Why Now? How America’s Late-Stage Capitalism Generated This Fascist Force

[yet to get its final polishing]

How Inevitable Market Forces Led to Fascism’s Growing Power

Never before in American history has a fascistic force gained so much power within our political system. The question arises: Why now?

An important part of the answer can be found in a dynamic built into the market economy itself. Unless adequately restrained, the competitive process inevitably tends to concentrate economic power into fewer and fewer hands.

And the process is inevitably non-random in determining what kinds of hands those will be. Competition selects: the actors who gain power through that competition will differ systematically from those who lose power.

Some of the qualities that competition selects for are laudable. Efficiency is rewarded. Those who find ways to offer better products for less will tend to gain market share.

But an additional kind of non-random selection is also happening. Those for whom there is such a thing as “enough” may reach some level of success and turn more of their energies toward living whole human lives. Those for whom there is never enough—who remain insatiable in their pursuit of wealth and power—will be more likely to keep competing for still more. And as the concentration of economic power narrows the field, more and more of the total power of the economic system will be wielded by the insatiable—both individuals and corporate actors.

Something similar happens with scruples. The competitive process inevitably favors, whenever there is an advantage to be gained by doing so, those willing to do what others will not. If deception pays, those willing to deceive have an advantage over those who will not. If exploiting workers pays, the advantage goes to those willing to exploit them. If concealing dangers from the public protects profits, those willing to conceal them gain an advantage over those whose scruples forbid it.

(And this is hardly hypothetical. Again and again—from asbestos and tobacco to fossil fuels—industries confronted evidence that their profitable products were killing people and chose to conceal or deny the danger rather than sacrifice the profits. They were, quite literally, willing to kill for money.)

That famous line “Nice guys finish last” describes a perennial danger in competitive systems: whenever scruples get in the way of winning, the competition gives an advantage to those less constrained by them.

It is as if the Invisible Hand has another, darker function. As competition concentrates economic power, that hand is also non-randomly distributing the power—handing more and more of it toward those willing to do whatever it takes to prevail.

No one has to choose this outcome. It emerges naturally from the competitive process itself.

 

THE DRAMATIC INCREASE IN CONCENTRATED ECONOMIC POWER

And the evidence shows that in the United States in recent decades, that predictable concentration of wealth has increased quite dramatically.

Between 1982 and 2025, the share of the nation’s total wealth owned by the 400 richest Americans more than quadrupled. Their combined wealth, measured against the size of the economy, increased about eightfold. And most of that increase went to the very richest of the richest.

In other words, over little more than forty years, an extraordinary amount of the nation’s economic power migrated upward into the hands of an ever-smaller group of people. Even within America’s very richest people, the power became increasingly concentrated at the very top.

The same concentration of economic power has occurred at the level of corporations. Across the economy, industries have become dominated by fewer and fewer corporations, in substantial part through waves of mergers and acquisitions. Between 1980 and 2010, the number of banks and thrifts fell by more than 60 percent, while the ten largest banking organizations went from controlling less than one-seventh of the industry’s assets to about half. In the airline industry, the four largest carriers increased their market share from 43 percent in 1985 to 72 percent by 2017.

Again and again, economic power once distributed among many independent actors has come to be wielded by a relative handful of dominant corporations.

[POSSIBLY DELETE: American agriculture provides a familiar picture of the same transformation. In 1935, nearly 7 million farms dotted the American landscape; today there are fewer than 2 million, and production has shifted dramatically toward larger operations. Just 4 percent of farms now produce more than half the value of everything American farms sell. And beyond the farms themselves stands an increasingly concentrated agribusiness system: four companies control roughly 80 percent of beef processing, while similarly small groups of corporations dominate such crucial agricultural markets as seeds and soybean processing.]

 

CONCENTRATION CHANGES THE CHARACTER OF THE SYSTEM

But increasing concentration does more than put more economic power into fewer hands. Because the competitive process that determines which hands those will be is non-random, concentration also changes the character of the economic system as a whole.

