A lot of people throw the word “fascism” around these days. No, conservatives, fascism is not people making you do anything you don’t like. No, liberals, you cannot vote fascism out of office. The word fascism comes from the Italian word “fascio,” which means an association, group, or bundle. Fascism is the bundling of government authority and big business, justified via nationalism. The most famous examples of fascism occurred in Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany.
The U.S. military-industrial complex is textbook fascism: the nationalist bundling of government authority (the U.S. military establishment and intelligence agencies) and big business (the war industry, which is comprised of the corporations that sell goods and services to the U.S. military and intelligence agencies). Built on stolen land and black labor, the United States of America was always a country designed to benefit a wealthy few, but it didn’t become fascist until, ironically, the Second World War. The military-industrial complex took root when the War Production Board coordinated the conversion of hundreds of companies into the business of war.1 Instead of dismantling the structure after the war, the U.S. government solidified it via the 1947 National Security Act. Fascism has been with us ever since.
Existing Scholarship
There are plenty of books about fascism. F.L. Carsten’s The Rise of Fascism, Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, and Kevin Passmore’s Fascism: A Very Short Introduction teach us about twentieth century Europe. Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works and Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning cover this European history and apply an expansive definition of fascism to the authoritarian leaders around the world today. Theo Horesh’s The Fascism this Time and the Global Future of Democracy and Brynn Tannehill’s American Fascism: How the GOP Is Subverting Democracy equate a mainstream U.S. political party and/or its followers with a rising fascism. While many of these books offer valuable information, all ignore the bipartisan militancy of U.S. foreign policy and the elephant in the room: the military-industrial complex.
Authors Naomi Wolf, Clara Mattei, Cornel West, and Sheldon Wolin inch us closer to this elephant. Naomi Wolf cautions in The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot that the George W. Bush administration steered the country toward fascism. Among the steps the administration took, according to Wolf, were the invocation of an internal and external enemy, the expansion of a massive surveillance dragnet, and the cooptation of mass media, though Wolf errors in placing the starting date during the Bush administration and in asserting that she herself was “born in freedom” in the United States. Clara Mattei demonstrates in Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism how fascists new to authority implement austerity as a way of cozying up to the liberal capitalists who run financial institutions. She helps us understand the military-industrial complex insofar as she centers the class conflict inherent to capitalism and notes that austerity indeed involves increasing expenditures on areas that profit the ruling class, such as war. In Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, Cornel West shows how racism is essential to the wars that the U.S. ruling class launches. Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism contributes by explaining how U.S. government and educational institutions are antidemocratic in nature; how feelings of patriotism, as routed through mass media, militarize and distract the exhausted working class; and how cold bureaucratic procedures grind down and smother any attempts at changing the system from within.
Existing studies, Carsten through Wolin, do not diagnose the root of the problem. Only by understanding how the U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC) is a fascist structure can one understand the full scope of the challenges facing humanity.
Structural Fascism
Do not confuse fascism with corporatism. In corporatism, large corporations capture and steer the federal government via, for example, lobbying Congress and financing political campaigns. While U.S. war corporations do exert heavy pressure within the federal government, the latter does not push back against this pressure. In fact, the Pentagon embraces the war industry as part of a “total force.” Fascism is further distinct from corporatism in that it invokes nationalism in its operations, and nationalism is not part of run-of-the-mill corporate capture. Lastly, the MIC is fascist, not corporatist, in how it has shaped the temperament of the body politic. Decades of manufacturing consent for war and funneling public funds (away from such programs as education, infrastructure, and healthcare) into war have turned the U.S. public into a desperate swarm. Instead of existing as mere consumers, as would happen under a corporatist government, large portions of the public are in dire economic straits, taught to hate a range of enemies, and conditioned to support a structure that promotes warfare.
The fascist structure known as the military-industrial complex utilizes multiple tools, not just violence, to stifle and harm the working class. It adeptly employs legal expertise and runs stellar public relations. While the fascist European states of the twentieth century were largely dominated by white men, the military-industrial complex incorporates women and people of color into its governing structures. This gives the impression that military and industry are inclusive and caring, while the wars at home and abroad and the neglect of the public at home actively kill children, people of color, and the poor and working class more broadly.
U.S. fascism developed through gradual, silent advances and massive boosts, justified by invoking alleged threats (e.g., Koreans, Vietnamese, Soviets, Arabs). The structure itself is fascist; no change in personnel at any level can alter its course. U.S. fascism is more durable than a fascism that revolves around a single figurehead; removing an entire system is far more difficult than getting rid of one human. U.S. citizens and residents are free to speak their minds as long as they don’t coalesce to pose a genuine threat to the military-industrial complex.
This study, written during 2021-2022, will be released here on Substack during summer 2024. It references the political Left and Right in a different way from how these terms are used in popular political discourse. The Left is anti-capitalist, and includes socialists, communists, and anarchists, among others. The Right is capitalist, and includes both capitalist political factions, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
Acronyms and initialisms are used throughout this text.
ACLU American Civil Liberties Union
CARES Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security
CBP Customs and Border Protection
CDC Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
DHS Department of Homeland Security
DOD Department of Defense
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation
FISA Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
FISC Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
FOIA Freedom of Information Act
ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement
JSOC Joint Special Operations Command
MIC military-industrial complex
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NDAA National Defense Authorization Act
NYPD New York Police Department
PPP Paycheck Protection Program
TSA Transportation Security Administration
Initialisms are used in footnotes.
AP Associated Press
NPR National Public Radio
NYT New York Times
WP Washington Post
WSJ Wall Street Journal
All citations refer to online content, unless indicated as print. Citations of military contracts refer to military contracting announcements, unless otherwise indicated. Any errors are the author’s alone, not the fault of any editors, associates, or Substack.
Chapter One lays out fascism’s development. Chapter Two covers its expansion following the attacks of 11 September 2001 (stylized herein as “9-11”). Chapter Three illustrates how government took care of industry when confronted with the COVID-19 pandemic. Chapter Four shows how this government prioritized militancy during the pandemic. Chapter Five chronicles the fascist response to the summer 2020 protests, and Chapter Six details fascism’s ongoing fortification. The Conclusion then offers a glimmer of hope.
Prior to the Second World War, disparate companies dealing in armaments were second fiddle to the U.S. military’s own arsenals, which manufactured weapons of war. For details of wartime mobilization, see David Brinkley’s Washington Goes to War (New York: Knopf, 1988).