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Italy, Germany, Japan • Breeding Grounds of Fascism • The Axis • Anti-Fascist Failures • Fascist Exploits • Fascist Ideologies • Destruction of the Axis • Indestructible Myths

The Sun Never Sets on America’s “Free World” • The Golden International • Big Welfare for Big Business • More Rational Corporate Planning • Technology: Starting, Stopping, Suppressing

The Castles of Power • The Ultra-Rich • The Corporate Overseers • The Chief Executive Network • Executive Managers • Junior and Contingent Members • Conflicts Among the Few • Purges and Conversions • Purifying Ideologies

An Abundance of Frustrations • Falling Apart: Work, Community, Family • Loneliness and Alienation • Crime: The Dirty Secrets • The Erosion of Authority

New Losses to Communism • Creeping Socialism • Third World Demands • Détente: A Cooler Cold War • Instability at the Top

Untamed Recession • The Hidden Unemployed • The New Inflation: Hyena’s Delight • The Dynamite of Class Conflict • Limited War • Unlimited Overkill

Making the Most of Crises • Consolidating Power • The Cat Feet of Tyranny • Many Paths

From Floundering Establishment to Super-America, Inc. • A Righteous Presidency • Remolding Militarism • The Restructuring of the Radical Right • New Ideologies of Central Power • Triplespeak

More Stagflation • More Money Moving Upward • An Abundance of Shortages • More Waste and Pollution • More Nuclear Poison • More Junk and Disservices

Integrating Separate Branches • Friendly Fascist Federalism • Community Carnivals • Contrapuntal Party Harmony • Union-Busting and the Slow Meltdown • The Lessons of the Watergate Conspiracy • Unhinging an Anti-Establishment White House • Coups D’Etat American-Style

Information as the March • The Symbolic Environment • Image as the Reality • Narrowing the Scope of Controversy • Manufacturing Opinion by Polling • The Electronic Throne • Monitoring as the Message • Womb-to-Tomb Dossiers • Economic and Social Vindicators • Educational Authoritarianism • Custodial Functions

Extended Professionalism • Job, Prometheus, Faust • For Consumers: Kidnapper Candy • Servitude’s Services • Conditional Benefactions • Rationed Payoffs • The Effulgent Aura

The Rungs of Violence • Precision Purging • Forceful Confrontation • Personal Injury • Covert Action • Conflict Among the “Slobs” • A Violence-Vigilante Culture

Sex: Through Liberation to Repression • Drugs: Religion of Some People • Madness: Escape from Madness • Cults: Belonging through Submission

Frying Pan-Fire Conflicts • Multilevel Co-optation • Creative Counterresistance • Innovative Apathetics

Impossibility: It Couldn’t Happen • Inevitability: It Will Happen Irreversibility: Eternal Servitude or Holocaust

A Good Neighbor in a New World Order • Democratizing the Establishment • Balancing the Economy • Democratizing the Social Base • Information for Human Liberation • Releasing Humanistic Values • Truth and Rationality

Yes, You … • Anyone Anywhere, Really? • High Aspirations, Realistic Expectations • My Country, Right and Wrong

It is about great achievements and tragic failures in America; about maneuverings that could turn the democracy we now know into a new form of despotism. Above all, it is about a more “true” democracy.

As I look toward the future, I see the possibility in America for a more genuine democracy than has ever existed. Economically, socially, culturally, and politically the people of that America would be able to take part—more directly than ever before—in decisions affecting themselves and others and our nation’s role in the world. The country would operate in the best sense of a national “honeycomb” of interrelating groups and individuals. On all sides, I see the potentials for that America. “The spirits of great events,” in Johannon von Schiller’s words, “stride on before the event/ And in today already walks tomorrow.” That kind of future, more than material possessions, has always been the vital center of the American dream.

Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion. On a world scale, all of this is already producing a heating up of the cold war and enlarged stockpiles of nuclear and non-nuclear death machines.

I see at present members of the Establishment or people on its fringes who, in the name of Americanism, betray the interests of most Americans by fomenting militarism, applauding rat-race individualism, protecting undeserved privilege, or stirring up nationalistic and ethnic hatreds. I see pretended patriots who desecrate the American flag by waving it while waiving the law.

In this present, many highly intelligent people look with but one eye and see only one part of the emerging Leviathan. From the right, we are warned against the danger of state capitalism or state socialism, in which Big Business is dominated by Big Government. From the left, we hear that the future danger (or present reality) is monopoly capitalism, with finance capitalists dominating the state. I am prepared to offer a cheer and a half for each view; together, they make enough sense for a full three cheers. Big Business and Big Government have been learning how to live in bed together, and despite arguments between them, enjoy the cohabitation. Who may be on top at any particular moment is a minor matter—and in any case can be determined only by those with privileged access to a well-positioned keyhole.

