Here at esnl, we’ve come to the conclusion that the United States has already become a fascist nation. Period.

If you accept the definition of Benito Mussolini, the man who made fascism part of our lexicon, then by all available evidence, the United States is a fascist country, when corporate and state power have been fused.

The characteristic of the modern fascist state include an explicitly exclusionary society, a rejection of egalitarianism, an ongoing demand for ideological purity, suppression of dissidence and social deviance, an embrace of technological modernism, the cults of the hero and the nation, the focus of justifiable anxieties on alien others, ongoing surveillance of the populace, social darwinism, public spectacle, and an unquestioning submission to the imperium of a quasi-mystical cult of The Leader [e.g. Il Duce or Der Fuhrer].

In practical terms, fascism represents the fusion of corporate, military, and political power and invariably pursues an imperial agenda.

The potential for fascism has always been present in American culture, starting with the Founders, whose concept of citizenship was based on the virtuous freeholder, the yeoman, who in turn was often the owner of non-citizen slaves.

But for much of our early history, centralized national power — the sine qua non of the fascist state — was perceived with skepticism and outright hostility. To cite one example: It took more than a century for Americans to accept one of the prerequisites of the imperial corporate state, a central bank.

Militarism, economic crisis, and a period of prolonged national insecurity invariably accompany the rise of fascism. Fear, uncertainty, and a desperate search for answers enable the rise of demagogues.

But here in the United States, another factor has been at play enabling a takeover much more subtle than those accompany the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, and other hierarchs of the past: The capture of the national and state legislatures by the corporate and finance sectors.

James Kwak and Simon Johnson charted the rise of the finance sector and their role in the collapse in their book 13 Bankers.

Blogging with Johnson at Baseline Scenario, Kwak writes about the conclusions of another book, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, written by political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson.

Here’s what Kwak has to say about the corporate capture of the state:

In 13 Bankers, Simon and I argue that the key forces behind the transformation of the financial sector and the resulting financial crisis were political, not simply economic. To this argument, at least two good questions spring to mind: Why finance? And why then? Hacker and Pierson have good answers to both of these questions. Their answer to the latter question is better than (though not inconsistent with) the answer we gave in our book. To the former question, their argument is simple: business interests in all sectors organized a takeover of political power that pushed organized labor and other groups protecting middle-class interests to the sidelines and made possible decades of policies that have enriched the super-rich at the expense of everyone else, including the merely affluent. Finance was simply the biggest and most profitable of these sectors–and, we would emphasize, the one best able to hold the government hostage in a financial and economic crisis. The answer to the second question is a bit more involved but particularly important. Many people, including Simon and me, have observed that American politics and the American economy reached some kind of turning point around 1980, which conveniently marks the election of Ronald Reagan. (We also pointed to other factors such as the deregulation of stock brokerage commissions in 1975 and the high inflation of the 1970s.) Other analysts have put the turning point back in 1968, when Richard Nixon became President on the back of a wave of white, middle-class resentment against the 1960s. Hacker and Pierson, however, point the finger at the 1970s. As they describe in Chapter 4, the Nixon presidency saw the high-water market of the regulatory state; the demise of traditional liberalism occurred during the Carter administration, despite Democratic control of Washington, when highly organized business interests were able to torpedo the Democratic agenda and begin the era of cutting taxes for the rich that apparently has not yet ended today. Why then? Not, as popular commentary would have it, because public opinion shifted. Hacker and Pierson cite studies showing that public opinion on issues such as inequality has not shifted over the past thirty years; most people still think society is too unequal and that taxes should be used to reduce inequality. What has shifted is that Congressmen are now much more receptive to the opinions of the rich, and there is actually a negative correlation between their positions and the preferences of their poor constituents. Citing Martin Gilens, they write, “When well-off people strongly supported a policy change, it had almost three times the chance of becoming law as when they strongly opposed it. When median-income people strongly supported a policy change, it had hardly any greater chance of becoming law than when they strongly opposed it.” In other words, it isn’t public opinion, or the median voter, that matters; it’s what the rich want. That shift occurred in the 1970s because businesses and the super-rich began a process of political organization in the early 1970s that enabled them to pool their wealth and contacts to achieve dominant political influence . . . To take one of the many statistics they provide, the number of companies with registered lobbyists in Washington grew from 175 in 1971 to nearly 2,500 in 1982. Money pouring into lobbying firms, political campaigns, and ideological think tanks created the organizational muscle that gave the Republicans a formidable institutional advantage by the 1980s. The Democrats have only reduced that advantage in the past two decades by becoming more like Republicans–more business-friendly, more anti-tax, and more dependent on money from the super-rich. And that dependency has severely limited both their ability and their desire to fight back on behalf of the middle class (let alone the poor), which has few defenders in Washington. At a high level, the lesson of Winner-Take-All Politics is similar to that of 13 Bankers: when looking at economic phenomena, be they the financial crisis or the vast increase in inequality of the past thirty years, it’s politics that matters, not just abstract economic forces. One of the singular victories of the rich has been convincing the rest of us that their disproportionate success has been due to abstract economic forces beyond anyone’s control (technology, globalization, etc.), not old-fashioned power politics. Hopefully the financial crisis and the recession that has ended only on paper (if that) will provide the opportunity to teach people that there is no such thing as abstract economic forces; instead, there are different groups using the political system to fight for larger shares of society’s wealth. And one group has been winning for over thirty years.

The corporate capture of government is the same force which has bribed elected officials through now-unlimited campaign contributions and lobbying to cede control over the nation’s communications media to the corporation and to install as regulators corporate officials who duck back through the revolving door into their old lucrative corporate jobs once they’ve done their regulatory damage.

There’s no need for the single party of the typical fascist state, since the bipartisan system effectively represents two strains of the same fundamental ideology.

The media have done their job well, suppressing dissent by ignoring it at the same time as they promote zealots demanding a purification of society and a return to a quasi-religious state mysticism.

We have become a fascist state in all but name.

An an aside:

The word “fascism” derives from fasces, the symbol of political power in Rome, and consists of a bound bundle of rods bound by iron bands. Symbolically, the fasces symbolized the power of unity: While one separate rod may be easily broken, bound together, they become unbreakable.

Once you’re aware of what it is, the fasces appears in amazing places: On the back of the dime, on the seals of the United States Senate and the National Guard administration, the tax court, even on the legs of the chair of the Lincoln Memorial.

These historical uses date back to the founding of the republic, where the explicit model was that of the Roman Republic, back in the days before Caesar’s adopted son turned into an imperial monarchy.

While some folks claim that the symbol represents the evil Illuminati conspiracy, it’s simply based on the only readily available model the founders had of a non-monarchical state. Plus educated folks in those days studied Latin and Greek as a matter of course, making the Roman model all that more accessible.

And there was another meaning to the fasces as well: The forms of punishment at the disposal of the officials whose lictors carried them. The rods symbolized the power to inflict corporal punishment by beating, while the ax head was the symbol of the ultimate power, capital punishment.