Chris Hedges: Inverted Totalitarianism

Image by Peg Hunter via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

with Chris Hedges

Originally on RT America on Sep 11, 2021

The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel on Jul 5, 2022

On the show Chris Hedges discusses the work of political philosopher Sheldon Wolin with Professor Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley, a student of Wolin’s.

Sheldon 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.”

Watch the video and/or read the transcript

From the archives:

Chris Hedges and Henry Giroux: The Age of Manufactured Ignorance

No Solutions Under Capitalism: Revolution is Required, by Paul Street

Foretelling the End of Capitalism, reviewed by Pete Dolack

From Iowa Nice to Iowa Nazi: A Report from the Friendly Fascist Heartland, by Paul Street

Visionary Inspiration and Practical Strategies for Direct Democracy: Winds of Change Book Review, by Marissa Mommaerts

Late-Stage Capitalism Deprives Us Of Meaning + The Capitalist Class Is Bringing America Towards Fascism, by Rainer Shea

Sheldon Wolin: Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? Parts 1-8, interviewed by Chris Hedges