Sheldon S. Wolin begins his book with an arresting set of images. He recalls how The Triumph of the Will, directed by the well-known Nazi sympathizer Leni Riefenstahl, memorializes the 1934 rally of the National Socialist Party. Out of a dramatically overclouded and gray sky (the film is in black and white) swoops a tiny plane carrying the Fuehrer. The camera brilliantly follows the plane's movements through the clouds, as reflected in the expectant and adulatory faces of the mostly young men gathered in the enormous field below (pp. 1 ff.). On May 1, 2003, Wolin reminds us, another military plane swoops from “the sky to land on an aircraft carrier…. The leader emerges, not as a plain and democratic officeholder, but as one whose symbolic authority is antidemocratic…. He, too, has promised a triumph of the will” (pp. 1–2).

By juxtaposing Hitler's Nuremberg rally to George W. Bush's premature and fraudulent announcement of a “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, Wolin delivers students of American democracy a jab in the ribs. We are about to lose the American Republic, he argues, less because we will be overtaken by a totalitarian regime than because “a certain heedlessness, an inability to take seriously the extent to which a pattern of consequences may take shape without having been preconceived” (p. x), has spread in American public life.

“Inverted totalitarianism”—Wolin's term for these imperceptible but fateful transformations—is not, like classical totalitarianism, based on a movement or a party overtaking the state apparatus; rather, inverted totalitarianism “demobilizes” and “disaggregates” the citizenry (p. 44). Characteristic of this regime is the institutional and ideological amalgamation of the state and the corporation: The state is viewed as the “biggest” corporation and the president as its CEO. The modern business corporation becomes the model of public power as such, with the consequence that citizens are reduced to consumers manipulated by the power of private media and advertising companies, serving, in turn, mega-corporations (p. 59).

Yet such trends toward the symbiosis of corporations with representative political institutions are not at all new. Already in the late 1930s, Frankfurt School theorists Frederick Pollock and Otto Kirchheimer (see Pollock, “State Capitalism” and “Is National Socialism a New Order?” in Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, 1941, pp. 200–25 and 440–55; Kirchheimer, “Changes in the Structure of Political Compromise,” ibid., pp. 264–89) theorized the emergence of a new political formation that they designated as “state capitalism.” State capitalism, based on the symbiosis of military, political, and industrial elites and the growing interpenetration of states and markets, was characteristic not only of the Nazi state but, in its mass democratic form, of the New Deal as well. In the postwar period, Dwight Eisenhower invented the term “military-industrial complex.” Are the trends Wolin analyzes through this new term really all that unprecedented?

According to Wolin, what justifies the term “inverted totalitarianism” is that since the attacks of September 11, 2001, American politics has been captured by “the imaginary of a global permanent war” (pp. 15, 28). The Bush National Security Strategy document and its doctrine of preemptive war evoke the Nazi ideology of Lebensraum by maintaining that the world must be made safe for America, just as the Nazis argued that they had a right to secure territories in which to preserve the future of the Aryan race (p. 48). This vision of unbounded power projected onto the world not only through the deluded visions of the “new American century” but also through the “projection of power inwards” (p. xiii), in the service of destabilizing “established boundaries—political, moral, intellectual, and economic,” deserves a new term (p. xv).

Here are some characteristics of this new regime: a political economy of fear, which renders the population constantly anxious about losing jobs by subjecting them to ever-rapid technological changes in the workplace and the competition of a global workforce—the “Wal-Martization of labor” (pp. 139, 238); a diminished Bill of Rights via powers given to law-enforcement agencies through the Patriot Act (pp. 67, 108); the ideology of the unitary executive and the practice of “signing statements”; the “torture memos” that enabled the Bush administration to violate the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Camp Baghram (p. 78); the practice of the “extra-ordinary renditions” of foreign detainees to unknown locations; and, Wolin could have added, the criminalization of immigration.

