Hello my friends,

I got several questions from my last article, "Clarifying Our Moment," about how the economy relates to competitive authoritarianism and fascism. So, I wanted to write a "part 2" to briefly answer this question historically and how it is playing out in our country today. I hope it brings clarity.

Capitalism and Authoritarianism: A Historical and Contemporary Critique

Capitalism, at its core, is an economic system defined by private ownership, markets, and the pursuit of profit. In liberal democracies, it’s often championed as a partner of freedom. Yet history tells a more complex story and shows that capitalism is not inherently democratic. It is actually adaptive, meaning it is able to serve authoritarian regimes as easily as democratic ones, especially when it is stripped of moral accountability and democratic guardrails.

Across the globe and throughout history, capitalism has repeatedly aligned with authoritarianism. This was not by accident but was intentional. When unchecked, capitalism can be a potent and lucrative tool for consolidating power, marginalize dissent, and prioritize profit over people. The question isn’t whether capitalism is compatible with democracy, it’s whether it remains accountable to democratic and ethical principles.

Historical Examples of Capitalism’s Authoritarian Flexibility.

Fascist Alliances and Industrial Power

In Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, capitalism wasn’t dismantled, it was weaponized.

German industrial giants like IG Farben, Siemens, Volkswagen, and Krupp partnered with Hitler’s regime, profiting from rearmament, forced labor, and genocide. These corporations didn’t merely survive under fascism, they thrived, trading democratic principles for access, contracts, and control. The Nazi state allowed capitalist enterprise to function freely, so long as it aligned with fascist goals and helped eliminate leftist opposition and labor organizing.

Similarly, in pre-WWII Japan, industrial conglomerates known as zaibatsu worked hand-in-glove with the militarist state. These firms supplied the empire’s expansion and profited from the exploitation of colonized populations. As in Germany, capitalism was not abolished, it was absorbed into a nationalist, authoritarian framework.

The Corporate State in Italy

Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy introduced the “corporate state,” where private enterprise operated under strict state coordination. While companies kept their profits, they lost their autonomy. Strikes were banned, unions were absorbed, and workers lost collective bargaining rights. In Mussolini’s own words: “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

Capitalism was preserved, but only insofar as it served authoritarian control and nationalist ideology.

Chile’s Economic Shock Therapy

Following the U.S.-backed 1973 coup in Chile, General Augusto Pinochet implemented sweeping free-market reforms with help from the “Chicago Boys,” who were economists trained under Milton Friedman. State assets were privatized, unions dismantled, and labor protections gutted.

Foreign investors profited. The wealthy elite expanded their control. Meanwhile, mass repression, censorship, torture, and social inequality devastated the Chilean people. Capitalism flourished, not as a force of liberation, but as a tool of authoritarianism.

These cases demonstrate a consistent pattern: capitalism doesn’t resist authoritarianism on its own. Left untethered from democratic values, it often enables and even demands it.

The American Case: Capitalism’s Authoritarian Undercurrent

The United States often presents itself as capitalism’s democratic ideal. But its history reveals a darker synergy: capitalism has repeatedly coexisted with, and even fueled, authoritarian impulses, from slavery and oligarchy to surveillance and suppression.

Slavery: The Original Capitalist Dictatorship

American chattel slavery was not just a moral catastrophe, it was an economic system. Enslaved Africans were treated as capital assets. Their labor fueled the cotton industry, drove northern manufacturing, and enriched banks, insurers, and landowners. Plantation capitalism was a violent, authoritarian regime enforced by law, armed militias, and terror. It thrived on dehumanization, and it laid the foundations for racial capitalism that endures to this day.

Oligarchy, Labor Suppression, and Red Scares

During the Gilded Age, tycoons like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan amassed immense wealth and power. When workers demanded fair wages and humane conditions, the state intervened, but not to protect them, but to defend capital. Resistance efforts such as the Homestead Strike (1892) and Pullman Strike (1894) ended in bloodshed. Federal troops and private armies were deployed to crush unions. Then later, during the Red Scare, labor activists and civil rights leaders were surveilled, smeared, or imprisoned. Critique of capitalism became equated with treason. Under the banner of “freedom,” dissent was criminalized and economic power became synonymous with political power.

