Mainstream WeeklyThe disinterestedly wise ought to desire the holding together of all being
— Bhagavad Gita, Verse 3.25
Normal men do not know that everything is possible
— David Rousset
Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present
— Albert Camus
The liberal democratic apparatus has been imploding, and the more I think about the lying world order [1], the more I am convinced from global to provincial that beneath the facade of democracy is an oft-concealed rotting reality. The political theorist Michael Walzer writes in "Liberalism and the Art of Separation" that "Liberalism is a world of walls, and each one creates a new liberty" (315). If the autonomous institutions strengthen liberal democracy, fusing these institutions with a supreme leader’s and a single party’s will or the sovereignty of capital indicates a totalitarian impulse. The litmus test for any proclaimed democracy, be it the largest or the smallest, is whether the institutional integrity is being upheld or erased. In the Indian context, an attempt at answering this test shows that the signs of rot are all around us. For example, the judiciary and the election commission ought to act disinterestedly, but they overwhelmingly do not. The totalitarian impulse visible in the collapse of institutions integral to the well-being of citizens of a polis does not entirely take the form of classic totalitarianism. The demise of democracy, as we have been witnessing, is not a collapse into classic totalitarianism "total mobilization, total war, and the like but is nicely orchestrated so that only the facade of democracy remains. At the same time, insidiously, like cancer cells, the core gets killed from the inside. How does this killing unfold? In his book Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin argues,
One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic: surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media. (105)
We see the replacement of citizenry by the electorate, i.e., "voters who acquire political life at the time of elections" (59), to sustain an order that keeps the power and capital in the hands of few. Wolin coined the term "inverted totalitarianism" [2] for this phenomenon. Managed democracy, the product of inverted totalitarianism, "exploits what appear to be formidable political and legal constraints, using them in ways that defeat their original purpose but without dismantling or overtly attacking them" (56).
The Economist Clara Mattei, in her book, The Capital Order, defines the capital order as maintaining a certain sociopolitical order ("the social relation of capital