Totalitarian democracy is a dictatorship based on the mass enthusiasm generated by a perfectionist ideology. The conflict between the state and the individual should not exist in a totalitarian democracy, and in the event of such a conflict, the state has the moral duty to coerce the individual to obey. This idea that there is one true way for a society to be organized and a government should get there at all costs stands in contrast to liberal democracy, which trusts the process of democracy to, through trial and error, help a society improve without there being only one correct way to self-govern.
Etymology
The term was popularized by Israeli historian Jacob Leib Talmon. and E. H. Carr, and subsequently by F. William Engdahl and Sheldon S. Wolin.
Definition
In his 1952 book The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, Talmon argued that the totalitarian and liberal types of democracy emerged from the same premises during the eighteenth century. He regarded the conflict between these two types of democracy as of world-historical importance:
:Indeed, from the vantage point of the mid-twentieth century the history of the last hundred and fifty years looks like a systematic preparation for the headlong collision between empirical and liberal democracy on the one hand, and totalitarian Messianic democracy on the other, in which the world crisis of to-day consists.
The political neologism messianic democracy<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA--> (also political messianism<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA-->) also derives from Talmon's introduction to this work.
Differences with liberal democracy
Talmon identified the following differences between totalitarian and liberal democracy:
Wolin, too, analyzes the symbiosis of business and public interests that emerged in the Cold War to form the tendency of what he calls "inverted totalitarianism":
<blockquote>While exploiting the authority and resources of the state, [inverted totalitarianism] gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of "private" governance represented by the modern business corporation. The result is not a system of codetermination by equal partners who retain their respective identities but rather a system that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power.</blockquote>
Elsewhere, in a 2003 article entitled "Inverted Totalitarianism" Wolin cites phenomena such as the lack of involvement of citizens in a narrow political framework (due to the influence of money), the privatization of social security, and massive increases in military spending and spending on surveillance as examples of the push away from public and towards private-controlled government. Corporate influence, he argues, is explicit through the media, and implicit through the privatization of the university. Furthermore, he contends that many political think-tanks have abetted this process by spreading conservative ideology. Wolin states: "[With] the elements all in place...what is at stake, then, is nothing less than the attempted transformation of a tolerably free society into a variant of the extreme regimes of the past century."
See also
- Anti-democratic thought
- Authoritarianism
- Autocracy
- Dictatorship of the proletariat
- Guided democracy
- Illiberal democracy
- Outline of democracy
- People's democratic dictatorship
- Post-democracy
- Soft despotism
- Sovereign democracy
- Tyranny of the majority