Must read art given the dangers of neo-nazi regime coming with Hillary or Trump
By Chris Hedges
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 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.
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2016 TruthDig
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