Part 3 (1/2)

In some respects, n.a.z.i expansionist policy accelerated the process of internal dissolution, because the methods of rule in the occupied territories were subsequently transferred to the Reich itself and contributed to the progressive destruction of public administration, which became more and more controlled by party functionaries.

-Hans Mommsen.

We are not just any hegemon. We run a uniquely benign

imperialism . . . it is a fact manifest in the way that

others welcome our power.

-Charles Krauthammer.

Save for the shameful ”relocation” of American citizens of j.a.panese ancestry, very few governmental actions during World War II could be described accurately as repressive. Perhaps that was why Corwin's Total War and the Const.i.tution had not entertained the possibility that, instead of a sweeping regulation of economy and society, a rapid increase in the size of the federal bureaucracy, and a unified front to a singular outside threat, totality might take the form of a convergence: between an external threat, part real, part imaginary, part concocted, and the indirect totalizing ”forces” already at work ”inside.” Under that scenario a significant portion of the resources of society might be focused upon a single great objective, say a war on terrorism, with no apparent drastic reconst.i.tution of the current system or ruffling of everyday life. Because significant change would then appear as a modest accentuation of previous tendencies, it could gain the protective cover of ”continuity” or ”precedent.” If most lives were lived normally-if, in other words, radical change, by gradually mes.h.i.+ng with normalcy so that, for example, ”yellow alerts” seemed familiar and rea.s.suring rather than exceptional-normalcy would then have ceased to serve as a restraint and measure of sanity.

The acceptance of restraints on personal freedom and being resigned to political impotence: such possibilities are not wildly implausible for a society that is accustomed to exchanging new habits for old, to adapting to rapid change, uncertainty, and social dislocation, to having one's fate determined by distant powers over which one has no control (globalization, market ”forces”). Especially plausible for a society addicted to a virtual reality where cosmic mayhem rules: where planets are routinely destroyed every evening, environmental catastrophes are created by (what else?) ”blockbusters,” and whole civilizations wiped out-a virtual reality readily available on several channels, a daily ”experience.”5 If we have already had the preview, what's unusual about the projection of overwhelming power even if it exceeds anything cla.s.sic totalitarians might have achieved or even imagined? After all, it may be simply a question of virtuality: of genre, not genus.

II.

Notwithstanding these possibilities, to liken American democracy to a dictators.h.i.+p, our const.i.tutional system to a totalitarian one, is to invite outrage tempered by disbelief. Only a visceral Bush-hater would discern similarities between an American president and the n.a.z.i Fuhrer or argue that American democracy displays totalitarian tendencies. Because so much rides on the plausibility of what follows, my hope is that skeptical readers will resist the impulse to dismiss it and persevere instead. And this for a particular reason beyond the foreign and domestic record of the present administration.

The stakes in this volume are two: the first is prompted by President Bush's remark that the United States is ”the greatest power in the world.” Not only must we ask how this ”greatest power” is const.i.tuted; we must also question the process by which it is legitimated. Does, or can, our Const.i.tution, which typically has been understood as intending to limit power, actually authorize power of the magnitude being claimed by the president, or is an extraconst.i.tutional justification being claimed? In light of the lofty, even sacred place that the ”original Const.i.tution” occupies in the ideology of the administration's most fervent supporters, that question should be of some interest, particularly to those who consider themselves conservatives.

The president frequently declares that our system is a democracy. The traditional understanding of democracy is that it is a system by which the citizenry delegates power to the government, and hence the latter has only such powers as are delegated to it. How, and when, did the people delegate ”the greatest power in the world” to their government? If the people did not have that power in the first place, where does it come from? or has there been an acquisition of powers unantic.i.p.ated in the founding doc.u.ment or in the theory of democracy, and are such powers inherently antagonistic to the spirit and logic of both const.i.tutionalism and democracy?

Our second concern relates to an equally fundamental and jeopardized inst.i.tution: can the citizen relearn the demands that democracy places on its highest, most difficult office-not, as commonly supposed, on the office of the president, but on that of the citizen? And that question has a practical corollary: the reinvigoration of citizens.h.i.+p requires more than a civics lesson. It would necessitate a reordering of basic power arrangements and a different understanding of civic commitments from that of spectator.

My main point will not be that the Bush administration was a facsimile of the n.a.z.i dictators.h.i.+p, or that the unremarkable George W. Bush resembled the charismatic Fuhrer, or that his supporters were n.a.z.iphiles who dreamed of a racist nation of goose-steppers. Rather, in coining the term ”inverted totalitarianism” I tried to find a name for a new type of political system, seemingly one driven by abstract totalizing powers, not by personal rule, one that succeeds by encouraging political disengagement rather than ma.s.s mobilization, that relies more on ”private” media than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda reinforcing the official version of events.

In cla.s.sic totalitarianism the conquest of total power did not result from a coalescence of unintended consequences; it was the conscious aim of those who led a political movement. The most powerful twentieth-century dictators.h.i.+ps were highly personal, not only in the sense that each had a dominant, larger-than-life leader, but each system was peculiarly the creation of a leader who was a self-made man. Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler did not just invent their personae; they literally built the organizations of their respective dictators.h.i.+ps. Each system was inseparable from its Fuhrer, or Duce. Inverted totalitarianism follows an entirely different course: the leader is not the architect of the system but its product. George W. Bush no more created inverted totalitarianism than he piloted a plane onto the USS Abraham Lincoln. He is the pliant favored child of privilege, of corporate connections, a construct of public relations wizards and of party propagandists.

The cla.s.sic totalitarian regimes, Stalin's Russia, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, were, importantly, the creation of a charismatic leader and unimaginable without his imprint. Inverted totalitarianism, on the other hand, is largely independent of any particular leader and requires no personal charisma to survive: its model is the corporate ”head,” the corporation's public representative. Among the cla.s.sical dictators.h.i.+ps only Stalin died while still in power, although his dictators.h.i.+p did not survive the century. In the inverted system the leader is a product of the system, not its architect; it will survive him. While Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were the princ.i.p.al authors of schemes that eventually led to disastrous overreaching, those who counsel the t.i.tular head of Superpower, the equivalents of the CEO, supply the hubris that confuses opportunity with capability and grossly underestimates the resources needed to accomplish the grandiose end of world hegemony.

One prominent Was.h.i.+ngton insider, notable for his influence and close ties with the Bush inner circle, declared that he looked forward to the day when the national government will have been ruthlessly shrunken so that its pathetic remains can be washed down a bathtub or (the versions vary) flushed down a toilet.6 Whatever its sound-bite value, that fantasy imagines either that the military will go the way of other major political inst.i.tutions, or, while the latter are flushed, the armed forces remain. In either case, since nothing is intimated about the structure of corporate power, presumably it survives, flushed by success, as it were, protected by a now privatized military. Such fantasies ignore the facts of huge defense spending accompanied by an aggressive foreign policy, a fervent nationalism, and a military that, unlike the German Wehrmacht in its contempt for business values, cohabits comfortably with corporate America.7 Be careful what you flush.

What we are in fact witnessing is something new, a conservative form of etatisme that, while it is hostile toward social spending, is eager to intervene in the most personal of affairs: s.e.xual relations, marriage, reproduction, and family decisions about life and death. The case of Terri Schiavo was the perfect ill.u.s.tration of a conservative version of etatisme. The Republican-dominated Congress was hurriedly called in to special session; Dr. Frist, the Senate majority leader, offered his professional judgment from a distance; the president flew back to Was.h.i.+ngton; evangelicals and Catholic groups besieged the media, Congress, and the Florida legislature-and all for the cause of a person whom medical opinion had p.r.o.nounced to be hopelessly brain-dead. What was significant was not the particular case but the tacit threat of quickly mobilized power, public and private, and orchestrated zeal. Intelligent design?

III.

An inversion is conventionally defined as an instance of something's being turned upside down. Unlike the cla.s.sic totalitarian regimes which lost no opportunity for dramatizing and insisting upon a radical transformation that virtually eradicated all traces of the previous system, inverted totalitarianism has emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation's political traditions. For our purposes an inversion occurs when seemingly unrelated, even disparate starting points converge and reinforce each other. A giant corporation includes prayer sessions for its executives, while evangelicals meet in ”franchised” congregations and millionaire preachers extol the virtues of capitalism.8 Each is a reliable component in a system of which the administration is the public face. An inversion is present when a system, such as a democracy, produces a number of significant actions ordinarily a.s.sociated with its ant.i.thesis: for example, when the elected chief executive may imprison an accused without due process and sanction the use of torture while instructing the nation about the sanct.i.ty of the rule of law. The new system, inverted totalitarianism, is one that professes to be the opposite of what, in fact, it is. It disclaims its real ident.i.ty, trusting that its deviations will become normalized as ”change.” Again exactly the opposite of the cla.s.sic totalitarians, who, far from disguising their break with the const.i.tutional system of the past, celebrated it.

What is typically meant by ”totalitarianism”? First and foremost, it is the attempt to realize an ideological, idealized conception of a society as a systematically ordered whole, where the ”parts” (family, churches, education, intellectual and cultural life, economy, recreation, politics, state bureaucracy) are premeditatedly, even forcibly if necessary, coordinated to support and further the purposes of the regime. The formulation of those purposes is monopolized by the leaders.h.i.+p. In cla.s.sical totalitarian regimes it was a.s.sumed that total power demanded that the entirety of society's inst.i.tutions, practices, and beliefs had to be dictated from above and coordinated (gleichgeschaltet), that total power was achievable only through the control of everything from the top. In actual fact, no totalitarian regime succeeded in perfectly realizing that vision. Although each of the cla.s.sic forms of totalitarianism was rife with corruption, plagued by incompetence, and corroded by cynicism, they did not fail for lack of trying.

Inverted totalitarianism works differently. It reflects the belief that the world can be changed to accord with a limited range of objectives, such as ensuring that its own energy needs will be met, that ”free markets” will be established, that military supremacy will be maintained, and that ”friendly regimes” will be in place in those parts of the world considered vital to its own security and economic needs. Inverted totalitarianism also trumpets the cause of democracy worldwide. As we shall point out in later chapters, ”democracy” is understood as ”managed democracy,” a political form in which governments are legitimated by elections that they have learned to control, the most recent example being the presidential election in Egypt in September 2005. President Mubarak, who had served for more than two decades, easily triumphed over a dozen rivals. Intimidation, corruption, unequal access to the media, and similar tactics reportedly were widespread.

Managed democracy is centered on containing electoral politics; it is cool, even hostile toward social democracy beyond promoting literacy, job training, and other essentials for a society struggling to survive in the global economy. Managed democracy is democracy systematized.

The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed. This has come about, not through a Leader's imposing his will or the state's forcibly eliminating opposition, but through certain developments, notably in the economy, that promoted integration, rationalization, concentrated wealth, and a faith that virtually any problem-from health care to political crises, even faith itself-could be managed, that is, subjected to control, predictability, and cost-effectiveness in the delivery of the product. Voters are made as predictable as consumers; a university is nearly as rationalized in its structure as a corporation;9 a corporate structure is as hierarchical in its chain of command as the military. The regime ideology is capitalism, which is virtually as undisputed as n.a.z.i doctrine was in 1930s Germany. The political challenge has been to harness these various dynamics: a military that wants ever more futuristic technology and more deadly weaponry; a corporate economy that is continually searching for new markets and outlets; churches that are on the prowl for converts; news and entertainment media as eager to expand their market share as they are to pay court to the political establishment; and an intelligentsia avid to secure a measure of status by cozying with executives, politicos, and generals, and, no doubt, ”speaking truth to power.”

The genius of the Republican Party is to perceive the possibilities present in these systematizing and dynamic inst.i.tutions and to combine them into something entirely new in U.S. politics, a dynamic reactionary movement professing to be a party of conservatism dedicated to small government, fiscal austerity, and a return to our Ur-myth, the ”original Const.i.tution of the Founders.” Not least a party that has developed an impressive system for recruiting future apparatchiks.

Although I shall indicate some similarities between the American political system and n.a.z.i Germany, my main argument is that while both systems belong to the same genus of totalitarianism, they represent different versions with some parallels and occasionally striking similarities. For example, the n.a.z.i ideology of Lebensraum was the official justification for conquering peaceful neighboring countries and extending German hegemony. According to the doctrine, Germany needed ”living s.p.a.ce” to accommodate the dynamics of a superior master race that, if it was to avoid lapsing into decadence, had to provoke the challenges of war. That doctrine bears a striking similarity to the Bush doctrine of preemptive war.

Preemptive war entails the projection of power abroad, usually against a far weaker country, comparable, say, to the n.a.z.i invasion of Belgium and Holland in 1940. It declares that the United States is justified in striking at another country because of a perceived threat that U.S. power will be weakened, severely damaged, unless it reacts to eliminate the danger before it materializes. Preemptive war is Lebensraum for the age of terrorism. The global character of terrorism offers endless opportunities for the preemptor to invade other countries on the grounds that they ”harbor” terrorists. The neoconservative ideologists had, however, selected Iraq for invasion shortly after the end of the first Gulf War; indeed, they had been arguing that the only means by which America could expiate the shame of Vietnam and prove its mettle was in battle against other states.10 It can be objected, nonetheless, that unlike the Polish army in 1939, which the n.a.z.is claimed was about to strike, terrorists are capable of terrible harm. However, Bush's declaration of a ”war” on terrorism was fraught with serious const.i.tutional implications; and whether or not it is legally justified, there is no guarantee that such a war could be won in any conventional sense. It was not Poland that brought about the defeat of the n.a.z.i war machine but hubris, overreaching, the decision to launch two unwinnable wars virtually simultaneously, first against the Soviet Union, then against the United States. The doctrine of preemptive war seems irrelevant if the foe is not another state, and when, typically, collection of evidence that proves a conventional state is ”harboring” terrorists takes time.

In the case of Iraq the script for applying the preemptive doctrine produced a disaster. Following the invasion of April 2003 and the rapid defeat of an army that mostly disappeared, the United States and its allies found their forces, as well as the Iraqi population, under continuous attack by an enemy whose exact ident.i.ty seemed elusive. While failing to link Saddam and terrorists, the United States succeeded in provoking the very terrorism that it had failed to find. The misadventure in Iraq suggests that the difference between an expansive doctrine of Lebensraum and Superpower's expansive doctrine of globalization is that the one was genocidal in intention and results, while the other had the more modest goals of reorganizing the Middle East, ensuring oil supplies, and securing Israel. Instead of laying waste to a whole continent and killing millions, Superpower's toll-thousands of innocent lives, widespread economic devastation and social dislocation, and years of military occupation-was unintended rather than deliberate.

Over time, perhaps, and with good fortune, the contrasts between cla.s.sic and inverted totalitarianism will emerge more sharply. Under the one the lives of ordinary people were relentlessly drab, unpromising, and harsh, save for the few able to collaborate successfully.11 Under the inverted form there is a good chance that eventually ordinary lives will be materially tolerable and safer; whether the regime will be democratic is problematic. The main reason for believing that the future might bring material improvement and social stability is that these objectives suit the needs of a conqueror concerned to avoid actually governing conquered land. A globalizing power wants military bases abroad, trading partners, markets, and consumers: suzerainty, not an old-fas.h.i.+oned empire.

The benignity of inverted totalitarianism as contrasted with the harshness of cla.s.sic totalitarian regimes is revealed in the ec.u.menical character of the one and the xenophobia of the other. The three cla.s.sic totalitarianisms, while extending their domination over other societies, never sought to incorporate them in the sense that, say, the Romans did when they extended Roman citizens.h.i.+p to conquered peoples. Instead Hitler and the other dictators strove to keep die Heimat clean of foreigners while glorifying its own native-born, and making citizens.h.i.+p seem precious by reserving virtually all positions of power and wealth for its own subjects. In contrast, globalizing superpower blurs the distinction between homeland and Ausland: it enthusiastically exports culture and jobs-while missing no opportunity to weaken trade union power at home and abroad-and just as enthusiastically welcomes skilled and unskilled foreign workers, especially if the unskilled understand that they are ”guests,” with few legal or political ent.i.tlements, rather than future citizens.

n.a.z.ism and Italian fascism both barely concealed their intention of dismantling the existing parliamentary governments of their countries; both recognized that their goal of total power depended upon the elimination of freely competing parties and fair elections. The Bush administration, having failed to make the case that its invasion of Iraq was a response to an imminent threat of ”weapons of ma.s.s destruction,” s.h.i.+fted its rationale to one of bringing ”democracy” to a nation despoiled by tyranny. What ensued was a curious variation on Corwin's scenario that threat of nuclear war would produce domestic totalizing powers and suspension of const.i.tutional democracy at home in order to obliterate an enemy abroad; instead, the nuclear threat allegedly posed by Saddam Hussein's regime was invoked to justify an invasion for the purpose of imposing democracy ab nihilo upon a society that, while it most likely wanted to be rid of Saddam Hussein, had expressed no clear wish to be democratized, especially if that meant secularization. Meanwhile, at home, the war against Iraq is declared by the Bush administration to be simultaneously part of the ongoing war against terrorism, although the evidence of links between Saddam and al Qaeda appears to be as slender as the evidence that Saddam possessed weapons of ma.s.s destruction. And, it might be added, almost as dubious as the evidence supporting Hitler's claim of 1939 that the Poles were poised to invade Germany.

Thus far the promoters of American superpower have evinced no interest in abolis.h.i.+ng a system that enables them to maximize power: a free politics, under the right conditions and controls, interposes no barriers to their kind of totalizing powers and may even serve as their auxiliary. The ”right conditions” refers to the porousness of inst.i.tutions that enables a different form of power-one ostensibly nonpolitical in its origins, unbound to const.i.tutional limits or to democratic processes (call it ”corporate power”)-to turn access or simple influence over legislators and policy-makers into copartners.h.i.+p: not as in a corporate state of Mussolini's fantasies but as in the incorporated state. Why negate a const.i.tution, as the n.a.z.is did, if it is possible simultaneously to exploit porosity and legitimate power by means of judicial interpretations that declare huge campaign contributions to be protected speech under the First Amendment, or that treat heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations as a simple application of the people's right to pet.i.tion their government?

To invert Marx: the first time, totalitarianism as tragic farce; the second, as farcical tragedy.

IV.

[If] political preferences are simply plugged into the

system by leaders (business or other) in order to extract