[Sithsaber]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism

Wolin believes that the democracy of the United States is sanitized of political participation and refers to it as managed democracy. He defines managed democracy as "a political form in which governments are legitimated by elections that they have learned to control".[10] Under managed democracy, the electorate is prevented from having a significant impact on policies adopted by the state through the continuous employment of public relations techniques.[11]

What are your opinions on this? These ideas have been around for a while but this is the first time they have been presented without the lefty rhetoric that shuts down people on the right and the general populace who still fear the commie boogieman.

[Rei Murasame]

All I can say is that they are very late figuring this out. People had pointed this out as early as the eighteen-fifties. What they are describing is a liberalism's successful bid for totality over a society. That is what it becomes, that's the whole point of it.

[Sithsaber]

Yeah but he doesn't sound like a red, ergo his opinions are respectable.

[Rei Murasame]

It gets better.

Sheldon Wolin says this:

While the versions of totalitarianism represented by Nazism and Fascism consolidated power by suppressing liberal political practices that had sunk only shallow cultural roots, Superpower represents a drive towards totality that draws from the setting where liberalism and democracy have been established for more than two centuries. It is Nazism turned upside-down, “inverted totalitarianism.” While it is a system that aspires to totality, it is driven by an ideology of the cost-effective rather than of a “master race” (Herrenvolk), by the material rather than the “ideal.”

Many decades ago Otto Koellreutter said this about liberalism, in an amazing insight:

The horrendous experience with the First World War has in our generation replaced the individualistic mindset with that of the community experience, thus creating the necessary preconditions for the coming into existence of the rule of law of the National Socialist state. It is understandable that the Liberal state of the rule of law portrayed itself, based on its intellectual attitudes, as the constitutional state and as the state of the rule of law, just as liberal democracy has been immersed in the belief that it is the only possible political form of modern statehood in the world. What we are observing here is the claim to totality in the world of liberal ideas.

This claim to totality, regarding the shaping of our national and state life raises, of course, the issue of the National Socialist worldview. National Socialism does not strive, in a sense of the long overdue liberal thinking, for a "total state" in the sense of the totality of the state power structure; rather it strives for the totality of the National Socialist worldview in all spheres of life.

Therein lies its "illiberal" attitude. And therefore resistance is being put up here at home and abroad by circles which, for their part, strive to hold on to the totality of the liberal world of ideas. The construction of the National Socialist German state governed by the rule of law is the sign that the totality of the National Socialist worldview has [already] prevailed in the German people [and has displaced liberalism].

They had to be totalitarian in order displace the liberal totality. But really, I don't think it matters how many people tell you this. You aren't planning to willingly surrender your hegemony to some other ideology, right? Exactly.

After all, I am pretty sure that you all already knew that liberalism wants totality, and needs it.

When you guys try to smear Fascists and Communists as being 'totalitarian', you and I both know that's just rhetoric, because technically everyone is totalitarian. Good thread, nice admissions.

[ThereBeDragons]

It's the difference at keeping someone at the bottom of a pit at which there is no way out, and leaving them in a pit where there is long and arduous way out requiring coordinated action from half the people in the pit, where all the people in it are convinced that the pit is the best place to be.

The fact that it's theoretically possible to leave the pit makes people not mind that they're in it.

[Rei Murasame]

That is beautifully put. I'd add that it also demands very little from its adherents, it demands only that people come out on election day and vote. It's the easiest thing in the world to subscribe to.

Also, a quote I found funny and very true in the wiki was this one:

Whereas in Nazi Germany the state dominated economic actors, in inverted totalitarianism, corporations through political contributions and lobbying, [instead] dominate the United States, with the government acting as the servant of large corporations. This is considered "normal" rather than corruption.

This is very key, the normalisation of the liberal state through the tactic of othering the 'tribal states' and 'communist states'. This was accomplished by using terms such as "the evil Empire" to describe the USSR, and "an enormous cult" to describe Fascist Japan, and a whole litany of adjectives, up to and including "demonic" to describe National Socialist Europe.

And so liberal democracy then became "normal".

