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Introduction to the 2017 Edition Introduction to the 2017 Edition Sheldon Wolin was our most important contemporary political theorist. He gave us a modern vocabulary to describe our decayed democracy and the poi- sonous effects of empire. He was a scholar who detested orthodoxies, rooted his understanding of democracy in the ancient concept of the Athenian demos and believed, like Max Weber, that politics was a vocation. Ralph Nader gave me Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism when it first came out in 2008. Nader, who has been fighting the abuse of corporate power longer and with perhaps more success than any other American, called it a “masterpiece.” Wolin cap- tured the political mutations caused by neoliberalism and coined the term “inverted totalitarianism” for the novel political and economic system it had spawned. He foresaw that this system of inverted totalitarianism would, as it has, eventually crush or hollow out our democratic institutions and give rise to an authoritarian or even totalitarian regime. 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. Inverted totalitarianism pays out- ward 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 totali- tarianism 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 wrote. “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 citi- zens 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.” Great writers and intellectuals give us a vocabulary that allows us to make sense of reality. They excavate depths that we, without their help, are un- able to fathom. We are captive to systems of power until we can name the xxvii xxviii Introduction to the 2017 Edition dominant myths and the intricate systems of coercion and control that extin- guish our freedom. We are a society awash in skillfully manufactured lies. Reality is whatever hallucination flickers on a screen. Solitude that makes thought possible— a removal from the electronic cacophony that besieges us—is harder and harder to find. We have severed ourselves from a print-based culture. We are unable to grapple with the nuances and complexity of ideas. We have traded ideas for fabricated clichés. We speak in the hollow language we are given by our cor- porate masters. Reality, presented to us as image, is unexamined and therefore false. We are culturally illiterate. And because of our cultural illiteracy we are easily manipulated and controlled. The great writers— Marcel Proust, Anton Chekhov, Hannah Arendt, Sim- one Weil, Max Weber, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and others— knew that thought is subversive. They chal- lenged and critiqued the dominant narrative, assumptions, and structures that buttress power. They freed us. They did not cater to the latest fashion of the academy or popular culture. They did not seek adulation. They did not build pathetic monuments to themselves. They elucidated difficult and hard truths. They served humanity. They lifted up voices the power elites seek to discredit, marginalize, or crush. Wolin was a writer of this stature. He gave us the words and the ideas to understand our corporate despotism— what he called “inverted totalitarianism.” He did so by battling the dominant trend within university political science departments that, as he lamented, has seen them become de facto social science departments “addicted” to quantitative projects, chasing after an unachievable scientific clarity and refusing to take a stand or examine the major issues facing the wider society. This quantitative gathering of “value- free” facts may get you tenure. It may get you invited as a courtier into the machinery of power—indeed, academic writing too often serves the ends of power. But these pursuits, as Wolin re- minded us, are intellectual treason. Wolin was not afraid to ask the huge, esoteric, uncomfortable, and often unanswerable questions that make the life of the mind and political thought vital and important. He called out corpo- rate power for its destruction of our capitalist democracy. He railed against the commodification of the individual and the ecosystem. He unmasked the mechanisms of manipulation. He denounced our corporate coup d’état. He upheld the integrity of the scholar. And he was often alone. I met Wolin at his home in Salem, Oregon, in 2014 to film a nearly-three hour interview. It was the last major interview he would give. He said then that “inverted totalitarianism” 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. “Downsizing, reorganization, bubbles bursting, unions busted, quickly out- dated skills, and transfer of jobs abroad create not just fear but an economy of Introduction to the 2017 Edition xxix fear, a system of control whose power feeds on uncertainty, yet a system that, according to its analysts, is eminently rational,” he wrote. Inverted totalitarianism also “perpetuates politics all the time,” Wolin said when we spoke, “but a politics that is not political.” The endless and extrava- gant election cycles, he said, are an example of politics without politics. “Instead of participating in power,” he wrote, “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 manu- factured political personalities, empty rhetoric, sophisticated public relations, slick advertising, propaganda, and the constant use of focus groups and opin- ion polls to loop back to voters what they want to hear. Money has effectively replaced the vote. Every 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 lobby- ists to shape, such a system deserves to be called ‘misrepresentative or clientry government,’” Wolin wrote. “It is, at one and the same time, a powerful con- tributing factor to the depoliticization of the citizenry, as well as reason for characterizing the system as one of antidemocracy.” The result is that the public is “denied the use of state power.” Wolin de- plored 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 wrote. “Actually they are a substitute. The notoriety they receive from the media and from politicians eager to take fi rm stands on nonsubstan- tive issues serves to distract attention and contribute to a cant politics of the inconsequential.” “One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be de- scribed as democratic,” he wrote, “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.” “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 interview. “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 fi nd themselves in tension or at odds or in competition with other groups, xxx Introduction to the 2017 Edition 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 argued. “Economics dominates politics— and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.” He continued: “The United States has become the showcase of how de- mocracy 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
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