Latest update April 27th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 11, 2010 Editorial
Guyana is not unique in having its form of governance trenchantly questioned. In fact, such a stance would appear to be a sine qua non of democracies, which by definition are permanently works in progress. How else would they be improved, if they were not questioned?
Many of us regard the US as a bastion of democracy, but even their system has not been spared. We have been exposed to the critique of Fareed Zakaria, who adjudged the US to have become an “Illiberal Democracy”. From the other end of the political spectrum, Sheldon S. Wolin, who taught political science at Berkeley during the upheavals of the sixties and later became professor emeritus at Princeton, argues that the US is actually an “Inverted Totalitarian” state.
Obviously in favour of increased citizen participation, Wolin asserts that, “Democracy is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs.” There would be few Guyanese, we believe, that would take issue with Wolin on that score but he points out that such a democracy places much responsibility on the citizenry it demands, “a politically engaged and empowered citizenry, one that voted, deliberated, and occupied all branches of public office.”
In the absence of such involved and active citizens, “Our thesis” he warns, “is this: it is possible for a form of totalitarianism, different from the classical one, to evolve from a putatively ‘strong democracy’ instead of a ‘failed’ one.” How much easier, we have to ask, such an eventuality may be for a state in which democracy has never been allowed to take deep roots?
In the US, Wolin claims that the insidiousness of its inverted totalitarianism “lies in wielding total power without appearing to, without establishing concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual. … A demotion in the status and stature of the ‘sovereign people’ to patient subjects is symptomatic of systemic change, from democracy as a method of ‘popularizing’ power to democracy as a brand name for a product marketable at home and marketable abroad.”
This demobilisation of the populace, according to Wolin, is achieved through a variety of mechanisms that are defined as normal and modern. Chief among these is the promotion of “market fundamentalism” – the dogma that the “invisible hand” of the market should address all social interactions. In this scenario we have to accept the chips that fall as the market decides.
Advertising is the handmaiden of the market and provides the fuel for the all-pervasive reach of the propaganda machinery that is the mass media. The populace is encouraged to waste their time on frivolous pursuits such as finding out the latest gossip about manufactured “celebrities” rather than understanding why their lives are so meaningless. We may live in the age of the greatest scientific advances, but who applies the “scientific method” to analysing their own circumstances?
Wolin maintains that in this inverted totalitarian state, the social sector that is in charge of the “managed democracy” is the business/corporate class whose main goal is to increase their profits. The tip-off is the growing gap between the rich and the poor. Managed democracy aims at the “selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry” under cover of improving “efficiency” and cost-cutting. Its primary tool is privatization. Wolin argues, “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.”
When not fixated on frivolity, the people are kept so enmeshed on survival that they cannot afford to dwell on the rampant corruption and betrayal of the public trust. According to Wolin, the focus on gay marriage or violence against women is not to resolve those issues but “to divide the citizenry while obscuring class differences and diverting the voters’ attention from the social and economic concerns of the general populace.”
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