Inverted Totalitarianism: Antecedents and Precedents

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?

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.”

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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.”

Illustrating this, “the invasive Patriot Act, with its inroads into personal liberties and the reduced power of the courts to check overly zealous officials, is first accepted by the public as a practical response to terrorism, but then it is soon cemented as a permanent element in the system of law enforcement. What may have emerged without premeditation is quickly seized upon and exploited. . . . It then seems logical to coordinate all the relevant agencies—federal, state, and local, and all armed forces, from police and National Guard to the traditional armed services—and, voilà !, we have a system. The Nazis called it Gleichschaltung (coordination). We might call it “management” to indicate its place in an opportunity society.”

As opposed to democracy, authoritarianism is the tendency to conflate power and authority. For authoritarians, the latter must be absolute because the principle of its legitimation is itself absolute, be it the race (white supremacists), the party (communists), the market (neoliberals), or whichever ideological fantasy one may fall for. The “War on Terror” is as good as any. The lethal enemies of ideologues are reformists; i.e., those committed to genuine reforms toward social justice and people’s power. It makes sense, in a way. If the ideology is correct, people’s judgment is secondary, and democracy has neither practical nor moral value.

In the United States, the authoritarian side of inverted totalitarianism was endorsed by an increasingly unhinged Republican party. One could make the case that the origins of the GOP’s ideological opposition to democracy can be traced back to the Cold War that began in the late 1940s. “Republicans and their supporters, says Sheldon Wolin, claimed that Soviet communism had launched a ‘conspiracy,’ a ‘plot’ for ‘world domination’ whose operations were secret and hidden, dependent upon spies and traitors. . . . The new ideology can be fairly described as totalizing and unapologetic for its absolutism. Its targets were not confined to Democratic politicians but included a wide range of matters: education, morality, religion, and popular culture.”

According to the author, this attempt to obliterate freedom of thought under the banner of anti-communism gave way in the 50s and 1960s to a new form of cultural dependency: Managerialism. The elevation of the cult figure of “the executive trained and certified in the dynamics and intricacies of organizing, administering, and exploiting power” began then to take place. For the GOP, managing a company became, in time, the one and only standard by which to evaluate the capacity to hold public office, absurdly assuming that leading a community for the common good of its people required the same set of skills and the same type of motivation as running a company for profits. As Sheldon Wolin underlines, “Managerialism, by definition, was not only elitist in principle but, in an age dominated by large-scale forms of ‘organization,’ a claim to rule. . . . Accountability figured mainly as profitability. In that sense organizational power, with its emphasis upon expansion, dynamic leadership, and risk taking, contrasted with constitutional authority, with its emphasis upon restraint, settled ways, checks and balances.”

By eventually adding to its base fundamentalists, creationists, originalists, and moral absolutists, the Republican party has succeeded in “organizing and focusing powers that challenge limits, be they limits regarding church and state, presidential powers, environmental protections, the distinctions between public and private, the protections for civil liberties, the observance of treaties, or respect for local markets.” Tactically, the union of market fundamentalism with its religious counterpart is a marriage made in heaven: “Thus the party is able to have it both ways, encouraging and subsidizing the powers that undermine the status quo while publicizing prayer in the Oval Office and making abstinence in the third world a condition of foreign aid.”