The Independent Review

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Charlotte Twight’s (1975) America’s Emerging Fascist Economy. The articles in this symposium engage the book’s key themes with an eye toward their present-day relevance. Before discussing the articles, let us provide some background on the author and the book. Charlotte Twight earned her juris doctor (JD) degree from the University of Washington School of Law in 1965. She worked as an attorney while writing and publishing America’s Emerging Fascist Economy. Soon thereafter, in the late 1970s, Twight decided to pursue a graduate degree in economics at the University of Washington. She earned her MA in 1980 and her PhD in 1983 under the guidance of Robert Higgs, who served as her dissertation adviser. After graduation, Twight secured a faculty…

Through most of the twentieth century, a serious ideological debate connected to the Cold War pitted capitalist democracies against socialist dictatorships. While the debate encompassed both political and economic systems, on the economic side of things, economists depicted economic systems as falling on a continuum between capitalist market economies and socialist centrally planned economies. At one end of the continuum were pure market economies based on private ownership and voluntary exchange. At the other end, the means of production were owned by government, and economic activity was centrally planned. Real-world economies were depicted as mixed economies, some closer to the capitalist end of the continuum and others closer to the socialist end.1 As the Cold War emerged out of World War II, the proponents of capitalism and free markets saw…

Fifty years ago, Charlotte Twight argued that “while it is objectively accurate to label the prevailing American economic structure fascist, most Americans do not realize that the economy embodies fascist principles and have not consciously chosen to embrace such a system” (1975, 13). She realized that the term “fascist” is “an emotionally charged, vituperative label” (1975, 13) but didn’t hesitate to use it—both because she believed it to be objectively correct and to raise the alarm, as the trend was noticeably “accelerating” (1975, 260) in the first half of the 1970s. She realized that many readers automatically equate fascism with the horrors of Nazi Germany, but her focus was on whether American economic policies increasingly mirrored those of Germany and Italy in the period before World War II. As…

In a famous essay published by The New York Review of Books, Umberto Eco identified fourteen characteristics of fascism that may explain why the word “fascism” “became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements” (Eco 1995). 1 Eco’s effort aims at identifying those features “that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism,” meaning characteristics that do not necessarily appear all together in a regime labeled as “fascism,” yet “one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist” (Eco 1995). Charlotte Twight’s America’s Emerging Fascist Economy was published in 1975, twenty years before Eco’s essay. Twight’s book offers us a sketch of what we consider the “economic spirit…

One of the most noted failures of the free market is its supposed inability to quickly adjust prices and wages to their new equilibrium levels after changes in supply and demand. That is, prices and wages are rigid, or, as they are more commonly described, sticky. Mainstream macroeconomists invoke price and wage stickiness to explain why decreases in the overall demand for goods and services cause declines in output and employment. In the words of the New Keynesian economist Paul Krugman, “shortfalls of overall demand would cure themselves if only wages and prices fell rapidly in the face of unemployment. . .. In reality prices don’t fall quickly in the face of recession” (Krugman 2009, 182). Krugman and other New Keynesian economists take the view that price stickiness is a…

In America’s Emerging Fascist Economy, Charlotte Twight (1975) argues that the United States was evolving into a fascist economy. A fascist economy, she notes, is defined by a philosophy of collectivism over individualism. It also includes the maintenance of private property rights over the means of economic production, but with heavy state influence and control in pursuit of the “national interest.” Specific economic policies may include, but are not limited to, industrial policy, wage and price controls, inflation, government licensing, government cartelization, and economic protectionism. A key feature of this economic system, Twight notes, is that it includes a variety of political engagements and rituals to create the illusion of participation by the masses, resulting in “participatory fascism.” The defining feature of participatory fascism is the “ostensible inclusion of all…