"FRIENDLY FASCISM"

Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1985). From the Preface:

     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 an 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 would 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.' 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' and in spontaneous or organized 'reaction (other than fright or apathy) to concentrated power . . . and inequality, injustice or coercion.'
     A few years ago too many people closed their eyes to the indicators of the first tendency.

Id. at xi-xii, citations omitted. Food for thought in this, our, post-democratic America . . . post-democratic world.