Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul slammed America’s system of governance at a rally in Kansas City, saying businesses and government are pushing the country into twenty-first century fascism.
But before you start picturing fair-skinned, blue-eyed CEOs and bureaucrats running amok and with their right arms held high, calm down. What the outspoken Texas Republican meant was fascist corporatism – an economic model most prominently seen in Mussolini’s Italy of the 1920s to the 1940s.
Fascist economic corporatism involved government and private management of full sectors of the economy – which Paul says is par for the course in today’s America.
“We’ve slipped away from a true republic,” Paul told thousands of his supporters at the rally. “Now we’re slipping into a fascist system where it’s a combination of government, big business and authoritarian rule, and the suppression of the individual rights of each and every American citizen.”
His words, which a few years ago might have been dismissed by most, rang loud and clear in Kansas. Paul’s rally coincided with long-established Missouri and Kansas GOP events – from which many attendees actually slipped away to hear Paul deliver his speech. Drawn out and bled dry by ongoing and expensive overseas military campaigns, Americans are more and more receptive to a foreign policy of peace, which is what Paul promises to deliver.
