ON CONTACT: UNDERCURRENTS OF AMERICAN FASCISM Chris Hedges, RT., September 19, 2021,
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On Contact: Inverted totalitarianism Chris Hedges, RT., 12 Sep, 2021
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Introduction by dmorista:
Introduction: Chris Hedges has long written about the specter of Fascism in the United States, at least since his prescient book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. He has also discussed the role of the “Liberal State” in moderating the excesses of Capitalism and the increasing failure of the U.S. “Liberal State” to do that in recent decades. In these two interviews from Hedges' internet TV show “On Point” he interviews two scholars with different points of view on the subject. In first interview he speaks with Gabriel Rockhill mostly about his recent article, “Fascist plots in the U.S.: Contemporary lessons from the 1934 'Business Plot' ”. In that article he looked at the failed 1934 plot to replace President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a general, and establish a harsh fascist regime in the U.S. Rockhill first briefly compares that plot with the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. He notes that in both cases wealthy supporters bankrolled and supported the plots. Rockhill looked more carefully at the 1934 plot itself and discusses the various wealthy figures who supported it in various ways and the whitewash of the situation by a Congressional Committee. Rockhill notes that both the 1934 and the January 6, 2021 events were followed by “faith in government” PR campaigns.
The second interview is with Wendy Brown, a professor at U.S. Berkeley who was a very prominent student of Sheldon Wholin. Wholin was the author of Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. That book took the position that the U.S. had already become a corporate authoritarian state but that it was done so more subtly without a charismatic far-right leader. There have been many events since Wholin wrote the book that he could not include in his analysis. The increasing role of “social media” on the internet, the rise of an American far-right demagogue to the Presidency, the parading about of right-wing activists carrying assault rifles, the anti vax and anti mask activists, and the increasing militancy of many young people with a left-wing point of view, such as the Occupy Movement and the Black Lives Matter movement are among them. Hedges and Brown discuss Wholin's ideas and how they hold up to these more recent events.
The transcripts of both interviews are posted along with links to the video of the interviews on RT.
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ON CONTACT: UNDERCURRENTS OF AMERICAN FASCISM
Chris Hedges, RT., September 19, 2021,
< On Contact: Undercurrents of American fascism — RT On contact >
< On Contact: Undercurrents Of American Fascism - PopularResistance.Org >
Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/rttv/
On January 6, 2021, a mob, incited by outgoing US President Donald Trump, stormed the US Capitol building, in an attempt to halt the in-session congressional certification of the 2020 election results. Within the mob, as scholar Gabriel Rockhill points out, were many current members of the military and police. Some of the leaders of the organizations involved, such as Proud Boys’ Enrique Tarrio and Joseph Biggs, had direct ties to US intelligence agencies, having served as FBI informants. Only one fifth of Capitol Police were on duty that day, both unprepared and underequipped, even though the US national security state had advance knowledge of the plot. Capitol Police were seen opening barricades and fraternizing with the mob.
The assault raises questions about how deeply fascist undercurrents run beneath the ruling elites and organs of state security. How much of the ruling capitalist class backed the organizations behind the assault on the Capitol? To what extent are proto-fascist groups such as the Proud Boys ‘astroturfed’ by them? (Astroturfed means discretely funded so as to create the illusion of a grassroots-movement.) What was the exact ratio and relationship between state agents and the para-state –i.e. vigilante– actors? Was this solely an organic conflict between the Trump and Biden camps, or was something deeper at play? And what does all this portend for the future, especially given the staggering levels of social inequality, deep financial wounds caused by the pandemic, and the decision by the Biden administration to walk back from its tepid campaign promises, including raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Is this a moment of rising fascism in American society? And is it prefigured by the attempt by ruling elites in the 1930s to carry out a fascist coup with the breakdown of capitalism? Is this where we are headed?
Transcript:
Chris Hedges: Today, we discuss the undercurrents of American fascism with the scholar Gabriel Rockhill.
Gabriel Rockhill: I’ll just point your listeners to a very important statement made by Mike German, who’s a former FBI agent and now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. He pointed out that some of those involved in The Capitol riot had been involved in similar incidents in recent years and were repeatedly caught on tape. And this is a quote from Mike German, “We know their names. We know their criminal histories. They’ve been doing it because the police have been letting them do it. They’ve been doing it because the FBI have been letting them do it.” Right? And this is from a former FBI agent. And so this should raise questions both about the capitalist backers and the state complicity in fascist forces on the ground. And one of the reasons it’s important to see this kind of triangulation between the capitalist backers, the state, and then parastate or, you know, parallel fascist organizations is because historically we know that this is often how fascist organizations have worked.
