The convergence of corporate power and fascist method: the public sphere stripped to its studs, every function sold to private profit, the whole enforced by the cult of dominance and the treatment of opposition as enemy action.
corporatocracy + fascist method — business rule, enforced by fascist means
The existing language runs out. "Authoritarianism" names the concentration of power but not its marriage to corporate wealth. "Oligarchy" names the rule of the wealthy few but not the fascist method of enforcement. The phenomenon this page diagnoses is the convergence of two projects that are conceptually distinct but practically allied, and it needs one word to hold both.
The convergence of two movements: first, the project of stripping the public sector — the government, the agencies, the shared institutions of the Union — down to its studs, a project with deep roots in the neo-Confederate hostility to federal power; and second, the project of transferring every function thus vacated to private corporate control, operated for profit, and enforced by methods that are recognizably fascist in their disregard for law, their cult of dominance, and their treatment of opposition as enemy action. The first hollows out the public. The second fills the hollow with private power.
The agencies defunded, the civil service purged, the shared institutions demolished. A neo-Confederate impulse older than the present movement: the Union stripped down to its studs, the common sphere emptied of everything it once held.
Every vacated function handed to corporate operators, run for profit, enforced by fascist method. The forms of government persist; the substance of governance has been privatized. The coercive machinery answers now to capital.
A clarification about the name, and a distinction worth drawing precisely. Corpofascism is built from two established things: corporatocracy — the domination of government by business corporations, run for their own profit — and the fascist method of enforcement. The "corpo-" points to corporate power, that is, to corporatocracy. It should not be confused with corporatism, a separate and older theory of sectoral organization under a supreme state, which this diagnosis does not invoke.
Nor is the claim that corpofascism is identical to what Mussolini professed. The opposite, in fact, is the decisive point. In Mussolini's corporate state the state was sovereign over the corporate bodies. In corpofascism the polarity is reversed: the business corporations are the principals, and the state becomes their instrument — while the fascist method of enforcement is retained. What is shared is the method; what is inverted is the question of who rules whom. The term names a documented convergence with unmistakably fascist features, not a historical equation.
The term, as this author first encountered it, comes from an unexpected source, and intellectual honesty requires crediting it. The world of Cyberpunk 2077 — the role-playing game developed by the Polish studio CD Projekt Red, building on the tabletop universe created by Mike Pondsmith — gives the concept its sharpest popular image.
In that world, state power has decayed so completely that the relationship between government and corporation has inverted: it is no longer that corporations gain legitimacy from governments, but that governments and entire countries gain legitimacy from corporate backing. The megacorporations field private paramilitary armies that have fought open wars. The police are, in effect, a corporate security force. The military function has been sold to the highest bidder. The corporations are above the law because they have become the law.
The game is fiction, and the credit belongs to CD Projekt Red for building the world and the story that render the idea so vivid. But the value of the fiction is diagnostic. It shows, in fully realized form, the endpoint of the trajectory: the condition toward which the demolition of the public sector and the privatization of force, pursued together, actually lead.
Night City is not a prediction of where America will be. It is an illustration of where corpofascism goes if it is not stopped.
Cyberpunk 2077 and its world are the work of CD Projekt Red, from the tabletop universe created by Mike Pondsmith. The game is credited here as the source of the popular image; the diagnostic application is the author's own.
Corpofascism is the disease. J.D. Vance is, so far, its clearest symptom — not its origin and not yet its center, but the place where the pattern is currently most visible. His career is a documented case study in one of corpofascism's essential moves: the installation of a politician at the heart of national power by private capital with an openly stated skepticism of democracy.
The man behind the installation is Peter Thiel, and the record is not in dispute. Thiel wrote in a 2009 essay that he no longer believed "freedom and democracy are compatible," locating part of the blame in the extension of the vote to women and the growth of welfare. The man who funded Vance's entrance into national politics is an intellectual patron of a movement that openly contemplates the replacement of democratic government.
The account of Vance's foreign-policy realignment draws substantially on David R. Lurie, "JD Vance's axis of authoritarianism," published in Public Notice (Aaron Rupar's publication) on June 19, 2026. The framing of Vance as the architect of an "axis of authoritarianism," the connection to the pre-war America First Committee, and the reading of the December 2025 National Security Strategy are Lurie's analysis, cited here with respect for his work. The funding record above is independently sourced (NPR, CBS, Politico, OpenSecrets) and kept distinct from his reporting.