Think back to the two kinds of selection described earlier. The competition rewards many admirable qualities: efficiency, ingenuity, discipline, hard work. But as the field narrows, it also increasingly concentrates power in the hands of those most single-minded in the pursuit of more wealth and power. That is, increasing power will be wielded by those for whom there is never enough, and by those less constrained by scruples about what they will do to prevail.

And who is left wielding that concentrated power is not mere chance, as if determined by a toss of the coin. Who prevails in the competition is not random but correlates with a definable set of traits and motivations—some of which involve an unusually strong desire to dominate their world. As the field narrows, more and more of the system’s power will therefore be wielded by actors whose qualities helped them prevail—including a willingness, in the pursuit of wealth and power, to cross moral lines that more restrained competitors would not.

So the economic system at Time Two is not simply the system at Time One with fewer actors. The balance of power among different kinds of actors has changed. A greater proportion of the system will be controlled by people who always want more power and how are not restrained by moral concerns in how they seek to gain more power.

Anyone who has studied the history of fascist regimes will recognize those two qualities—insatiability in the drive for power and a sociopathic disregard for the well-being of others—as hallmarks of fascistic power.

So the market economy has, built into it, a tendency to change the “character” of the economic force over time.

It begins with its banner proclaiming freedom. That’s what Adam Smith argued for in his 1776 classic, THE WEALTH OF NATIONS: multitudes of independent actors, each free to pursue their own interests. That’s what Milton Friedman celebrated in his FREEDOM TO CHOOSE (?).

But if the competitive process proceeds far enough without adequate restraints, more and more of the system’s power comes to be wielded by actors not committed to the systemic freedom of “free enterprise” but rather wanting to stack the deck to acquire ever greater power for themselves.

The Spirit of Freedom gradually loses power to the Spirit of Domination. A system long thought to be a good foundation for democracy (China has shown that to be less than iron-clad) gradually turns itself as into an incubator of the kind of fascist force we have seen growing in power in America over the past generation.

 

HOW ECONOMIC POWER HAS BEHAVED IN THE FASCIST MOMENT

Earlier, we saw that—as predicted from the dynamics of continuing competition—the American economy has indeed evolved toward ever-greater concentration of wealth and economic power. Now we can test the next stage of the argument against the historical record: Has that increasingly concentrated economic power also become, as predicted, less a force for the freedom celebrated by “free enterprise” and more a force for the plutocratic and fascistic forms of domination?

Recent American history provides disturbing confirmation of that prediction.

That project of converting economic power into power over the larger society was openly articulated more than half a century ago. In 1971, corporate lawyer Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warning that American business was losing ground throughout the culture and calling for a sustained, well-financed counteroffensive. Business, he argued, needed to exert greater influence over universities, textbooks, the media, public opinion, politics, and the courts. And that is essentially what happened. Over the following decades, enormous sums of corporate and billionaire money built an intellectual, political, legal, and communications apparatus capable of moving American society toward the interests and values of the Money Power.

Much of the machinery that now shapes American political consciousness was built with that money. When Washington’s intellectual establishment was dominated by institutions like Brookings, the conservative counter-establishment was comparatively puny. Then corporate fortunes and wealthy conservative families poured money into institutions such as the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and an expanding network of advocacy organizations.

HOW ECONOMIC POWER HAS BEHAVED IN THE FASCIST MOMENT

Earlier, we saw that—as predicted from the dynamics of continuing competition—the American economy has indeed evolved toward ever-greater concentration of wealth and economic power. Now we can test the next stage of the argument against the historical record: Has that increasingly concentrated economic power also become, as predicted, less a force for the freedom celebrated by “free enterprise” and more a force for the plutocratic and fascistic forms of domination?

Recent American history provides disturbing confirmation of that prediction.

