In his 2009 book Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy and the New World Order, Engdahl portrays America as driving to achieve global hegemony through military and economic means.
According to him, U.S. state objectives have led to internal conditions that resemble totalitarianism: "[it is] a power establishment that over the course of the Cold War has spun out of control and now threatens not only the fundamental institutions of democracy, but even of life on the planet through the growing risk of nuclear war by miscalculation"[9] Wolin, too, analyzes the symbiosis of business and public interests that emerged in the Cold War to form the tendency of what he calls "inverted totalitarianism": While exploiting the authority and resources of the state, [inverted totalitarianism] gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of "private" governance represented by the modern business corporation.
[10]Elsewhere, in a 2003 article entitled "Inverted Totalitarianism"[11] Wolin cites phenomena such as the lack of involvement of citizens in a narrow political framework (due to the influence of money), the privatization of social security, and massive increases in military spending and spending on surveillance as examples of the push away from public and towards private-controlled government.
Wolin states: "[With] the elements all in place...what is at stake, then, is nothing less than the attempted transformation of a tolerably free society into a variant of the extreme regimes of the past century.
Since Western democracies are always justifying states of exception, he argues, they are failing as sites of political agency.