[Sithsaber]

Well to be fair ww2 was all about the lesser of two evils. Just because the current system is illusionary doesn't mean we should all subscribe to open tyrannical madness.

[Rei Murasame]

I guess that the Cold War was also about 'the lesser of two evils'. You would say that if your intent is not to change anything. After all, any system that you can invent now that could possibly replace liberalism, could conceivably be called 'openly tyrannical' and thus 'bad'.

After all, it's replacing "dictatorship of X" with "dictatorship of Y", with the rationale that "Y" could save humans from whatever catastrophe "X" is going to cause if left to go on as is.

So, I'll put the ball in your court. Can you think of anything that you would like to replace the totality of liberalism with?

[ThereBeDragons]

Liberalism that leans more towards social liberalism than classic liberalism.

[Rei Murasame]

So the suggested answer is to go a little more to the centre-left, then? I'm not sure if this worked last time. Recall this story about Gordon Brown talking about John Kerry:

Gordon Brown could not believe the way Democratic US Senator John Kerry "lost" his first presidential debate with George W. Bush in 2004, a former aide to the prime minister has revealed.

Writing on his blog on Sunday, Damian McBride recalls how the then chancellor watched Kerry go head-to-head with Bush after he had discovered that Tony Blair would not be stepping down as prime minister in the near future.

"That evening, I sat with Gordon Brown at the hotel bar, and watched the first Presidential debate between John Kerry and George W Bush," McBride writes.

"In six years working for Gordon Brown, I never saw him so down. Within ten minutes of the debate starting, he was rasping criticism at his friend John Kerry. 'Look what Bush is doing – security, security, security. He’s defining the election, and instead of challenging him, Kerry’s going along with it. He’s trying to win on security – he’ll never win on security. Where’s the economy? Where’s jobs? Madness. Madness. He’s just lost the election.'"

McBride adds: "As each question was asked by the debate moderator, Gordon would thump the bar and deliver a word-perfect response for Kerry to deliver, and then thump the bar again and shake his head as Kerry made his [actual] response. 'Rubbish. Total rubbish. You’ve lost, man. You’ve lost.'"

I can completely understand how Gordon Brown felt, I often get that feeling when I watch social democrats failing at everything.

But sometimes, a social democrat, such as Gordon Brown - bless his heart - actually gets into power because he is very intelligent. That looks like this:

Gordon Brown repeatedly shouted at Tony Blair "you ruined my life" in the final confrontation that forced Blair to agree to announce a date by which he would stand down as prime minister, according to Andrew Rawnsley's new book. [...]

In the final showdown between Brown and Blair, against the backdrop of a backbench letter urging Blair to stand aside, Brown demanded not only a public declaration that he would hand over power but also to work as his partner in the interim.

The book says Brown demanded: "Who do you think is better than me? Do you think there is anyone who is better than me?" John Reid was "far too rightwing". Alan Johnson was "a lightweight". David Miliband was much too young. Was Blair saying, Brown demanded, that any of them was better qualified to become prime minister?

This face-off came to an end without a resolution. Talking about it afterwards to close allies, Blair described this confrontation with Brown as "ghastly" and "terrible" and told them: "He [Brown] kept shouting at me that I'd ruined his life."

Social democracy's perhaps counter-intuitive failure as a political contender in the current conjuncture is no coincidence. Ephemeral factors such as uninspiring leadership or the cumulative effect of incumbency are not primarily to blame (although these factors are real enough and hardly helpful). The causes for the travails of European social democracy are longstanding and organically ideological. Insofar as the social democratic Third Way sought to conjoin high finance with increasingly commodified forms of welfare provision through retail finance, the economic crisis is also a crisis of social democracy. Modern European social democracy is so closely imbricated with the system in crisis that it is in no position to offer an alternative.

So despite the best intentions, Gordon Brown's administration was also destined to fail, even after attaining power. Because the structure of the system itself will prevent you from actually doing anything about the crisis, even if you actually get slightly-more-to-the-left social democrats in. The same thing will happen anyway.

