Democracy Incorporated.
Managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism.
Sheldon S. Wolin.
Preface to the Paperback Edition.
SPARE CHANGE.
Democracy Incorporated describes certain tendencies in American politics and argues that they are serving to consolidate a unique political system of "inverted totalitarianism." Rather than attempting a summary of the volume, I want to examine a contemporary political development that, it could be argued, invalidates or undermines my thesis. I am referring both to the unprecedented election in 2008 of an African American as president and to the widely held expectation that the Obama administration would proceed promptly to undo the excesses of the Bush regime, many of which I had used as evidence in support of the thesis of Democracy Incorporated.
In adopting "change" as the signature theme of his presidential campaign, Obama chose an idea as American as the proverbial apple pie. Ever since the nation"s beginnings, Americans have seen themselves as futurists, notable for their receptiveness, even their addiction, to change and to its counterfeit, novelty. Typically, change was considered to be virtually synonymous with progress, with the promise of steady material improvement in the lives of most citizens as well as a better future for their children. Change thus tended to be identified with expanded opportunity rather than with a fundamental shift such as that represented by Jacksonian democracy, when power relationships among groups and cla.s.ses were significantly altered. Another example of fundamental change was the abolition of slavery, although arguably the political promise of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments was not realized until the presidential election of 2008.
Throughout much of American history, government has been an active promoter of fundamental change. The Civil War amendments were aimed at undoing past wrongs a.s.sociated with the inst.i.tution of slavery. New Deal programs significantly improved the lives of ordinary people, especially the poor, and marked a change in direction, away from free-market capitalism and toward a mixed economy notable for significant governmental initiatives and "interference" in the economy.
Thus we have two distinct conceptions of change, each involving active governmental intervention. One we can call mitigative or tactical change. It seeks to redress a situation or condition without significantly modifying power relationships (e.g., a "tax break for the middle cla.s.s"). The other, paradigmatic or strategic change, inst.i.tutes not only a new program but recasts basic power relationships: it reforms, empowers, sets a new direction (e.g., a single-payer health care system). Democracy Incorporated describes the paradigmatic change represented by the amalgamation of state and corporate power.
Sometimes a paradigmatic change takes the form of an attack on an entrenched or longstanding status quo-for example, reducing the power of the antebellum plantation owners. Sometimes a mitigative change might seek to undo a previous paradigmatic change in order to restore, to a limited extent, the status quo ante. For example, the repressive paradigm shift initiated after September 11, 2001, that included governmental wire tapping, surveillance, and denial of due process, might be undone by restoring prior practices more respectful of due process and First Amendment rights.
Paradoxically, Obama"s victory might turn out to be a reaction, a yearning for a certain status quo ante that would rescind some of the changes introduced by the Bush-Cheney administration, such as torture of detainees. If so, then the change promised by the 2008 election may be more mitigative than paradigmatic, aiming to restore or modify rather than opting for a sharply different direction.
In the mid-twentieth century, starting with the Cold War and its anticommunist crusade at home and abroad, and attaining its consolidation in the Reagan counterrevolution, the national fixation on change, while it retained a strong economic and technological driving force, was joined to a new and self-conscious conservatism. The result was a unique dynamic: change that professed to look backward to some distant "city on a hill." It was not regressive in the sense of actually restoring the past. Rather the "new conservatism" appealed to an idealized, mythical past as a strategy in its "culture war" against "liberalism." It combined political, religious, and cultural elements into an ideology that appealed to Founding Fathers, the "original" const.i.tution, biblical texts, "family values," the sanct.i.ty of "traditional marriage," and a militant patriotism. ("America, Love It or Leave It.") Its economic ideology also looked to an imagined past, to a "free economy" where harmony and prosperity had resulted from enlightened selfishness and "small government."