CH: On January 6th, 2021, a mob, incited by outgoing US President Donald Trump, stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to halt the congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election results. Within the mob, as scholar Gabriel Rockhill points out, were many current members of the military and police. Some of the leaders of the organizations involved, such as Proud Boys’ Enrique Tarrio and Joseph Biggs had direct ties to US intelligence agencies having served as FBI informants. Only one-fifth of Capitol police were on duty that day. And they were unprepared and underequipped, even though the US National Security state had advanced knowledge of the plot. Capitol Police were seen opening barricades and fraternizing with the mob. The assault raises questions about how deeply fascist undercurrents run within the ruling elites and organs of state security? How much of the ruling capitalist class backed the organizations behind the assault on The Capitol? To what extent are proto-fascist groups such as the Proud Boys astroturfed by them, meaning discretely funded to create the illusion of a grassroots movement from below? What was the exact ratio and relationship between state agents and the parastate, i.e. vigilante actors? Was this solely an organic conflict between the Trump and Biden camps or was something more at play? And what does all this pertain for the future, especially given the staggering levels of social inequality, deep financial wounds caused by the pandemic, and the decision by the Biden administration to walk back from its tepid campaign promises, including raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour? Is this a moment of rising fascism in American society? And is it prefigured by the attempt by the ruling elites in the 1930s to carry out a fascist coup with the breakdown of capitalism? Is this where we are headed? Joining me to discuss the nature and virulence of American fascism is Gabriel Rockhill, Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. So in this very fine article, you look back at this fairly serious attempt by the business elites to fund a fascist coup and draw parallels to the moment that we’re in now. But let’s talk about the undercurrent of fascism in American society, fascist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, as you write the formation of the American Legion after World War I. These have been essentially fascist or proto-fascist movements that have always existed within the power framework. Robert Paxton makes this point in this book, “Anatomy of Fascism.” So it’s not like it’s created anew. It’s something that’s been with us for a long time. Perhaps you can lay that out.
GR: Yeah. Fascist–fascism, when it arrived on the European scene, particularly in Italy and then extended to Germany, was later framed in terms of the kind of dominant history that we get in textbooks and the mass media as being an anomaly, an exception, a kind of break with democratic rule. And, of course, there were certain things that were relatively unprecedented. But one of the extraordinary things when you look at the actual history of fascist movements is that there were fascist movements in every capitalist state in the wake of the Great Depression, and that fascism always took on specific forms in relationship to its inscription within a very unique national context. In fact, one extraordinary analysis in this regard comes straight from the mouth of a fascist, the self-declared fascist, General Francisco Franco in Spain, who said, quote, “Fascism, since that is the word that is used, fascism presents, wherever it manifest itself, characteristics which are varied to the extent that countries and national temperaments vary,” end quote, which of course makes sense because if ultranationalism is one of the key components of fascism then when it manifests itself in different countries, simply taking models from elsewhere and imposing them would create the sense that, “Well, this is a foreign development,” and other such things. Georgi Dimitrov pointed out that when fascism is operative in the United States, it will be under the name of American patriotism and the defense of the constitution. And so specifically within the US context, there were of course a whole series of fascist and semi-fascist organizations that were operative in the ‘30s and even prior to the 1930s. So much so that there were a lot of discussions, even in the mainstream press, of Mussolini’s Blackshirts simply being the Italian version of the Ku Klux Klan. And this makes a lot of sense from the perspective–from a historical perspective because of the dedication on the part of organizations like the Silver Legion, Ku Klux Klan, Friends of Germany, and other such fascist or semi-fascist organizations because they were organizations that were dedicated to many of the same things that the Blackshirts in Italy and the Nazis were dedicated to, the supremacy of so-called Western civilization, a pro-capitalist orientation, a rabid anticommunism, an investment in ultranationalism that leads into imperialism and colonialism. And so in my own research, it’s been very important to break with this ideology of fascist exceptionalism that suggested only occurred maybe once or twice in history in unique places, and instead extend the analysis to look at all of these different fascist movements both in the past, and as you opened, as well in the present.
CH: Well, what’s interesting about these kind of paramilitary vigilante groups is that they were greenlighted by the ruling elites, especially after the civil war, to carry out a reign of terror. And they were the White Leagues, there were all sorts of organizations against African-Americans. They were used–the gun thugs, the militias, the Pinkertons, the American Legion were used to attack militant workers, the Wobblies with great deals of violence. Hundreds of people were killed. So there’s always been built within in the American system an accepted wing of fascism. And that nurturing of that wing in a time of crisis is very dangerous as we saw in the 1930s and as we are seeing now. Perhaps, you can talk about what happens in societal breakdown. You write extensively about the attempt of a–by the business elites to carry out a coup, recruiting the former Marine Corps General Smedley Butler. But draw those parallels between the 1930s and now, and what happens to these–this nucleus. And, well, we have to–we have to also acknowledge that there–these kind of paramilitary organizations have expanded with the creation of mercenary forces run by–many of them by Betsy DeVos’ brother, the former Blackwater. I think it’s called Xe now or something. So let’s talk about that.
