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?
| This post is part of a reading series on Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin. To quickly access all chapters, open the book title tab on the Authors & Books page. Disclaimer: This chapter summary is personal work and an invitation to read the book itself for a detailed view of all the author’s ideas. |
At that stage in the reading of Democracy Incorporated, we know that an inverted totalitarian regime, “precisely because of its inverted character, emerges, not as an abrupt regime change or dramatic rupture but as evolutionary.” Any totalitarian regime, however, is necessarily ideological. In the United States, a “free market” dogma backs corporatocracy’s inverted totalitarianism. Still, “How does good old American pragmatism, supposedly the least ideological, most practical of public philosophies, become the unwitting agent of a regime with affinities to the most ideological systems?”
In the United States, numerous antecedents can be found of police brute force quelling populist political protests held by all kinds of disenfranchised people. These antecedents have nevertheless rarely been used as precedents to justify repression, if ever. Repression only became its own ideological justification with the advent of the “War on Terror.” A war led under a concept broad enough to include legitimate expressions of political dissent at home alongside genuine acts of foreign terror. A war without an assignable end, which perpetual emergency facilitated the creation of a torture program and made it possible to indefinitely imprison real or supposed “enemy combatants” with no specific charges. A war that has enforced our present-day police state, spying on its citizens while brutally cracking down on those who reveal its crimes (Black Lives Matter, Julian Assange…). Repression became ideological the minute the government decided to define its action in reference to “terror” as such, in the same abstract way that the Chinese and the late Russian communist parties have allegedly fought against “the enemies of the people.”
On the more immediate side of things, establishing an authoritarian state is not that complicated. In any country, the crowd favors harsh sentences and opposes, for instance, rehabilitation programs for prisoners at the taxpayers’ expense. This is how antecedents in repression can become precedents sanctioning expanded police powers and reduced legal and political safeguards. Officials just have to refer to opinion polls appearing “to favor methods which weaken legal safeguards and diminish the institutions whose traditional role is to oversee, check, and alert the public to dangerous tendencies in the system.”