Conservative politics, however, was far from being merely nostalgic. In deliberately promoting inegalitarianism it qualified as paradigmatic. The celebration of the unchanging provided ideological cover for the basic aim of reversing or modifying as much as possible the changes previously introduced by egalitarian social programs. By reducing or eliminating programs that had helped to empower the Many, inegalitarianism reinforced a structure which combined state and corporate power. Although the administration of George W. Bush would continue and even intensify the attacks on liberal social programs and the "liberal culture of permissiveness," it subst.i.tuted a new paradigm that would refocus the dynamics which anticommunism had first generated. It would push outward in an aggressive quest for imperial hegemony, an emphasis different from the somewhat more provincially minded Reagan conservatives. The new paradigm would display a unique feature, one virtually unknown to previous versions of national ident.i.ty. It would define the scope of its dominion by postulating an enemy-terrorism-that had no obvious limits, neither temporal nor spatial, nor a single fixed form. Thus the new paradigm introduced a monumental change that redefined national ident.i.ty, overshadowing "republic" and "democracy." The "United States," hitherto a name that denoted the lower half of a continent, now signified a global empire.
Empire const.i.tuted a paradigmatic change, yet, like that love that dare not speak its name, it was repressed during the 2008 campaign even as the role of the presidency was evolving from a national to an imperial office. Attention was directed instead to the unprecedented spectacle of an African American candidate competing for and winning the highest office in the land. Before gauging the extent and type of change represented by that election, we need to ask: against what background has that change taken place? One might argue that throughout much of the twentieth-century white Americans have accepted and adulated African American public performers-musicians, actors and actresses, and writers-even as most white Americans tolerated segregation, discrimination, and racial slurs. Following the 2008 election all manner of established groups began to press their agendas on the incoming administration: environmentalists, health care advocates, state governors, antiwar groups, and, inevitably, corporate lobbyists. Strikingly less prominent were those advocacy groups representing African Americans. Had the election of "one of their own" had the ironic result of inhibiting instead of empowering?
Before August 2008, when the public first began to become (or be made) aware of the brewing economic crisis, "change" had been primarily a.s.sociated with ending the American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and with a promise both of sweeping socioeconomic changes (e.g., health care reform, environmental safeguards) and of political reforms (e.g., restoring const.i.tutional protections, outlawing the practice of torture, disavowing an expansive notion of executive power). Yet there was no talk of halting construction of the huge permanent American emba.s.sy in Baghdad, only Obama"s promise to honor the Bush timetable for withdrawing most troops from Iraq during the summer of 2009 while redoubling the military commitment to Afghanistan and pursuing the Taliban into Pakistan: in short, no talk of disentangling from our imperial commitments.
In the immediate aftermath of the election it became increasingly apparent that Obama"s notion of change was a highly pragmatic one. The specific kinds of change and their scope and depth would be contingent on circ.u.mstance and political calculations, rather than determined by the intensity of the public reaction against Bush-Cheney policies-that is, mitigative rather than paradigmatic.
At the outset there was the opportunity of choosing the actual agents of change, those who would head the departments and preside over the courts. The controlling premise appeared to be that there was a relatively small political cla.s.s, an elite, from which crucial appointments should be made. The operatives who were selected to be in charge of finance, economic policy, foreign affairs, regulatory policy, and health care proved to be seasoned deciders. Before the debacle of compromised cabinet nominees (Daschle, et al.), Obama"s original cabinet selections consisted primarily of Clintonistas, suggesting that they had been chosen before the gravity of the economic situation became widely acknowledged. They represented, in other words, a decision which a.s.sumed that the economy would remain more or less on course and that the situation in Iraq was being stabilized. This is borne out by the fact that, even before Obama took the oath of office, he and the leaders of the Democratic Party largely followed the initiatives proposed by the Bush administration during its final weeks. The major one was the $600 billion bailout of the major banks and credit inst.i.tutions whose arcane and largely unregulated practices were mainly responsible for the crisis. At the same time, the Obama administration hastened to staff its councils with seasoned veterans from the financial world. Save for the huge sums involved and the brazenness of the giveaway, what could be more unchanging than the perpetuation of the cozy and longstanding relationship between Washington and Wall Street?
