Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism:
America's most important contemporary political theorist, who died
Oct. 21, warned that militarists and corporate capitalists, obsessed
with creating a global empire, would extinguish our democracy. We
should have heeded his warning.
By Chris Hedges
November 02, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Truthdig
" - Sheldon Wolin, our most important
contemporary political theorist, died Oct. 21 at the age of 93. In
his books “Democracy
Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted
Totalitarianism” and “Politics
and Vision,” a massive survey of Western political thought that
his former student Cornel West calls “magisterial,” Wolin lays bare
the realities of our bankrupt democracy, the causes behind the
decline of American empire and the rise of a new and terrifying
configuration of corporate power he calls “inverted
totalitarianism.”
Wendy Brown, a political
science professor at UC Berkeley and another former student of
Wolin’s, said in an email to me: “Resisting the monopolies on left
theory by Marxism and on democratic theory by liberalism, Wolin
developed a distinctive—even distinctively American—analysis of the
political present and of radical democratic possibilities. He was
especially prescient in theorizing the heavy statism forging what we
now call
neoliberalism, and in revealing the novel fusions of economic
with political power that he took to be poisoning democracy at its
root.”
Wolin throughout his scholarship charted the
devolution of American democracy and in his last book, “Democracy
Incorporated,”
details our peculiar form of corporate totalitarianism. “One
cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be
described as democratic,” he writes in that book, “surely not in the
highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested
Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and
penal system, or, least of all, the media.”
Inverted totalitarianism is different from
classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression
in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the faceless anonymity
of the corporate state. Our inverted totalitarianism pays outward
fealty to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil
liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary,
and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism,
but it has effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to
render the citizen impotent.
“Unlike the Nazis, who made life uncertain for the
wealthy and privileged while providing social programs for the
working class and poor, inverted totalitarianism exploits the poor,
reducing or weakening health programs and social services,
regimenting mass education for an insecure workforce threatened by
the importation of low-wage workers,” Wolin writes. “Employment in a
high-tech, volatile, and globalized economy is normally as
precarious as during an old-fashioned depression. The result is that
citizenship, or what remains of it, is practiced amidst a continuing
state of worry.
Hobbes
had it right: when citizens are insecure and at the same time driven
by competitive aspirations, they yearn for political stability
rather than civic engagement, protection rather than political
involvement.”
Inverted totalitarianism, Wolin said when we met
at his home in Salem, Ore., in 2014 to film a
nearly three-hour interview, constantly “projects power
upwards.” It is “the antithesis of constitutional power.” It is
designed to create instability to keep a citizenry off balance and
passive.
He writes, “Downsizing, reorganization, bubbles
bursting, unions busted, quickly outdated skills, and transfer of
jobs abroad create not just fear but an economy of fear, a system of
control whose power feeds on uncertainty, yet a system that,
according to its analysts, is eminently rational.”
Inverted totalitarianism also “perpetuates
politics all the time,” Wolin said when we spoke, “but a politics
that is not political.” The endless and extravagant election cycles,
he said, are an example of politics without politics.
“Instead of participating in power,” he writes,
“the virtual citizen is invited to have ‘opinions’: measurable
responses to questions predesigned to elicit them.”
Political campaigns rarely discuss substantive
issues. They center on manufactured political personalities, empty
rhetoric, sophisticated public relations, slick advertising,
propaganda and the constant use of focus groups and opinion polls to
loop back to voters what they want to hear. Money has effectively
replaced the vote. Every current presidential candidate—including
Bernie Sanders—understands, to use Wolin’s words, that “the subject
of empire is taboo in electoral debates.” The citizen is irrelevant.
He or she is nothing more than a spectator, allowed to vote and then
forgotten once the carnival of elections ends and corporations and
their lobbyists get back to the business of ruling.
“If the main purpose of elections is to serve up
pliant legislators for lobbyists to shape, such a system deserves to
be called ‘misrepresentative or clientry government,’ ” Wolin
writes. “It is, at one and the same time, a powerful contributing
factor to the depoliticization of the citizenry, as well as reason
for characterizing the system as one of antidemocracy.”
The result, he writes, is that the public is
“denied the use of state power.” Wolin deplores the trivialization
of political discourse, a tactic used to leave the public
fragmented, antagonistic and emotionally charged while leaving
corporate power and empire unchallenged.
“Cultural wars might seem an indication of strong
political involvements,” he writes. “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.”
“The ruling groups can now operate on the
assumption that they don’t need the traditional notion of something
called a public in the broad sense of a coherent whole,” he said in
our meeting. “They now have the tools to deal with the very
disparities and differences that they have themselves helped to
create. It’s a game in which you manage to undermine the
cohesiveness that the public requires if they [the public] are to be
politically effective. And at the same time, you create these
different, distinct groups that inevitably find themselves in
tension or at odds or in competition with other groups, so that it
becomes more of a melee than it does become a way of fashioning
majorities.”