[Sithsaber]

Lets try another approach:

History is accumulative. We should not judge events based on months and years but by decades and centuries if possible. Context is crucial, and tough choices based on multifaceted weaving of the fates cannot be ignored. If we look objectively at your underlying reasoning, much of what you are apologetic towards is "correct". Empires rise and fall, history isn't a linear path, and the attempt of one civilization to establish itself as an expansionary hegemon can't sincerely be condemned by governments that are built upon the same foundations of conquest.

But this line of reasoning is flawed. Life isn't purely objective, and annihilation can't be written off as a mathematical necessity. The fact is that the axis powers were attempting to establish a new order that would have pushed the world back, and led to events that are almost unimaginable. Japan was in a unique position. It was not bound to western civilization but had utilized industrialization to become a force in some aspects superior to its competitors. But this rise came too late. The world order had shifted too far to permit such an empire, and "civilization" had developed to a point where open imperialism was coming to an end. Even if we solely look at an unhindered Japanese empire, we see devastation closer to the 16th than 20th century. It would have been in no ones interest besides the Japanese elite and their devoted thralls to allow such a thing to happen. At the end of the day some things have to die. Carthago delenda est ; Japan had to fall.

[Rei Murasame]

I have no idea how that response has anything to do with what I am saying. Nor do I see how this serves as a rationale for you to keep choosing social democracy over and over again, even though it does not do what you imagine it does.

Unless of course you actually have no illusions and are fine with having international finance ruling indefinitely, in which case I think you are going to completely destroy the whole world permanently if you get your way, but I'd respect your honesty about it, at least.

[Sithsaber]

What made you think i was a social democrat?

[quetzalcoatl]

What they are describing is a liberalism's successful bid for totality over a society. That is what it becomes, that's the whole point of it.

What is liberalism's 'secret'? Or more generally, why does a certain system evolve successfully and achieve totality (provisional), while others die on the vine or wither at the root?

[Rei Murasame]

What made you think i was a social democrat?

Well, if you aren't, fill me in. I simply took the sum total of your posting pattern and decided that you are probably a social democrat. It could be a wrong assumption. I also disagree with your argument about military brutality, for reasons that you will see when you read this post.

What is liberalism's 'secret'? Or more generally, why does a certain system evolve successfully and achieve totality (provisional), while others die on the vine or wither at the root?

Liberalism succeeded because of the military power of the nations that ended up propagating it, and because - fatefully - the petty-bourgeoisie in those Allied countries threw their weight behind the haute-bourgeoisie ideology of that time (liberalism) and did not resist it at that juncture.

Leon Trotsky sheds some light which I will build on here:

Any serious analysis of the political situation must take as its point of departure the mutual relations among the three classes: the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie (including the peasantry), and the proletariat.

The economically powerful big bourgeoisie, in itself, represents an infintesimal minority of the nation. To enforce its domination, it must ensure a definite mutual relationship with the petty bourgeoisie and, through its mediation, with the proletariat.

To understand the dialectic of the relation among the three classes, we must differentiate three historical stages: [1.] at the dawn of capitalistic development, when the bourgeoisie required revolutionary methods to solve its tasks; [2.] in the period of bloom and maturity of the capitalist regime, when the bourgeoisie endowed its domination with orderly, pacific, conservative, democratic forms; [3.] finally, at the decline of capitalism, when the bourgeoisie is forced to resort to methods of civil war against proletariat to protect its right of exploitation.

The political programs characteristic of these three stages -- JACOBINISM [left wing of petty bourgeois forces in Great French Revolution; in most revolutionary phase, led by Robespierre], reformist DEMOCRACY (social democracy included), and FASCISM -- are basically programs of petty bourgeois currents. This fact alone, more than anything else, shows of what tremendous -- rather, of what decisive -- importance the self-determination of the petty bourgeois masses of the people is for the whole fate of bourgeois society.

Nevertheless, the relationship between the [haute] bourgeoisie and its basic social support, the petty bourgeoisie, does not at all rest upon reciprocal confidence and pacific collaboration. In its mass, the petty bourgeoisie is an exploited and disenfranchised class. It regards the [haute] bourgeoisie with envy and often with hatred. The [haute] bourgeoisie, on the other hand, while utilizing the support of the petty bourgeoisie, distrusts the latter, for it very correctly fears its tendency to break down the barriers set up for it from above.

