Sheldon Wolin – Democracy Incorporated

An unprecedented combination of corporate and state power has progressively shaped itself up in the U.S. after WWII, characterized by Sheldon S. Wolin as “Inverted Totalitarianism.” What is behind this concept?

For better or for worse, myths have always been used to cement societies. What was the effective role of the “War on Terror” narrative after 9/11 and why is the American public so prone to endorse myth making?

Since WWII, the U.S. official doctrine is that it is the legitimate guardian of freedom in the world. To Sheldon Wolin, this signs the ideological drift from an open “constitutional imaginary” to a dictatorial “power imaginary.”

The United States is used to equating being “the greatest power in the world” and a democracy. But which is it? How and why a constitutionally limited government would turn into a superpower?

The war on terror was supposed to sign the dawn of a new world era. What does its “New-World” mythology rest upon, and how do we, the people, come to accept fear as the principle of political power?

Promising “democracy, development, free markets, and free trade” to the world in the wake of 9/11, the U.S. administration unwittingly made the case that market fundamentalism contradicts democracy.

“American superpower,” “the greatest power in history,” or, more recently, “America first” have become part of American political values. What about constitutional democracy?

Since the Ronald Reagan years, there is objective collusion in U.S. politics between religious archaism and market fundamentalism. How did this dynamic come to be and what makes it so powerful?

Corporate power is no longer an external force that occasionally influences policies and legislation; it is an integral part of the government. What are the main aspects of its “management” of democracy?

James Madison’s reference to the “confusion and intemperance” of the multitude used to be the rationale of a government by the elite. What is the intellectual legacy of elitism in the United States today?

By its military and economic weight on the international stage, the U.S. rightly fits the definition of an empire. To stand, it needs to deny ordinary Americans a genuine democracy.

Democracy is threatened by the inverted form of totalitarianism resulting from the free-market ideology. Is the Founding Fathers’ defiance against democracy an antecedent to its “management” today?

Democracy is, by nature, a work in progress, and Western history has had very few occurrences when the “demos” became a politically self-conscious actor. What do these moments teach us?

In the past, political transparency toward the people was antithetical to the government by an aristocratic elite. But has the US ever been a a government of, by, and for the people and how could it genuinely become one?