The word "totalitarianism" has a few interrelated meanings, but so it tends to be used to identify regimes that kill large numbers or at least percentages of people in line with the themes that Hannah Arendt went over in The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harvest[73?]):
The introduction of the notion of "objective enemy" is much more decisive for the functioning of totalitarian regimes than the ideological definition of the respective categories. If it were only a matter of hating Jews or bourgeois, the totalitarian regimes could, after the commission of one gigantic crime, return, as it were, to the rules of normal life and government. As we know, the opposite is the case. The category of objective enemies outlives the first ideologically determined foes of the movement; new objective enemies are discovered according to changing circumstances [424] ... Totalitarian politics which proceeded to follow the recipes of ideologies has unmasked the true nature of these movements insofar as it clearly showed that there could be no end to this process. If it is the law of nature to eliminate everything that is harmful and unfit to live, it would mean the end of nature itself if new categories of the harmful and unfit-to-live could not be found; if it is the law of history that in a class struggle certain classes "wither away," it would mean the end of human history itself if rudimentary new classes did not form, so that they in turn could "wither away" under the hands of totalitarian rulers. In other words, the law of killing by which totalitarian movements seize and exercise power would remain a law of the movement even if they ever succeeded in making all of humanity subject to their rule. [464]
In a perfect totalitarian government, where all men have become One
Man, where all action aims at the acceleration of the movement of nature or history, where every single act is the execution of a death sentence which Nature or History has already pronounced, that is, under conditions where terror can be completely relied upon to keep the movement in constant motion, no principle of action separate from its essence would be needed at all. [467]
C.f. her "Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution," fn. 5:
The best proof of the difference between Mao's and Stalin's rule may be found in a comparison of the population censuses in China and Russia. The last Chinese census, counting close to 600 million people, was higher than statistical expectations, while Russian censuses for decades have been considerably lower than what statistically was expected. In the absence of reliable figures for population losses through extermination, one could guess the figure of those who were murdered in Russia from these millions of people who were "statistically lost."
Now for example, then, the Khmer Rouge don't entirely fit Arendt's definition (they did not have a take-over-the-world goal), but once some of her parameters are slightly relaxed (they did make a "let's take over all of Vietnam" wish), it makes sense to say that they were totalitarian both in theory and in practice.
Another fairly precise standard (at least sometimes) comes from R. J. Rummel. Some of his statistics turned out to be fanciful (to put it mildly). For example, I ran his numbers for Yugoslavia one time and found he'd made a serious error in demographic/birth-rate calculations to get the projected population deficit that he used to support his incredible claim that millions of people were possibly killed by the Nazis, Ustashi, partisans, Chetniks, and Tito's victorious regime. Still, he has a more or less reasonable standard of totalitarianism, not quite as sharp as Arendt's; but so neither his, nor her, standard, would count most (if any) open societies as totalitarian.
One interesting and, as it happens, plausible accusation of totalitarianism as inflicted by an otherwise open society, upon some people, is this accusation against the US military occupation of Vietnam. Per Arendt, we'd need to show that the US military had a concentrated negative impact on Vietnam's population, for the claim to fully go through. So technically, since that can't really be shown, the US ecocide in Vietnam can't be described with full accuracy as totalitarian, as such. Or, if the description might be accurate, it would probably only be with respect to the years 1967-1969, when the US military probably killed a million South Vietnam civilians (besides the hundreds of thousands killed in earlier and later years). I mean, one government official did claim, at one point, that they were "essentially fighting Vietnam's birth rate," but again, except for those three years in particular, I'd be hard pressed to agree that they actually put a major dent in the birth rate. Now keep in mind, in 1965/1966 the US government sponsored the Indonesian government's execution of a million of its own people, and in 1971 assisted Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh, while desolating Cambodia and Laos besides, so all told, the US record at the time has a certain totalitarian flare to it; still, this was more towards foreigners, not domestically.
It's kind of silly to say that modern repression/oppression in the US, whoever the victims are and whatever the scale, indicates that the US is now slipping into a new totalitarianism. We could easily argue that when the country was founded, the institution of slavery, the restrictions on eligible voters, and the Generalplan-Ost kind of behavior of the republic towards its Native American neighbors, seem dominating in the intended sense. Or prescriptions of the death penalty here and there for same-sex behavior (or really, any penalties in that connection), the century-long genocide of other Native Americans, etc. might come across as totalitarian after a fashion, too.
