Fascism in Plain Sight: When Corporate Power Aligns with Authoritarian Rule
When repression is built into policy, budget lines, and legal codes, it doesn’t need to wear a uniform. It just needs to be enforced.
The architecture of repression is being built. The question is not if it will be used—but against whom, and when.
There’s a moment when critique becomes diagnosis. When the pattern becomes the plan. What we are seeing in the United States today is no longer a drift toward authoritarianism—it is its infrastructure being formalized, legalized, and funded. The fusion of executive power, corporate capital, and repressive machinery is not new in history. But its configuration here—under the guise of legality, patriotism, and economic efficiency—should alarm anyone who has studied the early stages of fascism.
Fascism is not a slur. It is a structure. A process. And we are walking it, step by step.
The detention centers being built for foreign nationals—many of whom are asylum seekers, long-time residents, or people whose visas have been revoked—are not simply immigration infrastructure. They are the physical manifestation of a political logic that sees entire groups of people as threats to the state. What begins as the criminalization of border crossers does not stop there. History is painfully clear: once the legal category of “enemy” is normalized, it expands.
And the machinery to enforce it—private detention contracts, militarized police, surveillance tech, armed civilian militias—will already be in place.
This is not speculation. It is precedent. In fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, repression didn’t begin with death camps. It began with laws. With economic alliances. With the use of state power to target scapegoated minorities while rewarding loyal capital. The early Nazi regime did not nationalize corporations—it partnered with them. IG Farben. Krupp. Siemens. These firms profited while the regime silenced opposition, redefined citizenship, and suspended civil protections.
That same alliance is now visible in the United States. Corporations bankroll campaigns that promise deregulation, union suppression, and tax cuts. In exchange, they enable the infrastructure of surveillance, subcontract incarceration, and provide the digital tools for monitoring dissent. The result is not just inequality—it is impunity for those who profit from the system and criminalization for those who resist it.
What we are seeing is the reorientation of state power. Not to serve public needs, but to protect wealth, punish dissent, and reshape belonging.
Fascism doesn’t announce itself. It begins with rules, categories, procedures. It hides behind legal language and budget cuts. It embeds itself in zoning codes, funding decisions, arrest records, and algorithmic risk scores. As anthropologists have long shown, state violence often works through mundane bureaucratic routines—forms, refusals, delays, quotas—disguising exclusion as administration.
The public sees only the visible tip: a border wall, a detention raid, a protest broken up. What lies beneath is a vast infrastructure designed to manage dissent, disqualify compassion, and reward obedience.
In that logic, fear becomes governance. The state does not have to be everywhere—it only has to make an example of someone. A few families detained. A few teachers silenced. A few journalists charged. The rest get the message.
Political ecology helps us see that authoritarianism does not just decide who belongs—it decides who survives. The same logic that strips legal protections from migrants also withdraws environmental protections from communities, treating both as expendable. The repressive state does not just patrol borders; it allocates harm.
In this moral economy, punishment is not just a deterrent—it is a signal. Anthropologically, fascism relies on what some cultures express in ritual: the creation of purity through the exclusion or sacrifice of the other. Those targeted are not simply punished; they are made to represent disorder, impurity, contagion. The spectacle of their punishment reaffirms the imagined moral order.
But there is another story to tell. One rooted in a very different anthropology: of mutual care, of collective memory, of moral refusal. If we are to resist what is emerging, we must recognize it for what it is—not an aberration, but a project. Not incompetence, but design.
And we must ask: When the next group is redefined as enemies of the state, who will speak? Who will stand?
The time to ask is now—before the walls are built higher, the laws made tighter, and the machinery turned inward.
Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Vintage Books, 2005.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House, 2018.
Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Crown Publishing, 2017.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the National Borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025.
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