It's Not Going to Be OK

The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs
will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis. The street
protests, strikes and riots that have rattled France, Turkey, Greece,
Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Iceland will descend
on us. It is only a matter of time. And not much time. When things
start to go sour, when Barack Obama is exposed as a mortal waving a
sword at a tidal wave, the United States could plunge into a long
period of precarious social instability.

At no period in American history has our
democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism
been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is
finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had.
And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague.
This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to
stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a
trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying.
Our economy has collapsed.

How will we cope with our decline? Will
we cling to the absurd dreams of a superpower and a glorious tomorrow
or will we responsibly face our stark new limitations? Will we heed
those who are sober and rational, those who speak of a new simplicity
and humility, or will we follow the demagogues and charlatans who rise
up out of the slime in moments of crisis to offer fantastic visions?
Will we radically transform our system to one that protects the
ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate
state, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal
security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent? We won't have
to wait long to find out.

There are a few isolated individuals who saw it coming. The political philosophers Sheldon S. Wolin, John Ralston Saul and Andrew Bacevich, as well as writers such as Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson,
David Korten and Naomi Klein, along with activists such as Bill
McKibben and Ralph Nader, rang the alarm bells. They were largely
ignored or ridiculed. Our corporate media and corporate universities
proved, when we needed them most, intellectually and morally useless.

Wolin, who taught political philosophy at
the University of California in Berkeley and at Princeton, in his book
"Democracy Incorporated" uses the phrase inverted totalitarianism
to describe our system of power. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike
classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or
charismatic leader. It finds its expression in the anonymity of the
corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism and the
Constitution while cynically manipulating internal levers to subvert
and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in
popular votes by citizens, but they must raise staggering amounts of
corporate funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate
lobbyists in Washington or state capitals who write the legislation. A
corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and
imposes a bland uniformity of opinion or diverts us with trivia and
celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi
fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics.
"Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true," Wolin writes.
"Economics dominates politics-and with that domination comes different
forms of ruthlessness."

I reached Wolin, 86, by phone at his home
about 25 miles north of San Francisco. He was a bombardier in the South
Pacific during World War II and went to Harvard after the war to get
his doctorate. Wolin has written classics such as "Politics and Vision"
and "Tocqueville Between Two Worlds." His newest book is one of the
most important and prescient critiques to date of the American
political system. He is also the author of a series of remarkable
essays on Augustine of Hippo, Richard Hooker, David Hume, Martin
Luther, John Calvin, Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and John
Dewey. His voice, however, has faded from public awareness because, as
he told me, "it is harder and harder for people like me to get a public
hearing." He said that publications, such as The New York Review of
Books, which often published his work a couple of decades ago, lost
interest in his critiques of American capitalism, his warnings about
the subversion of democratic institutions and the emergence of the
corporate state. He does not hold out much hope for Obama.

"The basic systems are going to stay in
place; they are too powerful to be challenged," Wolin told me when I
asked him about the new Obama administration. "This is shown by the
financial bailout. It does not bother with the structure at all. I
don't think Obama can take on the kind of military establishment we
have developed. This is not to say that I do not admire him. He is
probably the most intelligent president we have had in decades. I think
he is well meaning, but he inherits a system of constraints that make
it very difficult to take on these major power configurations. I do not
think he has the appetite for it in any ideological sense. The
corporate structure is not going to be challenged. There has not been a
word from him that would suggest an attempt to rethink the American imperium."

Wolin argues that a failure to dismantle
our vast and overextended imperial projects, coupled with the economic
collapse, is likely to result in inverted totalitarianism. He said that
without "radical and drastic remedies" the response to mounting
discontent and social unrest will probably lead to greater state
control and repression. There will be, he warned, a huge "expansion of
government power."

"Our political culture has remained
unhelpful in fostering a democratic consciousness," he said. "The
political system and its operatives will not be constrained by popular
discontent or uprisings."

Wolin writes that in inverted
totalitarianism consumer goods and a comfortable standard of living,
along with a vast entertainment industry that provides spectacles and
diversions, keep the citizenry politically passive. I asked if the
economic collapse and the steady decline in our standard of living
might not, in fact, trigger classical totalitarianism. Could widespread
frustration and poverty lead the working and middle classes to place
their faith in demagogues, especially those from the Christian right?

"I think that's perfectly possible," he answered. "That was the experience of the 1930s. There wasn't just FDR. There was Huey Long and Father Coughlin.
There were even more extreme movements including the Klan. The extent
to which those forces can be fed by the downturn and bleakness is a
very real danger. It could become classical totalitarianism."

He said the widespread political
passivity is dangerous. It is often exploited by demagogues who pose as
saviors and offer dreams of glory and salvation. He warned that "the
apoliticalness, even anti-politicalness, will be very powerful elements
in taking us towards a radically dictatorial direction. It testifies to
how thin the commitment to democracy is in the present circumstances.
Democracy is not ascendant. It is not dominant. It is beleaguered. The
extent to which young people have been drawn away from public concerns
and given this extraordinary range of diversions makes it very likely
they could then rally to a demagogue."

Wolin lamented that the corporate state
has successfully blocked any real debate about alternative forms of
power. Corporations determine who gets heard and who does not, he said.
And those who critique corporate power are given no place in the
national dialogue.

"In the 1930s there were all kinds of
alternative understandings, from socialism to more extensive
governmental involvement," he said. "There was a range of different
approaches. But what I am struck by now is the narrow range within
which palliatives are being modeled. We are supposed to work with the
financial system. So the people who helped create this system are put
in charge of the solution. There has to be some major effort to think
outside the box."

"The puzzle to me is the lack of social
unrest," Wolin said when I asked why we have not yet seen rioting or
protests. He said he worried that popular protests will be dismissed
and ignored by the corporate media. This, he said, is what happened
when tens of thousands protested the war in Iraq. This will permit the
state to ruthlessly suppress local protests, as happened during the
Democratic and Republic conventions. Anti-war protests in the 1960s
gained momentum from their ability to spread across the country, he
noted. This, he said, may not happen this time. "The ways they can
isolate protests and prevent it from [becoming] a contagion are
formidable," he said.

"My greatest fear is that the Obama
administration will achieve relatively little in terms of structural
change," he added. "They may at best keep the system going. But there
is a growing pessimism. Every day we hear how much longer the recession
will continue. They are already talking about beyond next year. The
economic difficulties are more profound than we had guessed and because
of globalization more difficult to deal with. I wish the political
establishment, the parties and leadership, would become more aware of
the depths of the problem. They can't keep throwing money at this. They
have to begin structural changes that involve a very different approach
from a market economy. I don't think this will happen."

"I keep asking why and how and when this
country became so conservative," he went on. "This country once prided
itself on its experimentation and flexibility. It has become rigid. It
is probably the most conservative of all the advanced countries."

The American left, he said, has crumbled.
It sold out to a bankrupt Democratic Party, abandoned the working class
and has no ability to organize. Unions are a spent force. The
universities are mills for corporate employees. The press churns out
info-entertainment or fatuous pundits. The left, he said, no longer has
the capacity to be a counterweight to the corporate state. He said that
if an extreme right gains momentum there will probably be very little
organized resistance.

"The left is amorphous," he said. "I
despair over the left. Left parties may be small in number in Europe
but they are a coherent organization that keeps going. Here, except for
Nader's efforts, we don't have that. We have a few voices here, a
magazine there, and that's about it. It goes nowhere."