I am uneasy with those who still adhere strictly to President Eisenhower’s warning in his farewell address against the potential for the disastrous rise of power in the hands of the military-industrial complex. Nearly two decades later, it should be clear to the opponents of militarism that the military-industrial complex does not walk alone. It has many partners: the nuclear-power complex, the technology-science complex, the energy-auto-highway complex, the banking-investment-housing complex, the city-planning-development-land-speculation complex, the agribusiness complex, the communications complex, and the enormous tangle of public bureaucracies and universities whose overt and secret services provide the foregoing with financial sustenance and a nurturing environment. Equally important, the emerging Big Business-Big Government partnership has a global reach. It is rooted in colossal transnational corporations and complexes that help knit together a “Free World” on which the sun never sets. These are elements of the new despotism.

A few years ago a fine political scientist, Kenneth Dolbeare, conducted a series of in-depth interviews totalling twenty to twenty-five hours per person. He found that most respondents were deeply afraid of some future despotism. “The most striking thing about inquiring into expectations for the future,” he reported, “is the rapidity with which the concept of fascism (with or without the label) enters the conversation.”¹ But not all knowledge serves the cause of freedom. In this case the tendency is to suppress fears of the future, just as most people have learned to repress fears of a nuclear holocaust. It is easier to repress well-justified fears than to control the dangers giving rise to them. Thus Dolbeare found an “air-raid shelter mentality, in which people go underground rather than deal directly with threatening prospects.”

Fear by itself, as Alan Wolfe has warned, could help immobilize people and nurture the apathy which is already too large in American society.² But repression of fear can do the same thing—and repression of fear is a reality in America.

I am afraid of those who proclaim that it can’t happen here. In 1935 Sinclair Lewis wrote a popular novel in which a racist, anti-Semitic, flag-waving, army-backed demagogue wins the 1936 presidential election and proceeds to establish an Americanized version of Nazi Germany. The title, It Can’t Happen Here, was a tongue-in-cheek warning that it might. But the “it” Lewis referred to is unlikely to happen again any place. Even in today’s Germany, Italy or Japan, a modern-style corporate state or society would be far different from the old regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese oligarchs. Anyone looking for black shirts, mass parties, or men on horseback will miss the telltale clues of creeping fascism. In any First World country of advanced capitalism, the new fascism will be colored by national and cultural heritage, ethnic and religious composition, formal political structure, and geopolitical environment. The Japanese or German versions would be quite different from the Italian variety—and still more different from the British, French, Belgian, Dutch, Australian, Canadian, or Israeli versions. In America, it would be supermodern and multi-ethnic—as American as Madison Avenue, executive luncheons, credit cards, and apple pie. It would be fascism with a smile. As a warning against its cosmetic facade, subtle manipulation, and velvet gloves, I call it friendly fascism. What scares me most is its subtle appeal.

I am worried by those who fail to remember—or have never learned—that Big Business-Big Government partnerships, backed up by other elements, were the central facts behind the power structures of old fascism in the days of Mussolini, Hitler, and the Japanese empire builders.

I am worried by those who quibble about labels. Some of my friends seem transfixed by the idea that if it is fascism, it must appear in the classic, unfriendly form of their youth. “Why, oh why,” they retrospectively moan, “didn’t people see what was happening during the 1920s and the 1930s?” But in their own blindness they are willing to use the terms invented by the fascist ideologists, “corporate state” or “corporatism,” but not fascism.

I am upset with those who prefer to remain spectators until it may be too late. I am shocked by those who seem to believe—in Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s words of 1940—that “there is no fighting the wave of the future” and all you can do is “leap with it.”³ I am appalled by those who stiffly maintain that nothing can be done until things get worse or the system has been changed.

I am afraid of inaction. I am afraid of those who will heed no warnings and who wait for some revelation, research, or technology to offer a perfect solution. I am afraid of those who do not see that some of the best in America has been the product of promises and that the promises of the past are not enough for the future. I am dismayed by those who will not hope, who will not commit themselves to something larger than themselves, of those who are afraid of true democracy or even its pursuit.

I suspect that many people underestimate both the dangers that lie ahead and the potential strength of those who seem weak and powerless. Either underestimation stems, I think, from fear of bucking the Establishment. This is a deep and well-hidden fear that guides the thoughts and actions of many of my warmest friends, closest colleagues, and best students. It is a fear I know only too well, for it has pervaded many years of my life.

