Before anyone's Jimmies are rustled, this is noted way down in the article, but when they refer to 'liberal' in this, they are not referring to what we would think of as political liberals in the US (progressives/communists), just the opposite, 'classical liberals' or 'Jeffersonian'.
Just a few snips of a very long article.
When people hear the word “fascism†they naturally think of its ugly racism and anti-Semitism as practiced by the totalitarian regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. But there was also an economic policy component of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and ‘30s as “corporatism,†that was an essential ingredient of economic totalitarianism as practiced by Mussolini and Hitler. So-called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a “model†by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe. A version of economic fascism was in fact adopted in the United States in the 1930s and survives to this day. In the United States these policies were not called “fascism†but “planned capitalism.†The word fascism may no longer be politically acceptable, but its synonym “industrial policy†is as popular as ever......
.....The Italian “Corporatist†System
So-called “corporatism†as practiced by Mussolini and revered by so many intellectuals and policy makers had several key elements:
The state comes before the individual. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines fascism as “a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized, autocratic government.â€
This stands in stark contrast to the classical liberal idea that individuals have natural rights that pre-exist government; that government derives its “just powers†only through the consent of the governed; and that the principal function of government is to protect the lives, liberties, and properties of its citizens, not to aggrandize the state......
....The U.S. Constitution was written by individuals who believed in the classical liberal philosophy of individual rights and sought to protect those rights from governmental encroachment. But since the fascist/collectivist philosophy has been so influential, policy reforms over the past half century have all but abolished many of these rights by simply ignoring many of the provisions in the Constitution that were designed to protect them. As legal scholar Richard Epstein has observed: “[T]he eminent domain . . . and parallel clauses in the Constitution render . . . suspect many of the heralded reforms and institutions of the twentieth century: zoning, rent control, workers’ compensation laws, transfer payments, progressive taxation.â€[8] It is important to note that most of these reforms were initially adopted during the ‘30s, when the fascist/collectivist philosophy was in its heyday.....
https://fee.org/articles/economic-fascism/