One might conjecture that paradigmatic change is less likely during periods of prosperity when members of society are presumably contented, but that when things are going very wrong society is apt to be more receptive to major, even paradigmatic changes. However, as the interval between November 4, 2008, and January 20, 2009, began to shrink, grandiose promises of change gave way to proposals for rescuing the economy rather than altering its fundamentals. Once the economy began to slide ever more downward, it was widely reported as inevitable that notions of change would have to be scaled down and subordinated to new priorities of confronting a worsening economic climate. Thus as change yielded to the priorities and requirements of policy and administrative decision making, the scope of change "contracted" and got lost in translation. Supporters, too, began to change, consoling themselves that Obama would at least be better than Bush: if not change, then a respite.
Politically sobered by the encounter with complexity, Obama adopted nuance and exchanged the rhetorical flourishes of the political campaign for the measured, insider discourse of "policy" and "decision making." Policy is commonly defined as the attempt to formulate a set of rules and guiding principles of action for achieving a specified purpose or outcome. It might also be described as the revelatory moment when the commitment to substantive change is tested. Judging from some of the early decisions of the Obama administration, the two paradigmatic opportunities presented by the apparent stabilization of Iraq and the economic recession were squandered in favor of "rescuing" or restoring as quickly as possible the economic status quo ante and of increasing the imperial military presence in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Crisis called for continuity, not departures.
It was not the banks alone that failed; so too did the political and economic imagination. In desperation liberal pundits and think-tank employees decided to go "historical," hoping to find inspiration in FDR"s New Deal and its response to the Depression. Besides overlooking that FDR had no more embittered opponent than the great bankers of his day (he called them "economic royalists"), it seems not to have occurred to establishment theoreticians that the main point of FDR"s action was that he did not try to imitate his predecessors or seek an earlier precedent for his programs. He chose, instead, to innovate, or, more accurately, to experiment with paradigmatic changes. It is revealing of the deep conservatism of our times that references to the New Deal have largely avoided a.s.sociating it with the notion of "experimentation" even though during the 1930s the phrase familiarly used was "the New Deal experiment," which was suggestive of a departure from business as usual and of a commitment to trying new and untested ideas. It was also overlooked that FDR was pressured from below by popular movements demanding programmatic action: Huey Long"s "Share the Wealth," the Townsend Plan for guaranteed incomes for all citizens.
If FDR and the New Deal exploited an opportunity for change, Obama and his administration a.s.sumed automatically the limits of change. Which raises the question of whether the truly profound change of the twentieth century, the dominance of corporate power-politically, economically, and culturally-has not produced an equally profound change: the effective management of the citizenry. Clearly, these two developments-corporate dominance and a managed electorate-point to a certain political rigidity that is reflected in perhaps the most striking aspect of the present predicament: the absence of alternatives other than variations on the theme of economic orthodoxy. When the idea of nationalizing the banks was being suggested it provoked an immediate storm: it was alleged as tantamount to "socialism." The Obama administration panicked and immediately declared it had no such plans, thereby denying itself a range of more imaginative remedies.
That reaction points to another great regressive change: the paucity of intellectual proposals that deviate from the current orthodoxies. This reflects a quiet but paradigmatic change: a shift in intellectual and ideological influence from academia to think tanks, the vast majority of which were conservative and dependent upon corporate sponsorship. Whereas the former had on occasion housed and nurtured deviants, "impractical dreamers" of new paradigms and challengers of orthodoxy, the think-tank inmates are committed to influencing policy makers and hence their horizons are restricted by the demands of practicality and constricted by the interests of their corporate sponsors to proposing mitigative changes.
