Totalitarian democracy is a term popularized by Israeli historian Jacob Leib Talmon to refer to a system of government in which lawfully elected representatives maintain a nation state whose citizens, while granted the right to vote, have little or no participation in the decision-making process of the government.[1] This idea that there is one true way for a society to be organized and a government should get there at all costs stands in contrast to liberal democracy which trusts the process of democracy to, through trial and error, help a society improve without there being only one correct way to self-govern.[1] Totalitarian democracy is equivalent to electoral autocracy.[citation needed]
J. L. Talmon's 1952 book The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy discusses the transformation of a state in which traditional values and articles of faith shape the role of government into one in which social utility takes absolute precedence. His work is a criticism of the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose political philosophy greatly influenced the French Revolution, the growth of the Enlightenment across Europe, as well the overall development of modern political and educational thought. In The Social Contract, Rousseau contends that the interests of the individual and the state are one and the same, and it is the state's responsibility to implement the "general will".
The political neologismmessianic democracy (also political Messianism)[6] also derives from Talmon's introduction to this work:[1]
Indeed, from the vantage point of the mid twentieth century the history of the last hundred and fifty years looks like a systematic preparation for the headlong collision between empirical and liberal democracy on the one hand, and totalitarian Messianic democracy on the other, in which the world crisis of to-day consists.
Engdahl, Wolin and Žižek
Engdahl and Wolin add some new dimensions to the analysis of totalitarianism.
In his 2009 book Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy and the New World Order, Engdahl portrays America as driving to achieve global hegemony through military and economic means. According to him, U.S. state objectives have led to internal conditions that resemble totalitarianism: "[it is] 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"[7]
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, [inverted totalitarianism] 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.[8]
Elsewhere, in a 2003 article entitled "Inverted Totalitarianism"[9] 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, he argues, is explicit through the media, and implicit through the privatization of the university. Furthermore, he contends that many political think-tanks have abetted this process by spreading conservative ideology. Wolin states: "[With] 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."[9]
Slavoj Žižek, in his 2002 book of essays Welcome to the Desert of the Real, comes to similar conclusions. Here he argues that the war on terror served as a justification for the suspension of civil liberties in the US, 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, he argues, they are failing as sites of political agency.[10]
^Carr, Edward Hallett. The Soviet Impact on the Western World. New York: MacMillan Company, 1947.
^Engdahl, F. William. Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. Boxboro, MA: Third Millennium Press, 2009, ISBN978-0-9795608-6-6.
^Wolin, Sheldon S. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
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