That project of converting economic power into power over the larger society was openly articulated more than half a century ago. In 1971, corporate lawyer Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warning that American business was losing ground throughout the culture and calling for a sustained, well-financed counteroffensive. Business, he argued, needed to exert greater influence over universities, textbooks, the media, public opinion, politics, and the courts. And that is essentially what happened. Over the following decades, enormous sums of corporate and billionaire money built an intellectual, political, legal, and communications apparatus capable of moving American society toward the interests and values of the Money Power.

Much of the machinery that now shapes American political consciousness was built with that money. When Washington’s intellectual establishment was dominated by institutions like Brookings, the conservative counter-establishment was comparatively puny. Then corporate fortunes and wealthy conservative families poured money into institutions such as the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and an expanding network of advocacy organizations. Within a decade, the balance of intellectual firepower in Washington had been transformed. Money Power had learned that it could purchase not only lobbyists and politicians, but an infrastructure for producing ideas, experts, arguments and policies—and injecting them continuously into American public life.

A substantial part of America’s Money Power has been involved in building the machinery that made that rise possible. The Heritage Foundation, organizer of Project 2025, has been supported by wealthy conservative donors and dark-money channels; donor-advised funds alone sent Heritage more than $18 million between 2020 and 2024. The Koch network converted enormous private wealth into nationwide political power through Americans for Prosperity and allied organizations, spending hundreds of millions to shape elections, taxes, regulation and environmental policy. In 2025 AFP launched a $20 million campaign to preserve Trump’s tax cuts.

The remaking of the courts offers an even more dramatic example. Leonard Leo, working with a network of donor-funded organizations, helped develop Trump’s Supreme Court lists and advised on the nominations that produced the Court’s conservative supermajority. His network raised hundreds of millions for judicial and political campaigns; then industrialist Barre Seid transferred $1.6 billion to a Leo-controlled organization—the largest known political-advocacy donation in American history. Here, concentrated private wealth was quite literally converted into enduring governmental power.

Within a decade, the conservative counter-establishment had gone from relative insignificance to outspending the older liberal and centrist institutions that had previously dominated Washington’s world of policy and ideas. Money Power had learned that it could purchase not only lobbyists and politicians, but an infrastructure for producing ideas, experts, arguments and policies—and injecting them continuously into American public life.

A substantial part of America’s Money Power has been involved in building the machinery that made that rise possible. The Heritage Foundation, organizer of Project 2025, has been supported by wealthy conservative donors and dark-money channels; donor-advised funds alone sent Heritage more than $18 million between 2020 and 2024. The Koch network converted enormous private wealth into nationwide political power through Americans for Prosperity and allied organizations, spending hundreds of millions to shape elections, taxes, regulation and environmental policy. In 2025 AFP launched a $20 million campaign to preserve Trump’s tax cuts.

The remaking of the courts offers an even more dramatic example.

The remaking of the courts offers an especially dramatic example. For decades, wealthy conservative donors funded the Federalist Society and the broader legal movement around it, creating a pipeline for identifying, grooming and promoting judges aligned with the interests of the Money Power. Over time, that machinery helped place its people throughout the federal judiciary, all the way up to the Supreme Court. Concentrated private wealth was thus converted into enduring governmental power.

Money Power also acquired enormous power to shape the political consciousness of ordinary Americans. Billionaire Rupert Murdoch poured enormous resources into creating Fox News, putting veteran Republican political strategist Roger Ailes in charge. Fox spent decades fostering grievance, resentment, fear and hostility toward designated enemies—the very emotions upon which fascistic politics feeds. In this way, concentrated wealth helped create a mass constituency receptive to fascistic power, enabling that power to gain control through the electoral machinery of American democracy even as it prepared to dismantle that democracy.