While they were laying out and clearing the road for bourgeois development,the Jacobins engaged, at every step, in sharp clashes with the bourgeoisie. They served it in intransigent struggle against it. After they had culminated their limited historical role, the Jacobins fell, for the domination of capital was predeterminated.

For a whole series of stages, the bourgeoisie entrenched its power under the form of parliamentary democracy. Even then, not peacefully and not voluntarily. The bourgeoisie was mortally afraid of universal suffrage. But in the last instance, it succeeded, with the aid of a combination of violent measures and concessions, of privations and reforms, in subordinating within the framework of formal democracy not only the petty bourgeoisie but in considerable measure also the proletariat, by means of the new petty bourgeoisie -- the labor aristocracy. [...]

Now, there are many things which may cause a nation to take actions. But the decision-making process is determined by a substantial amount, by the relationship between the three classes in the nation. Fascism placed the petty-bourgeoisie in the driver's seat in various second-tier powers, such as Germany, Italy, and Japan. Places which had no deep legacy of liberalism anyway. The same pattern also repeated itself in the post-war era in South Korea under Park Chung-hee, Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, and so on, but I digress.

However, quite crucially, petty-bourgeoisie control was never able to be enacted in either the UK or USA. Because of this, it meant that the most advanced first-tier nations in the world at that time remained under haute-bourgeoisie control and would be waging a war against Axis from a position of economic advantage (the USA's productive capacity was enormous), thus making things a lot more risky and precarious than it would have otherwise been.

To repeat this example using communism, simply unplug 'petty-bourgeoisie' and plug in 'proletariat', and unplug 'Axis' and plug in 'USSR', and unplug 'fascism' and plug in 'communism'.

Liberals have historically been very good at using tepid reforms to manage populations, and so when a rival ideology criticises liberalism, liberals tend to imitate that ideology in some shallow (non-structurally altering) way, until they have defeated that ideology, and then they cease imitating it. For example, in the USA the "New Deal" was useful in placating people when the competition was fascists and socialists. Now that there is no competitor out there, they can safely do away with it if they want.

Quoting the wiki from the OP:

According to Wolin, the United States has two main totalizing dynamics:

• The first, directed outward, finds its expression in the Global War on Terror and in the Bush Doctrine that the United States has the right to launch preemptive wars. This amounts to the United States seeing as illegitimate the attempt by any state to resist its domination.[4][14][15]
  
  
• The second dynamic, directed inward, involves the subjection of the mass of the population to economic "rationalization", with continual "downsizing" and "outsourcing" of jobs abroad and dismantling of what remains of the welfare state created by U.S. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Thus, neoliberalism is an integral component of inverted totalitarianism. The state of insecurity in which this places the public serves the useful function of making people feel helpless, thus making it less likely that they will become politically active, and thus helping to maintain the first dynamic.[4][14][16][17]

Which ties into this:

Liberalization and state intervention, the two pillars of corporate liberalism, developed hand-in-hand in the period of Atlantic integration, their relative emphasis deriving from the stubbornness of either the original liberalism (as manifested, for instance, in the pre-Suez political economy of Britain) or of state monopolism (as in the case of Gaullism). The American offensives were instrumental in setting free the forces for this transformation, and in activating the fractions of the bourgeoisie involved in its evolution. The short-term cyclical developments, notably in the profit-distribution process, which will allow US to explain the modalities of actual class formation and politics in the central period under review, however, should not obscure the fact that as a whole, the era of Atlantic integration was characterized by a (Fordist) class compromise between capital and labour on the basis of a 'Keynesian' sub-ordination of petty money interests to overall levels of productive investment, and a profit-distribution structure skewed towards productive capital. The New Deal in this respect, too, marked the beginning of an era and set the standard for Europe.

