From the wreckage of greed and fear, a new democracy must rise—hand-built, unstable, defiant. Like the Phoenix, it won’t be pretty. But it will fly.

In This Article

• Why even feudal systems offered more social protection than modern capitalism
• How mercantilism and early corporations blurred the lines between state and profit
• What the Enlightenment got right—and dangerously wrong
• How post-WWII corporate benevolence was more PR than principle
• Why neoliberalism turned economic pain into political poison
• How displaced masculinity fuels the authoritarian resurgence
• Why democracy won’t survive without shared economic security

How History Has Led Us to Fear, Authoritarianism, and the Unraveling of Democracy

by Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com

It's a twisted, medieval system, but it worked. You were born into your station, just like your lord. You worked his land, paid your dues, and in return, you got protection, a place in the social order, and access to the commons. Yes, back then, peasants had grazing rights. Today, we can’t afford groceries without scanning a loyalty card and hoping our bank account hasn’t been auto-drafted into oblivion. The contrast is stark, the changes over time, drastic.

The feudal system was built on mutual obligation. Yes, it was hierarchical, and yes, it was unjust. But it was anchored in place-based relationships. Everyone knew where they stood. Fear existed, but it was predictable: the harvest, disease, and the occasional war, not mass layoffs, pension theft, or algorithmic job rejections. The predictability of fear in the feudal system contrasts sharply with the unpredictability of modern economic challenges.

Mercantilism: When Trade Replaced Land as Power

As peasants scraped at the soil, the wealth they produced set sail for empire—stacked in gold, protected by cannon, and sanctified by kings. Mercantilism wasn’t about people. It was about profit that never looked back.

Then came the merchants. As global trade expanded in the 15th and 16th centuries, a new kind of wealth emerged—mobile, extractive, and deeply intertwined with the rise of the centralized state. With its web of local lords and mutual obligations, the feudal system was already fraying. The Black Death had disrupted the social order. And the printing press, a powerful tool of information, was disrupting the feudal system. Now, global trade is rewriting the economic order.

This period, known as the age of mercantilism, wasn’t about building strong communities. It was about amassing gold, extracting resources, and controlling trade routes. Monarchs, eager to centralize power and finance expanding empires, formed lucrative alliances with merchant elites. The crown offered protection, legal privilege, and monopoly charters. The merchants, in return, helped develop the empire and lined their own and the king’s coffers.

Enter the early joint-stock companies, most famously the East India Company—perhaps the first true multinational. It didn’t just trade spices. It ruled territories. It ran armies. It collected taxes and destabilized governments. It was a for-profit entity armed with sovereign powers. The marriage of state and capital was not just consummated—it was weaponized.

This commercial and state power merging also birthed a new kind of political anxiety. With feudalism unraveling and local ties weakening, society became more volatile. During this upheaval, specifically in the aftermath of the English Civil War, philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote his infamous political treatise, Leviathan (1651).

Hobbes didn’t write in a vacuum. He saw the chaos that followed the collapse of inherited authority and local structures. In his view, human beings left to their own devices were selfish, fearful, and prone to violence. Without a strong, central authority—a Leviathan—life would be, in his chilling words, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

So while mercantilism was transforming the economy, Hobbes was transforming political theory. He laid the intellectual groundwork for the modern state, not based on divine right but on rational fear. Submit to the sovereign, he said, and you’ll avoid mutual destruction. It was authoritarianism with a social contract twist—safety in exchange for obedience.

Ironically, Hobbes’ Leviathan has aged well—if you imagine it wearing a corporate logo. The centralized power he envisioned didn’t just manifest in monarchs. It eventually took root in boardrooms, stock exchanges, and balance sheets. Mercantilism didn’t just replace land with trade—it replaced obligation with contracts, relationships with transactions, and the commons with commodities.

The Enlightenment’s Promise—and the Industrial Machine That Broke It

The Enlightenment, with its celebration of reason, liberty, and man's rights, brought about a seismic shift in the economic landscape. It dismantled monarchies, ignited the flame of democracy, and sent philosophers into raptures over natural law and universal dignity. Suddenly, kings weren’t divine, and peasants weren’t disposable. The American colonies revolted. France overthrew its ancien régime. France overthrew its ancien régime. It was the age of revolution, fueled by the radical notion that individuals mattered more than inherited titles or superstitions in royal bloodlines.

