ABSTRACT
Here we explore the domestic and global expansion of capitalist power across recent decades, with emphasis on the U.S. In contrast to established wisdom, which depicts the U.S. as an exemplary democracy, in this chapter we look at the overriding confluence of corporate, government, and military power in American society as theorized by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s and later by such writers as Herbert Marcuse, Sheldon Wolin, Chris Hedges, Bertram Gross, and others. Gross was the first to envision the rise of a “friendly fascism” in the U.S. What Mills conceptualized several decades ago – power elite, oligarchy, state capitalism, warfare state, alienated mass society – appears more valid today than at the time Mills was writing. This developmental pattern has been driven by a profound rightward shift in American politics since the early 1980s, and especially since the events of 9/11.
