The Corporate State was born in the warm amniosis of an obliging Judiciary, which "found" corporations in a US Constitution that does not mention them. Following the Civil War, the Courts granted corporations the status of "persons" under the 14th Amendment, and proceeded to rationalize the extension of all the rights and protections that personhood afforded, under the Constitution.

The Corporate State matured quickly into a fecund replicator of corporate privileges and power. While its legal muscle continued to be developed by the Courts, the political prowess of the Corporate State was tested and in a contest between the last vestiges of community-based civil society, represented by the Populist Movement, and the confident embodiment of corporate might, the Progressives. In the end, the Progressives not only finished off the Populist's aspirations for popular democracy; they burried the memory that such a Movement had ever occured.

Progressives rejected the idea that civil society could best be served by democratic participation. They were infatuated with the flexing of corporate power over markets, legislatures and communities, and flocked to the attractions of "scientific management," economies of scale, and the siren song of "efficiency."

By 1900, the Populists had been ushered from the stage of national politics and the Progressives barreled in to fill the void, reinventing American governance in the image of corporate management, and subordinating local democracy and municipal government to the management decisions of a new bureaucratic hierarchy.

Bill Moyers' False History of Progressive "Ideals" -- Richard Grossman demolishes the false memory promoted even by proponents of expanded democracy and rights.

Progressivism's Eclipse of Civil Society -- "Civic Republicanism, Professional Politics, and the Eclipse of Civil Society," by Claire Snyder