Politically, as well as socially and economically, inverted totalitarianism is best understood as imperialist and hence as a postdemocratic or, better, post-social democratic phenomenon. It is marked by an expansion of the horizons and ambitions of the governing classes and an accompanying increase in the instruments of power, private as well as public, as well as by a decline in demotic power both in its instruments of governance (political democracy) and in its socioeconomic supports (social democracy).

—Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 194.

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