On April 29, 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in this message to Congress, stated what he believed was a great danger to this nation: “Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power,” thus signifying that “... the liberty of a democracy is not safe…” because of this private power becoming stronger than the actual democratic state. Again, these words were spoken by that President all the way back in 1938 and when we look at corporate as well as individual power as demonstrated by the incredible amount of business conducted by certain behemoth corporations, as well as the sheer amount of assets held by these corporations, in conjunction with individuals that themselves are worth billions upon billions of dollars, it has to be admitted that never has there been so much material wealth and temporal power held in the hands of those that do not need answer to their government, but in actuality, are the ones that are controlling that government for their personal and continual pleasure at the expense of the people, in whole, thereby suggesting that America really is not actually a functioning democracy, but rather is fascist at its core. This then is the proximate problem of our time, because whenever the people do not have agency, and therefore whenever we have a government which is not of, for, and by the people, then we do not have a democracy, but instead we have fascist despotism.
The country that America is supposed to have is mandated by its Constitution, and to cede such control to private interests and in particular to artificial constructs of the state, demonstrated by corporations, which currently are structured to be perpetual in their nature is anathema to the people being able to exert any direction or general purpose through that governance, because those with unelected private power are themselves in effective control of the decisions so being made by that government, because governmental positions have been captured far too often by private enterprise, and those that are in the most powerful governmental offices are consistently the same that are representatives not of the people, but are instead of that capitalistic industry.
That said, the two things that people have at their disposal are, first of all, that there are far more people than there are those that are in the privileged positions, of which those people are becoming more knowledgeable about how the lion’s share of the industrial and labor effort so made by those working people has been unjustly taken from them, which signifies that the number of those people, joined together, may yet have their valued say. The other thing in the people’s favor is that the founding of this nation was meant to demonstrate that the people had the fundamental right to throw off despotism, so as to pursue their unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which presently is being denied to a very wide swath of Americans, that do not receive a living wage, that do not have access to a strong labor union, and aren’t secure in their own persons, all because this has been co-opted by unelected powers that see the people not as citizens of this nation, and thereby entitled to equal rights, but rather as nothing much more than subjects, meant to be exploited, and manipulated for the benefit of those elites, and none else -- unless the mass of people, rise up against these elites as is their unalienable right.