By Mark Taliano
Sheldon S. Wolin, in his book Managed Democracy And The Specter Of Inverted Totalitarianism offers some particularly powerful points that resonate in Canada’s current political environment.
Voter management, (which is particularly timely with the current electoral fraud controversy) is a form of “managed democracy”. It occurs not only when illegal voter suppression tactics are used, but also with the time-honored propaganda technique of repeating slogans.
When a slogan is constantly repeated, people make the assumption that it is correct, even though the assumption necessarily isn’t based upon evidence. An example of this would be the repetition of the “corporate tax cuts” slogan. Evidence shows that these cuts are not producing results, but people assume the opposite because they are bombarded with the message.
Political parties and their corporate allies are particularly well-versed in diverting the public’s attention with non-substantive issues, and this, too, serves to manage the demos. If a potential voter can name Kim Kardashian’s sister, and describe what she wore (or didn’t wear) at the beach, then the voter has been diverted from substantive issues by inconsequential issues, and this is what politicians prefer. Television is particularly proficient at diverting the public’s attention and creating a politically passive, easily managed, electorate.
The harassment of citizen’s groups and the vilification of dissent has reached epic proportions with our current government. Today’s pervasive anti-social, anti-public political ideologies fortify themselves by demonizing pro-public, pro-social ideologies as being “socialist”. The incorrect inference that socialism is somehow a blood relative of communism strengthens the vilification, even though it is a baseless inference. Such vilification is a time-honored tactic of totalitarian regimes.
Corporate lobbying also serves to manage (and exploit) the public. Corporations spend $25 billion a year (Democracy WatchCanada) to lobby the government and thereby fortify their positions. Governments are invariably influenced by these pervasive lobbies, but the claim that the lobby interests necessarily represent the interests of society is mistaken. The tobacco lobby, for example, did not serve the public good through its disinformation campaign about the health effects of smoking. More recently, the disinformation campaign which denies human-caused global warming is not serving the public good either. The current mania to suppress, distort, and/or deny scientific findings serves short-term corporate and political interests, but not long term public interests.
George Orwell’s assertion that “during times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act” is particularly relevant today. The danger we are facing is that this so-called “management” of “democracy” is leading us inexorably towards a state that Wolin refers to as “inverted totalitarianism”.
An awareness of these assaults on our democracy is a powerful first step in protecting our freedoms.
Mark Taliano is a Niagara resident and a frequent contributor of posts to Niagara At Large.
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The premise of your argument is interesting. Conflating plain ole advertizing with corporate advocacy sure makes the numbers look big. I think even you will agree that ads for deals in the vegetable aisle are not all that sinister. And one of the best known users of “repeating slogans” is David Suzuki. The lines are not as clear as you would like to suggest.
Much noise about voter management … yet “managed democracy” is an oxymoron like “military intelligence”. There is no such thing. What is in plain view to most people is the acolytes of crony-statistism on one side and anti-establishment zealots on the other, shouting at each other from ideological fortresses.
And the vast majority is not paying attention … they don’t see the issues as personal, leaving little reason to engage. They beaver away at their lives, tuning out the noise, disenfranchising themselves in the process, and just maybe that is the end-game. You are quite right that “reality” TV has unashamedly become the contemporary version of “bread and games for the masses”.
Although I’m a pro-union environmentalist in the clean technology field, I don’t agree with the whole CO2 as the work of the devil syndrome. I don’t buy into banning chlorine. Gwynne Dyer is a very smart man, but just as wrong today about planetary sustainability as Malthus was wrong in the 1700s. I don’t smoke for my own reasons, but if people want to smoke, let them … with the caveat that they forfeit their state paid health care. Why should we pay for the life-style choices of others? By the same token, who authorized the state to dictate these choices? My kids are not wards of the state, and I don’t need some smarmy elitist telling me how to raise them. But that’s just details, and no corporate lobbyist needed to brainwash me. Certain fundamentals just make sense.
As explained in an earlier posting, what we have is the shedding of the “demos” (people) from “democracy”, leaving behind only “kratos” (power). Call for outrage over the disposition of “kratos” is just too late. That ship has sailed, rats and all. If you want to know where-in resides “kratos”, just walk into any post office, passport office, the NHS, the HRC, the “Ministry of Anything” below the level of Deputy Minister, and so on.
With great sadness one must conclude that for the most part our current elected officials are just window-dressing. They lack the training to “govern”. They have long ago abdicated their authority to an unelected unaccountable bureaucracy. And so in Canada, the US and to an alarming degree Europe, what we have are populations that are under-governed and over-regulated.
Nothing symbolizes the consolidation of “kratos” in the hands of the state more than Carswell’s 3600 page “pocket edition” of Ontario Provincial Offences listing in excess of 600,000 regulations. We in Ontario have moved from the prescient fiction of Orwell to the reality according to Carswell.
As to corporate messages of advocacy, my take is that except for policy wonks and the gullible for the most part they fall on deaf ears.
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Haven’t we heard this diatribe before?
This type of rhetoric has always raised questions as to what has happened to so many who followed the socialist ideology into some of the world’s greatest modern failures.
Nicolae Ceausescu Spouted this same ideology along with so many other socialist leaders. There is no doubt that there are many today that would applaud this very same article.
