Normally, I leave the political essays to Om. Unlike much of politics, however, I find this essay uniquely important—something I want to leave on the Viking Vibe before I go. Please do bear with me on this one, and read through fully. It may leave you with a fuller understanding of much of our current world.
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In the turbulent summer of 1989 Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist, published an essay entitled “The End of History?”. For context, that was the year of the Tiananmen Square protests, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the invention of the World Wide Web.
Mr. Fukuyama laid out his, somewhat presumptuous, position quite clearly. That the human race had reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” He was so confident of his claim that three years later in 1992 came his book entitled The End of History and the Last Man, approximately 108,000 words long and between 418 and 464 pages depending on the edition.
Now, and it’s very important we say this outright, Fukuyama was wrong. The twenty-first century did not bring worldwide embrace of liberal democracy. Already by the 2020s we are seeing global democratic backsliding. In 2009 for example 6% of the worldwide population was said to have been living in “autocratizing countries” (countries becoming more autocratic); in 2019 that was 34%. A chart from Regimes of the World suggests that in 2016, the number of democracies in the world reached an all-time high, and by 2025 has fallen to 87 countries. By nearly every measure the number of real liberal democracies in the world has already peaked and is now in decline.
Mr. Fukuyama rested under the incorrect assumption that the ideology in competition with liberal democracy would always be Marxist-Leninist socialism—the sort of government system the then crumbling Soviet Union was run under and which it often unsuccessfully tried to institute unto all of its satellite states. Obviously, that system of government is not in fashion either: the number of officially Marxist governments is at the lowest it’s ever been. (To avoid redundancy, I will be referring to leftist governments stemming from Marx’s original class-conflict philosophy simply as “socialism” from here on out).
So, if liberalism is in decline, and so is one-party socialism, what ideology has been turning the tide of global governance?
Some would say nationalism, the third wing of the spectrum if we take socialism as left and liberalism as the center. I disagree for the most part and find this reductionistic (as I do most takes referring to the political compass, actually). Nationalism or its more extreme form Fascism (loaded term!) have an “image” to them: the macho leader, the goose-stepping, the wars of territorial expansion. But what modern nations really have these traits? Do China or Russia, both illiberal countries who have both gained enough prominence economically and politically to once again challenge the United States, really fulfill them? Sort of, one could say, but I feel that’s reductionistic. China and Russia have not become strong through wars, they have become important through industry and the exportation of resources—in the case of Russia raw resources and in the case of China manufactured goods. Nearly every country in the world’s largest trade partner is China nowadays, and that’s not because China is conquering every country in the world.
But China, modern China, isn’t really socialist either. It has 6.3 to 6.5 million U.S. dollar millionaires, making it the second-largest population of high-net-worth individuals globally behind the United States. For context, the Soviet Union’s very first millionaire came into being only in 1989 after a period of economic liberalization the USSR tried to implement to avoid falling apart. When China was under the socialist authoritarian Mao Zedong, it vigorously destroyed remnants of the “old culture,” that allegedly perpetuated class struggle, such as statues of Confucius, but by 1994 after a period of economic openness, China started once again erecting statues of the philosopher. Even in our own lives, we have seen Chinese firms become some of the most influential in the world, take Temu or Alibaba. Who can really claim such a state is socialist and devoted to equality and carrying on the flame of class struggle? Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union doesn’t even claim to be socialist. For a period, Western media outlets declared Russia an oligarchy dominated by large resource corporations, but by the 2020s, it’s more or less coalesced around a strong central government. That’s obviously not socialism. A state which subsidizes private corporations and is in constant talks with them about maximizing output and production is not devoted to the rule of the workers.
So if they’re not nationalist and not fascist and not socialist and not liberal, what are they? I say they are Corporatist.
Corporatism is not the rule of corporations over the government and daily life (that is corporatocracy). This is an important distinction. When I refer to corporatism in this piece I mean especially authoritarian corporatism, but there are also nonauthoritarian corporatist countries (famously the Nordic countries call themselves corporatist).
