alt Hacker NewsThat doesn't even make any sense. Fascism is generally about top-down enforced control, whereas contracts are heavily decentralized. The world where you'd have contracts override laws would be some sort of extreme anarcho-libertarian society, which is rather the opposite of fascism.
That's what you heard in school, defending the US style of fascism as "democratic".
Fascism was a scheme to keep the old aristocrats turning industrialists to keep control of the state, whilst still keeping it under the democratic name. This was devised in the US in the 30ies and then in the old states also. Heavily supported by the US industrialists. Without them the fascism movement had no chance.
The US scheme of fascism came up with cooperate contracts overriding state laws, also pleasing the Chicago crowd, with decentralized control. At the will of the cooperations, who know better than the government of course. That's why Rockefeller could gun down strikers without any repercussions. That's why the Railroad Commission could call state military to gun down independent oil cooperations which undercut prizes of the industrialists. That's not liberalism, that's pure fascism/cooperatism/aristocratism.