In classical totalitarian regimes, such as those
of Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to
politics. But “under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,”
Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics—and with that domination
comes different forms of ruthlessness.”
He continues: “The United States has become the
showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be
suppressed.”
The corporate state, Wolin told me, is
“legitimated by elections it controls.” To extinguish democracy, it
rewrites and distorts laws and legislation that once protected
democracy. Basic rights are, in essence, revoked by judicial and
legislative fiat. Courts and legislative bodies, in the service of
corporate power, reinterpret laws to strip them of their original
meaning in order to strengthen corporate control and abolish
corporate oversight.
He writes: “Why negate a constitution, as the
Nazis did, if it is possible simultaneously to exploit porosity and
legitimate power by means of judicial interpretations that declare
huge campaign contributions to be protected speech under the
First Amendment, or that treat heavily financed and organized
lobbying by large corporations as a simple application of the
people’s right to petition their government?”
Our system of inverted totalitarianism will avoid
harsh and violent measures of control “as long as ... dissent
remains ineffectual,” he told me. “The government does not need to
stamp out dissent. The uniformity of imposed public opinion through
the corporate media does a very effective job.”
And the elites, especially the intellectual class,
have been bought off. “Through a combination of governmental
contracts, corporate and foundation funds, joint projects involving
university and corporate researchers, and wealthy individual donors,
universities (especially so-called research universities),
intellectuals, scholars, and researchers have been seamlessly
integrated into the system,” Wolin writes. “No books burned, no
refugee Einsteins.”
But, he warns, should the population—steadily
stripped of its most basic rights, including the right to privacy,
and increasingly impoverished and bereft of hope—become restive,
inverted totalitarianism will become as brutal and violent as past
totalitarian states. “The war on terrorism, with its accompanying
emphasis upon ‘homeland security,’ presumes that state power, now
inflated by
doctrines of preemptive war and released from treaty obligations
and the potential constraints of international judicial bodies, can
turn inwards,” he writes, “confident that in its domestic pursuit of
terrorists the powers it claimed, like the powers projected abroad,
would be measured, not by ordinary constitutional standards, but by
the shadowy and ubiquitous character of terrorism as officially
defined.”
The indiscriminate police violence in poor
communities of color is an example of the ability of the corporate
state to “legally” harass and kill citizens with impunity. The
cruder forms of control—from militarized police to wholesale
surveillance, as well as police serving as judge, jury and
executioner, now a reality for the underclass—will become a reality
for all of us should we begin to resist the continued funneling of
power and wealth upward. We are tolerated as citizens, Wolin warns,
only as long as we participate in the illusion of a participatory
democracy. The moment we rebel and refuse to take part in the
illusion, the face of inverted totalitarianism will look like the
face of past systems of totalitarianism.
“The significance of the African-American prison
population is political,” he writes. “What is notable about the
African-American population generally is that it is highly
sophisticated politically and by far the one group that throughout
the twentieth century kept alive a spirit of resistance and
rebelliousness. In that context, criminal justice is as much a
strategy of political neutralization as it is a channel of
instinctive racism.”
In his writings, Wolin expresses consternation for
a population severed from print and the nuanced world of ideas. He
sees cinema, like television, as “tyrannical” because of its ability
to “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification,
ambiguity, or dialogue.” He rails against what he calls a
“monochromatic media” with corporate-approved pundits used to
identify “the problem and its parameters, creating a box that
dissenters struggle vainly to elude. The critic who insists on
changing the context is dismissed as irrelevant, extremist, ‘the
Left’—or ignored altogether.”
The constant dissemination of illusions permits
myth rather than reality to dominate the decisions of the power
elites. And when myth dominates, disaster descends upon the empire,
as 14 years of futile war in the Middle East and our failure to
react to climate change illustrate. Wolin writes:
When myth begins to govern decision-makers in
a world where ambiguity and stubborn facts abound, the result is
a disconnect between the actors and the reality. They convince
themselves that the forces of darkness possess weapons of mass
destruction and nuclear capabilities: that their own nation is
privileged by a god who inspired the Founding Fathers and the
writing of the nation’s constitution; and that a class structure
of great and stubborn inequalities does not exist. A grim but
joyous few see portents of a world that is living out “the last
days.”
