#Sheldon Wolin

[weil-weil-lautre]

Today in the United States there is a circular system whereby elites are produced and the institutions producing them are confirmed as 'elite institutions,' thereby attracting a fresh supply of promising material that further confirms the institutions' special status. A small number of institutions select, groom, train, and certify a small number of individuals as exceptionally talented and warranting privilege. 'Elite' private preparatory academies, colleges, and universities, including Bible colleges and theological seminaries, perform the function of identifying and producing, not just elites, but authorities. At elite institutions, unlike community colleges and many public and private educational institutions, the humanities and social sciences are featured prominently, whereby those subjects are designated as a badge of superiority distinguishing their students from those at lesser schools emphasizing 'work skills.' The vocational education of elites is deferred to the highly competitive graduate and professional schools in law, medicine, business, the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, where not only qualified practitioners but 'leaders in their field' are produced. Although a few public universities, even an occasional public high school, make the cut, the high costs of elite institutions convert attendance into an investment. The expectation is that there will be a 'return' in the form of a prestigious career.

Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy, Inc, 163

#sheldon wolin #wolin #education #democracy #capitalism #quote #archivist #political science

[nicklloydnow]

“The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin in Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism calls our system “inverted totalitarianism.” The façade of democratic institutions and the rhetoric, symbols and iconography of state power have not changed. The Constitution remains a sacred document. The U.S. continues to posit itself as a champion of opportunity, freedom, human rights and civil liberties, even as half the country struggles at subsistence level, militarized police gun down and imprison the poor with impunity, and the primary business of the state is war.

This collective self-delusion masks who we have become — a nation where the citizenry has been stripped of economic and political power and where the brutal militarism we practice overseas is practiced at home.

In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union, economics was subordinate to politics. But under inverted totalitarianism, the reverse is true. There is no attempt, unlike fascism and state socialism, to address the needs of the poor. Rather, the poorer and more vulnerable you are, the more you are exploited, thrust into a hellish debt peonage from which there is no escape. Social services, from education to health care, are anemic, nonexistent or privatized to gouge the impoverished. Further ravaged by 8.5 percent inflation, wages have decelerated sharply since 1979. Jobs often do not offer benefits or security.

(…)

In my book America: The Farewell Tour, I examined the social indicators of a nation in serious trouble. Life expectancy in the U.S. fell in 2021, for the second year in a row. There have been over 300 mass shootings this year. Close to a million people have died from drug overdoses since 1999. There are an average of 132 suicides every day. Nearly 42 percent of the country is classified as obese, with one in 11 adults considered severely obese.

These diseases of despair are rooted in the disconnect between a society’s expectations of a better future and the reality of a system that does not provide a meaningful place for its citizens. Loss of a sustainable income and social stagnation causes more than financial distress. As Émile Durkheim points out in The Division of Labor in Society, it severs the social bonds that give us meaning. A decline in status and power, an inability to advance, a lack of education and adequate health care, and a loss of hope result in crippling forms of humiliation. This humiliation fuels loneliness, frustration, anger and feelings of worthlessness.

In Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Voegelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist.

(…)

Anti-politics masquerades as politics. No sooner does one money-drenched election cycle end, the next one begins, perpetuating what Wolin calls “politics without politics.” These elections do not permit citizens to participate in power. The public is allowed to voice opinions to scripted questions, which are repackaged by publicists, pollsters, political consultants and advertisers and fed back to them. Few races, including only 14 percent of congres­sional districts, are considered competitive. Politicians do not campaign on substantial issues but on skillfully manufactured political personalities and emotionally charged culture wars.

The militarists, who have created a state within a state and who plunge us into one military debacle after another, consuming half of all discretionary spending, are omnipotent. The corporations and billionaires, which orchestrated a virtual tax boycott and gutted regulation and oversight, are omnipotent. The industrialists who wrote trade deals to profit from unemployment and underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run the healthcare system, whose primary concern is profit not health and who are responsible for 16 percent of the worldwide reported deaths from COVID-19 although we are less than 5 percent of the global population, are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that carry out wholesale surveillance of the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to strip them of their original meaning to ensure corporate control and excuse corporate crimes, are omnipotent. The courts gave us Citizens United, for example, which permits unlimited corporate financing of elections by claiming it upholds the right to petition the government and is a form of free speech.

Politics is spectacle, a tawdry carnival act where the constant jockeying for power by the ruling class dominates the news cycles, as if politics were a race to the Superbowl. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.

(…)

Our corporate overlords and militarists prefer the decorum of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But they worked closely with Donald Trump and are willing to do so again. What they will not allow are reformers such as Bernie Sanders, who might challenge, however tepidly, their obscene accumulation of wealth and power. This inability to reform, to restore democratic participation and address social inequality, means the inevitable death of the republic. Biden and the Democrats rail against the cultish Republican Party and their threat to democracy, but they too are the problem.”

