U.S. economic elites are reincarnating “Mussolini-style fascism,” says author Joel Kotkin, who has spotlighted the political and economic dominance of the Silicon Valley elites.
Socialist Benito Mussolini allied with corporations to take control of Italy in 1922 after the trauma of World War I. He replaced its raucous, chaotic democracy with his idea of “corporatism,” where the society and economy would supposedly be centrally planned by rational interest groups of business leaders, unions, and farmers.
In the United States, corporations are now in the driving seat, Kotkin wrote July 7 for Unherd.com:
Mussolini’s idea of an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. In the West, for example, the “Great Reset,” introduced by the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, proposes an expanded welfare state and an economy that transcends the market for the greater goal of serving racial and gender “equity”, as well as saving the planet.
Mussolini’s corporatist government was initially popular among some U.S. elites in the 1930s. But it was disavowed as “right-wing Fascism” when Mussolini and his National Fascist Party allied with Adolf Hitler’s anti-semitic, Aryan-only socialist party, and then joined Hitler’s racial war against Russians.
Mussolini’s party got its name from his use of the Roman-era “fasces” symbol of authority.
The Democrats, and their myriad corporate-funded activists, are signing up for this bleak future, Kotkin writes:
This parallels with the alarming transformation of the US Democratic Party, the putative “party of the people” , now increasingly a subsidiary of the corporate elite. Among financial firms, communications companies and lawyers, [Joe] Biden outraised [Donald] Trump by five-to-one or more. Today’s oligarchs are particularly keen on the progressive non-profit sector, which provides important support for their political and social advocacy — a means for them to make politically correct statements about climate change, gender and race, while still obtaining enormous profit margins and unprecedented wealth.
Kotkin works at Chapman University and is the executive director of the Urban Reform Institute.
There is little support among Americans for the centralization of wealth and power sought by the emerging oligarchy of major corporations and their activist allies, Kotkin argues:
The tired capitalism of our corporate elite — who seem to have given up on broad-based economic growth — seems increasingly detached from the interests and aspirations of their own citizens’ needs … But building a coalition against the new fascism requires avoiding destructive nativism and instead focusing on how to restore competition and protect consumers from the overweening power, and vast wealth of the corporate elites.
Breitbart News has closely tracked the increasing consolidation of political power, wealth, and media control in the United States.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.