Chapter 7

Fascism

Fascism is therefore opposed to that form of democracy which equates a nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of the largest number; but it is the purest form of democracy if the nation be considered—as it should be—from the point of view of quality rather than quantity, as an idea, the mightiest because the most ethical the most coherent, the truest, expressing itself in a people as the conscience and will of the few, if not, indeed, of one, and tending to express itself in the conscience and the will of the mass, of the whole group ethnically moulded by natural and historical conditions into a nation, advancing, as one conscience and one will, along the self-same line of development and spiritual formation. Not a race, nor a geographically defined region; but a people, historically perpetuating itself; a multitude unified by an idea and imbued with the will to live, the will to power, self-consciousness, personality.

—Mussolini

Fascism is not only a party, it is a regime; it is not only a regime but a faith; it is not only a faith but a religion….

—Mussolini

For the empire to be preserved the natives must be clearly and forcefully aware of our superiority.—Mussolini

INTRODUCTION: THE DIFFICULTIES OF STUDYING FASCISM AS A POLITICAL IDEOLOGY

To study fascism as a political ideology is no easy task for one, very basic rea-son: fascist leaders and followers alike tend to declare that fascism is about action, not ideas; that fascism is best understood not as a political ideology.

We think otherwise. The fascist embrace of energetic action, including violence

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on behalf of one’s nation or race is an idea, and it contrasts with the central ideas of other ideologies. Let us begin our analysis by addressing this issue, for fascism’s distinguishable ideas, along with its actions, have become relatively mainstream in twenty-first century politics.

If liberalism, conservatism, and Marxism offer humanity the possibility of, respectively, achieving individual freedom, conserving the integrity of historical traditions, and realizing universal human equality, then fascism is the forceful and reactionary “No!” to all that the other three ideologies of modernity had hoped humans could achieve. Drawing on other understandings of, and potentials within humanity, fascism contests these modern goals. In contrast to liberalism, for exam-ple, it sees society less as a political community produced through agreement by free individuals, than as an organic “national” or “racial” whole to which its mem-bers belong by birth. Similarly, fascism does not conceive of humans as simply belonging to time-honored traditions (classical conservatism) or as fundamentally equal (liberalism and Marxism). Rather, fascism says that morally proper and cor-rect hierarchies exist within and between human groups—nations or races—such that some persons or groups are naturally superior and others are naturally inferior. Therefore, one is most “human” not when one is fighting for human equality, but rather when one is obediently securing natural differences through various forms of disciplined behavior defined by the leadership of the group.

Perhaps most fundamentally—especially from the perspective of liberal moder-nity—fascism does not believe that the human being is expressing its most valued, living potential when it uses its capacity to reason for the purposes of individual and collective human enlightenment. Fascism is hostile to reason and “intellectual” reflection. This is one of the main reasons fascism is associated with “action” and not “ideas.” Fascism’s action-orientation, however, is an idea in itself: it is the belief that human beings are realizing their potential when they are engaged in passionate and energetic action on behalf of their national or racial group. And this idea is founded on another idea, namely that human beings can and ought to be disciplined through obedience. For fascism, the human being fulfills its high-est potential when it asserts itself in action on behalf of the organic, national or racial whole, not when it reflects individually and with others about the most ratio-nal ends to pursue. The fascist endorsement of action includes, as is well-known, sometimes being brutally violent on behalf of one’s group.

From the perspective of fascism, the capacity of human beings to affirm the power and identity of their social group through violence is a potential that liberal-ism, conservatism, and Marxism seem to have neglected or not fully understood. Although liberalism and Marxism grasp the potential revolutionary value of vio-lence—in, for example, wars for self-determination or the emancipation of the

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oppressed—fascism embraces random and intensely destructive violence against those it considers national enemies (Bolshevik, communist, foreigner, homosexual, immigrant, intellectual, Jew, Muslim, person of color, traitor, to name just a few in alphabetical order). Fascism’s violence is often cruel, punitive, and humiliating. It is supposed to be; that is the idea, one of fascism’s characteristic ideas. As we shall discuss below, the legacy of all fascisms may not be the Nazi genocidal hor-rors of the concentration camp, the communal massacre, the assassination, or the torture cell, but it is within all fascisms to see human beings most alive when they are being violent, when they are actively asserting their nation’s or race’s wishes in brutal ways. The attachment to, almost love for, violence is a significant ideological departure from the other ideas we have discussed thus far.

