Inverted
Totalitarianism
By
Sheldon Wolin
The Nation
23 May, 2003
The war on Iraq has so monopolized
public attention as to obscure the regime change taking place in America.
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no longer represent voters.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?