The concept is also related to semi-democracy, also known as anocracy. Such hybrid regimes are legitimized by elections that are free and fair, but do not change the state's policies, motives, and goals. Now with a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges, Democracy Incorporated remains an essential work for understanding the state of democracy in America.Guided democracy, also called managed democracy, is a formally democratic government that functions as a de facto authoritarian government or in some cases, as an autocratic government. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level.ĭemocracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive-and where elites are eager to keep them that way.
But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"? Democracy is struggling in America-by now this statement is almost cliché.
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