“So to most Americans, even those who feel oppressed by what they call big government, it must sound strange to hear it said, in the past tense, that tyranny “came” to America. After all, we have a constitution, don’t we? We’ve abolished slavery and segregation. We won two world wars and the Cold War. We still congratulate ourselves before every ballgame on being the Land of the Free. And we aren’t ruled by some fanatic with a funny mustache who likes big parades with thousands of soldiers goose-stepping past huge pictures of himself.
“For all that, we no longer fully have what our ancestors, who framed and ratified our Constitution, thought of as freedom — a careful division of power that prevents power from becoming concentrated and unlimited. The word they usually used for concentrated power was consolidated — a rough synonym for fascist. And the words they used for any excessive powers claimed or exercised by the state were usurped and tyrannical. They would consider the modern “liberal” state tyrannical in principle; they would see in it not the opposite of the fascist, communist, and socialist states, but their sister.”
Joseph Sobran, “How Tyranny Came to America,”
Fascism is a nationalistic, authoritarian, militaristic, corporatist, collectivist, totalitarian agglomeration. So, yes, this is a fascist empire.
Fascism, of the U.S. variety, is characterized by extreme corporatism. No central propaganda ministry controls the flow of information. Instead, a few large corporations, through ownership of the major media outlets, control what the public is told, thus enabling these corporations to largely define the national political agenda and the parameters of public debate..
This kind of corruption can only appear when and if a government makes it legal to bribe politicians. Corporate campaign contributions as well as the revolving door, whereby politicians and regulatory bureaucrats move freely back and forth between government and business, has created such a situation
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