Surely, though, there were historical precedents for such abuses of power, and Wolin considers them. He argues that although James Madison may have dreamed of “managed democracy” (p. 155), he could never have realized this institutionally; although Cold Warriors projected an American superpower to counterbalance the Soviet threat, they could not have countenanced the idea of a sole global superpower; and although republican elitism and democratic enfranchisement were in a tug of war throughout American history, the Puritan elect of the Bay Colony would hardly be able to recognize themselves in the new Evangelical Elites of the Republican Party. Though such trends existed throughout American history, it is the unique combination of political, social, economic, and cultural forces since September 11 under the Bush administration that has given rise to inverted totalitarianism. One of the most successful parts of Democracy Incorporated is its account of the intertwining of fundamentalist faith and blind belief in technology with the ideology of the marketplace, which Wolin calls “the dynamics of the arachaic” (p. 115). Caught in the whirlwind of changes in jobs, houses, partners, and family members, ordinary American citizens have faith in the Bible and Revelation but reject the findings of the sciences concerning stem cell research, homosexuality, evolution, and other issues.

Some readers will not get past the ideological overtones of inverted totalitarianism, but this would be a great mistake. Others will point to President Barack Obama's election and claim that Wolin projected his despair about dismal American politics during the Bush years prematurely into a theory of a new regime type. They would be only half-wrong. Although the book was published in early 2008, it probably went to press in early 2007, and many developments—such as Supreme Court decisions concerning the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, Donald Rumsfeld's resignation, the removal of Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith from office in the last stages of the administration of George W. Bush, and the formation of a new government in Iraq—are not mentioned. However, Wolin challenges readers by claiming that even with a Democratic victory, the trends he has depicted will not disappear (p. 274).

Indeed, the bailing out of Wall Street, big banks, and auto companies starting in the fall of 2008 shows that the polity and the economy, states and markets, are intimately intertwined. Yet state power is distinct from private corporate power even if it acts to serve the latter. Wolin merges the two all too seamlessly into one. The question today is not whether there can be markets without states but to what ends state power will be exercised: to save capitalism from itself or to advance social justice and to assist those who are losing not only their jobs at astronomic rates but their homes as well, and with their homes, the roots of democratic self-governance—namely, a coherent sense of place and locality.

“Inverted totalitarianism” is an infelicitous phrase. But my quarrel with Wolin concerns less his phraseology than his methodology. There are no agents of resistance in this work; power does not seem to generate resistance and counterpower. No transformative social movements receive so much as a nod in this book (the Berkeley Free Speech movement of four decades ago receives one mention.) There are no women's movements, no ecology movements, no civil libertarian and immigrants' rights movements, no global justice movements. Agency is always on the part of the military-industrial complex, which steamrollers everything in its path. Complex institutional actors, such as state bureaucracies with their internecine struggles and competitions, and civil society actors, such as women's groups and civil rights associations, are hardly given any role in this story. Despite Wolin's lucid analysis of the dialectics of fundamentalist faith and free market ideologies, the rest of his diagnosis is remarkably undialectical. Like that of the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists—Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Frederick Pollock, Herbert Marcuse—Wolin's world, too, I am afraid, is “one-dimensional” (Marcuse).

I share many of the author's concerns about the future of the American Republic. But I also believe that pious evocations of the power of democracy without some indication of who the agents of democratic transformation are or can be are inadequate. This is not only a matter of 20-20 hindsight after President Obama's election, nor is it a matter of pessimism versus optimism; rather, it is a question of complex social analysis in the service of normative political theory. Already in 1981, nearly three decades ago, Wolin was arguing that the democratic, Jeffersonian tradition in the United States had lost out to the Hamiltonian, business-friendly, centralizing, and ultimately antiparticipatory forces. “The present constitution of power, and the social contract that legitimates it,” he wrote, “has produced the present deepening crisis. The crisis consists of two interrelated parts: the unprecedented magnitude of power at the disposal of the American state and the peculiarly abstract quality of it” (“The People's Two Bodies,” in Democracy: A Journal of Political Renewal and Radical Change 1 [1981]: 9–24; here p. 24). Wolin's terminology has changed, but not his assessment of the tendencies and ills of American history and polity.

In 1981, Wolin was ready to call for “a long revolution,” (ibid., p. 24). In Democracy Incorporated, such hopes have all but disappeared, but prospects of a “fugitive democracy,” which comes alive in those very rare moments when a people seizes the democratic power, which rightfully belong to it, are still invoked. Nevertheless, his social theory cannot carry the burden of his normative theory of politics, and without such an analysis, this book reads like another jeremiad in the great American tradition. This is quite an achievement, but it is also misleading about the transformative potentials of our world.