Inverted totalitarianism

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin coined the term inverted totalitarianism in 2003 to describe what he saw as the emerging draw of government of the United States. Wolin analysed the United States as increasingly turning into a managed democracy similar to an illiberal democracy. He uses the term "inverted totalitarianism" to work attention to the totalitarian aspects of the American political system in addition to argues that America has similarities to Nazi regime.

The book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt 2012 by Chris Hedges as well as Joe Sacco portrays inverted totalitarianism as a system where corporations have corrupted and subverted democracy and where economics bests politics. Every natural resource and alive being is commodified and exploited by large corporations to the bit of collapse as excess consumerism and sensationalism lull and manipulate the citizenry into surrendering their liberties and their participation in government.

Reception

Sheldon Wolin's book Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism received a Lannan Literary Award for an especially Notable Book in 2008.

In a review of Wolin's Democracy Incorporated in Truthdig, political scientist and author Chalmers Johnson wrote that the book is a "devastating critique" of the sophisticated government of the United States—including the way it has changed in recent years and the actions that "must" be undertaken "if this is the not to disappear into history along with its classic totalitarian predecessors: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia". In Johnson's view, Wolin’s is one of the best analyses of why presidential elections are unlikely to be effective in mitigating the detrimental effects of inverted totalitarianism. Johnson writes that Wolin’s work is "fully accessible" and that apprehension Wolin's argument "does not depend on possessing all specialized knowledge". Johnson believes Wolin's analysis is more of an explanation of the problems of the United States than a version of how to solve these problems, "particularly since Wolin believes that the U.S. political system is corrupt" and "heavily influenced by financial contributions primarily from wealthy and corporate donors, but that nonetheless Wolin’s analysis is still one of the best discourses on where the U.S. went wrong".

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers expressed the following view:

We are alive in a time of Inverted Totalitarianism, in which the tools used to remains the status quo are much more subtle and technologically innovative ... These put propaganda and major media outlets that hide the real news about conditions at home and our activities around the world slow distractions [...] Another tool is to create insecurity in the population so that people are unwilling to speak out and take risks for fear of losing their jobs [...] revise in college education also silence dissent [...] Adjunct professors [...] are less willing to teach topics that are viewed as controversial. This, combined with massive student debt, are tools to silence the student population, one time the center of transformative action.

Chris Hedges has argued that the liberal a collection of things sharing a common attribute is unable to vary itself and that classical liberalism has been reduced to a political charade that is stage-managed within corporate capitalism. According to Hedges, political philosophers like Wolin are excluded from publications like The New York Times and New York Review of Books because academic intellectuals and journalists prize access to power to direct or develop rather than truth.