Totalitarian Democracy - F. William Engdahl and Sheldon S. Wolin

F. William Engdahl and Sheldon S. Wolin

Engdahl and Wolin add some new dimensions to the analysis of totalitarianism. In Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy and the New World Order, Engdahl focuses on the American drive to achieve global hegemony through military and economic means. According to him, U.S state objectives have led to internal conditions that resemble totalitarianism: " a power establishment that over the course of the Cold War has spun out of control and now threatens not only the fundamental institutions of democracy, but even of life on the planet through the growing risk of nuclear war by miscalculation"

Wolin, too, analyzes the symbiosis of business and public interests that emerged in the Cold War to form the tendency of what he calls "inverted totalitarianism:"

While exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of "private" governance represented by the modern business corporation. The result is not a system of codetermination by equal partners who retain their respective identities but rather a system that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power.

Elsewhere, in an article entitled "Inverted Totalitarianism" Wolin cites phenomena such as the lack of involvement of citizens in a narrow political framework (due to the influence of money), the privatization of social security, and massive increases in military spending and spending on surveillance as examples of the push away from public and towards private-controlled government. Corporate influence is explicit through the media, and implicit through the privatization of the university. Furthermore, many political think-tanks have abetted this process by spreading conservative ideology. Wolin states: " the elements all in place...what is at stake, then, is nothing less than the attempted transformation of a tolerably free society into a variant of the extreme regimes of the past century"

Slavoj Žižek comes to similar conclusions in his book Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Here he argues that the war on terror served as a justification for the suspension of civil liberties in the USA, while the promise of democracy and freedom was spread abroad as the justification for invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Since Western democracies are always justifying states of exception, they are failing as sites of political agency. Žižek advocates a move to a new kind of socialism.