Democracy Incorporated (book-brief review)

[katty]

more: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8606.html

Democracy Incorporated:
Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism

Sheldon S. Wolin


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.

Sheldon S. Wolin is professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University. His books include Politics and Vision and Tocqueville between Two Worlds (both Princeton).

[Jim__]

1. I think the key is, "citizens are politically uninterested and submissive."

Can the nation check its descent?

Yes. But not if the citizens remain politically uninterested and submissive.

[katty]

2. concur-imo, we are in 'managed democracy' mode and

have been for quite sometime. When authentic, progressive ideas that turn into actual movements occur then a period of chaos and breakdown of the old order of things (short or long phase) is inevitable, this might result in increased freedoms, equality and the potential and real upgrade in 'living standards for all' after the initial (historically violent) jolting phase (as it has sometimes in the ancient or more recent past)but it certainly is a longshot.