inverted totalitarianism and managed democracy

Basically, the tension between the interest of the republic and its citizens (which Jefferson felt should be primary), and the financial interests of business and corporations (Hamilton’s ideal) has swung far too far to the interests of corporations and their billionaire owners at the expense of the general population. Corporate-public partnerships that have become so trendy have another name, it is fascism- the political science term for the fusion of the interests of corporations and the state. The corporatists have infiltrated all three branches of government, and it is up to us, the people, to take control back. Regulatory capture by corporate interests runs rampant throughout our politics, governmental agencies and institutes. Furthermore, the perversion of science and medicine by corporate interests is expanding its reach it is pernicious and intractable. The corruption of political systems by global corporatists has filtered down to our science, medicine and healthcare systems and must be exposed. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror.Because science, medicine and politics are three threads woven into the same cloth of public policy, we have to work to fix all three simultaneously. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies.

At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. At best the nation has become a 'managed democracy' where the public is shepherded, not sovereign.

But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms 'inverted totalitarianism'? Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive-and where elites are eager to keep them that way.

Summary: Democracy is struggling in America-by now this statement is almost cliché.

Inverted totalitarianism and managed democracy