Gleichschaltung in the age of oligarchic soft fascism

Must-read article by Instapundit in the NYPost: “How Team Biden is more and more corporations to do its bidding“. A teaser:

Fascism involves government control, but not ownership, of the means of production. Private companies exist, but they’re simply arms of the government.

That’s pretty much how things work in America today, except that even functions traditionally government-performed in countries like Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy have been outsourced to private organizations.

Take reordering the economy. The Nazis’ program of Gleichschaltung rearranged everything to suit the party’s goals, with the supervision of party officials and government boards.

In America, on the other hand, the corporations that control the commanding heights of our national economy do it themselves, following the philosophy of environmental, social and governance investing.

Read the whole thing. Concerned as I am about extremist attempts to turn our Supreme Court into a government lapdog (even as I acknowledge the need for some reform), I am wrily amused about all the hand-wringing about the state of our “democracy” from the part of politicians and media who are effectively pushing their own countries further and further along the path of transnational oligarchic collectivism (“transoc”). Indeed, as Insty lays out eloquently: there are many more similarities between what regimes like the Biden bubatron [=puppet show] are doing and classical fascism, than there are differences.

But there are three major differences. For one, classical fascism is nationalist and/or irredentist, while the new oligarchic soft fascism is transnational in nature.

Second, classical fascism had its more or less all-powerful dictator, while in transoc, the actual rulers are an oligarchy, not the nominal leader. (Nobody awake-not-woke would believe, for example, that the senile doddering fool Joe Biden is actually running anything himself. Nor that an older, more lucid, Biden would have been down with some of the more outré things being done by his misadministration.) Those of you who have read “1984” may remember that Big Brother was but a figurehead for the Inner Party, and may indeed not even have been a real person.

Third, classical fascisms imposed iron-fist control right from the start. In contrast, the modern variant is an iron fist in a velvet glove, and gradually nudges the population in the desired direction by media manipulation and creeping excommunication of all who aren’t on board with an agenda that becomes progressively more extreme and unreasonable. If one were to find a metaphor in a rock track, none seems to fit better than Tool’s “Track #1” (a.k.a., “Stinkfist”). It was originally written as a coarse and deliberately shocking sadomasochistic metaphor for the mindless search of ever more extreme stimulation (cf. “We Are Amusing Ourselves To Death”), and hence its lyrics [*] are quite unsuitable for even this somewhat family-friendly blog. But its description fits the modus operandi of, for example, the Alphabet Soup Agenda to a tee.

[*] Note that there isn’t a single unprintable word in the lyrics, aside from perhaps the original title.