GR: Yeah. I think that one of the things that you’re alluding to that’s so important for understanding both the deep history of fascism and its contemporary manifestations in the 21st century is the political economy of fascism, right? And so sometimes it’s assumed that fascism is simply a set of ideas or beliefs, and that in order to struggle against them, we need to wage a kind of ideological war in the name of being more tolerant, you know, fighting against the politics of hate and other such things. And in my own research, one of the things that I’ve kind of tried to bring to the fore, and other researchers have done this as well, is the ways in which so many of these movements gain both prominence and media visibility through the support of certain factions of the capitalist ruling class. And so in the case of the 1930s in the article that you’re alluding to that I published on the planned seizure of state power within the United States to establish an explicit fascist dictatorship. This was the language that was used at the time, right? They weren’t using the kind of whitewashed language in the post-White World War II era in which people would suggest, “Oh, it’s not really fascist. Maybe it’s something else.” They were explicit about this being a fascist dictatorship. And the capitalist ruling class contributed. And this included some of the leading families in the–among the kind of rubber barons of the early 20th century. Morgan of JPMorgan, the bank, du Pont, Rockefeller, Pew, Mellon, all of these elements of the capitalist ruling class recognize that they had an extreme and profound crisis on their hands. That crisis was both economic and ideological. The economic crisis was due to the fact that the Great Depression had really just wreaked havoc over the capitalist countries. And it had not done this to the Soviet–you know, to the Soviet Union which had broken with capitalism, at least to, you know, a very large extent, as a socialist–as a socialist state. And so it was becoming increasingly clear to many people, particularly the working and toiling masses, that capitalism wasn’t working and that socialism was doing a lot better. This was linked to an ideological crisis, and that was the inability of the political elite in the capitalist classes to rule hegemonically, meaning to rule by consent. To get the general population on board with their particular project. The election of FDR was quite important for the consolidation of a particular orientation within the political elite at that point in time, which basically amounted to a slight class compromise with the New Deal, as it was established in the ‘30s, the idea being that FDR was going to shore up the interests of the capitalist ruling class and give small provisions to certain sections of the working class in order to stave off revolution, right? But another faction of the capitalist ruling class as well as the right wing of the Democratic Party broke with FDR over this because they were looking at and examining what was going on in Europe, and they identified fascism as the best passable solution for both the economic and the ideological crisis of capitalism, right? Because fascism would allow them to get a certain sector of the population on board with a rabidly capitalist, anticommunist, anti-worker program that would ultimately allow them to increase their profits and invest in the permanent work comp.
CH: Well, to what extent–one of the things FDR did was recognize unions. United Mine Workers Union had been banned. He brought it back. The United Auto Workers union which carried the big sit-down strikes in Flint and other cities. To what extent did that kind of relationship with unions or willingness to accept unions form–or to what extent was that a driving factor in pushing the business elite to embrace fascism?
GR: Yeah. Definitely FDR’s support of union organizing and–as well other elements of the New Deal that were basically providing both organizing abilities and a social safety net to the working and toiling masses. And although this was only carving into capitalist profits ever so slightly, it was too much for certain sectors of the ruling class. At the same time, of course, as I’m sure you know, FDR didn’t by any means go far enough. You know, one of the stories that I tell in the lead up to this planned fascist seizure of state power was a conflict over the Bonus Army march of 1932. And FDR maintained the line that we shouldn’t pay this bonus. We shouldn’t really support the veterans in various ways. He didn’t push for a bill against lynching, right? So a very important part of the New Deal was what was going on for Black Americans at that point in time. He also kind of lined up on the military establishment in various ways and continued–I mean, in the lead up to World War II, some of the kind of more imperialist elements of the history of the United States. So it’s obviously a mixed record. And from our vantage point today, it’s important to do a kind of variegated analysis, right? Look at the gains for the working masses and then also point out where there are certain limitations.
CH: Great. When we come back, we’ll continue our conversation about the fascist undercurrents in American society with Professor Gabriel Rockhill. Welcome back to On Contact. We continue our conversation about the undercurrents of fascism in American society with Professor Gabriel Rockhill. So let’s just lay out for people who don’t know briefly that attempt to carry out a coup which, as you write in the article, which people can find on–is–liberationschool.org? Is that where they can read–it’s a very smart piece. All of your stuff is. But let’s lay out what happened. And it was the major ruling families. I went to prep school as a scholarship kid with their children and grandchildren. Let’s talk about what–and they are as–you know, up close, as repugnant as they seem. Let’s talk a little bit about what they did, just the mechanics of it.
