiar and acceptable and not as alien and objectional. But hyper competition gets pushed down to the individual level and squeezes out empathy. Inverted totalitarianism fragments society and atomizes people rather than galvanizing society into a single purpose as does overt totalitarianism.

Before reading this book, I have always thought of this concept as institutional totalitarianism where the institutions of society (public or private and the public-private ventures) grow so large, powerful, integrated, concentrated and bureaucratic that no individual can understand them, control them or oppose them. Corporate power and legislation become comingled. These institutions are already committed to what they are based on their essential nature. This is how democracy becomes assimilated. Such an institutional structure is rife with unintended consequences and the convergence of long-term tendencies. This is how we develop systems or ‘the system’ where rational decisions at the individual level result in irrational outcomes at the system level. This is a system that creates uncertainty and feeds on the fear such uncertainty creates. This why the climate change issue cannot be addressed, the legislative and regulatory actions necessary are contrary to corporate interest which has invested itself in the government.

The greatest change wrought by the 20th Century, as explained by the author, is the increasing and insidious dominance of corporate power in politics, economics, law, policy and culture producing a well-managed public. Public authority over the citizen is traded for private power over the employee. As the author puts it, the government is becoming more market oriented and the corporation is becoming more politically oriented creating the infrastructure and mechanisms for inverted totalitarianism. The call for privatization is not the call for increased liberty, it is a call for a different form of control. Privatization is about alternative power relationships removed from democratic accountability. Corporate power is not restrained by constitutional provisions, it is actually enhanced with constitutional decisions such Citizens United where massive corporate campaign contributions are falsely equated with personal free speech. Seriously, what kind of person is a corporation? Not one defined in the all-mightily original reading the U.S. Constitution. This is what the author means by inverted totalitarianism, it is not the overt totalitarianism of a centralized state. It is characterized by the rise of abstract corporate and institutional power, but still total power over the individual and with it, the decline of citizen power as democracy is assimilated. The leader is the product of the system, e.g., Donald Trump, rather than the architect of the system such as Adolf Hitler. Inverted totalitarianism is arcane and insidious whereas the traditional form of overt and obvious totalitarianism takes place in the open, within the public sphere for all to see. With inverted totalitarianism, cultural issues are not framed for resolution, they are intended for continuous conflict. This allows political leaders and the pundits to stand up for values that do not cost anything in terms needed benefits for the poor, new taxes on the wealthy or restraints corporate behavior. This is a way of depressing popular power without overtly suppressing it. This is achieved by appealing to the aspirations rather than the realities of the voters.

The author points out how Tocqueville saw that despotism could evolve naturally and peacefully out of democracy and representative government. The author also points out how, due to fear and passivity, we have made the Hobbesian deal to create a superpower leviathan based on democratic consent. Tocqueville foresaw the possibility of a comfortable democratic despotism. Hobbes foresaw a rational absolutist despotism. In either case, it is tyranny by consent. The trouble of course is that great power used abroad can be easily turned inward. For example, in the effort to root out terrorists. In this environment, domestic and foreign policy coagulate into one indistinguishable flow of power, e.g., The Patriot Act. The principles of self-government and global hegemony combine into managed democracy.

The power of the market overtakes the power of the state, but this is the market of large and dominate corporations, oligopolies and monopolies. It is not the innocent free market of the simple shop keeper. The current notion of the market is itself a new means of exercising meaningful power. Market principles are now market powers. The power to determine wages, patterns of consumption, opportunity or obligation, the power to do nothing less than reorder neighborhoods, cities, states and countries. A look a history shows that the nation state and the corporation developed together in a mutually supporting evolution. This has become the orthodoxy, a reification of the current economic system and social constructs. For example, mistaking the human created system of neoliberal economics for a law of nature or as just simply part of the natural order and thus unalterable with human action. When economic inequality is taken as natural it gets translated into political inequality and thus lack of equality before the law. With capitalism, power is based on capital and dependence is based on the division of labor, thus economic status becomes the basis for political status. Capital and labor are not solely economic characteristics, they acquire political, social and cultural attributes as well. This orthodoxy, by its very nature, prevents the consideration of alternatives.

Neoliberalism is very good at creating just enough instability to keep the civic public off balance. Instead of a democracy tending toward anarchy thus inviting in an overtly totalitarian order to maintain or restore order, democracy can instead tend toward a submissive compliance, to the overwhelming power of the institutions of democracy and the market, both public and private. Inverted totalitarianism does not displace other powers centers, it combines with them, e.g., evangelical religion, corporations, unions, media platforms etc. Political passivity is the price paid for private consumer pleasure where the citizen is replaced by the consumer and the spectator to create the managed democracy. In other words, inverted totalitarianism achieves the totalitarian order without the totalitarian leader. It is a faceless dictatorship. It comes about with a succession of seemingly unrelated events and decisions that have a cumulative effect upon society. Inverted totalitarianism is the inward-looking face of a world hegemonic Superpower. The primacy of profit over all human concerns and social relations is a sign of inverted totalitarianism. Inverted totalitarianism is not a coherent or articulated philosophy or theory of politics. It is an unintended consequence of ideological wars such as the Cold War and the War on Terror that result in the close cooperation of the state and the cooperation in fighting ideological battels. For example, during the Cold War, anything the benefitted, enabled or expanded capitalism was seen as a blow against communism.