But as always, the fine print came later. While the Enlightenment celebrated personal liberty, it conveniently sidestepped an awkward question: How do you reconcile human freedom with an economic system that turns people into commodities? Property rights were enshrined with the force of scripture. Social contracts were implied—maybe. Freedom from tyranny? Glorious. Freedom from poverty, wage slavery, and child labor? Not our department.

The Enlightenment cracked open the door to capitalism, but didn’t ask who’d be standing on the other side, holding the deed to the house. It paved the philosophical road for markets, contracts, and individualism. Still, it left society to fend for itself as the gears of economic expansion started grinding up everything in their path.

By the 19th century, the factory had replaced the farm, and the corporation replaced the noble estate. The steam engine became the new altar, and labor the new sacrifice. You didn’t serve a lord anymore; you served the clock. And when you broke, someone else was always waiting in line—hungrier, cheaper, more desperate.

This was the era Charles Dickens made famous—not because he exaggerated it, but because he survived it. Children worked ten-hour days in soot-covered mills. Women stitched until their hands bled. Men dropped dead on factory floors. The poor were criminalized, the rich sanctified, and the workhouse became society’s solution to poverty: grind them harder.

And yet, there was “progress.” Slavery ended, at least officially. Voting rights crept outward. Science flourished. But so did inequality. The corporation didn’t just join society—it began to consume it. Every corner of life became a transaction. The commons became real estate. The village market became a chain store. Community gave way to efficiency. The soul of the Enlightenment was still echoing, but the body had been swallowed by a smokestack.

The Gilded Age, Collapse, and the Interrupted Rise of Globalization

You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Bryan’s roar against the Gilded Age wasn’t just about money—it was about democracy suffocating under the weight of capital. The corporations didn’t just buy influence. They bought the future.

By the late 19th century, capitalism had lost what little shame it started with. Industrial barons weren’t just powerful—they were worshipped. This was the **Gilded Age**, and it didn’t bother with illusions. Wealth was concentrated beyond medieval imagination. Workers were disposable. The poor were blamed for existing. And the rich threw masquerade balls while children begged for coal in the street. Progress, they called it.

This was also the first age of globalization. Telegraphs crossed oceans, railroads spanned continents, and commodities markets connected farms in Kansas to factories in Liverpool. Global trade exploded, and with it came financial speculation on a scale never seen before. Capital could now travel faster than any ship, and often with less regulation than the neighborhood bake sale.

The result? Boom and bust cycles became baked into the system. The 1873 crash. The panic of 1893. The 1907 bank run. These weren’t bugs. They were features. Each collapse revealed the same flaw: the system rewarded speculation over stability. And no one seemed to learn until everything finally fell apart—**in 1929**.

The **Great Depression** wasn’t just an economic collapse—it was a moral one. People who had done everything “right” lost everything overnight. Breadlines wrapped around buildings. Banks locked their doors with your money inside. Entire countries slid into chaos. And just when things couldn’t get worse, **World War II** erupted—a violent, global reminder of what happens when you mix desperation with authoritarian ambition.

For a time, the trauma forced a reckoning. After the war, governments stepped in. They regulated markets, built safety nets, and taxed the rich. And yes, for a brief moment in history, the system tried to serve people, not just profits. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a pause in the machine—a rare window when we tried to make capitalism serve democracy rather than the other way around.

The Post-War Truce: When Corporations Played Benevolent Kings

After World War II, something unusual happened. Corporations and workers entered what could only be described as a cold truce. CEOs, fearing communism more than unions, suddenly became generous. Pensions were handed out like candy. Health insurance was part of the job, not a gamble. A single income could support a family, buy a home, and send kids to school. But let’s not romanticize it—this wasn’t born of compassion. It was the geopolitical strategy. The West needed to prove it could offer a better life than the Soviet bloc. Capitalism had to look like a ladder, not a trap. And for a while, it did.

This “Golden Age” of capitalism—roughly from the late 1940s to the early 1970s—was propped up by a unique cocktail: American industrial dominance (thanks in part to the fact that Europe and Japan were bombed to rubble), a baby boom that filled classrooms and factories, and oil so cheap you could practically drink it. Taxes on the wealthy were high, unions were powerful, and corporations, for once, pretended to be stakeholders in society instead of predators. It wasn’t a utopia—racism, sexism, and inequality still thrived—but there was a sense that the system, flawed as it was, could at least be negotiated with.

