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In his 1963 collection of political essays, The Presidential Papers, Norman Mailer wrote that there once had been “a time when simple totalitarianism could be found attached to Fascism, and perhaps to Bolshevism.” This totalitarianism “seemed synonymous with dictatorship”: “Oppression was inflicted upon a nation through its leaders … A tension was still visible between the government as the oppressor and the people as the oppressed.” Mailer's assessment of US society in the 1960s led him to conclude that this “simpler” time had passed. A new, insidious, form of totalitarianism had “slipped into America,” into the “psyche” of American citizens, without altering the existing political structure or visibly oppressing Americans.1
The description of 1960s America as a totalitarian society cuts across most conventional understandings of the meaning of the term “totalitarian.” While “totalitarianism” has always been, and remains, a protean concept, it is associated with certain core characteristics. Totalitarianism has an inseparable connection to the ideological conflict of the Cold War. The term became shorthand for the argument that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union shared an essential nature and should be categorized together as equal threats to the survival of American democracy and indeed liberal democracy everywhere. In addition to its enlistment as a fighting term in the Cold War, the meaning of totalitarianism centered on fears of coercive state control extending to all areas of life. Totalitarianism was the nexus in a web of connections to fears of economic collectivism, ideology, surveillance, propaganda, the use of terror, concentration camps—all centering on the issue of state control. The way in which Mailer's use of the concept of totalitarianism in the 1960s relates to these dominant understandings is the subject of this article.
In his work in the 1960s, Mailer developed a theory of cultural totalitarianism which de-emphasized the coercive role of the state and instead found the root of totalitarianism in the cultural conformity that permeated American society.2 In doing so, he transferred attention from the Soviet Union to the United States as the main focus of his theory of totalitarianism. This shift in emphasis from the statist or political totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to a more loosely defined cultural totalitarianism reflected Mailer's preoccupation with internal...