I fear any personal arrogance in urging this or that form of action—the arrogance of ideologues who claim a monopoly on truth, of positivists who treat half-truths as whole truths, of theoreticians who stay aloof from the dirty confusions of political and economic combat, and of the self-styled “practical” people who fear the endless clash of theories. I am afraid of the arrogance of technocrats as well as the ultra-rich and their high executives. Some of this arrogance I often find in my own behavior. I am afraid of blind anti-fascism.⁴

One form of blindness was suddenly revealed to me in a graduate seminar in which I was trying out the ideas in this book. One of my brightest students asked me a startling question: “Aren’t you a friendly fascist yourself, Professor Gross?”

She replied with a bill of particulars, which she amplified during a few weeks of disconcerting argument.

First, did not the Employment Act of 1946, which I had helped draft and administer, turn out to strengthen the role not only of the President but also of the corporate-government complex?⁵

She then went on to my writings on management. Didn’t they all point in the direction of a centrally managed society? She made a special point of my work on social indicators. Would not an Annual Social Report of the President, as I had proposed to Presidents Johnson and Nixon, concentrate more power in the presidential part of an increasingly imperial Establishment?

A strange answer to her rhetorical question came to me in the form of a dream. I saw myself searching for “friendly fascists” through a huge, rambling house. I climbed upstairs, ran through long corridors and opened the doors of many rooms, but found nobody. At last I came to a half-lit room with many doors. I sensed there was someone there, but saw nobody. Striding across the room, I flung open one of the doors—and there sitting at a typewriter and smiling right back at me, I saw MYSELF …

I think I now understand the meaning of this dream: For many years I sought solutions for America’s ills—particularly unemployment, ill health, and slums—through more power in the hands of central government. In this I was not alone. Almost all my fellow planners, reformers, social scientists, and urbanists presumed the benevolence of more concentrated government power. The major exceptions were those who went to the other extreme of presuming the benevolence of concentrated corporate power, often hiding its existence behind sophistical litanies of praise for the “rationality,” “efficiency,” or “democracy” of market systems and “free competitive” private enterprise. Thus the propensity toward friendly fascism lies deep in American society. There may even be a little bit of neofascism in those of us who are proudest of our antifascist credentials and commitments.

“You’re either part of the solution,” wrote Eldridge Cleaver in the 1960s, “or you’re part of the problem.” By now I think this statement must be both stood on its head and reformulated: “If you can’t see that you’re part of the problems, then you’re standing in the way of attacks on them.” It has taken me a long time to concede that I (and my colleagues) have often been a large part of the new Leviathan’s entourage. In any case, I no longer am. I no longer regard decentralization or counterbalancing of power as either impossible or undesirable. I see Big Business and Big Government as a joint danger.

For the majority of the population, of course, this is common knowledge. What almost everybody really knows is that the fanfare of elections and “participatory” democracy usually disguises business-government control. Some years ago, a few students popularized this conjugation of the verb “participate”:

In a world of concentrated, impersonal power, the important levers and wires are usually pulled by invisible hands. To no one is it given to look on many of the faces behind the hands. But everybody knows that THEY include both Big Business and Big Government. In a society dominated by mass media, world-spanning corporations, armies and intelligence agencies, and mysterious bureaucracies, THEY are getting stronger. Meanwhile, the majority of people have little part in the decisions that affect their families, workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, towns, cities, country, and the world. This is why there is declining confidence in the artificial images and rhetorical sales talks of corporate and political leaders and the many institutions which support them.

Some years ago Gunther Anders wrote a warning for the atomic age: “Frighten thy neighbor as thyself. This fear, of course, must be of a special kind: a fearless fear, since it excludes fearing those who would deride us as cowards; a stirring fear, since it would drive us into the streets instead of under the covers; a living fear, not of the danger ahead but for the generations to come.”⁶ If fear is to be fearless, stirring, and living, something else must be combined with it—in fact, envelop it.

That something is hope. I am not referring to any deterministic hope rooted in quasi-theological theories of inevitable emancipation through technological progress or proletarian revolution. I am referring to the kind of loving hope that is articulated in rising aspirations and actions toward a truly democratic America in a new world order.

In this hope I am encouraged by many visions of a future participatory democracy. I go along wholly with Alvin Toffler’s objective in Future Shock of “the transcendence of technocracy and the substitution of more humane, more far-sighted, more democratic planning,”⁷ and in The Third Wave of creating the “broadened democracy of a new civilization.”

As a realistic futurist, however, I start with the past and the present. In part I, “The Roots of Friendly Fascism,” I trace the sad logic of declining democracy in First World countries and of rising authoritarianism on the part of a few people at the Establishment’s higher levels. For those who have been hiding their heads in the sand, this picture may be a present shock even more painful than Toffler’s future shock.