Wolin was a bombardier and a navigator on a B-24
Liberator heavy bomber in the South Pacific in World War II. He flew
51 combat missions. The planes had crews of up to 10. From
Guadalcanal, he advanced with American forces as they captured
islands in the Pacific. During the campaign the military high
command decided to direct the B-24 bombers—which were huge and
difficult to fly in addition to having little
maneuverability—against Japanese ships, a tactic that saw tremendous
losses of planes and American lives. The use of the B-24, nicknamed
“the flying boxcar” and “the flying coffin,” to attack warships
bristling with antiaircraft guns exposed for Wolin the callousness
of military commanders who blithely sacrificed their air crews and
war machines in schemes that offered little chance of success.
“It was terrible,” he said of the orders to bomb
ships. “We received awful losses from that, because these big,
lumbering aircraft, particularly flying low trying to hit the
Japanese navy—and we lost countless people in it, countless.”
“We had quite a few psychological casualties ...
men, boys, who just couldn’t take it anymore,” he said, “just
couldn’t stand the strain of getting up at 5 in the morning and
proceeding to get into these aircraft and go and getting shot at for
a while and coming back to rest for another day.”
Wolin saw the militarists and the corporatists,
who formed an unholy coalition to orchestrate the rise of a global
American empire after the war, as the forces that extinguished
American democracy. He called inverted totalitarianism “the true
face of Superpower.” These war profiteers and militarists,
advocating the doctrine of total war during the Cold War, bled the
country of resources. They also worked in tandem to dismantle
popular institutions and organizations such as labor unions to
politically disempower and impoverish workers. They “normalized”
war. And Wolin warns that, as in all empires, they eventually will
be “eviscerated by their own expansionism.” There will never be a
return to democracy, he cautions, until the unchecked power of the
militarists and corporatists is dramatically curtailed. A war state
cannot be a democratic state.
Wolin writes:
National defense was declared inseparable from
a strong economy. The fixation upon mobilization and rearmament
inspired the gradual disappearance from the national political
agenda of the regulation and control of corporations. The
defender of the free world needed the power of the globalizing,
expanding corporation, not an economy hampered by “trust
busting.” Moreover, since the enemy was rabidly anticapitalist,
every measure that strengthened capitalism was a blow against
the enemy. Once the battle lines between communism and the “free
society” were drawn, the economy became untouchable for purposes
other than “strengthening” capitalism. The ultimate merger would
be between capitalism and democracy. Once the identity and
security of democracy were successfully identified with the Cold
War and with the methods for waging it, the stage was set for
the intimidation of most politics left or right.
The result is a nation dedicated almost
exclusively to waging war.
“When a constitutionally limited government
utilizes weapons of horrendous destructive power, subsidizes their
development, and becomes the world’s largest arms dealer,” Wolin
writes, “the Constitution is conscripted to serve as power’s
apprentice rather than its conscience.”
He goes on:
That the patriotic citizen unswervingly
supports the military and its huge budget means that
conservatives have succeeded in persuading the public that the
military is distinct from government. Thus the most substantial
element of state power is removed from public debate. Similarly
in his/her new status as imperial citizen the believer remains
contemptuous of bureaucracy yet does not hesitate to obey the
directives issued by the Department of Homeland Security, the
largest and most intrusive governmental department in the
history of the nation. Identification with militarism and
patriotism, along with the images of American might projected by
the media, serves to make the individual citizen feel stronger,
thereby compensating for the feelings of weakness visited by the
economy upon an overworked, exhausted, and insecure labor force.
For its antipolitics inverted totalitarianism requires
believers, patriots, and nonunion “guest workers.”
Sheldon Wolin was often considered an outcast
among contemporary political theorists whose concentration on
quantitative analysis and behaviorialism led them to eschew the
examination of broad political theory and ideas. Wolin insisted that
philosophy, even that written by the ancient Greeks, was not a dead
relic but a vital tool to examine and challenge the assumptions and
ideologies of contemporary systems of power and political thought.
Political theory, he argued, was “primarily a civic and secondarily
an academic activity.” It had a role “not just as an historical
discipline that dealt with the critical examination of idea
systems,” he told me, but as a force “in helping to fashion public
policies and governmental directions, and above all civic education,
in a way that would further ... the goals of a more democratic, more
egalitarian, more educated society.” His 1969 essay “Political
Theory as a Vocation” argued for this imperative and chastised
fellow academics who focused their work on data collection and
academic minutiae. He writes, with his usual lucidity and literary
flourishes, in that essay:
In a fundamental sense, our world has become
as perhaps no previous world has, the product of design, the
product of theories about human structures deliberately created
rather than historically articulated. But in another sense, the
embodiment of theory in the world has resulted in a world
impervious to theory. The giant, routinized structures defy
fundamental alteration and, at the same time, display an
unchallengeable legitimacy, for the rational, scientific, and
technological principles on which they are based seem in perfect
accord with an age committed to science, rationalism and
technology. Above all, it is a world which appears to have
rendered epic theory superfluous. Theory, as Hegel had foreseen,
must take the form of “explanation.” Truly, it seems to be the
age when
Minerva’s owl has taken flight.