Shortly before his inauguration President-elect Obama tried to explain why it would be necessary to scale down some of his promises for wide-sweeping social and economic reforms by saying that "we must look forward rather than back." In effect, that was then, this is now. Yet Obama"s remark was misleading on both accounts. First, the new administration was being less than candid about the systemic significance of the solutions it was introducing. In using the financial inst.i.tutions as the means of recovery it was reinforcing the state-corporate alliance. The significance of the placement of governmental representatives on the boards of various banks and financial inst.i.tutions was in effect the legitimation of that alliance and of the paradigm shift which it represented. The fundamental nature of that shift was underscored in the bailout of General Motors Corporation. The terms of the settlement involved the co-optation and neutralization of a powerful trade union, the United Automobile Workers. Under the terms of the bailout, the government-or as it was said "the taxpayers"-lent GM $50 billion. The union, which had also been forced to buy a 55 percent share in Chrysler, now had to draw upon its pension fund to purchase 17.5 percent of the shares in GM. The union further agreed to a wage freeze and pledged not to strike. In return it received representation on the corporation"s governing board but with the proviso that its shares would not bring voting rights. The workers" union also agreed to accept the loss of several thousand jobs of its members. Thus, under the terms of the "agreement," the union was, in effect, incorporated and rendered a party to its own humiliation and, given the highly doubtful future of GM itself, facing a possible chance of losing everything.
Obama"s reluctance to look backward had a more profound significance than the abandonment of a policy promised during the presidential campaign. From the beginning of his presidency he made it clear that he would strive to "reach out" to congressional Republicans and to make change a bipartisan affair. The crucial consequence of that strategy was to suppress any serious attempt to educate the public concerning certain potentially impeachable actions of Bush administration officials, most notably the extreme expansion of presidential powers (including "signing statements"), the practice of torture, the denials of due process, and, above all, the lies that were employed to justify the war waged against Iraq. Rarely has Santayana"s famous dictum-roughly, "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it"-been more relevant. When the actions of the Bush administration are compared to the one that led to the attempted impeachment of President Clinton, we have the clearest indication of the limited vision of the Obama administration. While "the audacity of hope" which Obama wrote about in his autobiography certainly has been fulfilled by the fact of his own election, that audacity does not appear to challenge the system of power which has brought the nation an endless war, bankruptcy, recession, and high unemployment. Change aplenty and all feeding the drift toward the system described in the pages that follow.
July 2009.
Preface.
As a preliminary I want to emphasize certain aspects of the approach taken in this volume in order to avoid possible misunderstandings. Although the concept of totalitarianism is central to what follows, my thesis is not that the current American political system is an inspired replica of n.a.z.i Germany"s or George W. Bush of Hitler.1 References to Hitler"s Germany are introduced to remind the reader of the benchmarks in a system of power that was invasive abroad, justified preemptive war as a matter of official doctrine, and repressed all opposition at home-a system that was cruel and racist in principle and practice, deeply ideological, and openly bent on world domination. Those benchmarks are introduced to illuminate tendencies in our own system of power that are opposed to the fundamental principles of const.i.tutional democracy. Those tendencies are, I believe, totalizing in the sense that they are obsessed with control, expansion, superiority, and supremacy.
The regimes of Mussolini and Stalin demonstrate that it is possible for totalitarianism to a.s.sume different forms. Italian fascism, for example, did not officially adopt anti-Semitism until late in the regime"s history and even then primarily in response to pressure from Germany. Stalin introduced some "progressive" policies: promoting ma.s.s literacy and health care; encouraging women to undertake professional and technical careers; and (for a brief spell) promoting minority cultures. The point is not that these "accomplishments" compensate for crimes whose horrors have yet to be fully comprehended. Rather, totalitarianism is capable of local variations; plausibly, far from being exhausted by its twentieth-century versions would-be totalitarians now have available technologies of control, intimidation and ma.s.s manipulation far surpa.s.sing those of that earlier time.
The n.a.z.i and Fascist regimes were powered by revolutionary movements whose aim was not only to capture, reconst.i.tute, and monopolize state power but also to gain control over the economy. By controlling the state and the economy, the revolutionaries gained the leverage necessary to reconstruct, then mobilize society. In contrast, inverted totalitarianism is only in part a state-centered phenomenon. Primarily it represents the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry.
