Quotes from Sheldon S. Wolin

A would-be demos is drawn to democracy not because ordinary people expect to rule, but because, in theory, democracy legitimates the expression of widely felt and usually deep-seated grievances, the possibility that those who have only numbers can use them to offset the power of wealth, formal education, and managerial experience.

Freedom and democracy, far from posing a threat to "free enterprise," become its instrument and its justification. And rather than serving as the means for furthering the political project of democratization, the state helps to inter it. vi

In America republicanism had to find a place for democracy, eventually even endow it with sovereignty—if only in the abstract—while contriving obstacles to popular power that simultaneously advantaged the Few (e.g., a property qualification for voting) and defined governing in ways that corresponded to the abilities of a new class of merchants, bankers, lawyers, and manufacturers.

The two constitutions—one for expansion, the other for containment—form the two sides of inverted totalitarianism.

Thus, early on, while the people were declared "sovereign," they were precluded from governing.

As the film draws to a close, the camera becomes riveted on a seemingly endless parade, row on row, of uniformed Nazis, shoulder to shoulder, goose-stepping in the flickering torchlight. Even today it leaves an impression of iron determination, of power poised for conquest, of power resolute, mindless, its might wrapped in myth.

No major politician or party has so much as publicly remarked on the existence of an American empire. Imperial power is not about restraint, and the consequences of empire are evident in domestic politics: in military expenditures, subsidies to globalizing corporations, mounting deficits, and the decimation of social programs and environmental safeguards.

It is commonly observed that today's domestic politics has changed in tactics and ferocity with the avowed aim of establishing a permanent Republican majority, the domestic equivalent of imperial hegemony, heralding a new politics and citizenry.

The emergence of Superpower and its joint imperium of state and corporation have resulted in the institutionalization and normalization of corruption. The doctored accounts, the public misrepresentations, and illegal transactions that have become a commonplace of corporate behavior in recent years have been transmitted to party politics

In the new model the presidency bears little resemblance to the original conception of a national leader and chief executive; it owes even less to the later ideal of the president as "the tribune of the people.

Congress, which was once thought to be the predominant branch of government because it supposedly stood "closer to the people," has been demoted to a position of power comparable to that of a corporate board. The latter tend to be creatures of the CEO rather than the independent supervisory power to which the CEO is theoretically responsible.

a tax structure that heavily favors the very rich while damaging most other classes. The favored group can then translate the windfall into political power. They become "a political donor class" that raises millions for the Republican Party and throws a few crumbs and broad hints to the Democrats.

Instead of collectivism, inverted totalitarianism thrives on disaggregation, on a citizenry who, ideally, are self-reliant, competitive, certified by standardized testing, but equally fearful of an economy subject to sudden downturns and of terrorists who strike without warning. Classical totalitarianism mobilized its subjects; inverted totalitarianism fragments them.

Inverted totalitarianism, in contrast, 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.

big spending is anti-American when directed to social programs but patriotic if it is funneled to the beneficiaries/defenders of the corporate state.

In contrast, inverted totalitarianism is only in part a state-centered phenomenon. Primarily it represents the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry.

The result is that citizenship, or what remains of it, is practiced amidst a continuing state of worry. Hobbes had it right: when citizens are insecure and at the same time driven by competitive aspirations, they yearn for political stability rather than civic engagement, protection rather than political involvement.

The roles Reagan played in his earlier career were an apprenticeship for his original contribution to American government, the creation of a "performance president" who fashioned illusion (a tough leader who had learned to throw a crisp salute) from inauthenticity (almost persuading himself that he had been present when inmates were freed from concentration camps).

It was assumed that the admission of new states to the Union could be orderly and need not disturb issues that the Constitution had either suppressed or postponed, such as slavery, women's suffrage, and the status of native Americans.

In the end these efforts at postponing the issue of slavery failed. The Civil War put in doubt the capability of free politics to keep up with an expanded scale. The proof was in the failure of postwar Reconstruction: despite military occupation democracy and racial equality failed to take hold in the South.

In both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections Bush's minions employed tactics that revealed a chain of corruption extending from local officials to the highest court, all with the intention of thwarting the popular will.25 The long-run consequences may prove more significant than the clouded elections: a popular distrust of the significance of elections themselves.

The citizen is irrelevant. He or she is nothing more than a spectator, allowed to vote and then forgotten once the carnival of elections ends and corporations and their lobbyists get back to the business of ruling.

The corporate state, Wolin told me, is "legitimated by elections it controls." To extinguish democracy, it rewrites and distorts laws and legislation that once protected democracy. Basic rights are, in essence, revoked by judicial and legislative fiat. Courts and legislative bodies, in the service of corporate power, reinterpret laws to strip them of their original meaning in order to strengthen corporate control and abolish corporate oversight.

Aristotle noted that leisure was a necessary condition in the politics of a good society.31 Or, as an early twentieth-century populist rephrased it, "Raise less corn and more hell.