This provocative and original look at current trends in the United States presents a grim forecast of a possible totalitarian future. The author shows how the chronic problems faced by the U.S. in the late twentieth century require increasing collusions between Big Business and Big Government in order to 'manage' society in the interests of the rich and powerful.

This "friendly fascism," Gross argues, will probably lack the dictatorships, public spectacles and overt brutality of the classic varieties of Germany, Italy and Japan, but has at its root the same denial of individual...