Gabriel Schoenfeld writes:

In the three months since Russia began its war of aggression, the character of the country has been changing before our eyes. Its much-vaunted military has been exposed as not only weak, disorganized, and corrupt, but also criminal, engaging in pillaging and the torture and mass slaughter of unarmed Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war. Resorting to a practice not seen since the Stalin era, Vladimir Putin’s government has also been deporting captured Ukrainians, apparently by the hundreds of thousands, to distant portions of Russia, first passing them through “filtration” camps where prisoners are interrogated for nationalist leanings and selected out for punishment. The Russian judicial system has been mobilized to crack down on dissent against the war; among other things, it is a crime punishable by up to 15 years in a labor camp to refer to it as anything but a “special military operation.” To the extent that there were independent media before the war, they have been shut down and the only voices now in print or on the air are official propaganda. Access to independent news sources on the internet has also been sharply restricted. In sum, Russia has taken a number of steps back toward the repression of the Soviet era.

But as draconian as these various measures all are, Russia is not yet properly called “totalitarian” as it rightly was during the reign of Joseph Stalin or even much of the Leonid Brezhnev era. About a century ago, Benito Mussolini called fascist Italy a “totalitarian state,” a concept that he defined with brilliant clarity: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” But whether the label of totalitarian actually applies to Mussolini-era Italian fascism, or, again, to Putin’s Russia today, is open to serious question. All-encompassing statism was more of an aspiration than an Italian accomplishment. Even the more thoroughgoing oppression of Nazi Germany did not quite fit the totalitarian model, at least according to the criteria set forth by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carl Friedrich in their influential 1956 volume, “Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy.”

To Brzezinski and Friedrich, totalitarian rule was an extreme form of authoritarianism possessing six characteristics: an all-encompassing ideology, a single party, a terroristic police, a communications monopoly, a weapons monopoly and a centrally directed economy. All six were necessary to fit the bill of totalitarian. Absent one, and the definition was not fulfilled. Stalin’s Soviet Union was the premier case. Nazi Germany, with its only partially centralized economy, was a close second. Putin’s Russia is moving alarmingly closer, but it still lacks some of totalitarianism’s key features.

Here at home and in the West, the concept of totalitarianism came under assault as the Cold War consensus unraveled in the 1960s and 1970s. Revisionist scholars saw it as offering an intellectual foundation and implicit justification for the Vietnam War and the Cold War. A barrage of journal articles and books was launched in an attempt to demolish the construct. As the counterculture emerged, it became fashionable in some quarters of the left to identify the United States itself as totalitarian, or pre- or proto-totalitarian, on a plane with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In this, the novelist Norman Mailer was a pioneer, opining in his famous 1957 essay, “The White Negro,” that citizens were “trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.” Herbert Marcuse, the political theory guru of the New Left, came next, arguing that all industrial societies, very much including the United States, were totalitarian. To some on the extremes, we were not America but “Amerika,” the spelling signifying a shared identity with Nazi Germany. “We shall not defeat Amerika,” proclaimed Abbie Hoffman, leader of the leaderless Yippies, “by organizing a political party. We shall do it by building a new nation—a nation as rugged as the marijuana leaf.”

Today, in one of those remarkable inversions of history, the charge that the United States is totalitarian no longer comes from the left but the right, from America’s growing contingent of self-proclaimed “post-liberal” intellectuals. [Continue reading…]