Corporatism was an outgrowth of the “third-way” political movements of the interwar era, i.e. outside the usual left-right political spectrum. Mussolini called himself a corporatist. The idea, simply, is that liberalism and socialism are both inefficient and immoral for the running of a state because liberalism, by nature, leads to the growth of large businesses and firms that control and abuse the lives of workers; and socialism, by nature, leads to endless class struggle such that there is no feeling of real national unity or “one-ness,” in the population. Corporatism suggests that the state should not lean into either of these angles, and should instead play a sort of “referee” in a country, allowing both capital and labor to exist, but letting the government, for the sake of stability in the country, have a role in the doings of both branches and how they interact with one another (create “corporations” of disparate groups and allow them to interact).
Corporatism comes into inherent conflict with liberalism because liberalism assumes that the government shouldn’t do anything (legal or not) leaning in favor of any party because it would hurt the freedom of those in the nation; corporatism presumes that the security of all the parties is worth it if it means choosing a few over others. Imagine there was a lawsuit against a major company that could hurt productivity in the country; in corporatism, the state decides who wins out by nature of what would benefit “society” more. In corporatism, labor unions are also officially integrated into the government system. They coordinate to negotiate wages, working conditions, and national economic policy in league with the state and businesses. Strikes are illegal. You know what that sounds like?
China. Every significant private company in China is required to house an internal CCP committee, and the only legal labor union, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, is directly controlled by the party.
And Russia. Putin’s ruling government has effectively nationalized or placed under heavy state influence its most critical industries, Gazprom and Rosneft most famously, while, as usual, suppressing independent labor unions in favor of state-coordinated ones.
But the realest seduction of corporatism comes from how one often has a difficult time identifying the propaganda around it. With socialism and liberalism, identifying propaganda tends to be easy. Look for terms like “class consciousness,” or “freedom,” and vague things like that. If corporatism had anything remotely similar, it may be “security,” or “unity,” but it tends to sound so reasonable or similar to other ideologies (what ideology doesn’t promise security and freedom?) that it’s hard to find out when someone’s trying to convince you. Corporatism sounds like the “obviously reasonable option” but remember that there’s no real perfection in politics. There will never be an obviously rational action for a state and nation to take because it must prioritize certain values in making all decisions.
There’s this claim you often hear, often from socialists, that liberalism often (or always) leads to nationalism and fascism because voters do not want to hear socialist rhetoric about a class war. This is not really true. Liberalism sometimes leads to corporatism which itself can lead to nationalism if taken to an extreme. Guess what, middle-class voters—whom socialists have long had trouble rallying—do not want to see violence and the stopping of services for some distant dream of a revolution. That’s not them being naive, that’s their democratic choice to want security. Corporatism rises in times of instability when the middle class (that is, us) do not trust liberalism to deliver benefits for ordinary people. When voters believe business interests have grown too strong and that the ruling class is out of touch.
The Nazis became the largest party in the German parliament mostly due to middle class backing. Ordinary people were tired of violence and street brawls, of economic chaos from the government’s inability to operate. They were willing to tolerate regressive politics because what they really wished for was stability. The increasingly weakening government of 1920s Germany depended on hyperinflation to pay off war debts, which further hurt quality of life. (Like ours, the 1920s was an age of expanding global corporations, and, for the first time it really seemed like financial interests were overtaking political interests in the shaping of world society).
Before the Nazi party took over, Germany was one of the most liberal democratic societies, but also one of the most dysfunctional states in the world. Universal suffrage, extensive civic rights, massive investments in public arts and culture—especially of the uncomfortable type to sensibilities in that age (homosexuality, interracial relationships, etc.)—were present, but openness combined with economic trauma allowed extreme rhetoric the freedom to organize. The first thing the authoritarians did was accuse the government of catering to foreign decadence. You could call that a textbook example of Karl Popper’s Tolerance Paradox. The nationalist regimes of the thirties were not in any way inevitable; they were a reaction to an open society that seemed to be failing and a government which seemed willingly disconnected from reality.
How do the autocratic regimes of the twenties—the twenty-twenties—legitimize their existence? How did Putin do it? Well, he “fixed Russia’s economy by getting the oligarchs under control! He restored state power over powerful international corporations and banks!” Why do Chinese companies succeed? They’re seen as an alternative to the otherwise dominance of the U.S. dollar.