And much of the rest of Corporate America has responded to Trump not with resistance but with accommodation. Amazon, Meta, Google, Adobe, Uber, Robinhood, major banks and energy companies were among the corporations and executives contributing millions to Trump’s second inaugural fund, many explicitly hoping to establish a favorable relationship with the incoming administration. Nine major law firms, after being targeted by Trump executive orders, agreed to provide nearly $1 billion in pro bono legal work for causes favored by the administration rather than fight him in court; four others did fight and won injunctions.

What is striking, taken as a whole, is not merely that some billionaires and corporations actively supported the new order, or that others yielded when threatened. It is HOW LITTLE resistance there has been, from the immense power concentrated in American business, to this unprecedented attack on the American constitutional order.

One of the most powerful sectors of American society has contained active collaborators, many accommodators, and pitifully few actors willing to risk substantial interests in resisting a dominance-seeking political force.

 

HOW THE INSATIABLES TRANSFORMED “ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE” INTO “ONE DOLLAR, ONE VOTE”

Thanks to the Insatiables’ relentless pursuit of wealth and power, those increasingly dominating the American economic system have worked successfully to tilt the American polity to favor the Money Power.

Decades after the Supreme Court began changing “One person, one vote” into “One dollar, one vote” when it decided that spending money to influence elections was “speech” supposedly protected by the First Amendment, it gave plutocracy another huge boost with the infamous Citizens United decision, which opened the floodgates for concentrated wealth to acquire still greater power over the American government.

Nor has the Supreme Court’s tilt toward corporate power been confined to campaign finance. A study covering a century of Supreme Court decisions found the Roberts Court to be the most pro-business Court of that entire period. When businesses faced non-business parties before the Roberts Court, business won 63 percent of the time—15 percentage points higher than under the next-most-business-friendly Court of the preceding century.

And the outcomes show which way the system has been tilted. In the years after World War II, workers received roughly two-thirds of the income generated by the nonfarm business economy. By the early twenty-first century, their share had fallen substantially; by 2022, one Federal Reserve study found labor’s share of U.S. income at its lowest level since the Great Depression. What labor ceased receiving went instead to the owners of capital.

This isn’t the first time American society has faced the problem of excessive concentration of economic power. When monopolistic corporate power emerged in the late nineteenth century, America eventually responded with antitrust laws. Such laws can be understood as an effort to keep the market powerful enough to discipline its actors, rather than allowing successful actors to become powerful enough to control the market. They are precisely the kind of collective barrier required if a competitive system is to remain a system of freedom rather than dominance.

But the process is self-reinforcing. As economic power becomes more concentrated, those wielding that power acquire greater ability to shape the political and legal system in their favor. That enables still greater concentration—which gives the Money Power still greater ability to shape the rules.

Once that process acquires enough momentum, even the safeguards society created to prevent excessive concentration become vulnerable to the concentrated power they were designed to restrain. American antitrust enforcement weakened substantially during the latter decades of the twentieth century, allowing mergers and increasing corporate concentration that earlier generations had regarded as threats to a genuinely competitive market.

The safeguards against concentration were themselves weakened by the increasingly concentrated power they were supposed to restrain.

 

CONCLUSION

In America, the economy has always been mighty—powerful enough to have a big impact on politics, law, and the larger culture. When most of the actors in the American Economic System had an allegiance to the idea of “freedom” — like “free enterprise”—that system could operate more or less in harmony with the democratic polity on which the nation was founded.

But as the ceaseless competition of the market economy inevitably worked over the generations – through a process of “selection” — to concentrate economic power more and more in the hands of the kinds of people and organizations most single-minded in their pursuit of wealth and power, and most willing to do whatever it takes to get them, the System itself became increasingly governed by the Spirit of Domination.

When the most powerful institutional system in a democracy comes increasingly to be animated by a spirit of insatiability in the drive for power, and insufficiently constrained by conscience, the Economy can become the enemy of Democracy.

That’s what we see in America now: that transformation of American Economic Power has generated the powerful fascistic force that has made this moment so dangerous for the nation and the democratic values on which it was founded.