Politics and the triumph of the will

When truth thwarts ambition, the powerful simply create their own reality, says ronan bennett

Skim your credit card into the politics section of any Charing Cross Road bookshop and the chances are it will bounce off a pile of glossy titles that will tell you more than you need to know about contraceptive equipment at Balmoral or the secret shame of a bulimic deputy prime minister.

The same card tossed into a bookstore in New York or Washington would likely come to rest on a tome dissecting the paradox of the affluent society or even the end of history itself. Big country, big ideas.

The latest big idea is "inverted totalitarianism" and it comes courtesy of Sheldon S Wolin, professor emeritus of politics at Princeton. Wolin argues that American democracy is on the verge of extinction, stifled by an ideologically charged convergence of big business and big government.

Fear is the key, driving people into the arms of politicians who no longer bother to conceal their contempt for participatory democracy. "The fear that is so prevalent in the country," Wolin cites an unnamed pundit as saying after 9/11, "[worked as] a cleanser, washing away a lot of the self-indulgence of the past decade." Not just of the past decade: a frontal assault on the remains of the Roosevelt New Deal was enabled the day the twin towers collapsed.

Just as in Weimar Germany, a new breed of politician has emerged from the smoke and dust. These are not run-of-the-mill jobbing placemen but men and women with a totalitarian credo that reduces politics to a matter of will, to "a determination to master the uses of power and to deploy them to reconstitute reality". "We're an empire now," a (frustratingly unnamed) "high level administration official" is quoted as saying. "We create our own reality."

This is surely what it is all about - the powerful creating their own realities when their ambitions are frustrated by the facts.