Wolin’s 1960 masterpiece “Politics and Vision,”
subtitled “Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought,”
drew on a vast array of political theorists and philosophers
including Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Immanuel Kant, John Locke,
John Calvin, Martin Luther, Thomas Hobbes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl
Marx, Max Weber, John Dewey and Hannah Arendt to reflect back to us
our political and cultural reality. His task, he stated at the end
of the book, was, “in the era of Superpower,” to “nurture the civic
consciousness of the society.” The imperative to amplify and protect
democratic traditions from the contemporary forces that sought to
destroy them permeated all of his work, including his books “Hobbes
and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory” and “Tocqueville
Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical
Life.”
Wolin’s magnificence as a scholar was matched by
his magnificence as a human being. He stood with students at UC
Berkeley, where he taught, to support the Free Speech Movement and
wrote passionately in its defense. Many of these essays were
published in “The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond: Essays on Politics
and Education in the Technological Society.” Later, as a professor
at Princeton University, he was one of a handful of faculty members
who joined students to call for divestment of investments in
apartheid South Africa. He once accompanied students to present the
case to Princeton alumni. “I’ve never been jeered quite so roundly,”
he said. “Some of them called me [a] 50-year-old ... sophomore and
that kind of thing.”
From 1981 to 1983, Wolin published Democracy: A
Journal of Political Renewal and Radical Change. In its pages he and
other writers called out the con game of neoliberalism, the danger
of empire, the rise of unchecked corporate power and the erosion of
democratic institutions and ideals. The journal swiftly made him a
pariah within the politics department at Princeton.
“I remember once when I was up editing that
journal, I left a copy of it on the table in the faculty room hoping
that somebody would read it and comment,” he said. “I never heard a
word. And during all the time I was there and doing Democracy, I
never had one colleague come up to me and either say something
positive or even negative about it. Just absolute silence.”
Max Weber, whom Wolin
called “the greatest of all sociologists,” argues in his essay
“Politics as a Vocation” that those who dedicate their lives to
striving for justice in the modern political arena are like the
classical heroes who can never overcome what the ancient Greeks
called fortuna. These heroes, Wolin writes in “Politics and
Vision,” rise up nevertheless “to heights of moral passion and
grandeur, harried by a deep sense of responsibility.” Yet, Wolin
goes on, “at bottom, [the contemporary hero] is a figure as futile
and pathetic as his classical counterpart. The fate of the classical
hero was that he could never overcome contingency or fortuna;
the special irony of the modern hero is that he struggles in a world
where contingency has been routed by bureaucratized procedures and
nothing remains for the hero to contend against. Weber’s political
leader is rendered superfluous by the very bureaucratic world that
Weber discovered: even charisma has been bureaucratized. We are left
with the ambiguity of the political man fired by deep passion—‘to be
passionate, ira et studium, is … the element of the political
leader’—but facing the impersonal world of bureaucracy which lives
by the passionless principle that Weber frequently cited, sine
ira et studio, ‘without scorn or bias.’ ”
Wolin writes that even when faced with certain
defeat, all of us are called to the “awful responsibility” of the
fight for justice, equality and liberty.
“You don’t win,” Wolin said at the end of our
talk. “Or you win rarely. And if you win, it’s often for a very
short time. That’s why politics is a vocation for Weber. It’s not an
occasional undertaking that we assume every two years or every four
years when there’s an election. It’s a constant occupation and
preoccupation. And the problem, as Weber saw it, was to understand
it not as a partisan kind of education in the politicians or
political party sense, but as in the broad understanding of what
political life should be and what is required to make it
sustainable. He’s calling for a certain kind of understanding that’s
very different from what we think about when we associate political
understanding with how do you vote or what party do you support or
what cause do you support. Weber’s asking us to step back and say
what kind of political order, and the values associated with it that
it promotes, are we willing to really give a lot for, including
sacrifice.”
Wolin embodied the qualities Weber ascribes to the
hero. He struggled against forces he knew he could not vanquish. He
never wavered in the fight as an intellectual and, more important,
in the fight as a citizen. He was one of the first to explain to us
the transformation of our capitalist democracy into a new species of
totalitarianism. He warned us of the consequences of unbridled
empire or superpower. He called on us to rise up and resist. His
“Democracy Incorporated” was ignored by every major newspaper and
journal in the country. This did not surprise him. He knew his
power. So did his enemies. All his fears for the nation have come to
pass. A corporate monstrosity rules us. If we held up a scorecard we
would have to say Wolin lost, but we would also have to acknowledge
the integrity, brilliance, courage and nobility of his life.
Chris Hedges, previously spent nearly two
decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle
East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50
countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National
Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for
which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.