Chris Hedge's Crush

 “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism”by Sheldon Wolin, 2008/2010

Wolin is the main squeeze of Chris Hedges, so I thought I’d read his most famous book.  The term ‘inverted totalitarianism’ seems both academic and convoluted, while claiming a spot in the vague ‘democratic’ center – as if democracy had no economic system, as if fascism and bureaucratic socialism were the same.  In reality Wolin was a Rooseveltian, or a secret mild-Social Democrat perhaps in the tradition of Norman Thomas.  He was an outrider at Princeton’s political science department, where his criticism of U.S. ‘democracy’ was considered heretical.

In essence, what the term ‘inverted totalitarianism’ means is that the formal democracy of the U.S. is turning into a totalitarian state step by step.  Every sector of society – the media, the elite education system, voting, the Two-Party structure, the legal hierarchy, the military and police forces, the scientific establishment, religious institutions, the capitalist corporate and war economy, even the culture – all are converging into a single, unitary neo-liberal/neo-conservative repressive front.  Wolin wrote this book during the Iraq War and the George Bush II administration, publishing it in 2008-2010.

Wolin considered this issue ‘a specter’ that has not yet arrived.  I don’t think any Leftist studying U.S. history actually thinks this is new, but it certainly applies now.  In the past I’ve called it ‘the Anaconda,’ as this conservative tilt is still happening as we speak.  Look at the wall-to-wall pro-war coverage on Ukraine by the whole bourgeois structure! According to Wolin, the watershed was 9/11, but there were certainly many earlier watersheds.  He notes McCarthyism and the stolen Bush/Gore election.

The term ‘inverted’ – which means ‘reversed’ or ‘upside down’ or ‘reversed relationship’ - doesn’t actually fit.  After all, what is ‘reversed totalitarianism?’  Why not call it ‘democratic totalitarianism’? Wolin also frequently uses the airy phrase ‘power imaginary‘, which along with the phrases ‘misrepresentative democracy,’ ‘fugitive democracy’ and a singular ‘Superpower” seems to be this book’s contributions to academic verbiage.  His favorites are authors like Max Weber, de Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt, who all look at society from a purely ideological view, adrift from material and class forces.  He is essentially an ideologue of humanist capitalism who can’t understand why it is drifting into a more open dictatorship.

Marxists do understand.

This book is really based on 9/11, the Patriot Act and the Iraq War – a war that Hedges himself lost his job at the NYT over.  For a thin layer of left-liberals, this war was a breaking point.  Wolin believes that the myths of democracy and Constitutionalism will work to cover the normalization of a stealth totalitarian system.  The word ‘democracy’ at this point provides a rhetorical function only.

Wolin recognizes that electoral democracy led to fascism in Italy and Germany.  He believes that real democratic practice is possible under capital, whereas leftists believe that capital precludes actual democracy.  Yet he understands the Constitution to be an anti-democratic document of elite ‘managed democracy.’ He understands the market power behind this totalitarianism, but denies that Nazism was an arm of German capital.  Wolin knows that in the U.S. the ‘free market’ is superior to freedom and democracy - but doesn’t extrapolate that idea.  He calls fascism ‘revolutionary,’ not counter-revolutionary, giving it popular credentials.  There is no other version of Marxism for Wolin but Stalinism.  He effortlessly combines Bolshevism (his word) with Nazism – a practice common across the political spectrum in the U.S.

So nothing new to read here actually. 

The Truth Behind the Words

Wolin knows that under ‘inverted totalitarianism’ citizens are only valued for their manipulated opinions on surveys, without having any real power or organization.  They are passive subjects responsible only for cheerleading, and that is the way the rulers like it. He calls it managed democracy. Global domination and empire extend Manifest Destiny and the Constitution on a ‘humanitarian’ basis, though Wolin seems to have no clue as to why the state and corporations might want global control.  As such, he does not predict the new cold war with China and Russia.

Wolin writes as if the 2-Party oligopoly rarely fights. As we have seen, the cultural faction fight for votes between two sections and the two parties of the capitalist class has been obvious for years.  Nor does he predict the growth of the populist right and left in his schema – or the rise of U.S. fascist groups and their influence in the Republican Party – that ‘old’ totalitarianism.  His description of the fake opposition Democrats is stunted.  He once used the words ‘working class’ that I saw – he prefers the archaic ‘citizen.’ He thinks the joint development of a version of democracy and capitalism was an historical accident. He does note the archaic religiousness permeating the right and neo-conservatism which buttresses the American myth.

In a way this book is a snapshot of a short period of time in which his theory is fleshed out.  Good theory is supposed to apply over a very long period of time, which is why the bogus Fukuyama “end of history” scenario collapsed quickly. This theory does have its roots in the U.S. Constitution, the ‘Founders,’ the ‘Originalist’ battle that made sure a popular majority would never cohere under that Constitution, along with the conquest of most of North America. But it seems most focused on the near present, which knee-caps its power.

Wolin suggests that a ‘fugitive demos’ can save us from this process, which he identifies in the activities of, of all things, NGOs.(!)  At this point Hedges himself is to Wolin’s left, being some kind of a Liberal-Left Christian socialist. Wolin knew in his bones that it is better to be an outlier than an outcast at Princeton, which is why he ignored Marxism and even Social-Democracy.  He kept within the parameters of the left centrist mindset, writing in a somewhat august and academic way about politics and history.  This book is best at exposing the hollow mantra of U.S. ‘democracy’ for all to see. Of special fun might be his long take-down of CNN hack Fareed Zakaria.  But why, since the targets are so many?

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Death of the Liberal Class,” “Empire of Illusion,” (both by Hedges); “The People’s Party Convention,” “Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (Zizek); “Lenin’s Las Struggle,” “The Populists Guide to 2020,” "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded" or the words “anti-fascist series” or “Zizek.” 

And I got it at the Library!

Red Frog

March 15, 2022