The Corporatist Doctrine

The richest billionaires in the United States were front-and-center guests at the presidential inauguration in January. We have a presidential administration that immediately declared war on its own citizens. It would be a falsehood to that no one expected us to end up where we are.

The Corporatist State

Published in 2007, Naomi Klein wrote in The Shock Doctrine an “accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big business is not liberal, conservative, capitalist, but corporatist.”

It’s main characteristics, she continues,

are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalization that justified bottomless spending on security. For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society. But because of the the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population outside the bubble , other feature of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture.

The modern doctrine of privatizing state services en-mass, Naomi Klein, says, came from Milton Friedman. Often referred to as the Chicago school of economics, where he taught and where his proteges studied under him, his proposals of mass privatization have used natural and human-made disasters as catalysts to maximize private profit and minimize the need for state services. This has applied to Chile, Haiti, Syria, China, and numerous other places. It “came home,” Klein says, after September 11, 2001, and after Hurricane Katrina in 2003. There was a huge effort to get rid of public schools in Louisiana. Of course, the security state increased dramatically after September 11.

Milton Friedman had long-standing affiliations with some think-tanks calling for a neoliberal, or corporatist approach to government since the mid-1990s. Among those thinks thanks are the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. The same Heritage Foundation that wrote Project 2025 – the playbook to privatize the government and attack civil liberties.

Twenty years later these policies are here to stay until we do something about it. The corporatist state has increased in strength, and has reached the point the rich live in a bubble and everyone else is disposable and a nuisance. That’s exactly why the current administration quickly revamped the US Digital Service to become the US Department of Efficiency, headed by the billion Elon Musk, and tasked it with “efficiently” overhauling the government and removing federal employees in an effort to quickly privatize essential services provided by the government.

It would be easy to blame the current administration, which as made the corporatist state obvious. Unfortunately but importantly, scholars, historians, and people continuing to pay attention, have pointed out that previous administrations have laid the groundwork for what’s happening.

Previous administrations, including the Democratic presidencies of Obama and Biden, also targeted non-white immigrants. A lot of attention has been given to ICE’s terrible policies of targeting non-white migrants for deportation. The detention of a Mahmoud Khalil, picked up for ICE because his political views has heightened that attention. The corporatist state is reaching the part where incarceration increases and civil liberties decrease.

How we respond will determine if we are governed by corporations or by people. We can’t have both.