Thanks to Donald Trump's increasingly hostile and race-baiting rhetoric, the topic of fascism -- what it is and what causes it -- is once again on the minds of many Americans.

And while Trump's rise to the top of the Republican field should scare anyone who's read about how Hitler and Mussolini rose to power, what's even scarier is that one of the key components of American fascism is already in place, and has been ever since the Reagan Revolution.

That component is monopoly, something former Vice President Henry Wallace identified as the key to fascism in a 1944 piece for The New York Times.

American fascists, Wallace wrote, 

"...claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective... is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

At the time Wallace was writing, the threat of fascism was very, very real.

The U.S. was fighting a two front war against Axis powers, and was just three years removed from a Japanese fascist attack on its home soil.

It was also just eleven years removed from the tense days of 1933, when Marine Corps General Smedley Butler exposed a plot by big business to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt in a military coup.

That plot, the so-called Business Plot, was concocted by the very same rich men and corporations who Wallace said would support American fascism.

But luckily, thanks to the New Deal and Roosevelt's trust-busting efforts, those forces had been kept in check, and would remain in check until the 1980s when President Ronald Reagan stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

That act, which was signed into law in 1890, is our government's most powerful tool against monopoly, and ever since Reagan threw it out the proverbial window, the monopolists -- Wallace's American fascists -- have been on the march.

Almost every major industry in the United States is now controlled by a of handful giant multinational corporations.