Fascism involves government control, but not ownership of the means of production. Private companies exist, but they are simply government weapons.
That’s pretty much how things work in America today, except that even functions traditionally performed by government in countries like Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy have been outsourced to private organizations.
Take the reordering of the economy. The program of the Nazis Gleichschaltung rearranged everything to meet the party’s objectives, under the supervision of party officials and government administrations.
In America, on the other hand, the corporations that command the reigning heights of our national economy are doing it themselves, following the philosophy of environmental, social, and governance investment.
Before ESG, they were supposed to run their companies for the benefit of shareholders, something that was required by their fiduciary duties to the people who, you know, actually own Company.
But according to the ESG philosophy, they are supposed to run their companies for the benefit of “stakeholders” — which could be employees, customers, “the community” or just about anyone — and things like “social justice” and environmental conservation, buzzwords that left them Doing pretty much anything they want.
In practice, they are not headed by a political party or government council, but by various non-profit organizations that are not really accountable to anyone, but oddly enough, they all seem to support pretty much the same programs.
But if you had any doubts that these organizations are, in fact, carrying out the bids of the Biden administration, see what happened when Congress tried to prevent 401(k) accounts from being managed according to ESG guidelines: a Biden veto pledge .
People rely on 401(k) funds for their retirement savings. If managers can manage those funds for purposes other than maximizing client returns, it’s effectively a tax on retirees to fund the social goals of the managers.
The Labor Department ruled that this is kosher, and with Congress looking to end it — with legislation passed by both the Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate — the Biden administration is making sure that the rule remains in effect.
Team Biden would have to raise taxes themselves for these purposes to tax people, which would cost votes. Replacing fund managers for this avoids responsibility.
When your retirement savings run out, blame the fund, not President Joe Biden. At least under traditional fascism, people knew what was to blame Der Fuhrer or Il Duce when things went bad.
Similarly, Congress passed the CHIPS Act to bail out American semiconductor companies. Now the Department of Commerce is ordering companies to provide free childcare to their employees while on the road.
For years, mandatory national pre-K has been democratic policy; instead of doing it themselves, they force companies to do it.
And you can bet that the federal government and the usual swarm of left-leaning nonprofits will have most of the say in what is taught.
Even that mainstay of fascist surveillance, censorship, has been outsourced.
In early modern England, the Court of Star Chamber licensed printers and penalized those who fell out of line. In Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union, governments monitored what people said, wrote, and published.
Now there’s denial: Big Tech censors people.
Did you criticize the lockdowns or suggest that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health or the World Health Organization were wrong about the COVID pandemic? (Which they often were.)
Have you shared stories (perhaps from this paper) about Hunter Biden’s laptop?
Then you were silenced by Big Tech companies, from Facebook to Twitter to Google.
They acted on behalf of the government – Elon Musk’s publication of the Twitter Files made clear how thorough, with these platforms keen to please bureaucrats by silencing their critics – but again, the actual action was by private actors .
It would have been much harder and clumsier for Anthony Fauci or Joe Biden to silence critics directly; it was easy for tech companies acting on his behalf.
Other politically incorrect groups are being silenced at the behest of organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which claim to identify “extremist” groups but appear to target only critics of the right.
And it’s all made easier by a media/political class that essentially is an ideological monoculture that does not welcome opposing ideas.
As if that weren’t enough, the Biden administration wants to make sure everyone is somehow under the thumb of the company. Biden’s candidate for labor secretary, Julie Su, is an enemy of freelancers and gig workers.
If you are independent and self-employed, it is more difficult to put pressure on you. When you work for a corporate boss who’s in the Democratic pocket, it’s much easier.
Su was the architect of AB5 in California, which destroyed the prospects of freelancers, independent truckers and other people beyond the reach of corporatist America. If she gets the chance, she does so nationwide.
Is what we have now a kinder and softer fascism than we saw in Germany and Italy? Certainly. But it’s still fascism. And it must stop.