A few years ago, William L. Shirer, whose monumental The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich certainly qualifies him as a penetrating observer, commented that America may be the first country in which fascism comes to power through democratic elections.⁸ In part II, “The Specter of Friendly Fascism,” I document this observation. These chapters provide chilling details on the despotic future that in the present already walks. Unlike Cassandra, I am not mad enough to prophesy what will happen. Looking at the future in the light of past trends and current tendencies, I warn against what could happen.

The main source of this new-style despotism, I show, is not the frenetics of the Extreme Right—the Know-Nothings, the private militias, the Ku Klux Klan, or the openly neofascist parties. Nor is it the crazies of the Extreme Left True, either of these might play facilitating, tactical, or triggering roles. But the new order is likely to emerge rather as an outgrowth of powerful tendencies within the Establishment itself. It would come neither by accident nor as the product of any central conspiracy. It would emerge, rather, through the hidden logic of capitalist society’s transnational growth and the groping responses to mounting crises in a dwindling capitalist world.

In tracing this situational logic, I try to see the changing crises in America and the world as they are viewed by the leaders of what is now a divided Establishment. I put myself in their position as they try to make the most of crises by unifying the Establishment’s higher levels, enlarging its transnational outreach, and reducing popular aspirations at home. Without an analysis of this kind, preventive efforts will be myopic, if not blind.

There is an old adage that the cure for the weaknesses of democracy is more democracy. The reason it sounds hollow is that “democracy,” like “fascism,” is used in many entirely different—even contradictory—ways. When one uses the term to refer only to the formal machinery of representative government, the maxim is a meaningless cliché. Much tinkering with, and perhaps improvements in, democratic machinery might even be expected on the road to serfdom. But if democracy is seen in terms of the decentralization and counterbalancing of power, then the subject for analysis is the reconstructing of society itself.

In part III, “True Democracy,” I discuss the endless processes of reconstruction. I show how the forces that have prevented friendly fascism from emerging already could be strengthened in the future. This, also, is not a prediction. It is a statement of what is possible, as well as desirable—and I concede at the start that it now seems less probable than a new despotism. But “in life,” as Marvin Harris advises, “as in any game whose outcome depends on both luck and skill, the rational response to bad odds is to try harder.”⁹

Fortunately, many people are already making the effort. In reviewing these warm currents, I show that they have an unfolding logic of their own—an alternative logic that includes and goes beyond the traditional American spirit of openness, willingness to experiment, “can do” optimism, and resistance to being pushed around. This is the long-term logic of democracy and of democratic response to crisis. This is a logic that helps define the endless agenda of things to be done and undone. It nurtures non-Utopian visions of true democracy. These are visions rooted in action to reduce the distances between THEM and US, and enlarge citizen activity and decentralized planning in our neighborhoods, cities, and counties. They are action-oriented visions of a country that no longer needs heroes and is led by large numbers of non-elitist leaders who recognize the ignorance of the wise as well as the wisdom of the ignorant.¹⁰ And, above all, there is the vision of America as a true good neighbor in a new world order.

I have written parts of this book in other countries. There I have felt at first hand the fear in people’s bones of renewed horrors stemming from American military force, economic penetration, or cultural domination. I have felt equally powerfully the hopes that people elsewhere have for those promises of American life that stand for peace, freedom, and progress. There is reason for these feelings.

As for America, I agree completely with Arnold Beichman that “This is a country in which one has the right to hope.”¹¹ More than that, it is a place where millions of people exercise that right and have reason to do so. I hope that more people will gain the courage to raise their hopes still higher. In this context, and perhaps only thus, it is easier to escape the fear of fear and confront the serious dangers looming ahead. It takes ever-brimming hope—fused with realistic expectations, patience, impatience, anger, and love—to develop the courage to fear, and the sustained commitment to rekindle constantly our best promises.

Friendly Fascism portrays two conflicting trends in the United States and other countries of the so-called “free world.”

The first is a slow and powerful drift toward greater concentration of power and wealth in a repressive Big Business-Big Government partnership. This drift leads down the road toward a new and subtly manipulative form of corporatist serfdom. The phrase “friendly fascism” helps distinguish this possible future from the patently vicious corporatism of classic fascism in the past of Germany, Italy and Japan. It also contrasts with the unfriendly present of the dependent fascisms propped up by the U.S. government in El Salvador, Haiti, Argentina, Chile, South Korea, the Philippines and elsewhere.

