Sheldon Wolin
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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Representative institutions no longer represent voters.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?
----
Sheldon
Wolin Sheldon Wolin is the author, most recently, of Alexis de
Tocqueville: Man Between Two Worlds (Princeton). A new edition of his book Politics and Vision is forthcoming. He is
professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University.
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