Reply #20: I always preface the use of it this way

[davidgmills]

Benito Mussolini said:

"Fascism should really be called corporatism because it is the meger of corporate and state power."

The Italians also had another term for it: "estato corporativo" or the corporatist state.

Then they listen.

Tell them you are talking about it the original and true sense of the word, not in the ambiguous sense it has come to mean.

Then of course mention a government "of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations."

We really do need to use this word in its very precise sense.

Anecdote: I wrote a paper on fascism which has been circulated around the net. The thesis was that we are becoming a corporatist (fascist) state. My father (80 years old) read it and later told me that he disagreed with my definition of fascism. I reminded him that the point of the article was that Americans don't know what fascism means and that I had used Mussolini's definition.

We really do need to get people thinking in terms of the corporatist state. It is the corporatist state that produces all the ills we associate with fascism.