The other is a slower and less powerful tendency for individuals and groups to seek greater participation in decisions affecting themselves and others. This trend goes beyond mere reaction to authoritarianism. It transcends the activities of progressive groups or movements and their use of formal democratic machinery. It is nourished by establishment promises—too often rendered false—of more human rights, civil rights and civil liberties. It is embodied in larger values of community, sharing, cooperation, service to others and basic morality as contrasted with crass materialism and dog-eat-dog competition. It affects power relations in the household, workplace, community, school, church, synagogue, and even the labyrinths of private and public bureaucracies. It could lead toward a truer democracy—and for this reason is bitterly fought …

These contradictory trends are woven fine into the fabric of highly industrialized capitalism. The unfolding logic of friendly fascist corporatism is rooted in “capitalist society’s transnational growth and the groping responses to mounting crises in a dwindling capitalist world” (p. 6). Mind management and sophisticated repression become more attractive to would-be oligarchs when too many people try to convert democratic promises into reality. On the other hand, the alternative logic of true democracy is rooted in “humankind’s long history of resistance to unjustified privilege” (p. 349) and in spontaneous or organized “reaction (other than fright or apathy) to concentrated power … and inequality, injustice or coercion” (p. 351).

A few years ago too many people closed their eyes to the indicators of the first tendency.

The Ku Klux Klan and American Nazis crept out of the woodwork. An immoral minority of demagogues took to the airwaves. “Let me tell you something about the character of God,” orated Jim Robison at a televised meeting personally endorsed by candidate Ronald Reagan. “If necessary, God would raise up a tyrant, a man who may not have the best ethics, to protect the freedom interests of the ethical and the godly.” To protect Western oil companies, candidate Jimmy Carter proclaimed presidential willingness to send American troops into the Persian Gulf. Rosalyn Carter went further by telling an Iowa campaign audience: “Jimmy is not afraid to declare war.” Carter then proved himself unafraid to expand unemployment, presumably as an inflation cure, thereby reneging on his party’s past full employment declarations.

Reaching the White House with this assist from Carter (as well as from the Klan and the immoral minority of televangelicals), Reagan promptly served the immediate interests of the most powerful and the wealthiest. The Reaganites depressed real wages through the worst unemployment since the 1929–39 depression, promoted “give backs” by labor unions, cut social programs for lower and middle income people, expanded tax giveaways for the truly rich, boosted the military budget and warmed up the cold war. They launched savage assaults on organized labor, civil rights and civil liberties.

Horrified by this new bill of frights, many people who had earlier thought Friendly Fascism exaggerated the danger of authoritarianism switched to the other extreme by the end of 1981. Some people donned sweatshirts depicting Reagan as “the fascist gun in the West.” Many attacked my use of the world “friendly.” Going further than I had ever done, the distinguished economist Robert Lekachman named a name:

Ronald Reagan must be the nicest president who ever destroyed a union, tried to cut school lunch milk rations from six to four ounces, and compelled families in need of public help to first dispose of household goods in excess of $1,000 … If there is an authoritarian regime in the American future, Ronald Reagan is tailored to the image of a friendly fascist …¹

Today, as the world moves toward 1984 and beyond, too many people fail to see the workings of the alternative logic. Their gloom seems unabated by awareness of the growing sources of hope and joy woven into the current scene of fear and grief. Others seem confused by either-or simplifications. “Which are you?” they ask me, “a pessimist or an optimist?” “Both” is the most sensible answer. To be only the former would be self-defeating—and to be only the latter would be self-deception.

But the questioning continues. “Since Friendly Fascism was published, which of the two tendencies has become stronger?”

Let me answer this one by first looking at the bad news, then at the good news—and then at the question of just who is looking how at what.

The bad news is that evil now wears a friendlier face than ever before in American history.

“Like a good TV commercial, Reagan’s image goes down easy,” Mark Crispin Miller has written, “calming his audience with sweet inversions of the truth … He has learned to liven up his every televised appearance with frequent shifts in expression, constant movements of the head, lots of warm chuckles and ironic shrugs and sudden frowns of manly purpose. Reagan is unfailingly attractive—‘a nice guy,’ pure and simple.” But what is really there, he asks, behind the mask?²

The President’s critics have many answers. Some call him “an amiable dunce.” Some see him, reports Miller, as a devil “who takes from the poor to give to the rich, has supported infanticide abroad, ravages his own countryside and props up brutal dictatorships.” Others regard him as a congenital falsifier who surrounds any half-truth with a “bodyguard of lies.” Miller himself has still another answer: there is nothing behind the mask. “The best way to keep his real self hidden” he suggests, “is not to have one … Reagan’s mask and face are as one.” To this, one might add that the Reagan image is an artfully designed blend of charisma and machismo, a combination that Kusum Singh calls charismacho.³

“Princes,” wrote Machiavelli many centuries ago, “should delegate the ugly jobs to other people, and reserve the attractive functions for themselves.” In keeping with this maxim, Reagan’s less visible entourage has surrounded the President with highly visible targets of disaffection: Volcker, Stockman, Haig, Weinberger, Kirkpatrick, and Watt. In comparison, Reagan looks truly wholesome. This makes it all the more difficult to focus attention on the currents and forces behind the people behind the President—or for that matter, other less visible leaders of the American Establishment.