GR: So the basic plot was the following, and I should preface this by saying sometimes when people identify conspiracies on the part of the capitalist ruling class or the political elite, people will cry foul immediately and say, “This is a conspiracy theory. This has never been proven.” Just so that your listeners know and viewers, this was proven by the US government in the McCormack-Dickstein Committee that investigated it, that there was indeed a conspiracy to overthrow the US government and establish a fascist dictatorship, even though the same committee also–they cut out some of the testimony in the final published report, and so it took, you know, a lot of investigative journalism to get the full story. But what we now know, and in fact we knew as of about 1934, 1935, is that a significant faction of the capitalist ruling class and finance capital in particular created in 1934, the American Liberty League. And this liberty league brought together business elites and high profile political figures, many of whom were on the right wing of the Democratic Party as I mentioned a moment ago. And they both put together the funds necessary, $3 million but they said they had up to $300 million. So an extraordinary amount of money. To hire what they referred to as a man on the white horse. They wanted a kind of military-style leader who they could use as the figurehead for this particular movement. They hired Gerald G. McGuire, who was an employee of a brokerage firm to go into a study tour for four months of European fascist movements in order to identify the best movement–or the best model to be applied in the United States. He came back after going to Germany, Spain, Italy, and France, and did identify some of what he considered to be the strengths of those various movements, like Hitler’s solution to unemployment was forced labor. He thought that would be a great idea within the context of the United States. Or the Blackshirts who used as the backbone for their movement impoverished veterans. He also thought that was a great idea. But the primary model that he latched on to was a fascist organization in France called the Croix-de-Feu or the Cross of Fire. And that was a fascist organization composed of some 500,000 commissioned and noncommissioned officers that later would grow into actually the biggest political party in France in the Third Republic. So it’s a very significant fascist organization. And with this model in mind, then he reached out to General Smedley Butler who is identified as one potential candidate. There were others, including General Douglas MacArthur, James E. Van Zandt, and others. And put to him the following project that if he could raise an army of about 500,000 veterans, march on Washington, and force FDR to accept him as a kind of Secretary of General Affairs, and then take a position as just a figurehead very much like the King of Italy, then the government could be–the elected government could be displaced. He would become the de facto leader, and could then pursue the agenda of his capitalist backers, which was to roll back the New Deal and to allow them to accumulate at the level that they’d like to accumulate. And moreover, by then also throwing the veterans themselves who had been mobilized in this fascist army under the bus, so to speak, because they were going to be paid their pensions for just one year, but after the fascist seizure of power was consolidated, they were going to be let go. That is the plot in a nutshell. But there were also other parallel plots, I should–I should mention just in passing. This was not the only one.
CH: Well–and this is exactly what the Nazis did. They betrayed the working class. They gave them a day off and then they abolished all the unions. The very core of their support, in many ways, came from certainly the rural working class, not so much the industrial working class. And you saw the same thing in Italy. There’s–I want to draw a parallel which you do in the article. So you talk about how during the investigations by the McCormack and Dickstein Committee in the House of Representatives, there was an immediate attempt to kind of cover up what the committee discovered to protect the ruling business elites, and you draw a parallel between what happened then and what’s happening now.
GR: Yes. Absolutely. I mean, the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, we can see very clearly because we have the distance that historically allows us to see more–you know, in a much more straightforward manner what was going on then. It ran a faith in government campaign. And this is often what bourgeois democracies will do when it becomes part of the public record, that there’s been some malfeasance on the part of the political elite or the capitalist ruling class. There’s so much blowback that they have to do something. And so a faith in government campaign consists in recognizing certain facts but then doing everything that they can in order to consolidate the general population’s belief that the government is ruling in their own best interest, right? So in the case of this committee that was investigating the fascist plot, they recognized that there was a fascist plot but they refused to call for–testifying any of the capitalist backers because this was simply based on “hearsay”, right, which is actually testimony on the part of those who were being enrolled in the plot. They also censored their report, as I mentioned earlier. They tried to use Red Scare tactics by saying that, “Well, the communists were backing some strike movements and whatnot.” And they didn’t pursue any prosecutions of the conspirators, even though it was a proven conspiracy, right? And as we know from the contemporary moment, the Republicans have been pushing back on a concrete investigation into what exactly happened on January 6th. We can, of course, relate this to other moments, right? The Warren Commission in the wake of the JFK assassination. We could look at the 9/11 Commission. There are so many other examples of what the political elite in a bourgeois democracy like the United States will do to try to really minimize the blowback from proven conspiracies or from moments in time, like January 6th, where a lot more needs to be known about who exactly was involved in allowing this to happen or participating in it financially from behind the scenes, right? In that regard, we don’t only need governmental investigations because of the limitations that I’ve just pointed out, but we need the work of investigative journalists, of activists, and militants who are really putting the pressure on in order to figure out what’s actually going on behind the kind of political spectacle that’s often created.
