A review by tsharris
Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism by Sheldon S. Wolin

2.0

I really wanted to like this book, but in all honesty it was a slog to the very end. It was incredibly repetitive, laden with footnotes to newspaper articles and glib references — it would have been much better as a long magazine article (which it may well have been originally). I also think Wolin was too focused on coining phrases than on providing coherent analysis. That said, I agree with his fundamental thesis: American democracy is increasingly "managed democracy." Citizens are encouraged to be apathetic or distracted or otherwise disengaged from political life, elites are pretty much capable of doing whatever they want between elections (and are rarely if ever punished when they screw up), and there is little daylight between big business and government, even after the Great Recession. His argument that this is somehow a new system of government is undermined by his extensive discussion of the anti-democratic tendencies of the American Founding. If anything, he has shown how tension between democracy and republicanism fluctuates over time, and that we're in a particularly strong republican (or anti-democratic) period. The question is whether the American people are capable of pushing back against republican elitism — that could be what's different about the present, unfortunately. Another problem is that I think Wolin mistakenly attributes far too much intentionality to the emergence of "managed democracy," to the extent that his account verges on conspiracy theory. Even if the system functions as Wolin describes, it is another matter entirely to attribute the system to the intentions of scheming elites.