Inverted Totalitarianism

By Steve Hynd

I missed it when it appeared, but thanks to the indefatiguable Kat I got a chance today to read Chris Hedges excellent, if depressing, piece for AdBusters on "inverted totalitarianism", what I've always called "soft totalitarianism" because it preserves an appearance of democracy while taking away most of the real power and choice available to voters. It's worth reading the whole thing but here's an extended snippet:

The levers of power have become so contaminated that the needs and voices of citizens have become irrelevant. The election of Barack Obama was yet another triumph of propaganda over substance and a skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by the mass media. We mistook style and ethnicity � an advertising tactic pioneered by the United Colors of Benetton and Calvin Klein � for progressive politics and genuine change. We confused how we were made to feel with knowledge. But the goal, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers mistake a brand for an experience.

...The cultural belief that we can make things happen by thinking, by visualizing, by wanting them, by tapping into our inner strength or by understanding that we are truly exceptional is magical thinking. We can always make more money, meet new quotas, consume more products and advance our career if we have enough faith. This magical thinking, preached to us across the political spectrum by Oprah, sports celebrities, Hollywood, self-help gurus and Christian demagogues, is largely responsible for our economic and environmental collapse, since any Cassandra who saw it coming was dismissed as �negative.� This belief, which allows men and women to behave and act like little children, discredits legitimate concerns and anxieties. It exacerbates despair and passivity. It fosters a state of self-delusion. The purpose, structure and goals of the corporate state are never seriously questioned. To question, to engage in criticism of the corporate collective, is to be obstructive and negative. And it has perverted the way we view ourselves, our nation and the natural world. The new paradigm of power, coupled with its bizarre ideology of limitless progress and impossible happiness, has turned whole nations, including the United States, into monsters.

We can march in Copenhagen. We can join Bill McKibben�s worldwide day of climate protests. We can compost in our backyards and hang our laundry out to dry. We can write letters to our elected officials and vote for Barack Obama, but the power elite is impervious to the charade of democratic participation. Power is in the hands of moral and intellectual trolls who are ruthlessly creating a system of neo-feudalism and killing the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And appealing to their better nature, or seeking to influence the internal levers of power, will no longer work.

We will not, especially in the United States, avoid our G�rd�erung. Obama, like Canada�s Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the other heads of the industrialized nations, has proven as craven a tool of the corporate state as George W. Bush. Our democratic system has been transformed into what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin labels inverted totalitarianism. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, a free press, parliamentary systems and constitutions while manipulating and corrupting internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens but are ruled by armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington, Ottawa or other state capitals who author the legislation and get the legislators to pass it. A corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. Mass culture, owned and disseminated by corporations, diverts us with trivia, spectacles and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. �Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,� Wolin writes. �Economics dominates politics � and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.�

Inverted totalitarianism wields total power without resorting to cruder forms of control such as gulags, concentration camps or mass terror. It harnesses science and technology for its dark ends. It enforces ideological uniformity by using mass communication systems to instill profligate consumption as an inner compulsion and to substitute our illusions of ourselves for reality. It does not forcibly suppress dissidents, as long as those dissidents remain ineffectual. And as it diverts us it dismantles manufacturing bases, devastates communities, unleashes waves of human misery and ships jobs to countries where fascists and communists know how to keep workers in line. It does all this while waving the flag and mouthing patriotic slogans. �The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed,� Wolin writes.

In a prior piece for CommonDreams, Hedges was even more explicit:

Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d'�t in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.

The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.

That sense of partisan hacks simply going through the motions was key to my own recent bout of Lying Bastard Fatigue, which very nearly led to my giving up blogging altogether. After all, most Democrat partisans have become, either knowingly or not, simple mouthpieces parroting platitudes designed to insulate the party's leadership from genuine anger. "The perfect is the enemy of the possible" is a phrase constructed in an Orwellian spin-factory. The more brutal truth is that the possible, in the current corporatist state's definition of possible, is the enemy of any kind of true progess and of liberal ideals.

In an interview with Thom Hartman, Hedges lays out the only rational option:

Obama has done nothing to alter the rape of America by corporations. He�s done nothing to alter the permanent war economy, 1 trillion dollars in defense-related spending, expansion of the imperial war in Afghanistan, 700 civilians dead in Pakistan from drone attacks since Obama took office. He hasn�t restored habeas corpus, revoked Bush�s secrecy laws, ended extraordinary rendition or the torture of detainees in our offshore penal colonies nor, most egregiously perhaps, the looting of the US treasury by speculative interests on Wall Street.

...Step outside the mainstream. Give up on the Democratic party. It isn�t gonna reform �Movement politics, join every movement you can get out there...From the Liberty Party, suffragettes, these are the correctives to our democracy. We on the left have forgotten that the question is not how do you get good people to rule, most people who rule are mediocre at best and usually venal. The question is how do we make those in power frightened of us and not be seduced by formal political processes.

Just how right Hedges is can be illustrated by how scared the GOP is of its own movement politics, as typified by the Tea Partiers. They're driving the Right's agenda while Democrat spelunkers are busily extolling the virtues of healthcare "reform" that will fine common people who can't afford even subsidized insurance while handing $800 billion in extra revenue to pharmacy companies and a carte blanche to insurers to raise their rates to whatever level they think the subsidized market can stand. We should be sharpening our pitchforks for the corporatist shills who inflicted this shell-game on us instead. The only real diffrerence in the two parties policies on healthcare, as on so many things, is that one wants to hand the corporations the whole store now, sure they can bamboozle the sheeple by telling them its in their own best interests via the corporate media, and the other wants to hand it over incrementally so the sheeple don't notice at all.

Solidarinosc!