Unlike the cla.s.sic forms of totalitarianism, which openly boasted of their intentions to force their societies into a preconceived totality, inverted totalitarianism is not expressly conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. Typically it is furthered by power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions. There is a certain heedlessness, an inability to take seriously the extent to which a pattern of consequences may take shape without having been preconceived.2 The fundamental reason for this deep-seated carelessness is related to the well-known American zest for change and, equally remarkable, the good fortune of Americans in having at their disposal a vast continent rich in natural resources, inviting exploitation. Although it is a cliche that the history of American society has been one of unceasing change, the consequences of today"s increased tempos are, less obvious. Change works to displace existing beliefs, practices, and expectations. Although societies throughout history have experienced change, it is only over the past four centuries that promoting innovation became a major focus of public policy. Today, thanks to the highly organized pursuit of technological innovation and the culture it encourages, change is more rapid, more encompa.s.sing, more welcomed than ever before-which means that inst.i.tutions, values, and expectations share with technology a limited shelf life. We are experiencing the triumph of contemporaneity and of its accomplice, forgetting or collective amnesia. Stated somewhat differently, in early modern times change displaced traditions; today change succeeds change.
The effect of unending change is to undercut consolidation. Consider, for example, that more than a century after the Civil War the consequences of slavery still linger; that close to a century after women won the vote, their equality remains contested; or that after nearly two centuries during which public schools became a reality, education is now being increasingly privatized. In order to gain a handle on the problem of change we might recall that among political and intellectual circles, beginning in the last half of the seventeenth century and especially during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, there was a growing conviction that, for the first time in recorded history, it was possible for human beings to deliberately shape their future. Thanks to advances in science and invention it was possible to conceive change as "progress," an advancement benefiting all members of society. Progress stood for change that was constructive, that would bring something new into the world and to the advantage of all. The champions of progress believed that while change might result in the disappearance or destruction of established beliefs, customs, and interests, the vast majority of these deserved to go because they mostly served the Few while keeping the Many in ignorance, poverty, and sickness.
An important element in this early modern conception of progress was that change was crucially a matter for political determination by those who could be held accountable for their decisions. That understanding of change was pretty much overwhelmed by the emergence of concentrations of economic power that took place during the latter half the nineteenth century. Change became a private enterprise inseparable from exploitation and opportunism, thereby const.i.tuting a major, if not the major, element in the dynamic of capitalism. Opportunism involved an unceasing search for what might be exploitable, and soon that meant virtually anything, from religion, to politics, to human wellbeing. Very little, if anything, was taboo, as before long change became the object of premeditated strategies for maximizing profits.
It is often noted that today change is more rapid, more encompa.s.sing than ever before. In later pages I shall suggest that American democracy has never been truly consolidated. Some of its key elements remain unrealized or vulnerable; others have been exploited for antidemocratic ends. Political inst.i.tutions have typically been described as the means by which a society tries to order change. The a.s.sumption was that political inst.i.tutions would themselves remain stable, as exemplified in the ideal of a const.i.tution as a relatively unchanging structure for defining the uses and limits of public power and the accountability of officeholders.
Today, however, some of the political changes are revolutionary; others are counterrevolutionary. Some chart new directions for the nation and introduce new techniques for extending American power, both internally (surveillance of citizens) and externally (seven hundred bases abroad), beyond any point even imagined by previous administrations. Other changes are counterrevolutionary in the sense of reversing social policies originally aimed at improving the lot of the middle and poorer cla.s.ses.
How to persuade the reader that the actual direction of contemporary politics is toward a political system the very opposite of what the political leadership, the ma.s.s media, and think tank oracles claim that it is, the world"s foremost exemplar of democracy? Although critics may dismiss this volume as fantasy, there are grounds for believing that the broad citizenry is becoming increasingly uneasy about "the direction the nation is heading," about the role of big money in politics, the credibility of the popular news media, and the reliability of voting returns. The midterm elections of 2006 indicated clearly that much of the nation was demanding a quick resolution to a misguided war. Increasingly one hears ordinary citizens complaining that they "no longer recognize their country," that preemptive war, widespread use of torture, domestic spying, endless reports of corruption in high places, corporate as well as governmental, mean that something is deeply wrong in the nation"s politics.
