While the versions of totalitarianism represented by Nazism and Fascism consolidated power by suppressing liberal political practices that had sunk only shallow cultural roots, Superpower represents a drive towards totality that draws from the setting where liberalism and democracy have been established for more than two centuries. It is Nazism turned upside-down, inverted totalitarianism. While it is a system that aspires to totality, it is driven by an ideology of the cost-effective rather than of a master race (Herrenvolk), by the material rather than the ideal.

Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (1960, revised 2004), p. 591