#hedges #chris hedges #scheerpost #America #democracy #voegelin #wolin #sheldon wolin #totalitarianism #inverted totalitarianism

[mycstilleblog]

"Hybris und Nemesis" von Rainer Mausfeld. Rezension

Wir leben in einer Zeit der Krisen. Nicht zuletzt in einer Krise der Demokratie. Haben wir überhaupt eine Demokratie? Hatten wir je eine? Oskar Lafontaine etwa urteilte in einem Interview mit Tilo Jung einmal: „“Deutschland ist keine Demokratie, sondern eine Oligarchie“. Beispielsweise sind 73 Prozent der Deutschen gegen einen Militäreinsatz der Bundeswehr in Syrien (Welt-Trend). Dennoch findet…

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#Colin Crouch #MAKRONOM #Oskar Lafontaine #Rainer Mausfeld #Sheldon Wolin #Simon Wren-Lewis #tilo jung #Westend Verlag

[azspot]

Chris Hedges and Sheldon Wolin: Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist?

#democracy #capitalism

[korrektheiten]

Umgekehrter Totalitarismus

Manova: »„Totalitarismus“ — da denkt man zuerst an martialisch auftretende Polizei, Führerkult, Umerziehungslager. Es stimmt, dass diese Dinge in der Vergangenheit für Diktaturen kennzeichnend waren. Das bedeutet aber nicht im Umkehrschluss, dass Gesellschaften, in denen diese Faktoren fehlen, nicht auch totalitär sein können. Es genügt auch, dass sich die Bürger eines Landes einem Prinzip „total“ unterordnen müssen, etwa dem Zwang zu arbeiten und sich an Auftraggeber anzupassen, die anderenfalls die Macht hätten, uns unserer Existenzgrundlage zu berauben. Ein enges Zeitregime, ein Netz von „Sachzwängen“, in denen wir gefangen sind, bedrängende Geldnot, die unsere Gedanken terrorisiert, ein Getrieben-Sein von der permanenten Furcht vor dem Absturz — diese Faktoren prägen das Lebensgefühl in diesem „Deutschland, in dem wir gut und gerne leben“. Sheldon Wolin hat dafür den Begriff „Umgekehrter Totalitarismus“ geprägt. In seinem neuen Buch erklärt Michael Meyen den Begriff und überträgt ihn auf heutige politische Verhältnisse. http://dlvr.it/Sw7mPx «

[phillipspost777]

Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism - Truthdig

[solidarishkeyt]

My concern in this essay is with the political uses of “democracy” in relation to two diametrically opposed notions that symbolize two equally opposed states of affairs. One is the settled structure of politics and governmental authority typically called a constitution, and the other is the unsettling political movement typically called revolution. Stated somewhat starkly: constitution signifies the suppression of revolution; revolution, the destruction of constitution. The two notions, though opposed, are connected by democracy. The English revolution of 1688, the American one of 1776, and the French of 1789 are generally considered major milestones on the road to modern democracy. The first two have long been interpreted as culminating in constitutional settlements that, in effect, justified and fulfilled the prior revolutions. In France the most common criticism of the Great Revolution was that it failed to produce a lasting constitution, with the result that France suffered a series of revolutions throughout much of the nineteenth century, and the French continue to look back on their revolutionary past with far more ambivalence than either the British or Americans.

While preparing Democracy in America, Tocqueville complained that he found it difficult “to distinguish what is democratic from what is revolutionary … because examples are lacking.” The question is, If democracy is rooted in revolution, what of democracy is suppressed by a constitution? Violence? Or is revolution politically richer than that, especially when contrasted with coups and putsches, the alternative methods of overthrow favored by oligarchs and would-be dictators? When a democratic revolution leads to a constitution, does that mark the fulfillment of democracy, or the beginning of its attenuation?

Lest this seem solely a question of terminology, recall the two different associations of democracy during the “revolutions” that led to the overthrow of communist tyrannies in the Soviet Union and in central and Eastern Europe. When the revolutions were under way in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and the Soviet Union, they were described as “democratic.” When they succeeded, most of the constitutions subsequently adopted were characterized as “democratic.” Yet a vast change had taken place in the character of politics from the revolutionary to the constitutional moment.

During the revolutions, politics was primarily the affair of “civil society,” not of conventional political parties or parliamentary processes. Various extralegal groups of workers, teachers, intellectuals, artists, students, religious dissidents, and ordinary citizens energized and sustained revolutionary movements whose internal politics was remarkably participatory and egalitarian. After the success of those movements, a different politics began to take shape, a politics of organized parties, professional politicians, and economic interest groups. Above all, it was a politics in which the overriding problems were declared to be economic. Suddenly Solidarity was rendered anachronistic by the faceless representatives of the International Monetary Fund. Solidarity-style democracy had become a burden. The sea change was captured in a contemporary headline in the New York Times, which a short time earlier had hailed the “triumph” of democracy: “East Europe’s Next Test: To Survive Democracy.” And so too in Asia, where immediately after the electoral victory of Thailand “prodemocratic forces” over the military, their leader remarked, “The Cold War is over. Now is the era of the economic leading the political.”

Nonetheless, it is probably true that insofar as the modern political consciousness favors any universal political form, it is constitutional democracy; and insofar as it has an image of “normal” democracy, it is of democracy housed within a constitution.