In the chapters that follow I shall try to develop a focus for understanding the changes taking place and their direction. But first-a.s.suming that we have had, if not a fully realized democracy, at least an impressive number of its manifestations, and a.s.suming further that some fundamental changes are occurring, we might raise the broad question: what causes a democracy to change into some non- or antidemocratic system, and what kind of system is democracy likely to change into?
For centuries political writers claimed that if-or rather when-a full-fledged democracy was overturned, it would be succeeded by a tyranny. The argument was that democracy, because of the great freedom it allowed, was inherently p.r.o.ne to disorder and likely to cause the propertied cla.s.ses to support a dictator or tyrant, someone who could impose order, ruthlessly if necessary. But-and this is the issue addressed by our inquiry-what if in its popular culture a democracy were p.r.o.ne to license ("anything goes") yet in its politics were to become fearful, ready to give the benefit of the doubt to leaders who, while promising to "root out terrorists," insist that endeavor is a "war" with no end in sight? Might democracy then tend to become submissive, privatized rather than unruly, and would that alter the power relationships between citizens and their political deciders?
A word about terminology. "Superpower" stands for the projection of power outwards. It is indeterminate, impatient with restraints, and careless of boundaries as it strives to develop the capability of imposing its will at a time and place of its own choosing. It represents the ant.i.thesis of const.i.tutional power. "Inverted totalitarianism" projects power inwards. It is not derivative from "cla.s.sic totalitarianism" of the types represented by n.a.z.i Germany, Fascist Italy, or Stalinist Russia. Those regimes were powered by revolutionary movements whose aim was to capture, reconst.i.tute, and monopolize the power of the state. The state was conceived as the main center of power, providing the leverage necessary for the mobilization and reconstruction of society. Churches, universities, business organizations, news and opinion media, and cultural inst.i.tutions were taken over by the government or neutralized or suppressed.
Inverted totalitarianism, in contrast, while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of "private" governance represented by the modern business corporation. The result is not a system of codetermination by equal partners who retain their distinctive ident.i.ties but rather a system that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power.
When capitalism was first represented in an intellectual construct, primarily in the latter half of the eighteenth century, it was hailed as the perfection of decentralized power, a system that, unlike an absolute monarchy, no single person or governmental agency could or should attempt to direct. It was pictured as a system but of decentralized powers working best when left alone (laissez-faire, laissez pa.s.ser) so that "the market" operated freely. The market furnished the structure by which spontaneous economic activities would be coordinated, exchange values set, and demand and supply adjusted. It operated, as Adam Smith famously wrote, by an unseen hand that connected partic.i.p.ants and directed their endeavors toward the common benefit of all, even though the actors were motivated primarily by their own selfish ends.
One of Smith"s fundamental contentions was that while individuals were capable of making rational decisions on a small scale, no one possessed the powers required for rationally comprehending a whole society and directing its activities. A century later, however, the whole scale of economic enterprise was revolutionized by the emergence and rapid rise of the business corporation. An economy where power was dispersed among countless actors, and where markets supposedly were dominated by no one, rapidly gave way to forms of concentrated power-trusts, monopolies, holding companies, and cartels-able to set (or strongly influence) prices, wages, supplies of materials, and entry into the market itself. Adam Smith was now joined to Charles Darwin, the free market to the survival of the fittest. The emergence of the corporation marked the presence of private power on a scale and in numbers thitherto unknown, the concentration of private power unconnected to a citizen body.
