America is now a full-fledged fascist country.

17 July 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

According to Wikipedia,

Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement,^[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.^[2][3] Opposed to Marxism, democracy, anarchism, pluralism, free markets, egalitarianism, communism, liberalism, and socialism ^[4][5]; fascism is at the far right, of the traditional left–right spectrum.^[6][5][7]

One can reasonably take exception to some aspects of that definition, but it is almost entirely true. The only seriously questionable part of it is its allegation that fascism is opposed to “free markets.” Free markets includes privatization of currently existing Governmental entities, such as infrastructure, education, health care and insurance, and natural resources — transferring them to private investors to control. Fascism isn’t “opposed” to that; fascism introduced that.

Despite the aristocracy-spread myth that privatization was introduced by two (alleged) democracies, the USA (Reagan) and UK (Thatcher), in the 1980s, privatization was, in fact, a big and central aim of the elite fascists. After all, aristocrats control the private wealth. Privatization means that they get to control also what was previously public. Privatization moreover provides corrupt politicians (their politicians) an opportunity to pay off their contributors (themselves) by offering them an inside track on public-asset sales. In September 2009, the European University Institute issued their RSCAS_2009_46.pdf, titled “From Public to Private: Privatization in 1920’s Fascist Italy” (subsequently retitled “The First Privatization: Selling SOEs” in the 2011 Cambridge Journal of Economics), by Germa Bel. (As I check for it again, I see that it has been removed by Google – probably because it busts the crucial neoliberal (or ‘libertarian’) lie that the first privatizations were in the 1970s-80s by ‘democratic’ countries – and so here is its URL: http://www.ub.edu/graap/bel_Italy_fascist.pdf, and here it is shown in the Journal.) He said in his summary: “Privatization was an important policy in Italy in 1922-1925. The Fascist government was alone in transferring State ownership and services to private firms in the 1920s; no other country in the world would engage in such a policy until Nazi Germany did so between 1934 and 1937.” He particularly noted: “In his first speech as a member of the Italian Parliament in June 1921, Mussolini said: ‘The State must have a police, a judiciary, an army, and a foreign policy. All other things, and I do not exclude secondary education, must go back to the private activity of individuals.’” For examples: Mussolini privatized the Government’s monopoly match-producer; monopoly life-insurance firm; monopoly telephone-company; re-privatized "Gio. Ansaldo & C. ... a large producer of machinery such as boats, trains, airplanes, and naval equipment”; expanded “the concessions system, and provided great legal flexibility, allowing public works such as the building of the motorways to be carried out either by the State or by means of concessions to private firms” and so, “Beginning in 1923, six tolled motorways were constructed in a short space of time." Then, in the February 2010 Economic History Review, he headlined a study specifically about the German case, “Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in 1930s Germany”. There, he reported that, though “privatizations in Chile and the UK, which began to be implemented in the 1970s and 1980s, are usually considered the first privatization policies in modern history, ... none of the contemporary economic analyses of privatization takes into account an important, earlier case: the privatization policy implemented by the National Socialist (Nazi) Party in Germany. ... Although modern economic literature usually fails to notice it, the Nazi government in 1930s Germany implemented a large-scale privatization policy.” Furthermore, “Germany was alone in developing a policy of privatization in the mid-1930s,” since Italy had finished its privatizations by then. The purposes of these privatizations, in both cases, were chiefly “receipts from selling” the assets to finance rearmament (and Italy’s and Germany’s imperialism), and also “the desire to increase support from” the major aristocrats (such as, in Germany, the armaments-making firms of the Thyssens, the Krupps, and the Flicks), who received sweet deals on these assets.

America, in fact, has the world’s highest ratio of privately held net worth divided by publicly held net worth; and, so, it is the most fascist country in the world, according to this crucially important measure of fascism. According to the U.S. Government’s “Balance Sheets”, its assets are $5.662 trillion, and its liabilities are $45.545 trillion, producing a net worth of (minus) -$39.883 trillion. America is also the country that has the highest total privately held wealth (privately held net worth), +$139.866 trillion, and that is 30.8% of the global total. China (with a population 3.8 times larger) is listed as #2 with +$84.485 trillion. #7 India (with 3.9 times the U.S. population) is +$15.365 trillion.; and #17 (not counting Taiwan though the CIA-run site Wikipedia is falsely treating Taiwan as being NOT a part of China, but instead a separate country — and so China’s total is actually +$93.340 trillion including both Hong Kong and Taiwan) is Russia with +$4.386 trillion. So, America’s billionaires dominate the world, though the country that they directly control (America) has been stripped of everything, by and for them, in order to achieve this. Because America’s public debt of $39.883 trillion ($45.545 trillion minus $5.662 trillion) is owed by all 340 million Americans, those 340 million individuals vastly subsidize America’s approximately a thousand billionaires, who control 139 of the Fortune Global 500 mega-corporations. (In 2022, China had the most — 145 of them. However, lots of China’s billionaires are moving their assets to the U.S., in order to be in a country that’s ruled by and for its billionaires. So, this is the competition between the U.S. and China.) In the IMF’s latest, 2023, study on “the Government Balance Sheet in China”, was reported that “at US$12.5 trillion, China has the largest stock of financial assets in the world.” So, whereas the U.S. Government has a net debt of $39.883T, which is the world’s largest, China’s Government has a net worth of +$12.5T, which is the world’s largest, and Russia’s Government has a net worth of +$4.386T (serving a population that’s only 11% as large as is China’s).