Henry Ford and the Machinery of Authoritarianism

Having a deep love of history early on in my life, Henry Ford was someone I came to admire as a boy. Not only because of his auto innovations, but I was mesmerized with how he popularized the assembly line and was fascinated at how industry worked prior to his innovations. It wouldn't be until seminary that I would also learn that he was also a virulent antisemite. After looking into him more deeply, I think he offers a chilling example of how capitalist influence can empower authoritarianism rather than oppose it.

​Hitler admired Ford, praising him in Mein Kampf as the only American resisting “Jewish influence.” He also reportedly had a portrait of Henry Ford in his office, further suggesting his admiration for the American industrialist. Ford’s newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, published antisemitic screeds later compiled into The International Jew, a text that not only sold widely, but influenced Nazi ideology. Ford would eventually receive the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938, Nazi Germany’s highest honor for a foreigner.

Ford’s anti-union tactics, like spying, strikebreaking, intimidation, mirrored authoritarian strategies. His blend of mass production, nationalism, and bigotry provided Hitler with both a symbolic and practical model for fascist capitalism. Ford’s story shows how industrial success, when fused with ideology, can amplify authoritarianism, not just abroad, but at home.

I discovered this history while researching the movement Christian Identity, which is a white supremacist version of Christianity that still exists today and was the movement that founded the Aryan Nations compound here in Idaho, which has since moved. William J. Cameron, who was editor and chief at Henry Ford's own "The Dearborn Independent" was an adherent of British-Israelism, which was the movement that gave rise to Christian Identity. Cameron was the one who authored most of "The International Jew."

Contemporary America: Capitalism’s Authoritarian Drift

Authoritarian capitalism is not a relic. It’s alive in the United States today and is reshaped by new technologies, media ecosystems, and political alignments. A handful of massive corporations now wield disproportionate power over law, policy, and public life. Billionaires and lobbying groups pour money into elections, influence legislation, and fund disinformation networks.

This is not a “free market,” it is the practice of corporate oligarchy. And it aligns easily with authoritarian movements that promise deregulation, tax cuts, and loyalty to elite interests over democratic accountability. Voter suppression laws, anti-labor legislation, gerrymandering, and the rollback of protest rights often have corporate backing, quietly justified as “pro-business” measures, even when they corrode democratic foundations.

Media outlets, political figures, and corporations also exploit religious identity and cultural division for profit. In our time as we have seen, Christianity in particular has been monetized by private schools, gun manufacturers, influencers, and political donors. This fusion of economic interests with religious fervor creates a powerful engine for authoritarian populism, one where dissent is seen as "heresy" and capitalism is seen as a moral crusade, not just an economic philosophy. This dynamic distorts both Christianity and capitalism, transforming each into a mechanism of control, fear, and profit.

From schools and prisons to water systems and the military, essential public services are increasingly outsourced to for-profit entities. Accountability vanishes. Incentives shift. Justice, education, and care are subordinated to quarterly earnings. This is stealth authoritarianism, which is cloaking governance without public input by having it driven by corporate interests that are insulated from democratic pressure.

What We Can Do

The arc of this history makes it clear that capitalism on its own will not save democracy. Left unchecked, it often becomes one of the driving forces that undermines it. But resistance is not only possible, it is happening and it begins locally, through collective action, democratic renewal, and moral clarity.

Here’s a few suggestions:

• Organize labor and support unions. Workers’ rights are democracy’s foundation. Strengthening labor protections fights both exploitation and plutocracy.
• Support local and cooperative economies. Invest in businesses and institutions rooted in your community, not extractive corporate chains.
• Defend public institutions. Fight against the privatization of schools, healthcare, and natural resources. Demand transparency and accountability.
• Confront propaganda. Reject media that monetizes division. Uplift independent journalism, fact-based discourse, and cultural literacy.
• Build cross-movement coalitions. Racial justice, environmental sustainability, economic equity, and democratic reform are all connected. The fight is shared.
• Engage politically at every level. Vote. Organize. Hold elected officials accountable to people, not profits.

Capitalism is not inherently moral. It will serve whoever holds power, whether democratic or despotic. History, from Hitler to Pinochet to privatized prisons, shows us how easily it becomes a tool of authoritarianism.

Today, the issues before us is freedom versus control. Democracy versus plutocracy. People versus profit. Whether capitalism becomes a tool of liberation or a weapon of oppression depends not on theory, but on action. It depends on our willingness to build systems rooted in justice, dignity, and care.