Editing Totalitarian democracy (section)

== Further interpretations ==
Engdahl and Wolin have added some new dimensions to the analysis of totalitarian democracy. 

In his 2009 book ''Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy and the New World Order,'' Engdahl portrays America as driving to achieve global [[hegemony]] through military and economic means. According to him, U.S. state objectives have led to internal conditions that resemble totalitarianism: "[it is] a power establishment that over the course of the [[Cold War]] has spun out of control and now threatens not only the fundamental institutions of democracy, but even of life on the planet through the growing risk of [[nuclear war]] by miscalculation"<ref>Engdahl, ''Full Spectrum Dominance,'' 2009, pg. viii.</ref>

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]].<ref>Wolin, ''Democracy Incorporated,'' pg. xxi.</ref></blockquote>

Elsewhere, in a 2003 article entitled "Inverted Totalitarianism"<ref name=":1">Wolin, Sheldon S. [http://www.thenation.com/article/inverted-totalitarianism "Inverted Totalitarianism"]. ''The Nation'' magazine, May 19th, 2003.</ref> 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."<ref name=":1" />

[[Slavoj Žižek]], in his 2002 book of essays ''[[Welcome to the Desert of the Real]]'', comes to similar conclusions. He argues that the [[war on terror]] served as a justification for the suspension of civil liberties in the US, while the promise of democracy and freedom was spread abroad as the justification for invading [[Iraq]] and [[Afghanistan]]. Since Western democracies are always justifying [[state of exception|states of exception]], he argues, they are failing as sites of political agency.<ref>Žižek, Slavoj. ''Welcome to the Desert of the Real'', London and New York: Verso, 2002</ref>