Again I will point to: http://www.persnicketiness.net/nwc/nwc1107full/index.html pages 6/7
Please understand that Ceausescu considered himself as a socialist. His socialist ideology ruined a brilliant country that had everything other nations could only hope for. Now the remnants of the Ceausescu regime are doing their best to impede progress on the basis that it does not fit into their failed ideology.
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Your observation about “political parties and their corporate allies” suggests that centrist and right of centre parties have an exclusive on this tactic. Sorry to burst your bubble but left of centre and green hued parties employ precisely the same tactics, but have huge public service unions and the environmental lobbyists as their stablemates.
Most people don’t want to be outraged all the time because they’re just to busy. We’ll leave that to the self appointed Jeremiah’s.
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Chris, the ship hasn’t sailed. The demos can and are making a difference.
Our federal government is unprecendented in its corruption (more on that later), and as freedom/democracy loving Canadians, we have an obligation to reject cynicism and passivity and to proactively try to make positive changes.
Some commentators are still conflating the rising power of the demos with communism, but that’s their issue, not mine.Totalitarians love to play that game.
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Mark, do you think that the USSR (Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics) was at all Totalitarian? They acknowedged that they sure weren’t communist.
In very few years, Stalin and Mao each killed more people than Hitler, and many more than the evils of the French, German, Portugueses, British, or American empires did in decades. (The Spanish may have killed more over centuries?)
Freedom needs protecting from power-hungry elites everywhere, regardless of political stripe.
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I agree totally with Mark…as I usually do.
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Isn’t it interesting that the writer of the article follows up with comments suggesting that only socialists appreciate the efforts of demos and that only the left are freedom/democracy loving Canadians? Citizens of all stripes care deeply about demos that attempt to move our society forward!
The key is ‘to move our society forward’. The key is not to conclude that every demo is to benefit our society as a whole and not simply for political and/or self-interest.
Before stating that our federal government is UNPRECEDENTED in its corruption may I suggest a look at the preceding Liberal regime or even even the currrent Ontario Liberals or to suggest reading Stevie Cameron’s book ‘On The Take’ Crime, corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years?
What is this writer’s issue other that beating the drum for socialism? Would the writer of the post be saying the same things about Unions if the government was socialist? Is there any chance that he might recognize ‘totalitarians’ if the government were socialist and supported by their union allies?
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Stalin was a right wing, totalitarian murderous dictator. To conflate Stalin with freedom loving Candians who object to a current political environment that is heading dangerously towards inverted totalitarianism is blindness.
Our current federal government has the dubious honor of being the ONLY Candian government EVER to have been found guilty of contempt of parliament. That is unprecedented. More on this later ….
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What an interesting new way to view politics, Mark!
‘Right wing’ = Dictatorship
‘Left wing’ = Democratic
(Not the traditional Individual vs State ownership divide.)
By that measure, is Thomas Mulcair also on the ‘Right’?
Is he a Democrat . . . or a Dictator like Harper?
Both Mulcair and Harper began their leaderships by refusing to talk to the press. Very strange bedfellows.
PS. Conflation is a two-way street.
PPS. What’s your other new term mean, ‘inverted totalitarianism’? Bottom-up democracy? Mob rule? Or . . . ? Please define it.
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“Our current federal government has the dubious honor of being the ONLY Candian government EVER to have been found guilty of contempt of parliament. ”
I can’t wait. I wonder if while commenting on this this you will have enough objectivity to examine the political reality of a minority government, the likes of which we have not seen since Confederation. Minorities make governments do peculiar things such as “No Carbon Tax”, Julia Gillard Labour Prime Minister in Australia. Political survival meant kowtowing to a couple of Green MP’s and voila Australia now has a carbon tax. Is Julia a liar or just a political opportunist? Is she contemptuous of the Australian electorate? Probably not from your perspective because in that case it fits your ideology so lying is okay.
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Electoral fraud is a crime, whereas what Julia Gillard did or did not do is not a crime, so it isn’t a fair comparison.
That being said, maybe she had an epiphany and finally figured out that the Greens are right and there should be a carbon tax. Climate scientist Andrew Weaver asserts that “We will live or die by our future consumption of coal.” The atmosphere should not be considered an “unregulated dumping ground”, so a carbon tax helps to regulate it. Unfortunately, coal is still relatively cheap, so a tax will provide a disincentive to using it, and an incentive to using alternate energies. As per David Suzuki, coal should be “consigned to history’s coal bin”.
As for the dangers of using coal (and 18% of Canada’s electricity still comes from coal), that would require more space …
It looks like the minority government in Australia served the public well in this case.
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Lorne, the phrase “inverted totalitarianism” belongs to Sheldon Wolin.
When the “demos” is managed to the extreme (electoral fraud, propaganda, diversion tactics, harassment of citizen’s groups, undo influence of corporate lobbies, muzzling of science …) it approaches the state of “totalitarianism” in the sense that the demos is controlled, manipulated, exploited, to suit the needs of the ruling oligarchs. It’s not overt totalitarianism like Hitler’s Regime etc., it’s more subversive and hidden.
If we allow issues such as electoral fraud to be swept under the carpet without a Public Inquiry, we risk losing democracy in increments. If our democratic deficits become large enough, we run the risk of being in a regime of “inverted totalitarianism”. The U.S is closer to this state than we are, but we’re catching up.
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Corporate Lobbying:
http://www.operationmaple.com/big-business/the-power-of-lobbying-in-canada
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Muzzling scientists:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16861468
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