“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

Who does that sound more like?  Liberals or “conservatives”?  Barack Obama or Rupert Murdoch?

The quote is from the father of fascism, Benito Mussolini, who knew that the fascistic merger of state and corporate power involves authoritarian principles, not liberal ones.

Here’s a fun quiz.  Below is a short list of actual right wing organizations in the U.S.  However, one of them is a name Frye came up with in 1942 to describe an American fascist organization.  See if you can guess which one.

American Life League

American Society for Tradition, Family and Property

Coalition on Revival

Committee for Justice

Defenders of American Democracy

Eagle Forum

Plymouth Rock Foundation

Traditional Values Coalition

(The answer after the jump.)

Defenders of American Democracy

From the “The Present Condition of the World,” 1942:

Given the right conditions, we could develop on this continent a Nazism of a fury compared to which that of the Germans would be, in American language, bush-league stuff.  And if it has not occurred, and even if the danger of its occurring has perhaps passed its meridian, our escape is due to the anodyne of prosperity and to certain economic and geographical features in our favour, not to any special virtue in us, any innate love of liberty in our people, or any invincible power in our democratic institutions.  With regard to the last, the general level of political education and insight is even lower here than in Germany before Hitler.  American Fascists, or Defenders of American Democracy as they would doubtless call themselves, if in the first place they could achieve power, would find even less difficulty in rounding up and shooting the leaders of what organized resistance there would be than the Nazis had in Germany, where nearly half the population, in 1932, belonged to well-disciplined revolutionary parties.  (CW 10, 216)