CH: Well, in a footnote here, you’re quoting Vanessa Wills. She talks about the DeVos families, Koch brothers, Robert Mercer, the Dorr brothers as key figures in The Capitol attack, drawing primarily from the ranks of small business owners, military, et cetera. They were–they were astroturfing or funding as they did with the Tea Party. Very similar kind of phenomenon.
GR: Absolutely. A hundred percent. And this is, again, why the political economy of fascism is so important. When there are fascist movements on the ground, these are rarely simply, absolutely organic and grassroots themselves because of the way in which they also play into the hands and interests of the capitalist ruling class. They’re pro-capitalist, antisocialist, generally anti-worker, et cetera. And so the capitalist backers of the lockdown protests as they’re called, are a really important part of the lead up to what happened on January 6th. And also the question of the complicity of the state in both allowing and potentially even encouraging what happened on January 6th. I’ll just point your listeners to a very important statement made by Mike German, who’s a former FBI agent and now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. He pointed out that some of those involved in The Capitol riot had been involved in similar incidents in recent years and were repeatedly caught on tape. And this is a quote from Mike German. “We know their names. We know their criminal histories. They’ve been doing it because the police have been letting them do it. They’ve been doing it because the FBI have been letting them do it.” Right? And this is from a former FBI agent. And so this should raise questions both about the capitalist backers and the state complicity in fascist forces on the ground. And one of the reasons it’s important to see this kind of triangulation between the capitalist backers, the state, and then parastate or, you know, parallel fascist organizations is because historically we know that this is often how fascist organizations have worked.
CH: And they successfully muted the press or turn the press into a megaphone. You have examples of that, how when Smedley Butler exposed this plot, he was discredited on the front pages of the New York Times and everywhere else. But just in the last minute and a half, I want you to talk about where we are now, how dangerous a moment it is, and to what extent has these–have these historical antecedents informed us about where we’re going?
GR: Yeah. One of the important things is to see that as Biden came into office in the United States, he used the PR campaign of being the savior of democracy and kind of last bulwark against Trumpism as a halo that really permitted him to roll back so many of his campaign promises and to continue the US imperialist expansions abroad, as well as crackdowns internally on dissent. And in that regard, we should not simply be hoodwinked by this kind of “good cop, bad cop” logic that’s often operative in bourgeois democracies where you have the Democratic Party and the Republican Party kind of functioning in this capacity, and instead recognize that there has not been a serious reckoning with what happened on January 6th, and that even the Democratic Party has a vested interest in continuing to function as a kind of tolerant party for fascist elements, because those fascist elements, as we know from history, are the final solution to class struggle. So if capitalism is on its heels, if socialism is advancing, the capitalist ruling class is not going to allow itself to be overthrown peacefully, right? It will mobilize counterrevolutionary forces of the most draconian sort. And so the fact that under democratic leadership with Biden, you have the continuation of fascist organizations in the United States, US imperialism, we have these fascist elements that are really integral to the deep history of capitalism, and therefore, from our perspective, as those who are struggling for a more egalitarian world, we have to recognize that fascism takes different forms and different shapes, and that it’s always an element operative under capitalist rule and bourgeois democracy. As much as it can help us stave off certain fascist elements, will keep some of them in the wings in case there’s ever a real threat to bourgeois democratic and hence capitalist ruling.
CH: Great. That was Gabriel Rockhill, Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University.
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On Contact: Inverted totalitarianism
Chris Hedges, RT., 12 Sep, 2021
< On Contact: Inverted totalitarianism — RT On contact >
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Chris Hedges discusses the work of political philosopher Sheldon Wolin with Professor Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley, a student of Wolin’s.
Wolin, who died in 2015, is our most important contemporary political theorist, one who laid out in grim detail the unraveling of American democracy. In his books ‘Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism’ and ‘Politics and Vision’, a massive survey of Western political thought that his former student Cornel West calls “magisterial,” Wolin lays bare the causes behind the decline of American empire and the rise of a new and terrifying configuration of corporate power he calls “inverted totalitarianism.” Wolin throughout his scholarship charted the steady devolution of American democracy and in his last book, ‘Democracy Incorporated’, wrote: “One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic, surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.” He argued that America’s system of inverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It finds its expression in the faceless anonymity of the corporate state. Our inverted totalitarianism pays outward fealty to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, but it has effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent.
Transcript:
CH: Welcome to On Contact. Today, we’re discussing the work of the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin with Prof. Wendy Brown.
WB: Would it be useful to just try to say a little bit about what he means by inverted totalitarianism?