One of the most potent engines behind this postwar prosperity was the GI Bill. It didn’t just help returning soldiers buy homes—it put millions through college and technical schools, many of whom would have never set foot in a university otherwise. The result? A newly educated workforce flooded into cities, shifting the U.S. from a largely agrarian society into a sprawling urban-industrial powerhouse. It was a deliberate, government-led intervention that gave working-class families access to opportunity and paid off for them and the economy. The idea that higher education should be cheap, or even free, wasn’t controversial. It was common sense. Compare that to today’s debt-ridden university system, and you start to see how far we’ve strayed from investing in people to extracting from them.

But it couldn’t last. As soon as the global economy recovered and competition returned, the smiling face of corporate benevolence melted into the cold stare of profit-maximization. The pension became the 401(k)—a gamble instead of a promise. Health insurance stayed, but only as long as your job did. And your job? Well, it started disappearing. First, it moved south, then overseas, and then into the cloud. Security was out. Shareholder value was in. The corporations didn’t change their nature—they no longer had to pretend. The truce was over. And we didn’t even realize we’d lost the war.

Neoliberalism: Growth Becomes God

The 1980s weren’t just about bad fashion and worse music. They marked the death of the post-war social contract. Reagan in the U.S. and Thatcher in the U.K. didn’t just tinker around the edges—they launched a full-scale ideological assault on the idea that government had any role in ensuring the well-being of its citizens. “Government is the problem,” Reagan famously said—and from that moment, policy became religion. Deregulation, privatization, and trickle-down economics weren’t just tools—they became doctrine. If it didn’t maximize shareholder return, it was heresy. The market wasn’t just efficient—it was infallible. And the altar? Compound growth, blessed by quarterly earnings reports and Wall Street analysts.

Corporations, now global juggernauts, were liberated from national borders and social obligations. The very concept of a “domestic company” started to feel quaint. Capital flowed freely, but labor remained tethered. Jobs went where wages were lowest and environmental laws were weakest. Towns that once thrived on manufacturing were hollowed out. Politicians told the unemployed to “learn to code” or “move to where the jobs are”—as if everyone had the luxury to reboot their lives like a laptop. Local economies became collateral damage in a system that saw human beings as variable costs. If you couldn’t add value on a spreadsheet, you were irrelevant. If you could, the goal was to extract it until you burned out or broke down.

In this brave new world, the concept of “bootstraps” was rebranded and sold back to the public as self-help hustle culture. Your pension became a volatile 401(k). Your health care was now a workplace perk—if you were lucky enough to have a job with benefits. Stability became synonymous with laziness, and precarity was repackaged as flexibility. Even truth became an externality: inconvenient data, dissenting voices, and community needs were brushed aside for efficiency. The system worked for capital. But for people, the rope they were told to pull themselves up with had been quietly sold to the highest bidder and replaced with gig work, credit scores, and motivational quotes.

The Collapse of the Social Contract

Globalization wasn’t just an economic shift—it was a cultural earthquake. Entire industries were shipped overseas in the name of efficiency, and the social infrastructure that held communities together went with them. The small-town hardware store became a Walmart. The local bakery became a franchise. The skilled union job was replaced by app-based gig work with no benefits and zero security. Towns that once made things became towns that stocked shelves. And the old promise—that hard work led to stability—became a cruel joke. People didn’t just lose paychecks. They lost purpose. They lost their place in the world. And worst of all, they were told it was their fault for not “adapting.”

This wasn’t the much-celebrated “creative destruction” economists love to discuss. There was nothing creative about it. It was social demolition—blunt, relentless, and entirely avoidable. The destruction wasn’t followed by renewal but by precarity, debt, and cultural disorientation. There was no Marshall Plan for the Rust Belt. No retraining miracle for coal towns or factory workers. Instead, the void was filled with hustle culture—an economic fantasy wrapped in motivational slogans. “Fail better,” they told you, while the banks got bailouts and you got overdraft fees. No pensions, no protections, and no future—just bootstraps and buzzwords.

Instead of rebuilding a sense of collective resilience, we got YouTube “success” gurus livestreaming from rented Lamborghinis, selling self-help while quietly backed by inherited wealth or crypto fraud. The cultural narrative shifted from “we’re in this together” to “you’re on your own.” Everything became individualized—even poverty. If you were struggling, it was because you didn’t meditate, hustle hard enough, or manifest your truth. The social contract didn’t just collapse—it was shredded, digitized, and sold back to us as an app with in-app purchases. Democracy, meanwhile, started to buckle under the weight of widespread alienation and economic betrayal.