Two things about this trajectory matter, and the second is the one that matters for the diagnosis. The first: the pattern is consistent — every documented action points the same direction. The second: it is detachable from any one man. Trump's affection for strongmen was personal and impulsive. Vance's is ideological and articulated. A personal affection dies with the person; an ideology, once it has captured a movement and installed its adherents, does not. That is why the symptom is worth watching. He may remain a symptom. He may, one day, become central. The disease does not depend on which.
If Vance shows installation by domestic capital, Jared Kushner shows the parallel move with foreign capital. The documentation is congressional, not speculative. Kushner's firm, Affinity Partners, was incorporated days after he left the White House. Six months later it received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund — approved over the objection of the fund's own screening panel, which called the operation "unsatisfactory in all aspects."
By 2026, congressional investigators found the firm managing roughly $6.16 billion, some 99% from foreign sources. A Senate investigation found fees as high as $157 million from foreign clients, including $87 million from the Saudi government, and described a structure raising the concern of circumventing the Foreign Agents Registration Act — the law requiring those who act for foreign powers to register as such.
The foreign money already in the system is a lever. The people who placed it there will eventually pull it.
This is not a claim about character. It is an observation about how leverage works: capital advanced in expectation of influence is a debt, and debts are collected. The expectation does not expire when an administration ends. It is a standing claim on the future conduct of a family at the center of American power — corpofascism's logic operating through the family rather than the firm.
A film imagined this convergence two decades before it arrived. Jonathan Demme's 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate made one decisive change from the Cold War original: it replaced the foreign communist conspiracy with a corporation. The villain is Manchurian Global, a politically connected private-equity and biotech firm, and its aim is to install a man it controls as vice president. The line that names the scheme: "You are about to become the first privately owned and operated vice president of the United States."
This is a parable, and it is useless if misread. Nothing here suggests that J.D. Vance, or any actual official, is a programmed puppet acting against his will. That is precisely the wrong reading — it would trivialize a serious argument into a conspiracy theory. Vance is a willing, articulate, ideologically committed participant in the project he advances. The horror of the real situation is the opposite of the film's: there is no conditioning to undo, no implant to remove. The man means it.
So what is the parable good for? Strip away the science-fiction mechanism — the implant, the trigger words — and what remains is a precise description of something that needs no fiction at all: a private corporate power, pursuing its own agenda, financing a politician's rise to place its interests at the center of national power. That is not brainwashing. That is patronage, and it is documented.
The new Manchurian Global is not a corporation with a laboratory. It is the ideological and financial momentum behind the movement — the network of fortunes and convictions that finds willing vessels and funds their rise. In 2004 the idea that a corporation could purchase a path to the vice presidency still needed the cover of science fiction to be sayable. Twenty years later the cover is unnecessary. The patronage is on the public record. The parable has become reportage.
It would be possible to dismiss all of this as alarmism if the machinery for corporate capture of government did not already exist. It does. Its name is Citizens United, and it is the best illustration of what to expect, because it is not a forecast — it is a fifteen-year-old precedent whose consequences are fully documented.
In 2010, the Supreme Court held that independent political spending by corporations could not be restricted. Justice Kennedy asserted that such expenditures "do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption." Extended months later to create the super PAC, the decision dismantled a century of campaign-finance regulation.
The results establish what happens when corporate money flows into politics without limit: more than $9 billion in outside spending since 2010, over $2.6 billion of it from undisclosed sources; a more than 28-fold increase in outside independent expenditures between 2008 and 2024. And the feature that connects directly to the foreign-money concern: shell corporations and dark-money channels can serve as conduits for funds whose true source the law no longer requires anyone to disclose.
Kennedy's claim — that corporate political spending gives rise to no corruption or its appearance — is the founding axiom of corpofascism stated by the Court itself: the proposition that there is nothing to fear in the marriage of corporate money and political power. Everything documented in the fifteen years since is the refutation of that axiom. Citizens United is not a warning about what corporate capture might look like. It is the door already standing open.
The convergence traced here — and the movement that carries it — is developed in full in The American Antichrist and the Apotheosis of Self-Interest: A Warning from an Elder Democracy, with every claim sourced and the constructive alternative laid out.