In the course of the 1960s accumulation conditions in the Atlantic area were more or less equalized, blocking the trans-Atlantic escape routes for American productive capital by eliminating the gap between US and European production conditions. As part of the same development, the profit share of bank capital climbed drastically in all countries involved, and rentier incomes revived as well. By the time Richard Nixon cut the dollar from gold in August, 1971 and thus set free an exponential growth of the mass of international liquidity, banks in practically all countries in the area had already been liberated from the Keynesian shackles imposed on them in the 1930s, or were soon to do so. The unimpeded international circulation of capital which had been the aim of the architects of Atlantic integration was finally realized - at the price of the system itself. Thrown into the rapidly widening channels of international credit, the mass of savings centralized by Atlantic bank capital served to facilitate the transfer of key segments of the productive apparatus of the North Atlantic heartland to new zones of implantation in the periphery.

This wave of internationalization, which widened the scope of the present crisis, also destroyed the very structure of Atlantic integration. By breaking the territorial coincidence of mass production and mass consumption, it undermined the capital-labour compromise and the complementarity of circulation relations; by allowing untrammeled competition in the search for new outlets for capital, and in the mobilization of peripheral elites, it destroyed the fundamental unity of purpose which had hitherto constituted the cornerstone of the hegemonial strategy of the Atlantic bourgeoisie.

Which leads to this:

Contrary to what was predicted at the time, US monetary hegemony survived the end of Bretton Woods. The American Dollar remained pre-eminent as the reserve and vehicle currency of the global financial system, and by abandoning the peg of the dollar to gold, the US actually gained rather than lost policy autonomy in the emergent flexible exchange rate system. Since US banks could accumulate liabilities in the key currency at zero-exchange risk, they augmented their competitive advantage in transnational financial affairs, which resulted in Wall Street becoming, more than ever before, the epicentre of "global" finance. This, in turn, consolidated the capacity of the US to shape the preferences of borrowers and lenders worldwide, imbuing the US with structural power. The US became the only state in an international system characterised by flexible exchange rates that could pursue expansionary macroeconomic policies on a consistent basis without the need of internal adjustment.

The presence of this new order—which hinged on the military capabilities of the United States—would progressively nurture a new economic order as well, one that began through deepened trading relationships between the United States and its allies but slowly extended to incorporate neutrals and even erstwhile and potential rivals—to the degree that they chose to participate in this order.

In retrospect, then, the structural conditions that permitted the creation and maintenance of this order can be readily discerned. They include the following factors:

• The economic hegemony of the United States globally, which was amplified by the use of the dollar as the international reserve currency, fiscal stability at home, and a highly effective national innovation system that underwrote repeated cycles of transformative growth
  
  
  
• The political willingness within the United States to bear the costs of global leadership as evinced through the bipartisan consensus on protecting American hegemony, which in turn spawned diverse domestic policies oriented toward expanding the nation’s power
  
  
  
• The irreducible military superiority of the United States, encompassing both the nuclear and conventional realms and extending to at least functional mastery over the global commons in the face of serious challenges from the Soviet Union and sometimes lesser states
  
  
  
• The inability of any of the Asian powers to decisively threaten the security of key neighbors in a system-transforming manner, as well as their incapacity to undermine the U.S. ability to defend its regional allies or to impede the United States from either operating freely in the continent or bringing force to bear at any point along the Asian littorals

The concatenation of these variables paved the way for the U.S. victory during the Cold War. In fact, this victory was finally procured because Washington succeeded in enjoying the best of both worlds: it maintained a remarkable degree of military advantage despite Soviet opposition, while at the same time sustaining an open economic system at home and an open trading system abroad, both of which interacted to permit the United States and its close allies to grow at a rate much faster than the autarkic economies of its opponents. The fact that the United States’ allies were able to regenerate their national power so quickly after the devastation of World War II was also a testament to the enlightened elites in these countries: they consciously pursued economic strategies that enabled their nations to make the best of the open economic order that the United States maintained in its interest but which provided collective benefits. The rise of these allies, such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and eventually the smaller Southeast Asian “tigers,” undoubtedly portended the relative decline of the United States. But such a decline was judged acceptable because these were friendly states threatened by common enemies, and their revival was judged—correctly—to be essential for the larger success of containment. [6]

Yet the ascendancy of these allies signaled a serious problem that marks all imperial orders, namely, that success produces transformations that can lead to their undoing.

