This time, Mussolini said, the bundle was the police and military power of the state combined with the economic power of industry. During the 1920s and 1930s that fascist system was adopted by Italy, Spain, Japan, and Germany.
Mussolini also noted that there was a more accurate word to describe his political/economic system: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism," he wrote in the Encyclopedia Italiana, "because it is a merger of state and corporate power." And indeed, the results of fascism can look very good, at first; in Germany it worked so well that Adolf Hitler was named TIME magazine's Man of the Year on February 2, 1939.
But democracy is rarer than we think.
We think of our "western" civilization as having a democratic heritage, but that's a mirage. For most of these thousands of years, kings, emperors, Caesars, popes, and warlords have ruled the lives of ordinary people.
Democracy was tried for just 185 years, from 507 BCE to 322 BCE, in Athens; the experiment came to a bloody end with the conquest of the area by warlord Alexander the Great.
The idea lay dormant for two thousand years; the rule of kings and warlords resumed, until the American experiment birthed it again "- in the midst of an economic crisis.
There have been just four of these 80-year, four-generation economic cycles in our nation's history, and all three of the previous ones threatened the very foundations of human liberty.
Yet as rare as democracy is in history, the concept is immensely compelling to the human spirit, and American expressions of the ideal have been the beacon that has lit the path forward for more than two centuries. From the French Revolution in 1789 to the people's uprising in Beijing in 1989, people around the world have used language and icons from the pens of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and their peers.
The Greek-Roman-Masonic-Iroquois-American idea of a government "deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed" is one of the most powerful and timeless ideas in the world, even if we didn't quite get it right at first (it was only true for propertied white males), and even if it's been strained since its inception.
On May 29th, 1989, over twenty thousand people gathered around a 37-foot-tall paper mache statue in Beijing's Tienanmen Square. They placed their lives in danger, but that statue was such a powerful archetypal representation that many were willing to die for it"and some did. They called their statue the "Goddess of Democracy": it was a scale replica of the Statue of Liberty that stands in New York harbor on Liberty Island.
It is tremendously ironic that today some Republicans proudly assert that our "founding fathers" intended that political power only belong to the moneyed elite and the corporations they control. "America is not a democracy," they say, "but just a republic." The will of the people, they argue, doesn't matter: billionaires and corporations should be running the show.
Is that a principle for which people would die in Tienanmen Square? No; they stood up for the goddess of democracy, inscribed with "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." They demonstrated for the oppressed, and for their own hopes for personal freedom.
But while much of the world tries to emulate the American experiment, contemporary America is moving in the direction of the corporate-state partnership.
Executives from regulated industries are heading up the agencies that regulate them. Other symptoms of increasing corporate control of the nation include widespread privatization and so-called public-private partnerships: euphemisms for shifting control of a commons' resources (like water or electricity) from government agencies to corporations.
Corporations and their agents have become the largest contributors to politicians, political parties, and so-called "think tanks" which both write and influence legislation.
That distinction between corporate control and human control is absolutely pivotal: governments that derive their just powers from the governed should be exclusively responsible to citizens and voters, and their agencies were originally created exclusively to administer and protect the resources of the commons used by citizens and voters.
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