The Masculine Identity Crisis and Political Fear

Men, especially working-class men, bore the brunt of the economic shift that began in the 1980s and accelerated into the 21st century. Raised to see themselves as providers, protectors, and breadwinners, they suddenly found themselves surplus to the economy's needs. The jobs that gave them identity—manufacturing, skilled trades, and unionized labor—were either outsourced, automated, or devalued. Women, socialized for flexibility and resilience, adapted to service work, caregiving roles, and precarious labor. Many men, socialized for dominance and control, had no script for irrelevance. The result wasn’t just unemployment—it was humiliation. And humiliation, as history shows us, is a gateway drug to authoritarianism.

Enter the strongman. The new authoritarian doesn’t wear a crown—he wears a trucker hat and promises to "make you great again." He doesn’t build anything. He blames everything. Immigrants, feminists, minorities, the media, “wokeness,” even democracy itself. His appeal isn’t in policy but in posture—brutal, loud, unapologetic. This posture feels like restoration for many men adrift in a world that no longer affirms them. He doesn’t fix your town. He gives you a villain. And in 2016, Donald Trump played that role to perfection. He turned economic insecurity into cultural warfare and repackaged systemic failure as personal betrayal by an imaginary elite. He sold fear as truth and cruelty as clarity.

The gender divide in voting that emerged during this period was no accident—it reflected two radically different lived experiences. In 2016, Trump won the male vote by double digits. By 2020, the split had grown more dramatic. As Trump leaned further into resentment politics and masculine grievance, more women recoiled. Especially college-educated women, younger women, and women of color. They had already been navigating the gig economy, unequal pay, and child care deserts without anyone throwing them a pity party. Many saw through the swagger and understood the threat, not just to rights, but to reality itself. The male vote, however, in many working-class and rural areas, drifted further toward authoritarianism, not always out of hate, but out of grief, confusion, and a desperate desire to feel powerful again.

Strongmen thrive on this emotional vacuum. They manufacture chaos, then promise to clean it up. They break institutions, then campaign as saviors. They destabilize trust in media, science, and law—and then claim they're the only ones who can restore it. It’s a rigged loop: more fear, more control, more permission for corruption, and more alienation. And by the time voters realize what's happening, it’s often too late. The courts are packed, the watchdogs are defanged, and the entire political narrative has been poisoned. The fight isn’t left vs. right—it’s fear vs. cooperation.

And while all this rage and dysfunction plays out in primetime, corporations continue humming along in the background—posting record profits, lobbying away regulations, and cashing in on the division. They don't need to take sides. The chaos works for them. A divided and distracted public is easier to exploit. A fearful population won’t demand higher wages or stable pensions. And a democracy teetering on the edge? That’s just one more “emerging market opportunity” waiting to be privatized. Why would they fix a system that works so perfectly for them?

Why the Corporate Engine Can't Stop

The machine doesn’t need a king—but it found one anyway. Built on fossil fuel, retail monopolies, and digital surveillance, the growth engine crowned Trump its mascot. He didn’t seize power—he was summoned by it.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: it’s not just that corporations don’t care. It’s that they can’t. The modern corporation is ruled by an unforgiving equation: exponential growth. Shareholders demand that profits rise, quarter after quarter, year after year, forever. Not just steady income. Not just survival. Growth. And not just any growth—compounded growth. If you’re not accelerating, you’re dying. Wall Street doesn’t reward maturity. It demands mania.

Let’s put that into perspective. A corporation earning $1 billion in profit and growing at 10% annually must generate $2.6 billion in ten years. And $6.7 billion ten years after that. And $17 billion ten years after that. The numbers spiral into economic absurdity. But the system doesn’t care. There’s no room for plateauing. If growth slows, stock prices fall, investors bail, and executives get tossed like imperfect produce. The math is the master now, and it doesn’t blink. It doesn’t care about the planet, your family, or whether your kids can breathe in 30 years. It cares about return on investment.

That’s why companies lay off workers while posting record profits. Why do they jack up prices even when costs fall? They fight climate regulation, consumer protections, and labor rights as if battling a hostile invasion. Because anything that slows the growth curve—even slightly—is treated as a threat to the system. That includes democracy, unions, journalism, and basic decency. In a compounding-growth economy, everything not directly feeding the bottom line becomes an externality to be managed or eliminated.

In such a system, the goal isn’t to create value—it’s to extract it. Nature becomes inventory. Labor becomes a liability. Time becomes debt. Truth becomes negotiable. And like any machine with no off-switch, this one burns through everything in its path until nothing is left to burn. Forests, trust, attention spans, communities—all sacrificed for “more.”

