Quotes from Sheldon S. Wolin

But, he warned, should the population—steadily stripped of its most basic rights, including the right to privacy, and increasingly impoverished and bereft of hope—become restive, inverted totalitarianism will become as brutal and violent as past totalitarian states.

They "normalized" war. And Wolin warned that, as in all empires, they eventually will be "eviscerated by their own expansionism." There will never be a return to democracy, he cautioned, until the unchecked power of the militarists and corporatists is dramatically curtailed. A war state cannot be a democratic state.

FDR and most of his closest advisers believed that the aim of the New Deal was to save the capitalist system from unreconstructed capitalists. Government regulation, instead of being the enemy of capitalism, was conceived as the means of saving it by promoting employment, decent wages, education, and a cushion against the cyclical swings endemic to capitalism.

In the United States the rise of an extreme and highly ideological Right was driven by an unrelenting assault on liberals, portraying them as both "hating America" and hostile to business

Once the economy appeared to be recovering, a powerful public relations campaign was mounted. The New Deal was depicted as the creature of leftist forces bent on transforming the country's economy.

Unlike scientific truths, which are cumulative and frequently superseded, archaisms are fixed, impervious to evidence. What is the doctrine of "the framers' original intent" and "constitutional originalism" but a variant of creationism and the denial of historical evolution

Another version of archaism is political and equally fundamentalist. In the narrative of the political archaist the United States was blessed with a once-and-for-all-time, fixed ideal form, an original Constitution of government created by the Founding Fathers in 1787.

Wolin wrote that even when faced with certain defeat, all of us are called to the "awful responsibility" of the fight for justice, equality and liberty.

How is it possible to have a "natural harmony" of selfish interests? Smith's answer: an "invisible hand" guided the individual selfish actor "to promote an end which was no part of his intention." "It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of society which [the individual] has in view.

The privatization of public services and functions manifests the steady evolution of corporate power into a political form, into an integral, even dominant partner with the state. It marks the transformation of American politics and its political culture, from a system in which democratic practices and values were, if not defining, at least major contributory elements, to one where the remaining democratic elements of the state and its populist programs are being systematically dismantled.

Weber's asking us to step back and say what kind of political order, and the values associated with it that it promotes, are we willing to really give a lot for, including sacrifice.

Once scientists were universally revered as exemplars of independent truth seeking, of knowledge for its own sake, but in recent years they have been accused of fraud, misrepresenting their findings, and other forms of cheating reflective of a highly competitive, market-oriented culture.

Privatization of education signifies not an abstract transfer of public to private but a takeover of the means to reshape the minds of coming generations, perhaps to blend popular education and media culture so as to better manage democracy.

The system would remain in place even if the Democratic Party attained a majority; and should that circumstance arise, the system will set tight limits to unwelcome changes, as is foreshadowed in the timidity of current Democratic proposals for reform.

He foresaw the moral and political decay that would see a culture entranced by celebrity and reality television elect Donald Trump to the presidency. He called on us, always, to resist.

One practical consideration that causes the corporationists to play along with religious zealots and political doctrinaires is that archaism helps to neutralize the power of the Many.

This contemporary version of the old struggle between "enclosure" and the "commons," between exploitation and commonality, pretty much sums up the stakes: not what new powers we can bring into the world, but what hard-won practices we can prevent from disappearing

What is at stake here is the control of public space and the power to depict, to discourage and intimidate, and ultimately to filter what is happening and being expressed at a time when technology makes filtering relatively easy.

The Cold War liberal even discovered the political utility of a civil religion. He was prepared to put aside the secularism and rationalism that, historically, had been among liberalism's defining elements and to seek validation for liberal anticommunism abroad and at home by appealing to theology, most notably that of Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realism. Niebuhr was notoriously pessimistic, subscribing to a view that stressed the dark side of human nature.

One consequence of the pursuit of an expansive power imaginary is the blurring of the lines separating reality from fancy and truth telling from self-deception and lying. In its imaginary, power is not so much justified as sanctified, excused by the lofty ends it proclaims, ends that commonly are antithetical to the power legitimated by the constitutional imaginary.

For almost a half century the new war was defined in starkly Manichaean terms, as an epical struggle for the fate of the world between totalitarian dictatorship promoting atheism and communism, and the freedom-loving, God-fearing capitalist democracy of the United States and its Western European allies.

Police control over demonstrators, combined with the media's censorship of popular protests and of third party activities, produces for inverted totalitarianism what Fascist thugs and censorship accomplished for the classic version.

Over the centuries politicians and political theorists—starting with Plato's Republic—have emphasized disinterestedness, not personal advantage, as the fundamental virtue required of those entrusted with state power.

At the same time rulers were exhorted to protect and promote the common good of society and the well-being of all of their subjects.