Sheldon S. Wolin, “Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy,” in Fugitive Democracy, and Other Essays, ed. Nicholas Xenos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 77–78.

[nebris]

"Inverted Totalitarianism. The faceless anonymity of the corporate state. It pays outward fealty to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, freedom of the press etc., but it has seized all of the mechanisms of power rendering the citizen impotent." ~Sheldon Wolin

[elhijoejuanamorales]

A Kind of Fascism Is Replacing Our Democracy | Axisoflogic.com #wolin #iraqwar #fascism #democracy #shockdoctrine #corporatemedia #media

A Kind of Fascism Is Replacing Our Democracy | Axisoflogic.com #wolin #iraqwar #fascism #democracy #shockdoctrine #corporatemedia #media

A Kind of Fascism Is Replacing Our Democracy, Newsday, July 18, 2003 “Sheldon S. Wolin – Jul 25, 2003 Sept. 11, 2001, hastened a significant shift in our nation’s self-understanding. It became commonplace to refer to an “American empire” and to the United States as “the world’s only superpower.” Instead of those formulations, try to conceive of ones like “superpower democracy” or “imperial…

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[sataniccapitalist]

#thewaronyou

#sheldon wolin #inverted totalitarianism #plutocracy #fake republic #fake democracy

[processes]

managed democracy, sheldon wolin

[wiki]

#sheldon wolin #managed democracy #capitalism #inverted totalitarianism #fugitive democracy #wolin #wiki

[hyperbanal]

The political role of corporate power, the corruption of the political and representative processes by the lobbying industry, the expansion of executive power at the expense of constitutional limitations, and the degradation of political dialogue promoted by the media are the basics of the system, not excrescences upon it. The system would remain in place even if the Democratic Party attained a majority; and should that circumstance arise, the system will set tight limits to unwelcome changes, as is foreshadowed in the timidity of current Democratic proposals for reform. In the last analysis the much-lauded stability and conservatism of the American system owe nothing to lofty ideals, and everything to the irrefutable fact that it is shot through with corruption and awash in contributions primarily from wealthy and corporate donors. When a minimum of a million dollars is required of House candidates and elected judges, and when patriotism is for the draft-free to extol and for the ordinary citizen to serve, in such times it is a simple act of bad faith to claim that politics-as-we-now-know-it can miraculously cure the evils which are essential to its existence.

Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2008)

#Sheldon Wolin #Inverted Totalitarianism #America

[canchewread]

Editor’s note: due to a mild (so far) case of burnout, I spent most of this past week working on a total of only two, medium-length (but heavily sourced) articles - you can read them here, and here. Hopefully, this coming week will be better but sometimes you just have to stop and breath - when I don’t, I end up missing weeks and weeks worth of stories.

This week’s Sunday quick-shot quotation is from Sheldon S. Wolin’s incredibly prescient 2008 non-fiction work “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.”

Years before Occupy Wall Street, Wolin was talking about the ascendancy of private-sector, corporate power over the political systems of western “liberal democracies” and the dystopian ruling order that dominance would produce - which he called, rather appropriately in my mind, “inverted totalitarianism.”

Although the material is dense, and fairly academic - you could do a lot worse than Wolin’s “Democracy Incorporated” if you want to study how thirty years of market fundamentalism effectively cratered what was left of western democracy after the Vietnam War. - nina illingworth

#Quickshot Quotation #Books #Sheldon Wolin #Democracy Incorporated #Quotes

[thearbourist]

Before Becoming Too Smugly Secular - Sheldon S. Wolin - Democracy Incorporated.

Before Becoming Too Smugly Secular – Sheldon S. Wolin – Democracy Incorporated.

As an atheist it is sometime easy to become hyper focused on what those people over there are doing wrong and how they need to fix their views and join the 21st century.  Sheldon Wolin takes this view and compares it to what we have going on right now in society, rightly criticizing the capitalist-consumption aesthetic that, by any other name, is doing exactly what religion does.

  “There was ,…

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#Capitalism #Democracy Incorporated #Secular Mythos #Sheldon Wolin

[disillusioned41]

THE REAL NEWS

Chris Hedges and Sheldon Wolin: Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? Full Version

Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism 

Written by: Sheldon s. Wolin Paperback: 384 pages Publisher: Princeton University Press; 1 edition (February 21, 2010)

Democracy is struggling in America--by now this statement is almost cliché. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"?

Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level.

Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come. (From Amazon)

#the real news #Chris Hedges #Sheldon Wolin #capitalism #democracy #Politics and Vision #Democracy Incorporated #totalitarianism

[korrektheiten]

Kritik der Woche (29): Umgekehrter Totalitarismus

Sezession:»Umgekehrter Totalitarismus: Der Frankfurter Westend Verlag neigt bei diesem Titel zur Ausführlichkeit. Überbordend ist der Untertitel, ausholend das fast 50seitige Vorwort Rainer Mausfelds (vgl. Sezession 88 und 102), umfassend das eigentliche Manuskript des Politikwissenschaftlers Sheldon S. Wolins (1922 – 2015). Er lehrte unter anderem in Berkeley und legte sein Hauptwerk bereits 2008 vor: Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy […] http://dlvr.it/SS8Fby «