Since the U.S. Government — even prior to Trump — has been spending more than half of all Congressionally appropriated U.S. expenditures on its military (less than half goes each year to all the rest put together), and now spends 65% of all of the entire world’s military expenditures, and since the mega-corporations that produce and sell weaponry to the U.S. Government and to its allied Governments (colonies) are by far the most profitable firms in America, the creation and extension of wars by the U.S. Government is the Government’s main actual function.

That’s an overview of America’s fascism. Here are the more obvious particulars on it:

Kimberly Wehle, a columnist at The Hill, headlined on July 16th a brilliantly argued and superbly documented article, at The Hill and at Yahoo News, “Opinion - King Donald? Supreme Court grants Trump power to repeal laws at his whim”, which I shall therefore excerpt here, because she is documenting that this fascism is now even being led by a one-person dictator, like the self-acknowledged ones (Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco) were:

“The executive has seized for itself the power to repeal federal law by way of mass terminations, in direct contravention of the Take Care Clause and our Constitution’s separation of powers.”

Read that again. These are the words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a dissenting opinion to the Supreme Court’s one-paragraph July 14 ruling, in which the majority basically held — without any justification or explanation whatsoever — that it’s fine that America has become a land of lawlessness with power consolidated in one person.

President Trump is the law now.

The case is McMahon v. New York, and it involves Trump’s stated plan to abolish the Department of Education by basically firing half of its workforce so that it cannot function. Unlike Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn DOGE experiment, this maneuver is not even thinly disguised by the pretense of government “efficiency.” Trump just wants the Department of Education to go.

The trouble is that, as a matter of the Constitution’s core separation of powers, Congress makes the laws. In 1979, Congress enacted the Department of Education Organization Act for purposes of “ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual.”

As Sotomayor explained in her dissent, which Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined, “only Congress has the power to abolish the department. The executive’s task, by contrast, is to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’”

By shutting down the Department of Education “by executive fiat,” Trump is blatantly intruding on the powers of the legislature to make the laws while ignoring the constitutional mandate, and his oath of office, that he duly execute those laws. …

Then there’s the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which, according to the department’s current website, “is a law that makes available a free appropriate education to eligible children with disabilities … and ensures special education and related services to those children, supports early services for infants and toddlers and their families, and awards competitive discretionary grants.” Seven million students across the country receive special education services supported by that law. …

All of these laws are now being gutted by the stroke of Trump’s pen, as if he were a king.

There has been no public debate in Congress, no mark-ups of bills amending the law, no ability for voters to call representatives to lobby for or against proposals to amend the Department of Education and the statutes it administers. There has been no budget analyses, no media coverage of congressional horse-trading, no interviews of people from both parties on the steps of the Capitol, no hearing from public school officials or teachers or parents on whether this is a good idea.

Trump simply snatched the power to make and repeal major federal legislation and programs that affect millions of American children for himself.

Worse, the majority on the Supreme Court is letting him do it. Like Trump, it made its ruling on-the-fly and behind closed doors — without full briefing, oral argument or a written decision explaining the justices’ rationale for allowing this end run around Article I of the Constitution (which lodges the lawmaking power in Congress) and Article II (which mandates that the president take care that the laws are faithfully executed).

The majority’s silence left it to the dissenting justices once again to try and back-fill the majority’s reasoning in a dissenting opinion so that the public has some sort of record. …

Mind you, the district court issued its injunction after considering dozens of affidavits from Department of Education officials and recipients of federal funding describing how McMahon’s mass terminations have already affected the ability to pay teachers, purchase materials and equipment, and enroll students on federal financial aid — and how full implantation of Trump’s plan could be far worse. The government submitted no evidence in response.

Ignoring the record entirely, and on an emergency motion filed by the administration, the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority simply overturned the injunction, effectively handing Trump a win — just weeks before the start of the new school year — without even bothering to actually grapple with the Constitution, the lower court’s findings or the dire impacts on millions of children and young adults that rely on the department’s programs in order to get an education. …

Here’s an entirely truthful instagram by the Democratic Party’s MSNBC summarizing the apparently unprosecutable past bribery (concerning Trump University) by Trump, of Pam Bondi who now is his U.S. Attorney General, and a lengthier and well documented version of that is here. Especially that fuller report makes clear how hopelessly corrupt today’s U.S. Government is, and so the fact should be pointed out that corruption serves the billionaires and disempowers the public, and that this happens in EVERY fascist nation (which includes all U.S. colonies), not only in America. Every empire is deeply corrupt, and America’s is no exception.

Although this enriches billionaires enormously (and here is a typical instagram about how enormously), the public suffer greatly from it. Furthermore, if America’s elementary schools are teaching their students that today’s America is a democratic nation, they are teaching a demonstrable and demonstrated falsehood. Either such a teacher is ignorant, or else the teacher is lying, to assert such a thing. And, now, under Trump, America is 100% a fascist nation, with a one-man dictator. (Trump has even bragged about it, he said “I run the country and the world.” His immediate predecessor Biden had said “I am running the world.”) So, all of this is now blatantly obvious. How can anyone deny that today’s America is, indeed, a fascist dictatorship?

Furthermore, the U.S. empire under Trump is coming apart; and, so, the failure of his Presidency will soon also be blatantly obvious, and the even-more-unpopular Democatic Party is unlikely to be able to benefit from this. America is heading to become a failed and failing state. But certainly the U.S. empire is coming to an end. Certainly it will soon end, but the question is whether it is willing to go all the way to a world-destroying WW3 in order to ‘win’ its war to control the whole world, or not? Because it could.

Why, then, do all of the U.S.-and-allied major ‘news’-media (and almost all of even their minor ones) refuse to publish any of my fully documented articles? Are they trying to keep facts such as these, in this report, hidden from the public? Of course, that (censorship), too, is a feature of fascism.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.