“Fascist” is therefore not simply about action; nor is it simply an adjective, often used as synonymous with “evil,” “bad,” “intolerant,” or “violent” to describe aggressive behavior on the part of the state or police; nor is it adequately charac-terized as “the Far Right,” “extreme nationalism,” or “‘strong man’ leadership.” It is true that fascism was never as clearly formulated as the other ideologies we have studied thus far, and that many fascist actions display a nearly incomprehensible kind of evil. It is also the case that fascist regimes stress the role of the leader, so much so that Benito Mussolini declared late in life something many fascist leaders have thought to be true: “What would Fascism be, if I had not been?” Indeed, one may learn a great deal about fascism by studying parts of the fascist phenomenon other than the ideas that underlie or constitute it. Nonetheless, we contend, along with many other observers, that it is possible both to discover certain shared characteristics and values among fascist ideologists, and to develop an ideology of fascism that is appropriately coherent, given its premises. As the renowned scholar of the phenomenon Stanley G. Payne has noted in the case of Italian fascism: “Though an exact and elaborate codification of doctrine was never achieved, it is now becoming recognized that Italian Fascism did function on the basis of a reasonably coherent set of ideas.”1 And that is true not only of Italian Fascism.

In sum, fascism attempts to say something meaningful about human beings, their society, and their future development. Fascist “action” is an idea. Acts encour-aged by fascism are undertaken with certain ideological goals in mind—truths for humanity and a goal culture toward which all humans should strive—that can be identified and subjected to the kind of analysis we offer in this book. Fascist acts do not “speak” for fascism in and of themselves, even if fascists believe they do.

1Stanley G. Payne, Fascism: Comparison and Definition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), p. 42.

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FASCISM AS ALIVE AND ONGOING IN MODERNITY

Several additional and related preliminary notes seem in order. The first is that, contemporary right-wing responses throughout the world to global migration and ongoing war clearly show that fascism, like Marxism, is neither a dead nor a dying phenomenon. For many years after the end of WWII, the tendency had been to treat fascism as a past phenomenon and to think that it would inevitably succumb to the ideological appeals of liberalism and Marxism-Leninism. Elements of this view still maintain prominence: fascism is seen as a blip in history, something that occurs during times of societal crisis. As soon as the crises pass, so does fascism.

We find reason to disagree strongly with this view. To relate again what we said above, fascism draws its emphases from aspects of humanity that have been underplayed by alternative ideological systems. These aspects of humanity are always present, ready to be mobilized by organized fascism in times of prosperity as well as crisis. Mussolini once enigmatically said: “political doctrines pass, human-ity remains.” What he meant was that the basic material for any well-organized ideological effort is always in place.

Moreover, fascism is neither dead nor dying because in either full or partial dos-ages, fascist movements are, for many people, credible parts of the political land-scape. There are too many examples of such movements to name. Their growing power is evidenced by increased popular support and their capacity to determine the agenda—sometimes under the names of the “far right” or “extreme” or “ultra” nationalism, sometimes as more “centrist” parties. Indeed, it is important to underscore that, since fascism’s inception, fascist movements have constituted their goals in language shared by both classical conservatism and liberalism. Early fascists in Europe spoke of “holy wars” and “crusades” when it was not unpopular to do so, and Mussolini described his extremely violent imperial conquests and sub-ordination of Libya and Ethiopia as a victories for “civilization over barbarism.” Also note how, in the first of the three quotations introducing this chapter, Mus-solini invokes democracy, conscience, spirituality, will, and religion. Today, fascists similarly claim to occupy the higher ground by invoking the good of civilization, culture, humanity, and, of course, of homeland, nation, and race. Such terms must be familiar to the reader: they are the terms of world, national, and local politics on all continents. They are sometimes even the terms of school curricula (determined by those in power).

