Observant reader will detect the shadows of Italian corporate fascism in the description.
Chicago style.
From Tablet Magazine, July 25:
To make sense of today’s form of American politics, it is necessary to understand a key term. It is not found in standard U.S. civics textbooks, but it is central to the new playbook of power: “whole of society.”
The term was popularized roughly a decade ago by the Obama administration, which liked that its bland, technocratic appearance could be used as cover to erect a mechanism for the government to control public life that can, at best, be called “Soviet-style.” Here’s the simplest definition: “Individuals, civil society and companies shape interactions in society, and their actions can harm or foster integrity in their communities. A whole-of-society approach asserts that as these actors interact with public officials and play a critical role in setting the public agenda and influencing public decisions, they also have a responsibility to promote public integrity.”
In other words, the government enacts policies and then “enlists” corporations, NGOs and even individual citizens to enforce them—creating a 360-degree police force made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you think make up your communal safety net, even your neighbors. What this looks like in practice is a small group of powerful people using public-private partnerships to silence the Constitution, censor ideas they don’t like, deny their opponents access to banking, credit, the internet, and other public accommodations in a process of continuous surveillance, constantly threatened cancellation, and social control.
And there’s an additional catch. “The government”—meaning the elected officials visible to the American public who appear to enact the policies that are carried out across the whole of society—is not the ultimate boss. Joe Biden may be the president but, as is now clear, that doesn’t mean he’s in charge of the party.
As a modern political trope, whole of society dates to the Obama administration’s attempt to pivot in the “war on terror” to what it called CVE—countering violent extremism. The idea was that by identifying at-risk individuals and then engaging them, American officials could “get left of the boom” and intervene before extremism led to violence.
In concept, the strategy called for empowering “community-led interventions” as a method of conflict resolution. In practice, the White House paired its progressive efforts at community activism with an aggressive expansion of counterterrorist operations and drone strikes.
But the true lasting legacy of the CVE model was that it justified mass surveillance of the internet and social media platforms as a means to detect and de-radicalize potential extremists. Inherent in the very concept of the “violent extremist,” was a weaponized vagueness. A decade after 9/11, as Americans wearied of the war on terror, it became passé and politically suspicious to talk about jihadism or Islamic terrorism. Instead, the Obama national security establishment insisted that extremist violence was not the result of particular ideologies and therefore more prevalent in certain cultures than in others, but rather its own free-floating ideological contagion. Given these criticisms Obama could have tried to end the war on terror, but he chose not to. Instead, Obama’s nascent party state turned counterterrorism into a whole-of-society progressive cause by redirecting its instruments—most notably mass surveillance—against American citizens and the domestic extremists supposedly lurking in their midst.
A reflection on the 20-year anniversary of Sept. 11 written in 2021 by Nicholas Rasmussen, the former director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, captures this view. “Particularly with the growing threat to public safety and security posed by domestic violent extremism, it is essential that we move beyond the post-9/11 counterterrorism strategy paradigm that placed the government at the center of most counterterrorism work.” Instead of expecting the government to deal with terrorist threats, Rasmussen advocated for “a much wider, more expansive and inclusive ‘whole-of-society’ approach” that he said should encompass “state and local governments, but also the private sector (to include technology companies), civil society in the form of both individual voices and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and academia.”
The whole-of-society trope can be traced from its initial popularization in the context of CVE in 2014-15 to its use as a censorship coordinating mechanism after the rise of Donald Trump initiated a panic over Russian disinformation, then as a call for increased social media clampdowns during COVID, to the present—where it functions as a generic slogan and coordinating mechanism of a party state, one originally built by Obama, and which now operates through the vehicle of the Democratic Party over which he presides.
What the various iterations of this whole-of-society approach have in common is their disregard for democratic process and the right to free association, their embrace of social media surveillance, and their repeated failure to deliver results. Indeed even Rasmussen, while advocating the whole-of-society approach, acknowledges that it “promises to be in many ways more messy, more complicated, and more frustrating in terms of delivering outcomes.” In other words, one shouldn’t count on it working.
Not that such flaws are disqualifying. In the same way that a particular politician’s poor standing with voters does not seem to discourage the party from anointing them as long as they can be trusted to serve its interests, the whole-of-society strategy remains attractive regardless of its outcomes, because it extends the party’s authority over formerly independent centers of power....
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