"The NRA provided that in America each industry should be organized into a federally supervised trade association. It was not called a corporative. It was called a Code Authority"
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Flynn’s line is a scalpel aimed at the New Deal’s rhetorical camouflage. The National Recovery Administration didn’t just regulate; it invited whole industries to cartelize under Washington’s blessing, complete with rulebooks on prices, production, and labor standards. Flynn’s point isn’t primarily administrative. It’s linguistic: power gets smuggled into public life under friendlier nouns.
“Corporative” carries European baggage in the 1930s - the whiff of Mussolini’s corporate state, where industry is organized into state-recognized syndicates that manage economic life in exchange for political compliance. Flynn knows that word would have triggered alarm bells in an America still defining itself against Old World hierarchies. So he highlights the substitution: “Code Authority,” a label that sounds technical, procedural, almost boring. That’s the trick. Bureaucratic blandness as political anesthetic.
The intent is accusatory but also diagnostic. Flynn is not merely saying the NRA resembled corporatism; he’s arguing that the designers understood the resemblance and chose euphemism to keep the project culturally legible. “Federally supervised trade association” is phrased to suggest coordination and oversight rather than coercion and consolidation, even though the structure incentivized incumbent firms, standardized behavior, and squeezed smaller competitors. The subtext: when government and industry fuse, the first casualty is not liberty in the abstract but language itself - the public’s ability to name what it’s seeing.
In context, this is Flynn the anti-statist critic watching emergency-era improvisation harden into a model. His cynicism lands because it targets the most modern form of persuasion: rebranding governance as management.
“Corporative” carries European baggage in the 1930s - the whiff of Mussolini’s corporate state, where industry is organized into state-recognized syndicates that manage economic life in exchange for political compliance. Flynn knows that word would have triggered alarm bells in an America still defining itself against Old World hierarchies. So he highlights the substitution: “Code Authority,” a label that sounds technical, procedural, almost boring. That’s the trick. Bureaucratic blandness as political anesthetic.
The intent is accusatory but also diagnostic. Flynn is not merely saying the NRA resembled corporatism; he’s arguing that the designers understood the resemblance and chose euphemism to keep the project culturally legible. “Federally supervised trade association” is phrased to suggest coordination and oversight rather than coercion and consolidation, even though the structure incentivized incumbent firms, standardized behavior, and squeezed smaller competitors. The subtext: when government and industry fuse, the first casualty is not liberty in the abstract but language itself - the public’s ability to name what it’s seeing.
In context, this is Flynn the anti-statist critic watching emergency-era improvisation harden into a model. His cynicism lands because it targets the most modern form of persuasion: rebranding governance as management.
Quote Details
| Topic | Business |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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