The less democratic a state is, the more powerful its elite becomes. The less openness there is in a society, the more citizens are disempowered, the more the elite can accrue to itself not only positions of influence, but financial wealth. We have seen a steady destruction of the democratic process in the United States with the rise of the corporate state, so that we exist in what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, probably America’s greatest living American philosopher, calls a system of inverted totalitarianism.