The face of American Fascism

From The New American Corporate State by Warren Meyer at Forbes:

A troika of big government, big business and big labor is attempting to run the country to its own advantage.

Opponents of President Barack Obama and the Nancy Pelosi Congress will often accuse them of being "socialist." I find that this term is unhelpful, as many folks use direct government takeover of industrial enterprises as the litmus test for socialism, and thus will reject this hypothesis about the president. It is more useful to think of this administration as pursuing a European-style corporate state, a form of political economy that allows the state to exert strong control in the economy while maintaining a nominal façade of private ownership.

While the intellectual origins of the corporate state go back much further, the first serious attempt to implement such a system was in 1920s Italy by Benito Mussolini. Under that system, state-sponsored industry cartels programmed every aspect of economic life, from wages and working conditions to prices, production levels and product specifications. Nearly every commercial action required a government license, which would be denied to those who showed insufficient loyalty to the state and its goals.

In the United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was almost certainly an admirer of Mussolini's economic system, as he copied many of its salient features into the code authorities and commercial licensing requirements of the National Industrial Recovery Act (which eventually was struck down by the Supreme Court). Prices, wages, production quotas and, in effect, nearly every detail of business practices in an industry were to be set by small groups of government, labor and industry leaders. The president was given the power to unilaterally revoke the right to do business, without any further due process, of any enterprise in America if it refused to conform to this reincarnation of the Medieval guild system.

Mussolini called his system Fascism.

From Oikophobia by James Taranto in the WSJ:

Why the liberal elite finds Americans revolting.

What is the nature of this contempt? In part it is the snobbery of the cognitive elite, exemplified by a recent New York Times Web column by Timothy Egan called "Building a Nation of Know-Nothings"--or by the viciousness directed at Sarah Palin, whose folksy demeanor and state-college background seem terribly déclassé not just to liberals but to a good number of conservatives in places like New York City.

In more cerebral moments, the elitists of the left invoke a kind of Marxism Lite to explain away opinions and values that run counter to their own. Thus Barack Obama's notorious remark to the effect that economic deprivation embitters the proles, so that they cling to guns and religion.
...
The British philosopher Roger Scruton has coined a term to describe this attitude: oikophobia. Xenophobia is fear of the alien; oikophobia is fear of the familiar: "the disposition, in any conflict, to side with 'them' against 'us', and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours.' " What a perfect description of the pro-mosque left.

Call it whatever you want but it still boils down to the fact that there really are some deluded Americans who think of themselves as aristocratic rulers not simply fellow citizens in a democratic republic.