A challenge to all our readers, posters, and commenters!
Some people, Americans and Europeans, still believe they live in democracies, despite growing evidence to the contrary.All will come out well in the end, they feel. So be it. Others think the democracy has moved on to something else, and shudder at the prospect. What would you call this new method of government?
Christiano-corporatism?
Corporato- imperialism?
Demogogic mobocracy?
Smoke-and-mirrors Oligarchy ?
Propagandic Siegneurialism?
Pressuregroupocracy?
Spin-o-Swindleism
Hypocritic-Charlatanism?
Pluto-Corporatism?
Revolutionary corporatism?
Regrettably, none slip off the tongue as easily as fascism.
Ideas, please
Fascism is a form of govt where government highly regulates business; that would accurately describe the U.S. today; europe would be more closely aligned to socialism, where govt owns certain bits of industry; by the way, the U.S. was never a democracy, which Jefferson believed to be the worst form of govt; the U.S. is a republic, which is vastly different from a true democrcay; the dumb downed americans of today dont know the difference, however;
When I went to get my citizenship, I had to pass an exam. It was very easy, except for one dodgy question: “Is the US a democracy or a republic?”. My answer was, a democratic republic. Wrong! A republic. Should have known that, although 98% of the people also got it wrong.
The irony is that nowadays I would answer the question correctly, because it is clearly a corporatist oligarchy, not a democracy. When the etablishments of both major parties basically agree on foreign policy and only compete on how best to please the rich and major interest groups, extracting the maximum money from them, it ceases to be a democracy.
A further comment to Mickey: actually, the fascists, Hitler and Mussolini, bent over backwards to court big business. They were very successful. Without the backing of the big industrialists they could never have prosecuted the war as successfully as they did. They did not ultimately fail because they owned or regulated business, but because they (or rather Hitler) bit off more than they could chew without sufficient resources or manpower. They were ground down, mainly by the Russians, who lost 8 million people in the process, although to hear most Americans you’d never know it. Now Stalin really did control industry.
I would suggest for the Uk, a Meretricious Liberalocracy. With one face we all bend over backwards to be liberal and politically correct, relaxing our laws to please minority groups; and with our other face we are complaining about what nonsense it is to be so polictically correct , and how dangerous it is to relax our laws in order to please minority groups. We are so obsessed with this ambivelence that I fear we are sleep walking into the anarchic ‘Rivers of Blood’ which was predicted some time ago by one of our far sighted politicians . We were all very shocked at him at the time, but now I wonder….