We’re Living in the Fascist Economy Charlotte Twight Warned About

In our modern politics of rage and polarization, the term “fascism” has emerged as America’s invective du jour.

Trump; Putin; Netanyahu; Islamists; far-left Democrats; far-right European political parties; public health experts; censorship opponents; those questioning mass migration; and many more have been labelled as fascists over recent years.

Fascism is seeming becoming an all-purpose derogatory label directed at all those we oppose, and for almost any conceivable reason.

To critics of imprecise language, false equivalences over what counts as “fascist” run the risk that the term itself might lose all meaning.

Perhaps one way of stepping back from the free-wheeling nature of discourse using the fascism label is to consider some of the deeper, perhaps scholarly, meanings attached to the word.

As many of us do know, the modern origin of fascism stemmed from the distinctive style of government based upon dictatorial executive power in twentieth-century Italy and Germany.

Mussolini and Hitler assumed autocratic powers for themselves and engaged in aggressive militarism both at home and abroad.

They restricted civil liberties, and undermined parliamentary, judicial, and other checks and balances against centralized political power.

The continental European fascists engaged in bellicose nationalism and expressed antipathy toward liberalism as well as other perceived ideological rivals.

Some of these features are interpreted as recurring throughout the West over the past decade, as part of general patterns of “democratic backsliding” and weakening institutional guardrails against executive power.

What is less widely known that fascism also entails a collectivist economic program of severe governmental control and restriction over commercial enterprise, free markets, and entrepreneurial spirit.

It is in its economic aspects that fascism reveals itself most clearly, and for this insight we can thank American economist Charlotte Twight for her careful examination of the nature and consequences of fascism.

About fifty years ago Twight published America’s Emerging Fascist Economy, with its declaration that “it is objectively accurate to label the prevailing American economic structure fascist.”

If this opening wasn’t breathtaking enough, Twight concluded her book by saying that the U.S. government “has been able to establish fascist controls over virtually every aspect of economic life.”

These diagnoses would surprise modern audiences who assume America remains the bastion of free-market capitalism, but Twight would counsel them to revise their priors.

But how did she arrive at the suggestion that economic fascism prevailed here?

The answer lays in the careful definition work and policy analysis that Twight undertook to understand the sheer breadth and depth of political influence over the world’s largest economy.

Fascism is a collectivist ideology that insists that political priorities prevail over all alternatives, with private economic initiatives nominally tolerated to the extent they do not contradict or undermine state superiority.

Twight said that “although fascism gives lip service to capitalism, a fascist economy is essentially orchestrated from the top by its political authorities” using a comprehensive suite of administrative, fiscal, legal, and regulatory measures.

The fascist economic program is consistent with Mussolini’s infamous dictum, “All within the state, Nothing outside the state, Nothing against the state.”

Twight critiqued a vast spread of economic controls over commerce, repressive monetary and financial policies, licensing obligations and labor market restrictions, distortive agricultural subsidies, and more.

The 1970s throwback of tariffs radically extends government control over individual and commercial decision-making, raising prices and misdirecting resources toward less efficient production.

As was the case at the time Twight wrote, politicians and bureaucrats use their immense discretionary powers to enforce compliance and, if deemed necessary, wrangle economic concessions from certain businesses and interest groups.

Perhaps the only difference between now and then is that modern-day “rent extractions” by political figures are more blatant and openly discussed, rather than conducted behind closed doors.

As recently minted GMU PhD candidate Caleb Pettit has perceptively noted, the tariff policy gyrations of the Trump administration reflect the active political higgling and bargaining you’d expect from a rent extraction process.

So here’s the line of thinking: if 1975 U.S. economic policy was labelled by Twight as fascistic, and 2026 policy looks and operates much like it did in the past, then why not describe the economic policies of today as fascistic?

The worry is that it has become fashionable these days to declare as “fascist” anything that breathes, speaks, and moves in ways we don’t like.

But in economic terms the creeping trend toward fascism has been more profound and ominous than perhaps many of us would care to admit.

The point is not that economic fascism only just arrived on the scene with, say, the ascension of Trump, but its core features have been a nagging feature of America’s economic policy landscape for many decades now.

Charlotte Twight told us this was the case fifty years ago, and her message has been receiving renewed interest among scholars in recent times (for example, a newly issued special issue of The Independent Review on Twight’s book).

But it is about time the American public heeded Twight’s message if the U.S. is to return to an economic condition firmly grounded in free market principles.

Mikayla Novak is Senior Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.