Totalitarian democracy
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Totalitarian democracy is a term popularized by Israeli historian
The phrase had previously been used by
J. L. Talmon
The
- Indeed, from the vantage point of the mid twentieth century the history of the last hundred and fifty years looks like a systematic preparation for the headlong collision between empirical and liberal democracy on the one hand, and totalitarian Messianic democracy on the other, in which the world crisis of to-day consists.
Engdahl, Wolin and Žižek
Engdahl and Wolin add some new dimensions to the analysis of totalitarianism.
In his 2009 book Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy and the New World Order, Engdahl portrays America as driving to achieve global
Wolin, too, analyzes the symbiosis of business and public interests that emerged in the Cold War to form the tendency of what he calls "inverted totalitarianism":
While exploiting the authority and resources of the state, [inverted totalitarianism] gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of "private" governance represented by the modern
corporate power.[8]
Elsewhere, in a 2003 article entitled "Inverted Totalitarianism"[9] Wolin cites phenomena such as the lack of involvement of citizens in a narrow political framework (due to the influence of money), the privatization of social security, and massive increases in military spending and spending on surveillance as examples of the push away from public and towards private-controlled government. Corporate influence, he argues, is explicit through the media, and implicit through the privatization of the university. Furthermore, he contends that many political think-tanks have abetted this process by spreading conservative ideology. Wolin states: "[With] the elements all in place...what is at stake, then, is nothing less than the attempted transformation of a tolerably free society into a variant of the extreme regimes of the past century."[9]
Slavoj Žižek, in his 2002 book of essays Welcome to the Desert of the Real, comes to similar conclusions. Here he argues that the war on terror served as a justification for the suspension of civil liberties in the US, while the promise of democracy and freedom was spread abroad as the justification for invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Since Western democracies are always justifying states of exception, he argues, they are failing as sites of political agency.[10]
See also
- Anti-democratic thought
- Authoritarianism
- Autocracy
- Electocracy
- Falangism
- Guided democracy
- Illiberal democracy
- National anarchism
- Neocameralism
- Outline of democracy
- Post-democracy
- Ruscism
- Soft despotism
- Sovereign democracy
- Tyranny of the majority
Notes
- ^ a b c Talmon, J. L. The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. Britain: Secker & Warburg, 1968.
- ^ de Juvenel, Bertrand. On Power: Its Nature and the History of its Growth, Salt Lake City: Hutchinson, 1948.
- ^ Carr, Edward Hallett. The Soviet Impact on the Western World. New York: MacMillan Company, 1947.
- ISBN 978-0-9795608-6-6.
- ^ Wolin, Sheldon S. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
- ^ J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism – The Romantic Phase, 1960.
- ^ Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance, 2009, pg. viii.
- ^ Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, pg. xxi.
- ^ a b Wolin, Sheldon S. "Inverted Totalitarianism". The Nation magazine, May 19th, 2003.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London and New York: Verso, 2002