Or consider France in the aftermath of the Second World War. There were a lot of executions, and not just of collaborators, at the end of that war, followed by two murderous wars of attempted recolonization (of Vietnam first, then Algeria). This after France had already overseen the decimation of African populations in connection with its initial invasion of Algeria, and in other areas later on (astonishingly, one French reporter, André Gide, attributed a population loss of 13,000,000 to a broad region under French control). And France would later prove relatively complicit in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
And so on and on: yet so none of this was because of America, or France, or whoever, being democratic/open, but was in spite of such tendencies.
Now, in the US, if there's any genuine and powerful totalitarian movement afoot, it's the conspiracy-theory cult that formed in connection with the former president. Their intellectual progenitor, Cornelius van Til, directly stated that the ideology at play is totalitarian:
Now it is of course true that many of the sciences do not, like theology proper, concern themselves directly with the question of religion. Granting this it remains a matter of great significance that ultimately all the facts of the universe are either what they are because of their relation to the system of truth set forth in Scripture or they are not. In every discussion about every fact, therefore, it is the two principles, that of the believer in Scripture and that of the non-Christian, that stand over against one another. Both principles are totalitarian [emphasis added]. Both claim all the facts. And it is in the light of this point that the relation of the Bible as the infallible word of God and the "facts" of science and history must finally be understood.
Two of the intellectual spearheads of Christian Reconstructionism, from whose cultural milieu the American conspiracy cult emerged, credited (in one of their books' dedications) van Til with the ideological inspiration for their own movement, and it is easy to see that the "Storm" prophesied by that cult, in terms of the cult's digital "prophet" with all his facile invocations of Christian motifs, is a postmillennial fantasy. And even had van Til not known exactly what he himself was implying by his above-quoted words, yet everything from his doctrine of "all men are one man in Adam" to "the regenerate have the sensus deitatis" to his disturbing references to burning people alive or using nuclear weapons on them, reflect the peculiarities that Arendt identified as the subtle hallmarks of totalitarian reasoning.
And so we see that with the conspiracy cult:
The lies of the movements, on the other hand, arc much
subtler. They attach themselves to every aspect of social and political life that is hidden from the public eye. They succeed best where the official authorities have surrounded themselves with an atmosphere of secrecy. In the eyes of the masses, they then acquire the reputation of superior "realism" because they touch upon real conditions whose existence is being hidden. Revelations of scandals in high society, of corruption of politicians, everything that belongs to yellow journalism, becomes in their hands a weapon of more than sensational importance. [353/354]
Or the cult, as a totalitarian movement, is said to know things miraculously and hence without real evidence:
While the totalitarian regimes are thus resolutely and cynically emptying the world of the only thing that makes sense to the utilitarian expectations of common sense, they impose upon it at the same time a kind of supersense which the ideologies actually always meant when they pretended to have found the key to history or the solution to the riddles of the universe. Over and above the senselessness of totalitarian society is enthroned the ridiculous supersense of its ideological superstition.
There is an obvious reason that the cult had to form around the president that it did, because Arendtian totalitarianism doesn't work without the appropriate kind of figurehead in place, an individual to whom the movement can transfer all other individual responsibility, a "strong man" with whose will the masses can "identify," and this one man was, after all, ever so willing himself to do such a thing. The staggeringly selfless devotion of many of his followers, to this day, their continued proclamation of his divinity, is such a crystal-clear incarnation of that functional slot in the totalitarian movement as Arendt understood the matter, that if we really were to claim now that America faces the emergence of a totalitarian system in its own borders, it will be for the sake of that man and his cult.
Perhaps the danger of free societies collapsing in on themselves is in the end nothing more than the paradox of tolerance (or a generalization over Gödel's mysterious loophole). Perhaps real totalitarianism isn't quite possible in our modern world (Arendt herself thought we might very well face very new forms of political darkness, after all). At any rate, fighting pandemics and being kind to gender/sexual minorities, and other such things, are not totalitarian, and will not, by themselves, lead to this.
