THE POSTDEMOCRATIC SYSTEM

Eugene Halton, The Great Brain Suck and Other American Epiphanies (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2008) (From "The Great Brain Suck": "Just as Vaclav Havel depicted the ascendance of the post totalitarian system in communist countries after Stalin's death, we have the coming to being what could be termed the postdemocratic system in America. By posttotalitarian he meant that totalitarianism for from bring over, had entered a new phase, shifting form the cult of personality characterizing the first generation to totalitarianism--with Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Ataturk--to a system running on virtual automatic pilot. Similarly, by post democratic system I mean a society that has lost it grounded democratic processes--ranging from vital neighborhood institutions to national political culture--in favor of the 'automatic pilot' of media, commercial, and celebrity requirements."  Id. at 1, 7. From "Out of the Fifties": "Fundable social science also bloomed in this era, riding the prosperity and the scientific ideal that survey research could replace mere social critique. Today the commodification of scholarship in the academy is so debased that departments actually list the ability to procure money as a consideration in hiring someone. Universities hold amounts of monies and grants as ideals for researchers to pursue, even humanities scholars, and corporate bureaucratic structures have become models that universities increasingly emulate. What a far cry from 'The American Scholar,' who is, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it: 'In the right state he is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.' Surely the elevation of procuring money to a virtue of scholarship represents the 'degenerate state' signaled by Emerson, not only for militarized scientific research but also the corporatized models of 'intellectual life' in general." Id. at 43, 46. From "Communicating Democracy: Or Shine, Perishing Republic": "American politics, and perhaps American culture more generally, seems to have become dislocated to the concept of the empty symbol, which mirrors back to the individual only what the individual will want to see. The empty symbol, as politicians use it, is perhaps similar to a technique in psychotherapy associated with Carl Rogers in which the therapist repeats the patient's statements as if saying something new, thereby prompting the patient to continue without having to take the lead. Similarly, if less empathically, the empty symbolist is one who attempts to signify anything while saying nothing. This is a smiling politics, the feel-good politics of Ronald Reagan, the sound bite and flag politics of the George Bushes, the politics that prevented Michael Dukakis from admitting he was a liberal in the 1988 presidential election and got Clinton to bypass it completely. It is a politics of entertainment, cynicism, and kitsch." Id. at 112, 114. From "The Art and Craft of Home": "As Tom Litton, an owner of a storage facility and representative of the industry, pointed out in an NPR radio interview we did on 'Storing the Self,' many people are living in larger homes yet still have so much stuff they need to parcel it out to storage facilities. Glut is a growing reason to store things in an America undergoing an obesity epidemic and what might be called a 'stuff epidemic.' Between 2001 and 2005 new storage in self-storage facilities increased by 36 percent, and whereas it took twenty-five years to build the first billion square feet of storage space between 1973 and 1998, it only took eight years to build the second billion square feet between 1998 and 2005. Americans are adrift in a Tsunami of stuff, unable to discard it or stop buying more of it." Id. at 206, 216.).