And the undoing later comes:

How will the rise of China, and for that matter, the rise of India as well, affect the underlying dynamics of the existing world system itself – the capitalist world-economy? Immanuel Wallerstein argues that the existing world system has entered into a structural crisis. The system has developed to the point that several secular trends have now reached their respective asymptotes, exhausting the system's space of self-adjustment. We are now in an age of great transition, at the end of which the existing historical system should be replaced by one or several other systems (Wallerstein 1995; 1996; 1998; 2003).

In other words, we do not live in "normal" times. In the coming century, instead of expecting more "development," more "modernization," more upward mobility, more of the same pattern of systemic dynamics that we have observed and with which we have become familiarized over the past five or six centuries, it may be more appropriate to expect more bifurcations, more chaos, more transformations and transitions, and more "turns" and "tricks" of the world history.

So there you go. Eventually there will be no more adjustments that can be made, and no more places on the earth that liberals will have not outsourced to, or externalised a war to. At that stage we'll see very interesting things happen, as the system will be challenged again by one or several actors of varying ideologies.

Now, on a slightly random note, I have been thinking about why we have to always go to the past in order to describe how things are now in the present. For example, how did we end up discussing the Second World War and the Cold War in this thread? It's because - perhaps almost subconsciously - we all know that retelling the past is not only an action that talks about what happened in the 'the past'. In fact, it has an effect on the world of 'the present', because how we understand 'the past', shapes our attitude to 'the present', and thus, 'the future', and that understanding happens in 'the present'.

[Rainbow Crow]

Americans Are Happier Than Ever, Gallup Study Shows

Does the above matter at all, within or without the context of the government's legitimacy?

[Rei Murasame]

Very amazing indeed. Check out the methodology as well: [Link]

It seems that the Americans became unhappy in September 2008, and then somehow they have begun to feel happy again, even though the structure which caused the crisis, has not changed. I don't think I'll ever understand how they - or any of the other 'happy' populations - are able to give such answers to survey questions.

But what I do understand is this. Ignorance is bliss. They probably are not aware of what is happening. That is, to me, the most likely explanation for these results. There is another explanation I can imagine, but it's a really horrible one, and I don't like to think about that one, much less actually type it. So I'll just go with 'they are probably not aware'.

[Rainbow Crow]

It seems that the Americans became unhappy in September 2008, and then somehow they have begun to feel happy again, even though the structure which caused the crisis, has not changed. I don't think I'll ever understand how they - or any of the other 'happy' populations - are able to give such answers to survey questions.

The answer is obviously that the economic crash and nasty election cycle taking place in 2008 made people less happy. Now that things are working again for the most part, people are happy again.

[Rei Murasame]

What is their definition of 'working again'?

For example: How are they enjoying 'the sequester'? How are they enjoying not getting loans for small businesses? How are they enjoying 'the grand bargain'? How are they enjoying flat wages?

[Sithsaber]

Lets try another approach:

History is accumulative. We should not judge events based on months and years but by decades and centuries if possible. Context is crucial, and tough choices based on multifaceted weaving of the fates cannot be ignored. If we look objectively at your underlying reasoning, much of what you are apologetic towards is "correct". Empires rise and fall, history isn't a linear path, and the attempt of one civilization to establish itself as an expansionary hegemon can't sincerely be condemned by governments that are built upon the same foundations of conquest.

But this line of reasoning is flawed. Life isn't purely objective, and annihilation can't be written off as a mathematical necessity. The fact is that the axis powers were attempting to establish a new order that would have pushed the world back, and led to events that are almost unimaginable. Japan was in a unique position. It was not bound to western civilization but had utilized industrialization to become a force in some aspects superior to its competitors. But this rise came too late. The world order had shifted too far to permit such an empire, and "civilization" had developed to a point where open eradication was coming to an end. Even if we solely look at an unhindered Japanese empire, we see devastation closer to the 16th than 20th century. It would have been in no ones interest besides the Japanese elite and their devoted thralls to allow such a thing to happen. At the end of the day some things have to die. Carthago delenda est ; Japan had to fall.