American Culture - i need help answering a question

[Sonic]

‎"The genius of our inverted totalitari­an system "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. The new system, inverted totalitari­anism, is one that professes the opposite of what, in fact, it is. The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed­."

Among the factors that have promoted inverted totalitarianism are

• the practice and psychology of advertising
• the rule of “market forces” in many other contexts than markets
• the penetration of mass media communication and propaganda into every household in the country
• the total co-optation of the universities
• political fanatacism/fables
• the idea of everyone's personal indebtedness to the higher powers

Among the commonplace fables of our society are hero worship and tales of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, action measured in nanoseconds, and a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose adepts are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge. Masters of this world are masters of images and their manipulation.'

The main social sectors promoting and reinforcing this modern Shangri-La are corporate power, which is in charge of managed democracy, and the military-industrial complex, which is in charge of Superpower. The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy. Its primary tool is privatization. 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.

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. It marks the transformation of American politics and its political culture from a system in which democratic practices and values were, if not defining, at least major contributing elements, to one where the remaining democratic elements of the state and its populist programs are being systematically dismantled.” This campaign has largely succeeded. “Democracy represented a challenge to the status quo, today it has become adjusted to the status quo.”

One other subordinate task of managed democracy is to keep the citizenry preoccupied with peripheral and/or private conditions of human life so that they fail to focus on the widespread corruption and betrayal of the public trust. In Wolin’s words, “The point about disputes on such topics as

• the value of sexual abstinence
• the role of religious charities in state-funded activities
• the question of gay marriage
• the morality of capital punishment and/or drug laws/enforcement

and the like, is that they are not framed to be resolved. Their political function is to divide the citizenry while obscuring class differences and diverting the voters’ attention from the social and economic concerns of the general populace.” Prominent examples of the elite use of such incidents to divide and inflame the public are the Terri Schiavo case of 2005

On inverted totalitarianism’s “self-pacifying” university campuses compared with the usual intellectual turmoil surrounding independent centers of learning, Wolin writes, “Through a combination of

• governmental contracts
  
• corporate and foundation funds
  
• joint projects involving university and corporate researchers
  
• wealthy individual donors
  

universities (especially so-called research universities), intellectuals, scholars, and researchers have been seamlessly integrated into the system. No books burned, no refugee Einsteins. For the first time in the history of American higher education top professors are made wealthy by the system'

Wolin reminds us that the image of Adolf Hitler flying to Nuremberg in 1934 that opens Leni Riefenstahl’s classic film “Triumph of the Will” was repeated on May 1, 2003 during Bush's flight to proclaim "Mission Accomplished" (The U.S. military spends more than all other militaries on Earth combined. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion; the next closest national military budget is China’s at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.)