We should not make the mistake of thinking that political power has been attenuated with the recent ‘conservative’ moves to ‘shrink government’, ‘get government off our backs’, cut taxes, reduce regulations, privatization etc. Amidst these efforts, political power has been augmented with the privatization of public tasks such as private prison management companies and private contractor armies. The power of the unaccountable bureaucratic state and large corporations of anonymous ownership have combined to assert authority and control with greater effectiveness and less accountability. So-called small government only invites in alternative sources of authority such as large corporations and institutions, domestic and international, that combine with traditional government but are not accountable to the people in a democratic political process. Such non-democratically accountable power centers can be philanthropic and humanist or rapacious and pernicious. Without democratic accountability, the outcomes are left to other undefined and unknown processes such as the market. Lack of a democratic process and democratic accountability does not produce governance by disinterested elites, it produces governance by crass opportunists.

Just as we learned that the transition from G.W. Bush to Barack Obama did not bring about needed paradigmatic change but only a respite, so too it appears to be the same with the change of no-change from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. It is only the appearances that appear to change. The chance for change will once again be squandered in a search to secure the sacred status quo of stability. There is a deep conservatism of our time that is not simply political, I see it as a symptom of fear. Fear to try anything new or different in terms of meaningful public policy to address real human issues.

[Wedma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es handelt sich um die deutsche Ausgabe mit dem Titel "Umgekehrter Totalitarismus".

Einige Tage ist es her, als die letzte Seite ausgelesen war, das Buch beschäftigt mich im Geiste immer noch.
Es lohnt sich. Wirklich. Auch für diejenigen, die nicht so ganz unbeleckt sind und sich mit dem Thema Machteliten und ihr Treiben bereits befasst haben.
Auch für diejenigen, die „Warum schweigen die Lämmer“ von Reiner Mausfeld (bleibt nach wie vor ein must read) gelesen haben. Mausfelds Vorwort zu diesem Werk, S. 8-54, gar nicht mal so kurz also, ist aussagestark und ebenso unbedingt lesenswert wie das vorliegende Buch von Sheldon Wolin. Beide möchte ich nicht missen.
Die Zitate am Buchrücken beschreiben den Inhalt sehr treffend, z.B.: „Wolins Buch ragt aus der Literatur der politischen Philosophie weit heraus, weil er kompromisslos die faktischen Machtverhältnisse und ihre zerstörerischen Auswirkungen benennt.“ Rainer Mausfeld.
Diese Sicht der Dinge muss man einfach kennen. Dann wird vieles klarer, was heute in der Welt passiert. Man kann das Ganze adäquater einschätzen.
Jedes Kapitel hat seine Highlights. Angefangen mit den Mythen, die in die Welt gesetzt werden, der Verschmelzung der Religion und elitärer Macht, um die Herrschaftsverhältnisse zu sichern und weiter auszubauen, zur Entstehung der Demokratie, i.e. von wem und für wen sie gedacht war und geschaffen wurde, bis zu der analysestarken Beschreibung der elitären Machtverhältnisse in der Busch-Ära und noch vieles mehr. George W. Busch wurde dabei oft George der Zweite genannt. Man sieht, guten Humorsinn und gewisses Unterhaltungstalent, wie auch das erzählerische Können, kann man dem Autor wohl kaum absprechen.
Der Text ist sehr verständlich geschrieben. Klar und für alle zugänglich zu bleiben, war Wolin ein extra Anliegen, was ihm auch gut gelungen ist. Spätestens ab dem 8.ten Kapitel wird es echt aufschlussreich. Und bis dahin informativ und spannend, was natürlich bis zum Schluss bleibt.
Wolins Darlegungen und Erklärungen sind prima nachvollziehbar. Vergleiche der Gesellschaftsverhältnisse beim umgekehrten Totalitarismus der Gegenwart mit den totalitären Regimen der Vergangenheit erschienen nicht nur plausibel und überzeugend.
Sie regen zum Nachdenken und Diskutieren an. Insofern ist es schade, dass das Buch erst in diesem Jahr zum ersten Mal in deutscher Übersetzung erscheint.
Gehe weiter nicht ins Detail. Original ist immer besser als eine kurze Nacherzählung. Nehmen Sei sich lieber Zeit fürs Original und lesen Sie selbst. Es lohnt sich.

Fazit: Diese Inhalte sollte man kennen. Schon allein, um nicht dumm und veräppelt nach Strich und Faden sterben zu müssen, salopp gesagt.
Wer noch nicht im Klaren ist, wie Propaganda aufgebaut wird, damit sie sicher funktioniert, dem sei das Buch „Propaganda“ von Jacques Ellul ans Herz gelegt.
Wolins Buch „Umgekehrter Totalitarismus“ sollte man kennen. Unbedingt.