That focus, of course, is at the heart of this book. It is developed throughout the chapters on “The Roots of Friendly Fascism” (Part One) and “The Specter of Friendly Fascism” (Part Two). The more unpleasant of these currents are briefly listed in the right hand column of the table (pp. 344–345) comparing trends toward “Friendly Fascism, U.S.A.” (as set forth in Chapters 8–16) with “U.S.A., Early 1980s.”

Lamentably, my observations in these nine chapters still hold. They provide a way of looking at Reagan and some Republicans without placing a retrospective halo on the head of Carter or any Democrats. They offer a perspective that places the “new right” and “neo-conservatism”—and also “neo-liberalism”—in the context of the U.S. social system in a period of global stress. Instead of conforming with the current liberal fashion of abstract moaning about threats to democracy, they pinpoint the many paths that tyranny walks as it comes slowly “on little cat feet.”

But when I sent the book to the printer in January 1980, I underestimated two factors: the speed with which some of the evils might emerge and the power of the nice guy friendliness that would help disguise their emergence. These factors require an extension of my earlier warning.

When I think of the new dangers from reactionary forces, I remember the famous words used toward the end of the Franco-led rebellion against the Spanish republic: “I have four columns marching on Madrid and a fifth column inside the city itself.” Today, I see five columns marching against the people of the United States and our democratic institutions.

In the geography of politics, all five columns come from what is loosely known as “the Right.” None of them was first assembled after Reagan’s inauguration. All have a long history behind them. Each was helped—openly or secretly—by his campaign organizers. Each contributed to his election. None is separate from the others. Each column mingles with the others and squabbles with them over strategy, tactics and division of the spoils. While each operates both under cover of darkness and in open daylight, the first four can more readily be seen and combatted.

The first is a motley array of fanatical freebooters. The so-called Moral Majority whips up militarism in an effort to stem anti-militarist tides among other evangelicals. The Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazis stir up racism and anti-semitism. Well-financed frenetics lead frenzied campaigns on the so-called “social issues,” stirring up both sexism and heterosexism. The so-called “right to life” opponents of abortion often condone the destruction of life through military adventurism and the restoration of the death penalty. Political hucksters capitalize on the fear of “crime in the streets” by promoting the quick fixes of more electrocution and imprisonment, despite clear evidence that these are no more capable of deterring crime than the phlebotomy—bloodletting—used in the Middle Ages was capable of curing disease.⁴ Together, these groups focus attention on the many scapegoats—Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, feminists, lesbians, gays, anti-war people and low-income criminals—needed by the larger forces leading what Piven and Cloward call “a new class war against the unemployed, the unemployable, and the working poor.”⁵ In addition to fostering a “violence-vigilante culture,” they distract attention from the many shared interests of the unrich majority and promote divisive tensions among the heterogeneous elements of the low- and middle-income population.

The second is a far-flung suicide squadron. With passionate intensity and compulsive conviction, its leaders flash their instruments of suicidal destruction. Overstating the dangers of a Soviet attack on Western Europe or the Persian Gulf, they flaunt their machismo by reserving the right to make a first strike against the Soviets. Understating the destructive power of U.S. and NATO forces, they seek the charisma (and for the corporations involved, the cost-free capital) derived from resolute dedication to that power’s tumescence. For the men and women in military training camps, this glorification of violence is enshrined in the training song: “Kill, Kill/ Hate, Hate/ Murder, Murder/ Mutilate.”⁶ Behind this bravado is the tacit knowledge that the Reagan administrations’s enlargement of overkill capacity breeds insecurity in the first instance and, if ever used, would destroy its users. The unspoken theme song, even more ominous that the “Kill, Kill” chant, is “Spread our missiles far and wide/ Defend ourselves by suicide.”