Corporatism in the United States can be said to explain the rise of Trump, though it often aligns more with rhetoric used than actual political policy. Unitary Executive Authority—heard of the term? It’s the idea that all federal bureaux should be under the American president and that he should have full control over appointments. It’s why we have Kash Patel, and for a time had Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy jointly in charge of DOGE. The inherent idea is that this simplifies federal processes. The side-effect is that it weakens Congress and thus weakens the separation of powers, and oh! Look at that! Unintended illiberalism. Well, Congress is corrupt anyway, isn’t it? It’s all paid for by the billionaires. It’s corrupt and Trump bypassing Congress is just “necessary” for proper governance. And look, there you have it, that’s the sort of movement in government functions that could lead to corporatism. Liberalism does not inherently lead to corporatism and thus to nationalism and fascism, the economic failures of liberalism do. And the tolerance of liberalism is what’s leading to the rise of such ideologies in the United States. And if it can happen in the United States, it can happen anywhere else in the world.
Here I have included a list of contemporary governments and political entities I consider to run under corporatism.
The current authoritarian governments of Russia (United Russia; right wing) and China (The Chinese Communist Party; left wing).
Bloc Québécois in Canada: Quebec’s vaguely left-wing ruling party. BQ advocates for heavy state involvement in protecting French Canadian language and culture through legislation, subsidizing Quebec’s cultural industries, and managing labor relations on a “Quebec-first” basis.
The currently ascending European anti-immigration right wing, that is: Reform UK in Britain, Alternatif für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, National Rally in France, the ruling Brothers of Italy party in Italy (which traces its lineage directly from a party formed in 1946 by former members of the Mussolini government and uses similar party symbology), and others. These use corporatist rhetoric of state-enforced national unity and economic protectionism to challenge liberal globalism, but do not split the state into integrated unions in the classical corporatist way. They—at this time, anyway—lack the actual structural mechanics for the style of corporatism we have really focused on here.
The African National Congress in South Africa (left wing). The ANC governs through a formal tripartite alliance with COSATU, South Africa’s largest labor federation, and the South African Communist Party.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India (right wing), which has cultivated close state coordination with favored industrial conglomerates (Adani and Ambani connections) while deploying the RSS, a Hindu nationalist cultural organization, as a quasi-state body that enforces social unity from outside formal government structures.
Clearly, this is a worldwide movement, truly independent of the left-right spectrum as we currently know it. That is proof that history, and history of the ideological battles, are not over. In this coming decade, I believe we will see greater involvement of the government in culture in nearly every region of the world. We will see the expansion of the cultural war more officially, in a more state-sanctioned sense.
Maybe this normalization of corporatism on the national level will perpetuate itself towards the international level. To some extent it already has. If there was anything liberalism succeeded in, it was creating a world stage where aggressive “great-power politics” and sabre-rattling was taboo. Theoretically, an unlawful invasion of another state would lead to internal condemnation, and sanctions, and unity to keep the global peace and freedom. The level to which such a legalistic world system ever did exist is debatable—after all, was the once popular invasion of Iraq justified?—but there can be no debate that international law was considered important, at least more so than it is now. Now, in this decade, we may see the return of great power conflicts. Ukraine first, perhaps, maybe the Red Sea Corridor next, or Taiwan. Without congruence with its member states the United Nations becomes powerless. And without a general agreement to international liberal law, who will really make an effort to protect smaller countries? Who but themselves, with their own nationalism, their own growth of arms. What about appeasement of foreign powers? How much should we care? And now we have a severe echo to the international status quo before the beginning of the second world war.
Corporatism rarely introduces itself by name, but it can be said to have been one of the most successful ideological movements in recent history. The first step is understanding that it exists. Just defining such a movement sets us far ahead. As the lines between state power, corporate muscle, and cultural identity continue to blur, we are left to answer a defining question of the twenty-first century: can a fractured democracy fix its own dysfunction, or will we inevitably invite the state into our culture to do it for us? Will the old-fashioned dichotomy triumph or will we ultimately have to retire the left-right spectrum? Will the movement ever stop? When? The one certainty we have, as usual, is that history is not over at all.