CH: Yes. Please, yes.
WB: Okay. Let’s try to do that. So he understands the risk of using this term because we hear the term and, you know, any mildly educated sentient being is going to think the ‘30s and ‘40s in Europe and/or depending on your political predilections, the Soviet Union. And so Wolin knows it’s risky but he wants us to see that it is possible to have a society that is so de-democratized and that has turned against democracy at the level of its governing powers, and has so consolidated the force of the media, the evangelical church, the intelligentsia, the corporate and financial sectors of the economy, and state power that you do have something like a total society.
CH: Sheldon Wolin who died in 2015 is probably our most important contemporary political theorist. One who laid out in grim detail the unraveling of American Democracy. In his books, “Democracy Incorporated” and “Politics and Vision” a massive survey of western political thought that his former student Cornel West calls “Magisterial.” Wolin lays bare the causes behind the decline of American empire and the rise of a new and terrifying configuration of corporate power he calls inverted totalitarianism. Wolin, throughout his scholarship, charted the steady devolution of American democracy and in his last book “Democracy Incorporated” wrote “One cannot point to any national institution that can accurately be described as democratic, surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class, biased judicial and penal system, or least of all the media.” He argued that America’s system of inverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It finds its expression in the faceless anonymity of the corporate state. Our inverted totalitarianism pays outward fealty to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the iconography traditions and language of American patriotism and democracy, but it’s effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent. Joining me to discuss the seminal work of political theory is Prof. Wendy Brown, class of 1936, first professor of Political Science, and a core faculty member in the Program for Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley, who--and I know this from Sheldon Wolin himself, was considered by him to be one perhaps his most brilliant student. Thank you, Prof. Brown. Let’s begin with the break that Wolin made. He--and you’ve written about this. He wasn’t a Marxist. He kind of fell into a category of its own--of his own. Can you explain what that category is?
WB: Certainly, Chris. And let me just say it’s a pleasure to be here and to be talking about Sheldon Wolin with you. Wolin was certainly not a Marxist but he was a leftist. And for many, that would mean as a political theorist, oh, he must have been a kind of radical democrat or Arendtian. But he wasn’t quite those things either. He was a really sui generis. He was a thinker who drew on the entire history of western political thought, as well as his deep knowledge of American history and American intellectual contributions, to track the development and the predicaments of democracy across the three to four hundred years, if you want to kind of leave it loose like that, that democracy took shape in the US. And his radicalism pertained to the fact that he was both interested in the denigrations we’re familiar with of democracy, what capitalism does to it, what racism does to it, what exclusions at the cite of gender and so forth does to it. But he went well beyond that to track the specific forms of power, governing power that in his view undid democracy in the last 40 years. And this is what makes him really a novel, original thinker. He was interested in the way that the peculiar amalgam of corporations and the state starting in the ‘70s, not just the service of the state to the economy but the amalgam of the state and the--and corporate power. And it’s adduction as well of the media, of the military, and so forth. The way that that changed the very form and force of governing powers in the US to demobilize democracy, to neuter it at its core, and to create what he called managed democracy on the one hand and superpower on the other. And we can break those terms down as we talk.
CH: He cites the start of this as being the aftermath of World War II, correct?
WB: Correct.
CH: And what happened after World War II?
WB: For him--well, of course the common story is what happened World War II is you get FDR, you get the new deal, you get the social state, you get democracy toward the improvement of life conditions for the many, and an increasing development of state power on behalf of the people. But Wolin was smart enough to see that while he never disputed that that was happening, at the same time, what’s happening in the post-war period is the development of expertise and science, increasingly understood as properly governing us, and the development of the corporate form in political economy. And it’s the development of corporations in his understanding and their increasing place in governing and in harnessing science and technology to their purposes that begins to transform the nature of governing even before we get to the Reagan Revolution.
CH: He was also quite critical of mass media. This is from the book. “Cinema and television share a common quality of being,” he says, “…tyrannical. In a specific sense, they are able to block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation of its total impression.” What is that he--he’s attempting to argue in terms of mass communication that of course has now enveloped on a 24-hour basis, American society and global society?
WB: You know, this is one of these places where we’re going to feel the slightly dated quality of the book because of course there’s no acknowledgement of social media, which has become so important in transforming understandings of what’s going on in the world, ways we communicate, and of course ways we imbibe knowledge. But what Wolin was already onto was the extent to which media was increasingly harnessed not in his view by the state but by corporate to delivery certain kinds of understandings of what was happening, and to limit what he understood to be the deliberative or we could say cognitive dimensions that democracy requires. So his critique here is a fairly standard one for the ‘80s and the ‘90s, namely that mass media was increasingly saturating us with distraction, with sound bites, as we called them then, and less and less with serious accounts or narratives of the world that we live in. He was especially distressed in that. So we should--we should just add this book was penned during the era of the George W. Bush presidency, both sessions of it. And it’s important to see that Wolin is very much motivated but he considered to be the media’s abetting of our tolerance of the Bush v. Gore decision that is the manipulation of a national election by the Supreme Court, which he said the media basically sold to us as acceptable, and he was especially worked up about the media’s tolerance of the imperial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And in his view, it’s this turning point in the media’s playing down of two things that he sees that’s really gouging democracy and democratically delivered information, deliberation, and accountability. That--that’s one reason he goes after the media the way he does.
