{"id":1724,"date":"2018-06-04T07:57:04","date_gmt":"2018-06-04T14:57:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paulmcelligott.com\/blog\/?p=1724"},"modified":"2018-05-20T20:00:08","modified_gmt":"2018-05-21T03:00:08","slug":"words-have-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paulmcelligott.com\/blog\/post\/words-have-meaning\/","title":{"rendered":"Words Have Meaning"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you pay attention to progressive media, you will hear people use the term \u201ccorporatist\u201d to describe politicians who accept generous bribes, I mean campaign donations, from large corporations, usually via dark money contributions to their SuperPACs. In this use of the word, \u201ccorporatist\u201d means \u201cwholly owned by and beholden to corporate interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

This sometimes trips up less-informed members of the progressive left, who will incorrectly say that \u201cgovernment by corporations\u201d is fascism because \u201ccorporatism\u201d was an integral part of fascist ideology in the days of Benito Mussolini.<\/p>\n

When I said, \u201cthis use of the word,\u201d I meant that the word \u201ccorporatist\u201d has multiple meanings, and the ownership of our government institutions by massive corporations is a relatively recent usage which was not employed by Fascist Italy.<\/p>\n

Corporatism<\/a> in fascist times was the belief that a nation was like a human body. The word comes from the Latin \u201ccorpus,\u201d literally meaning \u201cbody.\u201d In place of organs, a nation had \u201ccorporate groups,\u201d which included business, labor, the clergy, the military, farmers, academia, and the list goes on. Each one of these corporate groups had a defined role to fill to advance the interests of the nation. The fascist twist on corporatism is that the corporate groups filled those roles under the close \u201cguidance\u201d of a strong national leader.<\/p>\n

The critical difference between early-20th-century fascist corporatism and 21st-century capitalist corporatism is that under fascism, business was subservient to the state. Today we have the exact opposite: the government is subservient to unelected business interests that are not accountable to the people in any way.<\/p>\n

Therefore, I get leery when people today start using the word \u201ccorporatist\u201d in the 21st-century context, especially when there is already a perfectly good word that would never be accidentally conflated with fascism.<\/p>\n

Oligarchy.<\/p>\n

Of course, if oligarchy is any better than fascism, it is only by subtle shades of very dark gray. At this moment, the oligarchs do not have anything approaching their own Gestapo or secret police, though I must concede that those who protested against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) may wish to offer a rebuttal.<\/p>\n

Call it oligarchy or 21st-century capitalist corporatism, it all adds up to the same threat to our way of life. In a republic, political power is public property, the ultimate socialized resource, distributed equally to all persons, then consensually and conditionally yielded to a representative government. As political power is privatized, increasingly consolidated in fewer and fewer hands, the republican<\/em> part of our constitutional republic is slipping away from us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The word “corporatism” gets thrown around loosely today, but it once had an even darker meaning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1725,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[208,278,279,282,281,280],"class_list":["post-1724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-venting","tag-constitutional-republic","tag-corporatism","tag-corporatist","tag-fascism","tag-oligarchy","tag-republic"],"yoast_head":"\nWords Have Meaning - Paul McElligott Dot Com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.paulmcelligott.com\/blog\/post\/words-have-meaning\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Words Have Meaning - 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