The third is a big money battalion. Under the cover of the maxim “There is no free lunch,” the Reagan administration has been giving the truly rich the largest corporate welfare program in U.S. history—through not only military contracts but also an immense variety of tax give-aways, loans, loan guarantees and regulatory or deregulatory favors. The huge handouts promote capital flight, robotization, commodity speculation, merger-mania, condo-mania, speculation in urban and rural real estate and the construction (triply subsidized by federal, state and local government) of luxury hotels and skyscraping office buildings. As a reward for initiative in extracting these benefits from the federal, state and local treasury, top executives get more than free lunch. They get free breakfasts, dinners, cocktail hours, theater tickets, country clubs, vacation resorts and executive planes, boats and limousines. They enjoy free, round-the-clock services by devoted retinues of in-house and out-house academics, lawyers, accountants, public relations people, call-girls, call-boys and other experts. The bill for all this corporate and sensory gratification is paid, of course—but not by them. The money comes, rather, from the pockets of the great majority of Americans. The so-called “trickle down” theory is merely a justification for the actual policy of moving money upward. This is done by cutting income maintenance programs for lower and middle income people, encouraging or tolerating higher unemployment and imposing higher taxes on payrolls and consumption. In “Moving Money Upwards” and the other parts of “Friendly Fascist Economics” (Chapter 10), I outlined the general strategy of doing these things. But in 1980 I didn’t anticipate how rapidly and ruthlessly the next administration would start to do them.

The members of the fourth column are sappers of the Constitution. With the active help of the Reaganite White House, they are burrowing deeply under almost every provision of the Bill of Rights. The Department of Justice itself has become a staging ground for those undermining the civil rights of minorities and the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendment rights of all people. Sixth and Seventh Amendment rights to jury trials are being sidetracked by plea bargaining in criminal cases and “rent-a-judge” schemes in civil cases. Reaganite invasions into the area of personal sexual behavior—through regulations on birth control or abortion—threaten to undermine the Ninth and Tenth Amendments on rights retained by or reserved to the people.

The fifth column is inside our minds. It is composed of the ruling myths that camouflage, encourage and legitimate the other four columns. As shown in “The Friendly Fascist Establishment” (Chapter 9) and “Managing Information and Minds” (Chapter 12), these myths go far beyond “nice guy” imagery. They establish America’s symbolic environment. The Reagan administration has triggered a great leap forward in the mobilization and deployment of corporatist myths. Many billions of tax-exempt funds from conservative foundations have gone into the funding of such think tanks as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. According to the Wall Street Journal, nearly three hundred economists on the staffs of conservative think tanks are part of an informal information network organized by the American Heritage Foundation alone.⁷ (This contrasts with only about two dozen economists working for trade unions, most of whom are pinned down in researching contract negotiations.) To transmit the myths concocted by the scores of such think tanks, new systems have been put in place. “The fanciest television studio in Washington, D.C. does not belong to ABC, NBC or CBS but to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,” writes Robert K. Massie, Jr. “Through Biznet …” the chamber’s president boasts, “we are going to influence the affairs of Congress; we are going to impact on the White House itself for the good of the nation.”⁸ In 1981, at the White House itself, presidential assistant Wayne Valis organized the Budget Control Working Group, a business coalition that backed up Reagan’s personal lobbying by sparking at least half a million telegrams and phone calls to members of Congress from local business executives, particularly campaign contributors. “This business coalition,” stated Valis, “is our most reliable, strongest, best organized, most sophisticated support … It’s resources are almost scary, they’re so big.⁹

Distributing general propaganda, however, is perhaps the scariest operation of the fifth column. Expanded government intervention into the lives of ordinary people is glorified under the slogan “getting the government off our backs.” Decriminalization of corporate bribery, fraud and the dumping of health-killing wastes is justified under the banner of “promoting free enterprise” and countering “environmental extremists.” Private greed, gluttony and speculation are disguised in “free market” imagery. Business corruption is hidden behind smokescreens of exaggerated attacks on the public sector. Like Trojan horses, these ideas penetrate the defenses of those opposed to any new corporatism. They establish strongholds of false consciousness and treacherous terminology in the minds not only of old-fashioned conservatives but also of the most dedicated liberals and left-wingers.

Hence on many issues the left seems bereft, the middle muddled and the right not always wrong. Other elements are thereby added to the new bill of frights.

One is a frightening retreat by liberals and leftwingers on the key gut issues of domestic policy: full employment, inflation and crime. “Deep cynicism has been engendered in progressive circles by past experiences with ‘full employment’ legislation (as) the tail on the kite of an ever-expanding military economy.”¹⁰ A movement for full employment without militarism or inflation is seen as dangerous by old-time labor leaders, utopian by liberals and by some marxists as impossible under capitalism. Inflation is seen as a conservative issue—or else one that requires the kind of price controls that necessitate more far-reaching social controls over capital. Middle-of-the-roaders try to deal with crime by fussing too much with the details of the police-courthouse-jail-parole complex and too little with the sources of low-income crime, racketeering, political corruption and crime in the executive suites.¹¹ Thus the demagogues among the Reaganites and their frenetic fringes have been able to seize and keep initiatives on these issues. Those of us who have tried to formulate progressive alternatives too often find ourselves whistling in the dark …

