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Totalitarianism, if it isn’t as bad as it gets, is as bad as we have ever known. Embodied most dramatically in Stalin’s Soviet Russia and Hitler’s Nazi Germany, totalitarianism ostensibly breaths politics into everything but suffocates genuine political action. While tyranny merely closes its hand around the throat of political opponents, totalitarianism gets inside of you and demands that the only thing inside of you be it. It calls the truth a lie and structures reality to make its lies the truth. Extreme left or extreme right, it cannot bear the uncertain chaos of the middle.

Totalitarianism is so nakedly hostile to the aspirations of democracy that it’s natural to assume that one can’t morph into the other. Yet democracy has an eerie affinity for totalitarianism: while democracy legitimizes majority rule, totalitarianism harnesses the masses; and, while Western liberal democracies have split their publics into masses of isolated, inward-looking individuals, totalitarianism can offer these masses a path to perverted self-respect and wholeness, even if the path cuts through the heart of what it means to be human.

If our society is a pane of shattered glass, totalitarianism can glue the shards back together into a ball of jagged ends.

Chilling though the specter of totalitarianism is, democratic platitudes aren’t anchored to a sober and immediate understanding of democracy’s nastiest alternative. Some critics might compare some present government with a previous regime (usually Hitler’s). These ad hoc historians, though, inevitably sound like shrill crackpots or clumsy orators: the former can’t differentiate between apples from oranges while the latter can’t articulate the difference.