Part 1 (1/2)

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 s.h.i.+ft such as that represented by Jacksonian democracy, when power relations.h.i.+ps 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 relations.h.i.+ps (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 relations.h.i.+ps: 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 relations.h.i.+p between Was.h.i.+ngton 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 s.h.i.+ft in intellectual and ideological influence from academia to think tanks, the vast majority of which were conservative and dependent upon corporate sponsors.h.i.+p. 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 s.h.i.+ft which it represented. The fundamental nature of that s.h.i.+ft 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 leaders.h.i.+p, 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?