Still more frightening has been the even greater retreat on the subject of detente—best defined as the relaxation of tensions in place of confrontation between military powers. In “The Democratic Logic in Action” (Chapter 20), I opened by suggesting a “Detente II” to include all NATO and Warsaw Pact countries, and eventually Third World countries, to replace the shaky, bilateral, and now crumbling Detente I negotiated by Nixon and Brezhnev in 1972. In other First World Countries, action along these lines is taken for granted by anti-war movements and promoted by governments through expanded trade, cultural and scientific exchanges and improved communication at all levels. In the United States, on the contrary, most liberals and left-wingers have dropped the idea entirely. Some dodge the issue because they identify it with Nixon and Kissinger, now outspoken opponents of the detente into which the anti-war movement forced them years ago. Others oppose detente because of the ridiculous idea that U.S.-Soviet tension reduction, which is the precise meaning of the word in Spanish (distension), German (entspannung), and Russian (razrjadka), would result in some “co-dominium,” that is, rule of the world by the two superpowers. Others fail to see that relaxation of tensions is a necessary precondition of all anti-war demands: a nuclear freeze, reduction of nuclear and non-nuclear weaponry, cessation of testing and the renunciation by the U.S. of the first strike option. Indeed, members of both the suicide squadron and the big money battalion have exploited Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and influence on Poland in order to raise the high tension level on which increased military spending depends.

Finally, many people allow such “dirty words” as fascism (or even capitalism and exploitation) to cloud their perception of the evils among us. Because fascism is often a violent epithet hurled at any user of brute force, they are taken in by the simplistic linkage (dissected on p. 30–31 and again on p. 294) of fascism with brutality alone. Because some think of fascism only in the classic forms they observed (or suffered from) between World Wars I and II, they reject the term’s use in referring to the significantly different corporatist tendencies in countries of highly industrialized (or “post-industrial”) capitalism. Other symbols may be O.K.—Nicos Poulantzas’ “positive state,” Morton Mintz’s “America, Inc.,” Senator Sam J. Ervin’s “post-constitutionalism,” Kenneth Dolbeare’s “repressive managerialism,” the Wall Street Journal’s “benign totalitarianism,” or even the New York Times’ “over-all corporate-government complex.” But not the nasty seven-letter word—not Stephen Spender’s “fascism without tears,” nor R.E. Paul’s and J.T. Winkler’s “fascism with a human face,” and, of course, not “friendly fascism.” S.J. Woolf, a British analyst, is so upset by the different meanings given the word (a phenomenon characterizing every important word in the dictionary) that he adds to the confusion by suggesting that “perhaps the word fascism should be banned.” This principle, of course, would also ban ban dictatorship, authoritarianism and totalitarianism, and such “squeaky clean” terms as democracy, freedom and equality. The tyranny of emotion-laden terms is to be fought not by avoidance but by clarifying the meanings one gives to them. The fault, dear reader, is not in the stars or the symbols, but in ourselves and how we fail to clarify our usage.

To help clarify my meaning, I have tried to sweep away the myths surrounding classic fascism (p. 28–33) and sharply pinpoint both the similarities and the differences among the varieties of authoritarian capitalism (as briefly summarized on p. 168–172). For those who take “friendly” too seriously, I have focussed sharply in “The Ladder of Terror” (Chapter 14) and elsewhere on the many “iron fists” beneath the velvet gloves of mind management, manipulation, rationed payoffs and co-optation. Occasionally, in deference to some people’s overly tender sensibilities, I have identified the sharpening conflict between capitalism and democracy without once using the ugly word beginning with “f.”

In a recent interview with Fortune I used the word syzygy to refer to the repressive conjunction of Big Business and Big Government without either losing tis identity. Attacking “solemnly silly syzygy,” the reporter saw “syzygy avoidance … being fiercely debated on Agronsky and Company, harmoniously elaborated by all those characters who keep nodding at each other on Washington Week in Review, joked about in a Johnny Carson monologue or lengthily testified on before Congress.”¹² Despite this Fortune fantasy, unfortunately, no euphemistic word play by itself could possibly break through the media’s silken controls and focus national attention on the evils among us or the many kinds of action needed to avoid a new authoritarianism. Even a conservative like Kevin Phillips is ignored when in Post-Conservative America (New York: Random House, 1982) he warns against “apple pie authoritarianism” or an American Caesarism that “could make a more triumphal entry through television than was ever possible by chariot.”

I participate.	We participate.
You (singular) participate.	You (plural) participate.
He, she or it participates.	THEY decide.