William R. Neil — “The continuing tension between Neoliberal economics and democracy”

Today’s Neoliberalism had nearly silenced serious left dissent by the late 1990s, or successfully isolated it in remote academic corners. Bill Clinton’s two terms in the 1990s are proof of that. And there is the continuing tension between Neoliberal economics and democracy: notice the desperate, barely concealed attempt by the Republican Right to shrink the franchise, using as one of its main levers the racial stigmas from “The Great Incarceration” and the yet to be proven accusations of voter fraud.

This political “shunning” of the left happens even in the supposedly liberal Ivy League. The late political theorist Sheldon Wolin (1922-2015), shortly before his death, in an interview with Chris Hedges, spoke of the silent treatment he was given by the faculty at Princeton University when he placed a copy of his new magazine “Democracy” on the faculty lounge coffee table. He was shunned. Perhaps they did not like where he was going with his last book, or could see it coming much earlier: Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2008). Here is that interview, Segment Seven from a nine part series at the RealNewsNetwork.…

Real-World Economics Review Blog
“The continuing tension between Neoliberal economics and democracy”

William R. Neil

Will Denayer — Neo-liberalism, just world theory, inverted democracy and the refugee ‘crisis’

The connection between the delusion of a just world [everyone gets what they deserve] and neo-liberalism is very easy to make. To neo-liberals, the fact alone that you are unemployed proves that you deserve it. Aside from accidental occurrences (the world is not perfect), the world is ultimately just. You get what you are worth. You become what you make of yourself. No further analysis is needed. There is no reason to look into economics or history or sociology or whatever else. There are no specific or special circumstances. As an unemployed person, you fail to make a contribution to society (you are not, in Cameron’s words part of ‘a hardworking family’ who ‘speaks English’). You are dysfunctional (it’s certainly not the economy or companies which do not invest). You do not deserve any help. What you deserve instead is punishment and an iron fist (this is why Offer calls Lerner’s work a parable of the dying welfare state).

Any other vulnerable group can be blamed in on the exactly the same grounds and in the same sociopathic way. Elderly people who depend on a state pension (and perhaps on a fuel allowance so that they do not freeze to death in the winter) did not succeed in life and therefore deserve nothing than disrespect and no help. The inferiority of ill and disabled people is clear, otherwise they would be healthy and therefore society owns them nothing or as little as possible. Refugees who end up on our shores should not come from dysfunctional countries (even though we contribute to mess these countries up, but that is just mere business). No one has the right to disrupt the elite’s entitlements or question the class structure of society, its inherent and blatant injustices, its malfunctions, its moral degeneration.…

Sheldon Wolin explains in his book on democracy and inverted totalitarianism (see here) that the main difference between the pre-war totalitarianism and the political regression of today is that Hitler could not could wait to ban political parties, dissolve parliament, suspend the constitution and destroy the free press, while today all these institutions are fully functioning. We have political parties, free elections, parliaments, constitutions, there is an independent judiciary, check and balances, a free press and much more. The problem, as Wolin sees it, is that most of the institutions that are supposed to safeguard democracy and human and political and social rights have become ‘inverted:’ they actively contribute to goals that are diametrically opposed to their original purpose. Wolin analyses such processes of ‘inverted totalitarianism’ in great detail. He provides many convincing case studies.… 

Social Darwinism alive and well as neoliberalism.

flassbeck economics

Neo-liberalism, just world theory, inverted democracy and the refugee ‘crisis’
Will Denayer

Chris Hedges — Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism

An elegant tribute to Sheldon Wolin, who recently passed away at 93.

Wendy Brown, a political science professor at UC Berkeley and another former student of Wolin’s, said in an email to me: “Resisting the monopolies on left theory by Marxism and on democratic theory by liberalism, Wolin developed a distinctive—even distinctively American—analysis of the political present and of radical democratic possibilities. He was especially prescient in theorizing the heavy statism forging what we now call neoliberalism, and in revealing the novel fusions of economic with political power that he took to be poisoning democracy at its root.”

Wolin throughout his scholarship charted the devolution of American democracy and in his last book, “Democracy Incorporated,” details our peculiar form of corporate totalitarianism. “One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic,” he writes in that book, “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.”

Inverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but 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…

Truthdig
Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism

Chris Hedges

Corey Robin — Sheldon Wolin, 1922-2015

More than a tribute to Sheldon Wolin.

Corey Robin
Sheldon Wolin, 1922-2015

Chris Hedges — The Great Unraveling

The ideological and physical hold of American imperial power, buttressed by the utopian ideology of neoliberalism and global capitalism, is unraveling. Most, including many of those at the heart of the American empire, recognize that every promise made by the proponents of neoliberalism is a lie. Global wealth, rather than being spread equitably, as neoliberal proponents promised, has been funneled upward into the hands of a rapacious, oligarchic elite, creating vast economic inequality. The working poor, whose unions and rights have been taken from them and whose wages have stagnated or declined over the past 40 years, have been thrust into chronic poverty and underemployment, making their lives one long, stress-ridden emergency. The middle class is evaporating. Cities that once manufactured products and offered factory jobs are boarded up-wastelands. Prisons are overflowing. Corporations have orchestrated the destruction of trade barriers, allowing them to stash $2.1 trillion in profits in overseas banks to avoid paying taxes. And the neoliberal order, despite its promise to build and spread democracy, has hollowed out democratic systems to turn them into corporate leviathans.

Democracy, especially in the United States, is a farce, vomiting up right-wing demagogues such as Donald Trump, who has a chance to become the Republican presidential nominee and perhaps even president, or slick, dishonest corporate stooges such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and, if he follows through on his promise to support the Democratic nominee, even Bernie Sanders. The labels “liberal” and “conservative” are meaningless in the neoliberal order. Political elites, Democrat or Republican, serve the demands of corporations and empire. They are facilitators, along with most of the media and most of academia, of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of “inverted totalitarianism.”

How could I not post a link to an article with a lede like that?

Truthdig
The Great Unraveling
Chris Hedges

ht Don Quijones at Naked Bull-Shit

Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? (Parts 1, 2 and 3) — Chris Hedges interviews Sheldon Wolin

For many years now, Wolin has been perhaps Hedges’ most cited source in articles and lectures about the state and direction of American society. An intellectual peer of Noam Chomsky, albeit less well known, Wolin is the author of seminal books on contemporary political theory, including “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism,” and “Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought.” He is an enthusiastic proponent of popular participation in government. 

In part two of the conversation, which was produced by The Real News Network, Hedges mentions that Wolin wrote that he “doesn’t believe we have any authentic democratic institutions left.” 

Wolin responds: “I don’t. That may be a bit of an overstatement, but I think—in terms of effective democratic institutions, I don’t think we do. I think there’s potential. I think there’s potential in movements towards self-government, movements towards economic independence, and movements towards educational reform, and so on, that have the seeds for change. But I think that it’s very difficult now, given the way the media is controlled and the way political parties are organized and controlled, it’s very difficult to get a foothold in politics in such a way that you can translate it into electoral reforms, electoral victories, and legislation, and so on. It’s a very, very complex, difficult, demanding process. And as I’ve said before, democracy’s great trouble is it’s episodic.”

Truthdig
Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? (Parts 1, 2 and 3)

Chris Hedges interviews Sheldon Wolin, Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University
Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly

Chalmers Johnson — Inverted Totalitarianism: A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled

Goldie but goodie that bears repeating. Chalmers Johnson reviews Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.

Alternet
Inverted Totalitarianism: A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled

Chalmers Johnson