Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/sheldon_wolin_and_inverted_totalitariani
sm_20151101/
Posted on Nov 1, 2015
By Chris Hedges
Sheldon Wolin discusses his ideas with Chris Hedges in this still from
Hedges' interview with Wolin for The Real News Network. (TRNN via YouTube)
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.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/sheldon_wolin_and_inverted_totalitariani
sm_20151101/
Posted on Nov 1, 2015
By Chris Hedges
Sheldon Wolin discusses his ideas with Chris Hedges in this still from
Hedges' interview with Wolin for The Real News Network. (TRNN via YouTube)
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.
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