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[casi] Inverted Totalitarianism



http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030519&s=wolin

Posted May 1, 2003

Inverted Totalitarianism

by Sheldon Wolin


The war on Iraq has so monopolized public attention as to obscure the regime
change taking place in the Homeland. We may have invaded Iraq to bring in
democracy and bring down a totalitarian regime, but in the process our own
system may be moving closer to the latter and further weakening the former.
The change has been intimated by the sudden popularity of two political
terms rarely applied earlier to the American political system. "Empire" and
"superpower" both suggest that a new system of power, concentrated and
expansive, has come into existence and supplanted the old terms. "Empire"
and "superpower" accurately symbolize the projection of American power
abroad, but for that reason they obscure the internal consequences. Consider
how odd it would sound if we were to refer to "the Constitution of the
American Empire" or "superpower democracy." The reason they ring false is
that "constitution" signifies limitations on power, while "democracy"
commonly refers to the active involvement of citizens with their government
and the responsiveness of government to its citizens. For their part,
"empire" and "superpower" stand for the surpassing of limits and the
dwarfing of the citizenry.

The increasing power of the state and the declining power of institutions
intended to control it has been in the making for some time. The party
system is a notorious example. The Republicans have emerged as a unique
phenomenon in American history of a fervently doctrinal party, zealous,
ruthless, antidemocratic and boasting a near majority. As Republicans have
become more ideologically intolerant, the Democrats have shrugged off the
liberal label and their critical reform-minded constituencies to embrace
centrism and footnote the end of ideology. In ceasing to be a genuine
opposition party the Democrats have smoothed the road to power of a party
more than eager to use it to promote empire abroad and corporate power at
home. Bear in mind that a ruthless, ideologically driven party with a mass
base was a crucial element in all of the twentieth-century regimes seeking
total power.

Representative institutions no longer represent voters. Instead, they have
been short-circuited, steadily corrupted by an institutionalized system of
bribery that renders them responsive to powerful interest groups whose
constituencies are the major corporations and wealthiest Americans. The
courts, in turn, when they are not increasingly handmaidens of corporate
power, are consistently deferential to the claims of national security.
Elections have become heavily subsidized non-events that typically attract
at best merely half of an electorate whose information about foreign and
domestic politics is filtered through corporate-dominated media. Citizens
are manipulated into a nervous state by the media's reports of rampant crime
and terrorist networks, by thinly veiled threats of the Attorney General and
by their own fears about unemployment. What is crucially important here is
not only the expansion of governmental power but the inevitable discrediting
of constitutional limitations and institutional processes that discourages
the citizenry and leaves them politically apathetic.

No doubt these remarks will be dismissed by some as alarmist, but I want to
go further and name the emergent political system "inverted
totalitarianism." By inverted I mean that while the current system and its
operatives share with Nazism the aspiration toward unlimited power and
aggressive expansionism, their methods and actions seem upside down. For
example, in Weimar Germany, before the Nazis took power, the "streets" were
dominated by totalitarian-oriented gangs of toughs, and whatever there was
of democracy was confined to the government. In the United States, however,
it is the streets where democracy is most alive--while the real danger lies
with an increasingly unbridled government.

Or another example of the inversion: Under Nazi rule there was never any
doubt about "big business" being subordinated to the political regime. In
the United States, however, it has been apparent for decades that corporate
power has become so predominant in the political establishment, particularly
in the Republican Party, and so dominant in its influence over policy, as to
suggest a role inversion the exact opposite of the Nazis'. At the same time,
it is corporate power, as the representative of the dynamic of capitalism
and of the ever-expanding power made available by the integration of science
and technology with the structure of capitalism, that produces the
totalizing drive that, under the Nazis, was supplied by ideological notions
such as Lebensraum.

In rebuttal it will be said that there is no domestic equivalent to the Nazi
regime of torture, concentration camps or other instruments of terror. But
we should remember that for the most part, Nazi terror was not applied to
the population generally; rather, the aim was to promote a certain type of
shadowy fear--rumors of torture--that would aid in managing and manipulating
the populace. Stated positively, the Nazis wanted a mobilized society eager
to support endless warfare, expansion and sacrifice for the nation.

While the Nazi totalitarianism strove to give the masses a sense of
collective power and strength, Kraft durch Freude ("Strength through joy"),
inverted totalitarianism promotes a sense of weakness, of collective
futility. While the Nazis wanted a continuously mobilized society that would
not only support the regime without complaint and enthusiastically vote
"yes" at the periodic plebiscites, inverted totalitarianism wants a
politically demobilized society that hardly votes at all. Recall the
President's words immediately after the horrendous events of September 11:
"Unite, consume and fly," he told the anxious citizenry. Having assimilated
terrorism to a "war," he avoided doing what democratic leaders customarily
do during wartime: mobilize the citizenry, warn it of impending sacrifices
and exhort all citizens to join the "war effort." Instead, inverted
totalitarianism has its own means of promoting generalized fear; not only by
sudden "alerts" and periodic announcements about recently discovered
terrorist cells or the arrest of shadowy figures or the publicized
heavy-handed treatment of aliens and the Devil's Island that is Guantánamo
Bay or the sudden fascination with interrogation methods that employ or
border on torture, but by a pervasive atmosphere of fear abetted by a
corporate economy of ruthless downsizing, withdrawal or reduction of pension
and health benefits; a corporate political system that relentlessly
threatens to privatize Social Security and the modest health benefits
available, especially to the poor. With such instrumentalities for promoting
uncertainty and dependence, it is almost overkill for inverted
totalitarianism to employ a system of criminal justice that is punitive in
the extreme, relishes the death penalty and is consistently biased against
the powerless.

Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that
is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one party, whether
in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing
system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the
well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a
sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping
the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of
fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers. That scheme is abetted by a
sycophantic and increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of
universities with their corporate benefactors; by a propaganda machine
institutionalized in well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations;
by the increasingly closer cooperation between local police and national law
enforcement agencies aimed at identifying terrorists, suspicious aliens and
domestic dissidents.

What is at stake, then, is nothing less than the attempted transformation of
a tolerably free society into a variant of the extreme regimes of the past
century. In that context, the national elections of 2004 represent a crisis
in its original meaning, a turning point. The question for citizens is:
Which way?



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