CH: Let’s talk about war. He himself was a veteran.
WB: Yes.
CH: He was a--what was he, a bombardier or something in South Pacific?
WB: Yes. Yes, indeed. Yeah.
CH: But he understands the corrosive force of the imperial project internally. So, perhaps now we can talk about the relationship between what he calls managed democracy and superpower.
WB: So let’s just get our terms first, maybe. For him, managed democracy is a situation in which democracy has not been overtly overthrown, but is neutralized. And it’s neutralized by a lot of different courses, including for him the fact that it’s reduced essentially to elections. And he finds it very telling that we no longer talk about citizenries, we talk about electorates. He also finds it telling that we no longer talk about a, citizenry. Rather, we talk about targeted pieces of the electorate, a divided electorate. So, democracy is managed by reducing it, by containing it, by organizing it, by targeting it, and by limiting its force, limiting the force of the demos. Superpower is the term he coins to talk about this robustly imperial moment in early 20th--21st Century America. So, managed democracy has to do with what’s happening domestically. Superpower has to do with his understanding of what the US is becoming as it projects its power and its ideals outward. And here, he’s, again, very focused on the Middle East wars, but he’s also focused on the extent to which Bush himself understood his mission as a President to be that of bringing America’s power to the rest of the world, and America’s model of existence to the rest of the world. And for Bush, Wolin believes that’s the model of corporately managed democracy.
CH: Great. When we come back, we’ll continue our conversation about the political theorist Sheldon Wolin and his book “Democracy Incorporated” with Prof. Wendy Brown. Welcome back to On Contact. We continue our discussion about the work of the political theorist Sheldon Wolin and his book “Democracy Incorporated” with Professor, Wendy Brown. So he, in the book, talks about what happens when National Defense becomes corporatized, and he writes, “The fixation upon mobilization and rearmament inspired the gradual disappearance from the national political agenda of the regulation and control of corporations. The defender of the free world needed the power of the globalizing expanded corporation not an economy hampered by trust busting. Moreover since the enemy was rapidly anti-capitalist, every measure that strengthened capitalism was a blow against the enemy.” This really encoded language became a way to revoke all of the regulations brought about by the New Deal and programs by the New Deal to bring us where we are in it.
WB: Yes. That’s exactly Wolin’s argument, that on the one hand deregulation at home, which means, as he put it essentially giving all power to those who already have power and leaving the rest of the citizenry dangling. But on the other hand, where you started in that quotation was also with the military. His concern is that even military organization and power is being increasingly outsourced and amalgamated with corporate power. And this then becomes a rather different argument from those who say, “Oh, US wars are imperial because they’re serving global capital.” That’s not Wolin’s point. His point is more subtle. It’s the point that what you have in an increasingly out sourced military and a military that is creating conditions favorable for global capital. Iraq is a prime example, became a playground for international capital as soon as Saddam Hussein was toppled. What you have in that combination is the transformation of American government legitimated by its service to the people and it’s transformed instead into something that is operating on behalf of corporate interests, and the military itself is increasingly saturated with that dimension.
CH: He argues that through inverted totalitarianism, you get a figure like Biden, you get a figure like Obama, Bush that there’s a--and he’s right, of course, there’s a complete continuity largely between on real issues, maybe not on cultural issues but certainly on imperial and capitalist issues. He says that it’s essentially access to cheap credit and cheap consumer goods that act as a kind of pacifier--political pacifier that prevents the rise of a demagogue. I remember asking him whether if when you took away that access to cheap credit and those cheap consumer goods, would you get a demagogue and he conceded that perhaps. And I’m interested in your thoughts about Trump, and how it fits with his notion of inverted totalitarianism.
