Inverted totalitarianism
After reading my recent col- umn (more like a tirade) on the dysfunction posing as governance in our nation’s capital, a valued reader suggested the explanation lies in a 9-year-old book by Princeton political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.
Despite its densely academic title, the basic concept Wolin presents seems fairly understandable and intriguing to a boy from the Ozark hills.
Wolin certainly raised a valid question: Has our America been transforming into some strange political beast where democracy is managed and government and economic interests are blended to create insurmountable power?
Portions of Wolin’s views even in 2008 appear to make sense in helping explain why things have become increasingly fouled in the swamp of lucrative dishonesty permeating our D.C. government.
Care to take a stab at guessing what Wolin claims provides root for this destructive political condition? If you said lucre, you’d be right on the money.
In essence, Wolin’s inverted totalitarianism describes a modern-day form of government increasingly morphing into an “illiberal democracy.” It’s a system, Wolin contends, where corporations have corrupted and subverted democracy to the point where cost-effective economics trumps our republic of, by and for we the people.
It’s also a philosophy where everything is made a commodity and exploited to collapse. Meanwhile, the citizenry is lulled and manipulated through pervasive consumerism and sensationalism into surrendering liberties and active participation in government.
We need not look far to see how special-interest lobbying, a sensationalist national media, pervasive governmental spying, the exorbitant cost of seeking public office, the lying and scheming for personal public-service advantage, as well as the trend toward ignoring our Constitution appears to mesh with Wolin’s philosophy.
Inverted totalitarianism is neither Republican nor Democratic in nature. Rather, it’s a perverted form of gaining control. Government is created and democracy becomes managed while leading America into a larger, calculated order of things globally.
Wolin’s concept fit better before the phenomenon of independent-minded tycoon and political neophyte Donald Trump turned the professor’s idea on its head last November.
No doubt Trump hasn’t been—and still isn’t—part of the entrenched political establishment that for years has been on the receiving end of corporate and specialinterest lagniappe. He didn’t need their money, did he? He only needed (and got) enough Americans who were sick of it all.
Coming from the corporate side, Trump’s role instead has been one of thriving on consumerism as well as being the corporate giant buying the influence with politicos of both parties. He understands the corruptive game.
Wolin’s analysis also could apply in significant measure to state governments, where special interests and money often take precedent over the wants and needs of voting citizens. Whenever decisions in the seat of any government don’t seem logical, behind-the-scenes influence is likely.
Wolin cites three primary ways in which his concept is the inverted form of classical totalitarianism.
First, rather than government dominating economic actors, in inverted totalitarianism, corporations become dominant, with government acting to serve their special interests. This approach soon is considered normal.
Secondly, voting is the only political activity expected or desired from citizens. Low turnouts are interpreted as an indication that most of the population has given up hope that the government will help. That didn’t work out as projected in Trump’s case, now, did it?
Third, rather than openly mocking democracy, the U.S. maintains the idea that it is the global model of democracy. (Hard for me to call today’s turbulent nation a model for anything but democratically divided). In short, inverted totalitarianism reverses our expected classical view of government first being answerable to the people.
“It’s all politics all the time,” Wolin writes, “but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is steady and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns.
“And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities… . What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash.”
His message, right or wrong, should be enough to make us ask what’s truly going on within what we’ve always been simplistically led to view as our democratic republic. Who does government answer to nowadays?
As one reviewer explained: “[W]e need to understand the deep roots of our present troubles ourselves, and Wolin’s book is an excellent beginning.”