http://www.tikkun.org/...
The Anatomy of American Governance.
Sheldon Wolin's ( see link below ) overarching thesis is that America's national political order has evolved into what he calls an inverted totalitarianism. Unlike the top-down dictatorships of a Stalin or a Hitler, America's form of "totalism" is rooted in an interdependent "copartnership" of corporation and state that, like any individual corporation, is hierarchically structured and headed by a strong executive (the President). Both the corporate and state components of this amalgamated enterprise are managed by policy-makers and administrators who, in many cases, are the product of privileged backgrounds, a system of elite university training, and professional connections that Wolin describes as "self-validating" and "self-perpetuating."
Update 1
thank you for the excellent suggestions to change title of this diary
Wolin identifies this managerial class as "the elites." They are the proverbial Best and Brightest who shape the decisions and oversee the operations of America's defining institutions: among them, the federal government, business corporations, financial institutions, the mass media, the major political parties, corporate law firms, think tanks, religious organizations, and the various commercial channels of American popular culture.
It can be inferred from Wolin's text that the elites represent two special challenges for American democracy. The first is that, because they gain their experience and understanding of life in privileged circumstances and in conjunction with power and influence, they tend to carry out their responsibilities with little or no regard for the concerns and needs of ordinary Americans. Instead, their focus ¾ sharpened by the potential for great monetary reward and/or personal prestige ¾ is fixed on the goals of maximizing the profits and/or influence of their organization, and, in the case of business corporations, of strengthening the power of the state to help them consolidate and expand global markets.
The second challenge presented by the elites is that, although they run pretty much the entire show of American economic and military power, they are largely insulated from popular influence. One reason for this is the barriers imposed by what Wolin describes as "managed democracy" ¾ an arrangement, to be more fully explained in the following section ¾ in which democracy is systematized in a way that effectively suppresses citizen participation. Another reason the elites are insulated, in Wolin's view, is that the American public as a whole has little or no awareness of itself as a political counterforce; it appears, instead, to be either oblivious of, or apathetic toward, the distancing of government policy from its own needs and concerns. We can guess that at least one reason for this is the common popular belief that, despite recurrent historical evidence to the contrary, the complex decision-making required in national governance is best left exclusively to those who have demonstrated their superior capacity by dint of advanced degrees from elite universities. A major point in Wolin's book is that this perspective must be reversed. In order to reorient government to a concern for the common good, he believes, ordinary people must organize themselves as a conscious counter-elite that makes its own voice heard.
Democracy Incorporated:
Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism
by Sheldon S. Wolin
http://press.princeton.edu/...
Sheldon S. Wolin is professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University. His books include Politics and Vision and Tocqueville between Two Worlds (both Princeton).
Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come.
Reviews:
"If democracy means more than occasional elections and protection of those rights that are compatible with economic and political elites' interests, Wolin's analysis of our democratic predicament is shocking, solid, and fundamentally correct."--C.P. Waligorski, Choice
"Of the many books I've read or skimmed in the past seven years that attempted to get inside the social and political debacles of the present, none has had the chilling clarity and historical discernment of Sheldon S. Wolin's Democracy Incorporated. Building on his fifty years as a political theorist and proponent of radical democracy, Wolin here extends his concern with the extinguishing of the political and its replacement by fraudulent simulations of democratic process."--Jonathan Crary, Artforum