And here’s where the political explosion happens. When people realize the system isn’t just unfair but unfixable, they don’t all become revolutionaries. Many become resentful. Confused. Angry. And in 2016, enough of them turned to a man who didn’t promise to repair the machine—he promised to blow it up. Donald Trump wasn’t a glitch in the matrix. He was its natural output: a billionaire brand with no moral compass, governing experience, and plan—except chaos. But chaos felt honest to those who'd spent decades being quietly shredded by compounding growth. Their towns were gutted. Their pensions are replaced with risk. Their futures sold for quarterly returns. So they voted for a wrecking ball.

This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s arithmetic—and backlash. It’s the inevitable result of tying democracy to a runaway engine with no brakes or conscience. And as long as we keep pretending that we can regulate or tax our way out of a system designed to extract rather than sustain, we’ll keep getting more Trumps, more strongmen, and more people willing to burn it all down just to feel something again.

Restoring Democracy: Bootstraps That Actually Work

If we want democracy to survive, we can’t just fight disinformation and voter suppression. We have to fight the fear that makes people susceptible to it in the first place. That means rebuilding trust, restoring dignity, and offering shared prosperity, not as a dream, but as a baseline. Authoritarianism feeds on desperation. It thrives where hope is dead and the future looks like a threat. We can’t out-argue propaganda if people are too exhausted or scared to listen.

Universal healthcare isn’t socialism. It’s infrastructure. Paid leave isn’t a luxury—it’s a public good. Childcare, education, housing, community broadband—these aren’t giveaways. They’re the modern bootstraps. They give people room to breathe, to think, to participate. You can’t build democracy based on panic, debt, and despair. A stable life shouldn’t be a prize for the lucky—it should be the entry fee for a functioning society.

And here’s the more profound truth: the real threat to our future isn’t immigrants or drag queens or woke college kids—it’s the planet heating up beneath our feet. Climate change is not a partisan issue. It’s a civilizational one. Droughts, floods, wildfires, crop failures, and climate migration will dwarf anything today’s culture warriors are screaming about. And yet, while the world literally burns, we’re stuck fighting over gas stoves and bathroom bills. Fear has been weaponized to protect the status quo, when the real fear, the only fear that matters, is what happens if we keep ignoring the science and delaying collective action.

Authoritarianism thrives when people are scared, angry, and alone. Democracy thrives when people feel seen, supported, and connected. That’s the fundamental divide. Not left vs. right. Not red vs. blue. It’s fear vs. trust. Corporate power vs. human dignity. Extraction vs. cooperation. And unless we start building a society where people can stop fearing each other long enough to worry what actually matters, the future won’t belong to democracy—it will belong to the strongest brand of strongman willing to sell certainty in a collapsing world.

History doesn’t repeat. But it rhymes loudly. We’ve heard this chorus before. The question is: will we write a new verse, or let the old one destroy the future? Donald Trump is in the process of dismantling much of the U.S. government, not by accident, but by design. And he’s not doing it alone. He’s backed by a radicalized Republican Party more loyal to power than to the Constitution. When he and his enablers are finally removed from office, we’ll face a moment of reckoning—and opportunity. Just as FDR rebuilt a broken nation in the 1930s, we will have the chance to rebuild America again, fairer, stronger, and rooted in dignity. Then, and only then, will America be great again.

About the Author

Robert Jennings is the co-publisher of InnerSelf.com, a platform dedicated to empowering individuals and fostering a more connected, equitable world. A veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army, Robert draws on his diverse life experiences, from working in real estate and construction to building InnerSelf with his wife, Marie T. Russell, to bring a practical, grounded perspective to life’s challenges. Founded in 1996, InnerSelf.com shares insights to help people make informed, meaningful choices for themselves and the planet. More than 30 years later, InnerSelf continues to inspire clarity and empowerment.

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Article Recap

Corporate authoritarianism didn’t arise overnight—it was centuries in the making. From feudal loyalty to capitalist extraction, the history of capitalism reveals how democracy was slowly undermined by systems that prize profit over people. If we want to stop the rise of strongmen and restore civic health, we must rebuild the social and economic foundations people need to feel secure and free. That starts with real bootstraps—not fairy tales.

#CorporateAuthoritarianism #HistoryOfCapitalism #DemocracyInCrisis #Neoliberalism #StrongmanPolitics #FromFeudalToCEO