WB: It’s a good question, Chris. It’s tricky because what Wolin is trying to depict with inverted totalitarianism and maybe we should spend a minute or two trying to break up in the term. But what he’s trying to depict is a form of power, total power over the people that is not exercised by a charismatic or demagogic leader. And that does not involve overt repression, and the use of the state for repressive or tyrannical purposes. And does not have I guess I would say characteristics of the Trump regime. But what Wolin has done so brilliantly I think is give us the markers that would explain how that regime comes to be possible. It’s not within the ambit of what he’s talking about because he’s trying to talk about the kind of control that is possible without a Trump, that we already had inverted totalitarianism before we got Trump, but it does help explain why that--as you say, once you--once you get rid of the external enemy, once you get rid of the preoccupation with terror that’s focused--that focuses the Bush years, how you could turn that inward toward rancor and resentment against immigrants, against minority races, against feminists, and environmentalist, and how you could produce a demagogic leader. But maybe would it be useful to just try to say a little bit about what he means by inverted totalitarianism?
CH: Yes, please. Yes.
WB: Okay. Let’s try to do that. So he understands the risk of using this term, because we hear the term and, you know, any mildly educated sentient being is going to think the ‘30s and ‘40s in Europe and/or depending on your political predilections, the Soviet Union. And so Wolin knows it’s risky, but he wants us to see that it is possible to have a society that is de-democratized and that has so turned against democracy at the level of its governing powers, and has so consolidated the force of the media, the evangelical church, the intelligentsia, the corporate and financial sectors of the economy, and state power that you do have something like a total society. What he doesn’t want to be saying and he doesn’t want to be misunderstood as saying, “Oh, we’re at risk of losing all our civil liberties.” His point is actually, you can have your Liberties. You can have your consumer pleasures. You can have your choice of 2,000 TV channels. And still have completely lost democracy. So totalitarianism stands for, in his view, that inversion of democracy into its opposite, which for him is not tyranny, but an anti-democracy in a totalitarian force. And then he spends a lot of the book in, I think, a totally fascinating contrast between classic totalitarianism, which depends on mobilization of society, personal rule, control of the economy, heavy bureaucracy, and inverted totalitarianism which depends on more abstract powers, political demobilization of the citizenry, private media, not propaganda, corporate style management, not tyranny, and what he calls the porosity of documents like the Constitution, which can be radically re-signified to enable corporate control, torture, and other such things.
CH: That’s an important point because you’re right. This does make it different from classic totalitarian societies about it’s not just demobilization but it’s about inducing a kind of lethargy within the population. He said, “Managed democracy is democracy systematized.” What does he mean by that?
WB: He means that it’s the opposite of what democracy must be, which is uncontainable, unchannelable energies of the people for a public or common purpose. And once it’s systematized, those what he calls demotic energies are gone. So once democracy is organized as target or focus groups, and targeted populations, and electoral manipulation, and pollsters who feed us the positions that they intend to be asking us about, once you get that systematization, then you’ve lost what he calls that demotic energy, the energy of the demos which he no longer believes can be an energy that can fully rule because we’re too large for that. He thinks democracies only work at small scales and relatively simpler societies, but he does think democratic uprisings or democratic challenges, what he calls fugitive democracy can bring us back to institutions that facilitate that. And so that’s really his program for the future. You know, the book was written before “Occupy Wall Street” and it was certainly written before “Black Lives Matter” and it--and it was certainly written before, you know, the Bernie Sanders movement that then, you know, comes out of both. But that’s what Wolin is trying to--is trying to reseed or energize. He’s very clear that--go ahead.
CH: He pulls out of Ancient Greece, the destruction of the demos with the Athenian imperial power that crushes Athenian democracy. I just want to close the last minute and half on Max Weber because he likes Weber a lot. And there’s that short essay that everyone should read called “Politics as a Vocation” because there was a kind of Calvinist streak--I speak as a former seminarian, Presbyterian, where it’s a constant battle which Weber understood and that’s what he meant by Politics as a vocation. And Wolin argued that every time you turned your back, those dark forces that would seek to eradicate your civil liberties and your freedom would immediately go to work. So it’s a kind of perpetual never-ending fight. Just in the last minute, can you, kind of, explain that idea?
WB: Wolin really appreciated this part of Weber as you say, the part that understood politics as Weber puts it as a slow boring through hard boards, by which he didn’t mean a march through the institutions, but rather that you have to endure and perdure with a cause but also with a certain sobriety that anchors that cause, understanding that you’re in it for the long haul, and that you keep pursuing ideals or cause, however you want to put it in politics without becoming faint of heart, without whimpering or whining that your team didn’t win, and above all, without imagining that you ever finally achieved your cause, because as you say, Weber understands it in his existentialist post-Nietzschean way as a constant battle, a constant struggle between forces that disagree. And so you don’t quit, you don’t give up, you don’t whimper, you don’t turn to God, you just keep enduring and perduring.
CH: Well, and Weber also understood that against a faceless bureaucracy, it may be impossible in modernity to even overcome it but that you still had to struggle against it anyway. That was Professor Wendy Brown on the work of the political theorist, Sheldon Wolin, and his book “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.” Thank you.
WB: Thank you, Chris.
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