Despite the power of corporations over political processes and the economy, a determined political and economic opposition arose demanding curbs on corporate power and influence. Big Business, it was argued, demanded Big Government. It was a.s.sumed, but often forgotten, that unless Big Government, or even small government, possessed some measure of disinterestedness, the result might be the worst of both worlds, corporate power and government both fashioned from the same cloth of self-interest. However, Populists and Progressives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as trade unionists and small farmers, went a step further to argue that a democratic government should be both disinterested and "interested." It should serve both the common good and the interests of ordinary people whose main source of power was their numbers. They argued, perhaps naively, that in a democracy the people were sovereign and government was, by definition, on their side. The sovereign people were fully ent.i.tled to use governmental power and resources to redress the inequalities created by the economy of capitalism.
That conviction supported and was solidifed by the New Deal. A wide range of regulatory agencies was created, the Social Security program and a minimum wage law were established, unions were legitimated along with the rights to bargain collectively, and various attempts were made to reduce ma.s.s unemployment by means of government programs for public works and conservation. With the outbreak of World War II, the New Deal was superseded by the forced mobilization and governmental control of the entire economy and the conscription of much of the adult male population. For all practical purposes the war marked the end of the first large-scale effort at establishing the tentative beginnings of social democracy in this country, a union of social programs benefiting the Many combined with a vigorous electoral democracy and lively politicking by individuals and organizations representative of the politically powerless.
At the same time that the war halted the momentum of political and social democracy, it enlarged the scale of an increasingly open cohabitation between the corporation and the state. That partnership became ever closer during the era of the Cold War (194793). Corporate economic power became the basis of power on which the state relied, as its own ambitions, like those of giant corporations, became more expansive, more global, and, at intervals, more bellicose. Together the state and corporation became the main sponsors and coordinators of the powers represented by science and technology. The result is an unprecedented combination of powers distinguished by their totalizing tendencies, powers that not only challenge established boundaries-political, moral, intellectual, and economic-but whose very nature it is to challenge those boundaries continually, even to challenge the limits of the earth itself. Those powers are also the means of inventing and disseminating a culture that taught consumers to welcome change and private pleasures while accepting political pa.s.sivity. A major consequence is the construction of a new "collective ident.i.ty," imperial rather than republican (in the eighteenth-century sense), less democratic. That new ident.i.ty involves questions of who we are as a people, what we stand for as well as what we are willing to stand, the extent to which we are committed to becoming involved in common affairs, and what democratic principles justify expending the energies and wealth of our citizens and asking some of them to kill and sacrifice their lives while the destiny of their country is fast slipping from popular control.
I want to emphasize that I view my main construction, "inverted totalitarianims," as tentative, hypothetical, although I am convinced that certain tendencies in our society point in a direction away from selfgovernment, the rule of law, egalitarianism, and thoughtful public discussion, and toward what I have called "managed democracy," the smiley face of inverted totalitarianism.
For the moment Superpower is in retreat and inverted totalitarianism exists as a set of strong tendencies rather than as a fully realized actuality. The direction of these tendencies urges that we ask ourselves-and only democracy justifies using "we"-what inverted totalitarianism exacts from democracy and whether we want to exchange our birthrights for its mess of pottage.
Acknowledgments.
Ian Malcolm has guided the ma.n.u.script throughout the long process from gestation to completion. I am deeply indebted for his comments and criticisms. Thanks also to Lauren Lepow for her skillful editing and encouragement. Anne Norton contributed several pointed and helpful suggestions. Arno Mayer took time off from his own writing to offer encouragement, invaluable criticisms, and intellectual companionship despite our continental divide. All of the above are absolved from responsibility for any errors or missteps in the pages that follow.
Finally, special thanks beyond words to Emily Purvis Wolin for companionship extending over more than sixty years.
Democracy Incorporated.
Preview.
. . . the eminence and richness of a Reich which has become a superpower.
-German commentator at the opening of a new Reich Chancellery in 19391.
i.
The Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl"s famous (or infamous) propaganda tribute to Hitler, memorialized the 1934 rally of the n.a.z.i Party at Nuremberg. It begins with a dramatic, revelatory moment. The camera is trained on a densely clouded sky. Magically, the clouds suddenly part and a tiny plane glides through. It swoops down, lands, and The Leader, in uniform, emerges and strides triumphantly past the salutes of admiring throngs and the party faithful. As the film draws to a close, the camera becomes riveted on a seemingly endless parade, row on row, of uniformed n.a.z.is, shoulder to shoulder, goose-stepping in the flickering torchlight. Even today it leaves an impression of iron determination, of power poised for conquest, of power resolute, mindless, its might wrapped in myth.
On May 1, 2003, in another tightly orchestrated "doc.u.mentary," television viewers were given an American version of stern resolve and its embodiment in a leader. A military plane swoops from the sky and lands on an aircraft carrier. The camera creates the illusion of a warship far at sea, symbolizing power unconfined to its native land and able to project itself anywhere in the world. The leader emerges, not as a plain and democratic officeholder, but as one whose symbolic authority is antidemocratic. He strides resolutely, flight helmet tucked under his arm, outfitted in the gear of a military pilot. Above, the banner "Mission Accomplished." He salutes a prearranged crowd of uniformed military personnel. Shortly thereafter, swaggering, he reemerges in civilian garb but without discarding the aura of anticivilian authority. He speaks magisterially from the flight deck of the carrier Abraham Lincoln, now cleared with the military carefully ringed about him. He stands alone in the ritual circle expressive of a sacrament of leadership and obedience. They cheer and clap on cue. He invokes the blessing of a higher power. He, too, has promised a triumph of the will: The United States will: * champion aspirations for human dignity; * strengthen alliances to defeat global terrorism; * . . . defuse regional conflicts; * prevent our enemies from threatening us [and] our allies . . . with weapons of ma.s.s destruction; * ignite a new era of global economic growth * expand the circle of development by opening societies and building the infrastructure of democracy; * transform America"s national security inst.i.tutions.2 Myth wrapped in might? Will to power?
ii.
Both spectacles are examples of the distinctively modern mode of myth creation. They are the self-conscious constructions of visual media. Cinema and television share a common quality of being tyrannical in a specific sense. They are able to block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, of its total impression.
In a curious but important way these media effects mesh with religious practice. In many Christian religions the believer partic.i.p.ates in ceremonies much as the movie or TV watcher takes part in the spectacle presented. In neither case do they partic.i.p.ate as the democratic citizen is supposed to do, as actively engaged in decisions and sharing in the exercise of power. They partic.i.p.ate as communicants in a ceremony prescribed by the masters of the ceremony. Those a.s.sembled at Nuremberg or on the USS Abraham Lincoln did not share power with their leaders. Their relationship was thaumaturgical: they were being favored by a wondrous power in a form and at a time of its choosing.
The underlying metaphysic to these dreams of glory, of an "American century," of Superpower, was revealed in the musings of a high-level administration official when he or she attributed a view of "reality" to reporters and then contrasted it with that held by the administration: reporters and commentators were "in what we [i.e., the administration] call the reality-based community [which] believe[s] that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That"s not the way the world works anymore. We"re an empire now, we create our own reality. And while you"re studying that reality-judiciously as you will-we"ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too, and that"s how things will sort out. We"re history"s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."3 It would be difficult to find a more faithful representative of the totalitarian credo that true politics is essentially a matter of "will," of a determination to master the uses of power and to deploy them to reconst.i.tute reality. The statement is a fitting epigraph to Riefenstahl"s Triumph of the Will-is it a possible epitaph for democracy in America?
CHAPTER ONE.
Myth in the Making.
I.
Robert S. Mueller III [director of the FBI] and Secretary of State Powell read from the Bible. Mr. Mueller"s theme
was good versus evil. "We do not wrestle against flesh and
blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities,
against the cosmic powers over the present darkness, against
the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places," he said,
reading from Ephesians 6:1218.
Mr. Powell, who followed, touched on trust in G.o.d.
"Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow