Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism by Sheldon S. Wolin

This book's central thesis is that a new species of totalitarianism has come into existence, with certain surface characteristics of democracy, but also with many traits of "classical" totalitarianism. Author Sheldon Wolin calls it "inverted totalitarianism," and I find it helpful to think of it as totalitarianism-lite wearing a democracy skinsuit. 

The democracy skinsuit is what makes it so hard to see, to the point where anyone can easily deny or even ridicule the idea itself: just point to the Constitution, point to our two (allegedly oppositional) political parties, or point to various legacy democratic institutions, and claim, "We don't have a totalitarian system at all, you conspiracy theorist. Look at all this democracy!"

Again this is part of the ruse, it's why the skinsuit fools everyone. First, unless the Constitution is followed it's merely a rotting piece of paper. Second, far from "two political parties" it is far more accurate to say we have a monoparty system with two occasionally oppositional factions--and despite slogans to the contrary, both clearly serve party elites before citizens. Third, more and more of our legacy democratic institutions are increasingly captured, in a wide range of ways, by corporate and government interests. The military/defense industry is merely the best-known example of regulatory capture; the pandemic has exposed the sad capture of the FDA and other health regulatory bodies as they've been caught blatantly placing pharma industry interests before the health of the people.

The pandemic also revealed the starkly obvious capture of state-approved media, showing it to be filled with obedient flacks furthering state power and state messaging: see for example the vile examples of joint government/Big Tech-imposed censorship of social media, as well as the disturbing, infamous "Sinclair script" event from early on in the pandemic. [Edit: go here if and when Youtube censors that prior link.]

This book is quite George W. Bush-focused, showing how his administration's creeping authoritarianism, combined with the events of 9/11, were skillfully used to dramatically expand the government's power and reach, abrogating more and more of the rights of citizens. The book came out in 2006: understandably Bush and his idiotic second Iraq war were fresh in mind in those days. But it's instructive to read this book with a "history rhymes" lens, as under the guise of the pandemic the Biden administration used a nearly identical playbook with equal relish, further expanding the reach and power of the government.

People really want to believe that "their" party has the good guys, and the other party has the authoritarian bad guys. If only "their" party were in power things would be fixed, and things like this continuously creeping authoritarianism wouldn't happen. The record shows, however, that once the state has the power it has, either party can and will use it, and then extend it. Neither side is the "good" side, and they may not even be "sides" any more except in the skinsuit sense. 

The book, while valuable, meanders, is repetitive, and at times is downright boring, so I would much rather direct readers to chapters 22-25 of Dr. Robert Malone's book Lies My Government Told Me. It is a much tighter articulation of the concept of inverted totalitarianism, although the discussion there focuses more on medical totalitarianism and the pharmaceutical industry's total regulatory capture of the FDA and other health regulatory bodies. The central paradigm is of course Wolin's idea originally (and Malone obviously credits him), but in many ways Malone has a more perceptive, more nuanced and less partisan take on the topic than Wolin.

Finally, I can't help thinking: there was an all-too-brief period of democracy in Athens in the 5th century B.C., a fleeting period of near-democracy in the Italian Renaissance city-state era... and until the modern era that was it for all the thousands of years of recorded history. That was all the democracy there ever was! And if today's "pseudo-democracies" are carefully structured (as Wolin convincingly argues) to strictly limit the power of the people, then perhaps genuine democracy is merely an outlier, the exception that proves a depressing rule: that government of, for and by the people simply isn't in the cards for we humans.

Despite being repetitive (and at times tiresomely so), this book is still worth reading in order to grasp and sit with the concept of inverted totalitarianism. I believe it's a crucial paradigm to navigate modern America.

[As usual, have mercy on yourself and read no further! what follows are simply my notes and thoughts as I read through the book. Save yourself! At most skim the bold parts; preferably don't read anything at all.] 

Notes:

Preface:

p x: Mitigative or tactical change (e.g.: "tax breaks for the middle class") versus paradigmatic or strategic change (e.g.: Jacksonian democracy, FDR's New Deal or post-Civil War reforms).

p xi: The Obama presidency as an instrument of the status quo, and to an extent much more than had been expected or "hoped" (bank bailouts, empire building, etc.).

p xiv: The two profound changes of the 20th century were the dominance of corporate power and effective management of the citizenry.

p xv: See the perspective on GM and having the UAW get 55% of the post bankruptcy shares in the company: the author saw it as the government "had forced" the union to buy that share, which was the "co-optation and neutralization of a powerful trade union" and made the UAW "a party to its own humiliation" (!!)... what a weird and totally inaccurate way to see it: the UAW got a glorious sweetheart deal here, it was the bondholders who were crammed-down and humiliated here! It's amazing how you can get totally different perspectives on the same thing depending on your lens.

Preface:

p xvii: Local variations of totalitarianism, also that today the 20th century versions have much more powerful technologies and control compared to earlier systems.

p xviii: On inverted totalitarianism as not perceived fully by its participants/controllers: They seem unaware of the consequences of power holder actions or inactions: "There is a certain heedlessness."

p xx: [Money quote here] "How to persuade the reader that the actual direction of contemporary politics is toward a political system the very opposite of what the political leadership, the mass media, and think tank oracles claim that it is, the world's foremost exemplar of democracy?"

p xx: Author was early to see the lack of credibility of the media in 2008, also saw clear voter fraud in the 2000 election (again, if the Republicans were so easily able to fraud their way into office...)

p xxiii: On "increasingly open cohabitation between the corporation and the state" post WWII, "taught consumers to welcome change and private pleasures while accepting political passivity."

p xxiv: "managed democracy" as the "smiley face of inverted totalitarianism."

Preview: 

p 1ff: Comparing the Nazi propaganda film The Triumph of the Will with W's landing on an aircraft carrier after the "mission accomplished" of Iraq; on myth creation; cinema and television as "tyrannical" where the viewer is a "communicant in a ceremony" with no real power.

p 3: "We're an empire now, we create our own reality. ...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Chapter 1: Myth in the Making

p 5: How "on cue" to 9/11, the media "acted in unison, fell into line, even knew instinctively what the line and their role should be." [Heavy! Same after COVID]

p 6: In a culture known for freedoms and quirkiness why so much unison after 9/11? "A unanimity eerily comparable to that of a more openly coercive system."

p 12: On creating a mythology: how it's so easy to do in such an apparently secular society, there's already in place all the promises of advertising to have you be "born again": younger, cleaner, happier, etc. Applying that myth to the creation of a superpower or an empire with a quasi-religious role in the world.

Chapter 2: Totalitarianism's Inversion: Beginnings of the Imaginary of a Permanent Global War

p 15: "How would we go about detecting the signs of totalitarianism?" Preliminary question

p 19: The Constitution as an "imaginary" in the sense that it is dependent on what politicians (and citizens) conceive it to be. Compare to the "power imaginary" which is usually accompanied by a justifying mission ("defeat communism" or "get terrorists").

p 26: The Cold War as a new "imaginary": total war yet not; of uncertain but prolonged duration; a hidden enemy; with starkly Manichean terms; an epic struggle, etc. [Sounds a lot like the war on terrorism...] Leading us to global involvement and away from New Deal-era social reform, and normalizing totalizing power. It was also during this period that "an extended relationship between the military and the corporate economy began in earnest."

[When you look at all the hyperbolic language used in all these cold wars strategy reports and documents you realize that at the end we "became our enemy"--we ended up just like the USSR.] 

p 35: Note also mechanisms put into place during the cold war "against Communism": the FBI, the OSS/CIA, the House Un-American Activities Committee, loyalty boards, all of which was a new form of government power of "thought policing to enforce ideological conformity."

p 37: The author describes this as "...anti-communism as mimesis: the character of the enemy supplied the norm for the power demands that the democratic defender of the free world chose to impose on itself."

p 37ff: On McCarthyism and how it purged New Deal values of social democracy from the national power imaginary. 

p 39: On how the Cold War led to the enlargement of state power as well as a legitimization of an "elite" to run the apparatus of state power, thus a political elite class of the "best and the brightest." Also implicit here was a presumption of the indifference and ill-informed nature of the masses.

p 40: Finally on inverted totalitarianism being formed not the result of a premeditated plot; instead it is the result of a set of actions and practices undertaken in ignorance of their lasting consequences.

Chapter 3: Totalitarianism's Inversion, Democracy's Perversion

p 41: "We are not just any hegemon. We run a uniquely benign imperialism... It is a fact manifest in the way others welcome our power." --Charles Krauthammer, speaking about the Bush Doctrine

p 42: On the establishment of totalizing forces as part of a non-apparent, gradual or continuity-based trend: for example: "yellow alerts" for terrorism seeming more and more familiar--and even reassuring rather than exceptional. Eventually "normalcy would then have ceased to serve as a restraint and measure of sanity." Note also this is something plausible for American society which is already accustomed to exchanging new habits for old, to adapting to social dislocation, etc.

p 44: Inverted totalitarianism not as a political system with one personalized fuhrer, but a system of abstract totalizing power. In inverted totalitarianism "the leader is not the architect of the system but its product." [The author uses George W. Bush here, giving the image of him piloting a plane onto the USS Abraham Lincoln, but if you think about it Joe Biden is an even better example: only a totalizing bureaucracy would put a demented old man in power and feed him via teleprompter. But there are other examples: see Reagan's second term, Wilson's last couple of years in office, etc]. Inverted totalitarianism 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."

[Also interesting how this author is quite anti-right but in reality the US has reached it latest peak of inverted totalitarianism under a government of the left.]

p 47: "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, would served for more than two decades, easily triumphed over a dozen rivals... Managed democracy is centered on containing electoral politics."

p 47: "The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed."

p 49-50: Contrasting the racial purity aspect of a "vanilla" dictatorship or "vanilla" totalitarianism with the "ecumenical" aspect of inverted totalitarianism, where it weakens its own trade union power as it welcomes large amounts of foreign workers (calling them guests!) giving away citizenship openly and widely, whereas these traditional dictatorships would consider citizenship something precious, and would reserve it for ethnically German (or Italian, etc) people.

p 50: Likewise, vanilla totalitarian systems would openly dismantle the existing parliamentary governments of their countries, whereas the inverted totalitarian system co-opts the system: [Also, you can use the judicial system and the legislative system, you can also create pandemics, etc., to impose your force within the existing "democratic" system]

p 53: It's interesting how the author cites here that democracy contributed importantly to the rise of both the Nazis and the Fascists, it "even served as a preparation." Hitler and Mussolini gained office through popular elections, but then once in power "proceeded to eviscerate the systems of parliamentary governance." Note also that both of these systems had a "thin" democracy: short-lived (and notoriously corrupt in Italy's case), and neither had "a fund of democratic political experience or a tradition of participatory politics."

p 54: Note the strict orthodoxy required of traditional regimes: as we would say today, everyone in inverted totalitarianism has "to stay on message" (!) See also "resentful elites convinced of their natural right to rule" and "less fearful of the mass than contemptuous of its gullibility." Wow. You do get the impression lately that our government is increasingly contemptuous of its citizens.

p 56: How did the old totalitarian systems extract such sacrifices from their people? "A short answer might invoke the potency of calibrated doses of fear, combined with excitement at being a part of a great undertaking and expectations about opportunities in the present." 

p 57-8: Note also the US prison system which is "significantly privatized" and "has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world" as one of the instruments of control of inverted totalitarianism. The author argues that this is also a strategy of political neutralization of African-American culture.

p 58: Imposing uniform opinions through private media conglomerates: this is a less direct way of stamping out dissident thinking. Also the government can easily punish dissident thinking through the withholding of appropriated funds or using the regulation system to either enforce or waive things. [Obviously this is a clear mechanism used in enforcing uniformity of thought in healthcare]

p 59: On controlling strategic points in the legislative and administrative system of government; also electing "pliant legislators for lobbyists to shape" which results in a misrepresentative or clientry government" depoliticizing the citizenry; "anti-democracy" per the author's phrase.

p 66: Modern pseudo-democracy as "a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives." 

p 68: On how inverted totalitarianism "has cultivated the intelligentsia" in the university system through government contracts, grants, wealthy donors, etc.; They've been "seamlessly integrated into the system." They are "made wealthy by the system." Note what a contrast this is to the university culture of dissidence and opposition during the Vietnam war! In this current era "the Academy had become self-pacifying."

Chapter 4: The New World of Terror

[This chapter is "a detour through Hobbes and Tocqueville."]

p 69: A good example here of how the author tends to see everything through his own prism, how he forces-fits everything into his prism: see footnote 4 (p 69 and p 304) where Wolin argues the celebration of a technological, utopic "New World" at the millennium was short-lived thanks to the Y2K bugs: the author has no idea that this stuff was known about and had been worked on (mostly by Indian outsourcing firms) for years leading up to the year 2000, and it turned out to be a non-event. That, of course, wouldn't fit his characterization in this part of the book at all. On one level it's just a throwaway footnote and a minor part of the overall argument, but on another level it reveals how easy it is to view everything in a way to fit your viewpoint.

p 71: 9/11 as a catalyst for the growth of the inverted totalitarianism system, abrogating the rights of citizens, spying on citizens, etc., also a drumbeat of how "a furtive network of fanatical enemies was tirelessly plotting death and destruction" on us, "only await[ing] the opportunity when a free society relaxed its guard." [Not unlike the fear so easily imposed on society via the COVID virus.]

p 71: Note also the silencing of any thought that the 9/11 attacks were committed in retaliation for US government actions abroad: these were dismissed/ignored by the US media completely. "It was an object lesson in how the system can enforce censorship and stifle opposition without appearing to do so."

p 73-4: Institutions in the American system designed to check power (e.g.: Congress, the courts and oppositional political parties) were all co-opted by 9/11, by the Patriot Act; they all became "auxiliaries."  There were very few dissident voices anywhere in our government standing in the way of what turned out to be an unprovoked attack on one country (and later unprovoked attacks on several others...).

p 74-5: On Thomas Hobbes as perhaps the first Western political theorist to correlate fear and power and explain how they can be used to concentrate state power and "crucially, how that outcome could be represented as the product of popular consent." Neo-conservatives as "neo-Hobbesians"; how Hobbes named the state Leviathan, the absolute power, the first image of superpower, used to assure the citizenry of safety and protection. Extended discussion following here about the nature of the Leviathan; of perpetual authority, with no requirement to be periodically reaffirmed; the use of fear and terror as justification for unlimited power; also the unspoken but clear suggestion that that authority could redirect its power on its own citizenry as well. 

p 76: Occasionally the author lapses into pretentious syntax, this page has an example. "According to his argument extraordinary, concentrated power had to originate in the freely given consent of individuals."

p 79: Alexis de Tocqueville talked in a vein similar to Hobbes although referring to a more benign type of power; a sovereign with "an immense tutelary power" sitting above the crowd of equal men.

Chapter 5: The Utopian Theory of Superpower: The Official Version

p 82ff: The author here quotes liberally from a US government national security strategy report (The National Security Strategy of the United States of September 9, 2002) that he argues "represented the clearest formulation of the administration's understanding of the mission of Superpower and of its totalizing reach. The document is also the best evidence of the ideology promoting inverted totalitarianism." [Note also the author says in the footnotes: "Not long after it had been issued, the administration withdrew it without offering an explanation or disavowal." I guess this supposedly implies either they felt guilty about it, believed it even though they withdrew the document, or that it gave away too much about their strategy and thus had to be withdrawn; in any of these cases however it adds to the potential rhetorical force of using it to make the author's point.]

p 85: Interesting language in this NSS document about "weak states," how they can be used to justify intervention because they can be a place that harbors cartels or terrorists; you can also read into it that a "weak state" simply doesn't comply with the US's wishes or fails to be a sufficiently exploitable client state of the United States. See Michael Hudson's striking book J is for Junk Economics and his discussion of client states and client oligarchies in weak states just like these (see my notes #36, #47, #58 and #83).

p 89ff: On creating justification for preemptive war, such as acting against emerging threats "before they are fully formed." Likewise, erasing a line between foreign and domestic in terms of intervention (especially military action in the context of terrorism).

p 92-3: The test case of this NSS doctrine was the (second) Iraq War; a type of utopian opportunity that resulted in a flop on every level: the superpower military failed, it provoked an insurgency that left Iraq "ungovernable and close to being uninhabitable" while it worsened the problem of terrorism, added more numbers to the enemy and added to a collective of countries that found common ground opposing the United States! 

Chapter 6: The Dynamics of Transformation

p 95-6: On transformations in prior historical examples of ancient Greece and Rome, which moved from aristocracies to democracies to empire; See also repeated regimes in France from 1789 and thereafter; also the UK in just two decades went from monarchy to Parliament to Cromwell and then back to the monarchy (!); the United States went from colonies to overthrowing England, to forming a decentralized confederation, followed by a new federal system, then faced secession movement, and is now a tremendously centralized superpower structure under "managed democracy."

p 98: Note how something like a Constitution can prevent too much change or concentration of power, but not necessarily; and then likewise the document itself will always lag well behind actual means of power because technology moves so much more rapidly than the law or interpretations of a document. Essentially the powers of the Leviathan or the superpower dramatically outstrip the citizens' ability to control their effects.

p 101: "...the condition for the ascendance of Superpower is the weakening or irrelevancy of democracy and constitutionalism--except as mystifications enabling Superpower to fake a lineage that gives it legitimacy." Ouch. 

p 101: The author cites the Florida recount, basically what he considers to be a stolen election, as "the crucial event exposing how deeply political deterioration had penetrated the system." The author points out that it occurred "amidst scarcely a ripple of [popular] discontent." [One thing that's fascinating to me--and it's also disturbing in the Orwellian "memory hole" sense because people's memories are so short--is that if it's so obvious that the 2000 election was thrown (the author goes so far as to use the word "coup" to describe it on page 101!) why are any claims about the 2020 presidential election being stolen always mocked and referred to as baseless in the corporate media? Makes you wonder.]

p 102: The media at first did not respond with a chorus of support for the 2000 election result but they did make a circus of the events in Florida, but then the media in general dropped the entire story without comment. Everybody had the impression that it was just a hiccup followed by proper "government continuity."

p 102: The president (any president, or better put: the persona of the president) as a "cinemythological figure"

p 105: On using war as an expansion of state power; also "after 1945 warss acquired a certain abstract quality." "Distant wars"; [See here the fascinating discussion from Walter Lippman's book Public Opinion on how governments create and manipulate pseudo-environments and mental images, and how the use and manipulation of those mental images to shape opinion and behavior.]

p 111: Features of a political system during constant war would be political deadlock, an equally divided electorate, campaigns for a small number of undecided voters, safe seats throughout the legislature, etc. Candidates tend to become long-term incumbents. Also the system wants to produce culture wars to further divide the citizenry and divert voters attention. "Cultural wars might seem an indication of strong political involvements. Actually they are a substitute." (!!!)

Chapter 7: The Dynamics of the Archaic

p 114ff: The author believes there was another Great Awakening that happened after the 2000 presidential campaign and 9/11. Further, he believes there is a "remarkable commingling of politics and religion that has occurred in recent years"; descriptions follow of Wolin's impressions of fundamental and Evangelical Christians [which sound sadly quite cardboard, suspect and projection-based]. It sounds like the typical and predictable fear and loathing of Christianity that you'd hear from a typical northeastern establishment intellectual, complete with quotes from the book of Revelations and quote-minings from Jerry Falwell, as if he is somehow representative...

p 117: Wolin asserts that "Evangelicalism [sic? What the heck kind of a neologism is this?] is one element in a broader ideological matrix, "archaism," that includes political and economic variants of fundamentalism."

p 117: [What is it with the obsession about this random Alabama judge who wanted to have a Ten Commandments monument placed within his courthouse? Everybody in the elite media establishment seems to attach to this event as if it's some kind of thing of grand significance. Is it?]

p 118: On the "archaists" having fixed beliefs, impervious to evidence, beliefs that flourished in the past. See Leo Strauss as an intellectual godfather of many of the neocons, whose own archaisms came from Plato, Aristotle and Nietzsche; "A system of belief archaism."

p 120: Archaism with the original Constitution in the eyes of political fundamentalists; the idea that the Constitution is under siege by liberals.

p 122: Archaism in economic thought in theories of the free market, with Adam Smith as the "bible." Boy the author sure gets this wrong! Smith's book was written to oppose mercantilist theories of his era: the problem today is both conservatives and liberals today are as mercantilist/oligopolist as ever, they don't look back to Adam Smith in the least. Neomercantilism drives almost all of our economic lives today. Wolin gets this exactly wrong. Also he gets it wrong as he parodies the idea that there could be an invisible hand, he calls this the invisible hand "theological" in nature, as if it's some kind of intelligent design. If in evolution and biology there's a spontaneous and emergent order, why couldn't it be true in markets as well?

p 124: "According to Max Weber Protestant sects once preached frugality, only to find that this encouraged saving, savings became investments, and, lo and behold! Protestantism had launched capitalism--to vulgarize Weber's thesis."

p 126: On losing the monasticism and independence of science, to be absorbed and integrated into corporate and government bureaucracies, "leaving scientists and their findings more vulnerable to political and corporate manipulation" [the author doesn't say this since it post-dates his book, but this is precisely what is happening right now with medical authoritarianism and the suppression of dissident medical views, also the drug discovery and drug development industry has been fully corrupted and captured.]

p 126: Bringing up the creationist versus Darwinian curriculum battles as a metaphor of the battles between religion and science; [one day I would love to see an academic elite talk about physics and how at the quantum level we have the exact opposite: a unification of these two presumed oppositional poles]

p 128: On the uncertain character of contemporary life and the promise of stability in the appeal of the archaic; also the usurpation of the political system by corporate power; also corporate types indulging conservative and fundamental religious donors as a form of make-believe; corporate power is happy to see any kind of stable legal framework, thus "constitutional fundamentalists" serve its purposes perfectly well; likewise corporate power can co-opt the legal system by cultivating "accommodating judges and eager lawyers."

[This was a strange and not entirely relevant chapter full of psychological projection; it's the weakest, worst and least interesting chapter of the book so far.]

Chapter 8: The Politics of Superpower: Managed Democracy

p 131: "Superpower is the union of state and corporation in an age of waning democracy and political illiteracy. This chapter inquires into some of the political changes that are making Superpower and inverted totalitarianism possible and demoting democracy from a formative principle to a largely rhetorical function within an increasingly corrupt political system."

p 132: Elements include: 1) Empire and military might, with bases throughout the globe, and arms sales and alliances with weak client states, and 2) globalizing corporations. This turns the US "into a 'home base' for international economic and military strategies."

p 133: On the idea that foreign policy should be kept away from "the whims of a democratic citizenry"; it should be insulated from domestic politics.

p 135ff (as well as note 8 on p 313): Extended discussion and various examples given of regulatory capture here; discussions held between the Bush administration and top energy company executives; the Bush administration chose a high-ranking lobbyist of the National Association of Manufacturers to head up the consumer product safety commission (this is a fox guarding the henhouse type situation); several all-too-typical examples of corporate executives taking leave to run government departments (and set policy); high ranking military officers hired by corporations; etc. Obviously we've seen this progress far still further in today's era with the complete capture of pharmaceutical regulatory bodies like the FDA and NIH.

p 136 :"Privatization" as another aspect of the symbiosis between corporations and the government; it's become a norm now that it's even done in the military (this is the one zone of government activity that libertarians used to concede that the government should actually run). The author calls this an example of "the expansion of private (i.e., mainly corporate) power and the selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry. These trends are not driven by a desire to reduce control over the populace." (Talk about an understatement right there). Also: "...control over the population... can be accomplished through 'private' mechanisms largely divorced from popular accountability and rarely scrutinized for their coerciveness."

[The author here may be guilty of his own "archaism" in the prior chapter, as he longs for a past era when institutions were run by disinterested members of the polis, and when "public service was meant to embody a mode of conduct and a set of ideals." The more I read history the more I presume that this a platonic ideal that probably never existed.]

p 139: Here we have a standard rundown of the stereotypical evils of corporations. centering on Walmart, Enron, WorldCom, etc. "[Wal-Mart] is inverted totalitarianism in a corporate, imperial mode."

[It's also interesting that the author blames Reagan and Bush for using corporate managers when Kennedy actually was the originator and celebrator of the idea! Remember the "best and the brightest,"? And who could forget former Ford CEO Robert McNamara, champion of analytics and "body counts" in Vietnam? The author should know better, as he actually cites Halberstam's book (see p. 165 note 11). Maybe he didn't remember that part...]

p 141ff: More on the idea of "managed democracy": not the oxymoron you think it is, it's exportable to other countries, and best of all you get to choose the regime to enforce it (see the Bush phrase "regime change"); "Having domesticated democracy at home, the administration knew the specifications in advance; hence a proven product could be exported, along with expert managers boasting honed skills, tested nostrums, and impressive resumes." See also the cynical quote "If you move too fast, the wrong people could get elected." Thus you need to "manage" it: filtering out any non status quo views, having the right people preselected, etc.

p 143: The author here doesn't seem to understand modern neomercantilism/monopoly capitalism; he confuses "capitalism" with "what we're doing today" which is not capitalism at all. If anything barriers to entry are worse than ever, you can't start a business, the system is designed to protect all the oligarchies and oligopoly corporations that are already in place; it's really neomercantilism or monopoly capitalism, not capitalism.

p 146: On judiciary capture, and "the cultivation and production of reliable jurists." 

p 147ff: On how participatory democracy has been skillfully disintermediated; "Elections enact a kind of primal myth in which 'the people' designate who is to rule them" but it's an illusion a once every few years ritual of voting and then hand over all your power until the next election with the next pre-selected list of elite-approved canditates! "In a truly participatory democracy elections would constitute but one element in a process of popular discussion, consultation, and involvement."

p 149: On the paradox of the people have the authority to elect, but no power to set the terms of the elections, nor to regulate campaign finance, nor to regulate ads, nor to influence debate formats; thus giving us the phenomenon of "highly managed elections."

p 149ff" An inquiry here into "the ideological antecedents of the peculiar combination of governing elites and a populace that reigns without ruling." What follows here is the author's highly (and unfortunately) partisan description of all the evils of the Republican party (the party of the elite and the wealthy) and of all the generous goodness of the Democratic party (the party of the workers, of the many and of minorities and the poor). There's a tremendous irony here in the "archaism" of the author's partisanship here, for anyone who still thinks the Democratic party is the party of the workers, minorities and the poor, please see Balaji Srinivasan's insightful discussion of the "flippening' of the Democratic and Republican parties in his book The Network State!

p 150ff: Discussion of ancient Athens and the anti-democratic reaction after the Peloponnesian War; of using elites to run the system, characterizing the demos as fickle, irrational, etc; The author then moves on to a discussion of the views of Machiavelli, who believed in giving more power to the people, that they were more stable and less fickle than everyone thought; Then moving on to the idea that, per Machiavelli, the demos could be "managed" and how it turned out that they were more pliant and malleable than expected, and further that a "civic religion" could be used to manage them still further (!); See also Gibbon's famous remark about the Roman emperors: "that they cared less whether a religion was true and more whether it was useful." 

p 151ff: On Machiavellian republicanism and how Machiavelli's teachings made their way to England, first filtered through Elizabethan dramatists including Shakespeare, then the Civil Wars and the struggles of Puritanism with the kings/aristocrats; the Puritan migration to the American colonies, followed by the formation of a republican elite there which directed a war against Britain and drafted the Constitution; Note here the mechanisms in place like the system of checks and balances, separation of powers, the electoral college, judicial review, etc.; all of these were various "instruments of stability" and only the House of Representatives was to be directly elected. "The framers of the Constitution were the first founders of modern managed democracy." See also the requirement of extraordinary supermajorities to amend the Constitution; thus another aspect of managed democracy; the author argues this ultimately leads to modern voter apathy and low voter turnout. [Super interesting journey through political history here.] 

Chapter 9: Intellectual Elites Against Democracy

p 159: Modern governments require high-end skills typically lacking in ordinary citizens, thus by definition we entrust a few elites to manage these complex systems. "...elite contempt [for the masses] is prudently camouflaged, or perhaps sublimated, as managed democracy. In its belief that the Few should more or less monopolize power, political elitism displays its elective affinity with capitalism."

p 161: On bifurcating education into two-year technical schools and universities: the latter are a path for the elite, first through prep schools and universities. Note also that the system also gives these private universities and prep schools substantial public funds.

p 162ff: "How do contemporary elites become elites? What are they taught? Who authorizes them?" On elitism as a "self-sustaining enterprise" producing successful rich alumni who feed the elite institutions themselves which will choose future elites and "network" everyone. [I feel like this system is in chaos right now as the "white elite" is being displaced by a new elite, I guess we'll eventually find out who our new elites are, likely they will be the "same as the old boss"...]

p 164: Politics stops at the water's edge, and international relations elitism is most pronounced and bipartisan, foreign affairs seen as outside politics and "a domain of expertise where notions of democracy seemingly made no sense." [You can easily argue that democracy is best and most easily disintermediated in international affairs, in war, in geopolitics.] 

p 165-6: Comparing the glorious '60s era of protesting Vietnam War at universities all over the country versus the fact "that none of those institutions was ruffled by anti-war agitation at the time of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 testifies to the effective integration of universities into the corporate state." [I'd go further and cite the nearly universally enforced university COVID vax mandates as another more recent example of the co-optation of the university by the state. Nobody protested.]

p 168ff: On important "Straussians" (as in Leo Strauss) in the US government: specifically Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. The author repeats himself here on Strauss's influence from Nietzsche. Straussian ideology lacks specific policies but instead has grandiose ambitions, like democratizing the Middle East.

[This chapter also seems to be barely tangential to the work itself. Wolin is citing various works written by elites that celebrate either dictators directly or some sort of non-democratic pro-elite system or works that describe the decline of an elite-based system.]

p 183: "the 'Southern aristocracy' provoked the civil War" according to Wolin, [who makes this claim without evidence--a claim that could be believed only by a believer of history books written by the winners! I think it's much more explanatory to recognize precisely who invaded who, and that Fort Sumter in some ways was a false flag event triggered by the North in order to justify invasion.]

p 182-3: Also I wonder with this author's aggressive critiques of American foreign policy; isn't this like shooting fish in a barrel? We've been idiots in foreign policy ever since time began... certainly we've been idiots for most of the 20th century.

Chapter 10: Domestic Politics in the Era of Superpower and Empire

p 184: "In a one-party state politics is, in effect, 'privatized,' dissociated from the practices of citizenship and confined within the party, where it takes the form of intramural rivalries for the privileges of power and status. It is a politics that never goes public except to orchestrate unanimity. Inverted totalitarianism follows a different route. Instead of pursuing unanimity, it encourages divisiveness; instead of rule by a single master race, it promotes predomination--that is, rule by diverse powers which have found it in their interests to combine while retaining their separate identities. [Notes that Wolin gets some of these key "powers" totally, totally wrong, but the general idea is sound] The key components are corporate capital, the very rich, small business associations, large media organizations, evangelical Protestant leaders, and the Catholic hierarchy."

p 185: "Opposition is not abolished but neutralized, its politics constrained within limits, allowed a minor concession now and then that keeps its supporters hopeful..."

p 189: The key difference between classical and inverted totalitarianism: classical totalitarianism eliminated politics; inverted totalitarianism contains politics by introducing structures designed to facilitate managerial control: like political parties, between which the citizen choose--this is the citizen's only role in democracy, and "the voter is akin to a response system engineered by public opinion surveys, pollster strategies, and media advertising that first stimulates voters to vote and afterwards encourages them to relapse into their accustomed apathy." [Ouch]

p 190: "President Wilson ordered the army to invade Mexico in 1914" [I had to look this one up: this is the Veracruz incident in Mexico, I had no idea about it. And I naively thought Wilson "kept us out of the War..." It's funny, the more I learn about Wilson I'm tempted to completely throw over to the side of the woke students at Princeton who pretty much protest his entire existence. They're not wrong.]

p 190: [I don't get why this author romanticizes the Vietnam War protests, and his claims that the Vietnam War was "vigorously and successfully opposed at home"... Nobody even knew it was a thing until several years after it began; it wasn't until eight years in the conflict that there was enough pressure to scale it back, and that even didn't happen until well into Nixon's presidency. Can a thing be "successfully opposed" a near-decade after it began? This is an "okay Boomer" comment if I ever saw one.]

p 192: "It makes no sense to ask how the democratic citizen could 'participate' substantively in imperial politics." [Yes, things change significantly when you're an empire mucking things up all over the world, and it's possible that democracy (if we ever had it in a semi-alive form in the first place) began to die in 1917 when the US entered WW1.]

p 193 "In bringing democracy to Iraq the United States has also exported our practices of contractual malfeasance, from overbilling to non-performance to shoddy work..."

p 194: The citizen as occasional voter; lobbyists as full-time citizens.

p 195: [Interesting (and naive) take on deregulation here: the author looks at it from the standard first order viewpoint: that deregulation weakens the power of the people. Au contraire mon frère! Sadly, deregulation and regulation both strengthen powerful corporations: deregulation does so directly, regulation does so via second order effects as it eliminates competition and makes barriers to entry higher: this strengthens the oligopoly/monopoly market players, by stripping out the weaker players who on the margin cannot bear the added regulatory costs. Worst of all, it speeds up industry regulatory capture of the government regulatory bodies.]

p 196: "Classical totalitarianism mobilized its subjects; inverted totalitarianism fragments them... Corporate capitalism is creating an imperial workforce of dependent low-wage workers, preferably of large numbers of undocumented, fearful aliens, the new metics, for whom survival, rather than political participation, is uppermost."

p 210: [Another money quote here] "The occasional citizen who, muttering about corrupt politicians, retreats into political hibernation and emerges blinkingly to cast a vote does not mean to make himself an easy object of manipulation or to confirm the elites view of democracy as a useful illusion." Nobody means to make inverted totalitarianism a thing, it just happens as the second order consequence of everybody's (in)actions.

Chapter 11: Inverted Totalitarianism: Antecedents and Precedents

p 211: The author starts this chapter (again) unable to believe why the 2000 election, with the irregularities of Florida, didn't produce the kinds of public demonstrations and protests, when tremendous protests happened for example in 2004 in Ukraine with their fraudulent election.

p 212: On the idea that inverted totalitarianism doesn't show an obvious "break" like Franco's coup or Lenin's Russian Revolution; it's something that people don't recognize because there isn't really a model for us in prior examples of tyranny. Also it's widely just assumed that "we have a democracy" and no one questions it.

p 214: Antecedents but not precedents: there are examples of police being used to break strikes and break unions at the end of the 19th century, or to manage crowds in the Civil Rights movement. Now in the "terrorist era" we don't see the repression that we are under for what it is, as the police evolved from an extension of the law to an intrinsic element of a system of control and repression.

p 215: Also, it seems "logical" to coordinate all the relevant agencies dealing with terrorism, but (voilà!) this coordination now means we have a system of control that reaches throughout all elements of government.

p 220: The author has a tremendously naive understanding of Wilson and of our entry into the First World War: he claims Wilson's administration was "reformist" and genuinely democratic, and that it "redirected its energies into making the world safe for democracy." Holy cow, could you swallow line of manufactured propaganda any harder. Wilson fooled us into getting into World War I and played a tremendous role in weakening the demos with his economic policies to follow, as well as the Central Bank policies that were in effect thanks to the establishment of the Federal Reserve, which happened just before his administration. This author doesn't understand that Wilson was no different from Bush II, a bellicose fool with delusions of empire, fooling the demos into a war they had no interest in and gained no benefit whatsoever from.

p 225ff: Long-winded discussion of the republic structure of the United States from its origin and how it was never democracy at all but "managed democracy": only the Congress is directly elected, the Senate never was designed to be directly elected (only later did this become the case), the President is indirectly elected (Electoral College), the Supreme Court is chosen by the President and confirmed by the Senate, etc.

p 230ff: On a disaggregated majority, something that prevents the majority of your citizens from developing their own coherence politically; something that dates back to the early days of the United States when we begin to expand westward. "The task of elitism in the so-called age of democracy was not to resist democracy but to accept it nominally and then to set about persuading majorities to act politically against their own material interests and potential power."

p 234: The author has an interesting take on the Federalist Papers: he calls Hamilton and Madison's ideas "seemingly opposed but actually complementary strategies" essentially to disintermediate the demos from power. 

Chapter 12: Demotic Moments

p 238: "Inverted totalitarianism marks a political moment when corporate power finally sheds its identification as a purely economic phenomenon, confined primarily to a domestic domain of 'private enterprise,' and evolves into a globalizing co-partnership with the state... The former becomes more political, the latter more market-oriented." [You can see this in corporate America with the woke movement today]

p 239: A money quote, a really good one, on how to impose anti-democracy: by "...conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy. The intense pace of work and the extended working day, combined with job insecurity, is a formula for political demobilization, for privatizing the citizenry. It works indirectly. Citizens are encouraged to distrust their government and politicians; to concentrate upon their own interests; to begrudge their taxes; and to exchange active involvement for symbolic gratifications of patriotism, collective self-righteousness, and military prowess."

p 246ff: Discussion of prior historical analogues: Athenian democracy during 4th century BC, Italian city-states, and then the Putney debates during the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, then the US experiment in the 1780s.

p 255ff: "Republican theory" is a counter force from Madison, Hamilton and Adams to institutionalize the more centralized power system rather than have 13 decentralized sovereign states (which were becoming increasingly governed by popular forces). This created a republic as a counterforce to demotic power. Note that there is a rhyming push-pull across centuries where initially the structure was set up where the citizens only were able to vote directly for their Congressional reps, which was pushed back with Andrew Jackson's presidency for example.

Chapter 13: Democracy's Prospects: Looking Backwards

p 260: The author talks about lying; on the importance of truth telling in a democracy. Under non-democratic forms of government, "lying is typically done by the sovereign or its agents" whereas"self-government is, literally, deformed by lying." [By this definition we have a profoundly deformed democracy, given the astonishing amount of lying of our government in past decades--regardless which party is in power. One can't help but recall certain incredibly baldly-told lies from just the past couple of years: like "two weeks to flatten the curve" or "if you get vaccinated you won't get COVID".] 

p 263: "At bottom, lying is the expression of a will to power. My power is increased if you accept a picture of the world which is a product of my will."

p 264ff: See also Plato and The Republic on how rulers "will have to give subjects a considerable dose of imposition and deception for their good." The noble lie. Also: "Plato darkly concludes: by nature the masses prefer an illusory reality, and so they may turn on the philosopher, making him a martyr to the truth. Thus the masses fear the truth, and their instinct is to cling to the unreal."

p 270: Finally we get here a brief admission from the author that it's not all Bush's fault, he actually admits the Democratic administration under Kennedy lied (uh, preposterously so) about the situation in Vietnam, all of which was exposed with to the release of the Pentagon papers. Note of course that this era was when we were promised "wise men" and "the best and the brightest."

p 275: On the prospects for democracy in an era of rapid change: people's memories are dimmed collectively, conscience is blunted, "no collective memory means no collective guilt"; change is not a neutral force and it is a "constructed" reality.

p 277: The lack of democracy across history suggests that the natural tendency for political power is to be monopolized by the few.

p 279ff: See James Madison's 10th Federalist essay, where he bemoaned factions and interests that bedeviled the government under the Articles of Confederation; united by a "common impulse of passion, or of interest" he argued that factions and interests were a feature not a bug of a free society, and the challenge was to make a system that made it difficult for a majority of interest to coalesce or to control all branches of government. Madison is usually regarded as the father of the Constitution.

p 281ff: Combining Madison's checks and balances with Hamilton's idea of an elite executive.

p 283: On the enclosure movement of 16th century England: closing off land that had been used by the commons but owned by wealthy landowners; this is a metaphor for the idea of politics also being "enclosed" with occasional pro-demotic respites, representing attempts to open it up to the people. That modern politics is now "enclosed" because of the big money aspect of political office.  And now we have a demos which is more like a movie or TV audience: credulous, nurtured by an "unreality of images on the screen."

p 285: See Madeline Albright asking Colin Powell (who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time), "With all of those troops and arms at your disposal, why not use them?" On stupidly having no sense of proportion. 

p 285-6: Back to Madison for a minute: what the elites can do today is construct temporary majorities or fashion factions when needed to justify their use of power and manipulate the irrational electorate: the author gives an example of a blue collar Reagan Democrat who "votes against his own interests"; this is how you make the demos "at once complicit and irrational."

p 286: "[I]nverted totalitarianism will likely survive military defeat and public scorn of its leader... the system will survive his retirement, would survive even if the Democrats were to become the majority party and control of both the presidency and the Congress." [Holy cow was the author ever right about this, it is precisely what happened!]

Vocab:

Thaumaturgical: the capability of a magician to work magic (or other paranormal events) or of a saint to perform miracles. Sometimes translated into English as wonderworking. 

Lebensraum: Living space; a Nazi concept of expanding to accommodate and create living space for the German people.

Metic: a foreigner living in an ancient Greek city who could have certain, but not all, of the privileges of citizenship (Wolin uses the word to describe undocumented immigrant labor in the United States as "a new metic class").

To Read:

The Triumph of the Will (Nazi propaganda film)

Marie Gottschalk: The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.: The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business

Walter Lippmann: Essays in the Public Philosophy

Leo Strauss: Thoughts on Machiavelli

Shadia Drury: The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss

Harvey Mansfield Jr.: Taming the Prince

Niall Ferguson: Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire

Michael Mann: Fascists

Carl Schorske: Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture 

John Brewer: The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688-1783

Antonio Gramsci: Selections from the Prison Notebooks

***Jose Saramago: The Cave (novel)

Arthur M. Schlesinger: The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933

***James Madison's 10th Federalist essay

***R.H. Tawney: The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century