Several passages jump out as disagreeable.
“Unlike the Nazis, who made life uncertain for the wealthy and privileged while providing social programs for the working class and poor, inverted totalitarianism exploits the poor, reducing or weakening health programs and social services, regimenting mass education for an insecure workforce threatened by the importation of low-wage workers,” Wolin writes. “Employment in a high-tech, volatile, and globalized economy is normally as precarious as during an old-fashioned depression. The result is that citizenship, or what remains of it, is practiced amidst a continuing state of worry. Hobbeshad it right: when citizens are insecure and at the same time driven by competitive aspirations, they yearn for political stability rather than civic engagement, protection rather than political involvement.”
So if the social welfare net gets reduced that's "exploitation." And "totalitarianism" is when workers are not being shielded from competition.
I didn't read it as reducing social welfare is exploitation, rather in context of the entirely of the passage. Health care for example has eroded as a byproduct of cost for example. You have folks on medicare that cant afford medication for example and the purveyors of that system wont negotiate that cost at the benefit of corporations and their lobbyists. "regimenting mass education for an insecure workforce threatened by the importation of low-wage workers" I think lays out fairly well what he meant in the context of
competition.
Inverted totalitarianism also “perpetuates politics all the time,” Wolin said when we spoke, “but a politics that is not political.” The endless and extravagant election cycles, he said, are an example of politics without politics.
This paragraph is meaningless bullshit.
No one is tying people to a chair and forcing them to watch political analysis. You cant use modern technology without being inundated with it either. I think we as a society have less free will than we think https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-free-will-an-illusion/
And so on. I could cite many more things from the article but those two give a sense of why I think the entire thing is crap. The entire article is just a series of pet peeves being expressed by an older person who might as well be saying "keep off my lawn." It's generic enough to not be objectionable sounding on its face but doesn't hold up to any significant scrutiny, just stuff that's intended to reinforce the misgivings of a reader about how politics is sometimes messy and doesn't result in the "proper" choice.
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