Wolin

Democracy is perpetuated as philanthropic gesture, contemptuously institutionalized as welfare, and denigrated as populism. p.572

These writings are intended as a contribution to a renewed democratic discourse, one that can be disentagled from the disillusions bred by recent neoconservative rhetoric and the cheap flattery of cynical demagogues of right-wing populism. That discourse must confront the meaning of the state and of its cohabitation with corporate power. Facing up to the state means recognizing that the dominant forms of power in the society, both public and private, are inherently antidemocratic in their structure and objectives and that if democracy is to be practiced and extended, teh conditions of politics will have to be transformed. (1989)