To be sure, the mere presence of such terms does not indicate the presence of fascism. The terms civilization, nation, culture, and so forth may be understood in non-chauvinistic ways. There are liberal nationalists as well as Marxist humanitar-

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ians to whom the fascist appropriation of such terms appears as nothing less than cynical manipulation. Be that as it may, we must see that, like all ideologies, fascism gives terms like “democracy,” “civilization,” “humanity,” and “the people” specific meanings within the context of the fascist belief system. It is not enough, then, to say that when one glorifies the nation or exalts its people, that one is being a fascist. We must ask: “What is meant by ‘the nation,’ and what is meant by ‘the people?’” As we have seen, liberalism also offers a conception of “the people” as a group of individuals who consent to live under institutions that provide for their individual freedom. This is not the meaning of “the people” for fascism. As Mussolini says above, “the people” is more than what liberalism says it is. To take just one dimen-sion, “the people” has a single and specific personality. Fascism, therefore, does not always change the specific terms of the ideological debate, but it does change their meanings and uses the terms with different emphases.

Reflecting on the lasting impact of fascism in relation to the prior dominance of socialism, liberalism, and democracy, Mussolini once suggested that dominant ideologies were difficult to predict; that for all we could know, the future might be one of fascism:

Given that the nineteenth century was the century of Socialism, of Liberalism, and of Democracy, it does not necessarily follow that the twentieth century must also be a century of Socialism, Liberalism, and Democracy: political doctrines pass, but humanity remains; and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of author-ity, a century of the Right, a century of Fascism.2

An excellent although controversial case can be made for the proposition that fascism, in its various manifestations, had at least as much impact—perhaps more—during the twentieth century as either of the other two ideologies. And it is certainly possible that its impact has not lessened in the twenty-first century. Indeed, as A. James Gregor, once asserted, “However one chooses to characterize ‘fascism,’ it is clear that modern revolutions share more affinities with the fas-cism of Benito Mussolini than they do with the Marxism of Karl Marx or Fried-rich Engels.”3 Anthony Joes agreed: “The fascist solution to the problem of eco-nomic frustration and political instability seems to ‘fit’ in many cases. A formula of nationalism, corporatism, and elitism, originally concocted in a European ‘great

2Benito Mussolini, “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism,” in Fascism: An Anthology, Nathanael Greene, ed. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968), p. 43.

3A. James Gregor, in Fascism in the Contemporary World by Anthony Joes (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978), p. xii.

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power’ environment, has been adapted at various times from Lima to Accra, and from Cairo to Tokyo.”4

A glance at the table of contents of this book reveals two final introductory points concerning our treatment of fascism. The first is that our discussion is confined to a relatively short chapter. Such a structure indicates that fascism will be viewed not only on its own, but also in the reflected light of liberalism, conser-vatism, and communism and in anticipation of our discussion of Nazism; that is, fascism will provide us with a critical and comparative perspective on the other idea systems. Thus, our relatively brief treatment should not be taken as an indication that we regard fascism as less important than the other ideologies.

In addition, mention must be made of the rather strict separation herein made between fascism and Nazism. In common language, fascism is often used to refer to the past political structures in both Italy and Germany. As previously noted, such use seems inappropriate, in that a set of fascist ideas can be seen as exist-ing independent of those two particular nation-states. Further complicating this matter is that the primary founding father of the movement, Benito Mussolini, served as the leader of Italy during its fascist period. Hence, it becomes difficult to separate the doctrine from its application in Italy. Although we should not see every action of Mussolini as head of the Italian state as an expression of fascist doctrine, in many ways Mussolini’s Italy does provide us with an ideal model of a regime that put into place the fascist outlook on humanity, and we will examine fascist ideology under this premise. This being the case, given the significant dif-ferences between Italian fascism and Nazism, the latter cannot appropriately be simply called fascist, even though the regime expressed many fascist traits. The same is true of many fascist or partly fascistic leaders and movements. As is the case with the other ideologies we examine, the different ideological elements show up in varied dosages rather than in their entirety, with deviations that give localized manifestations of the phenomenon a particular character. We should note that in suggesting that Adolf Hitler should not simply be called a fascist, we are taking a somewhat controversial position. As Anthony Joes explains:

Some scholars… deny that Nazism is an example of fascism at all. Others argue that fascism includes regimes remarkably different from Hitler’s Germany in many important ways. It is our position [Joes’] that the Nazis were one manifestation, and not a typical one, of a general fascist phenomenon.5

4Joes, Fascism, p. 199.5Ibid., p. 4.

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In our view, Nazi Germany can therefore be, at best, seen as a most radical form of fascism, but it can more appropriately be characterized as the worst, most hei-nous form of biological racism the modern world has ever seen. We shall address additional complications of the complicated relationship between fascism and rac-ism as we proceed. For now, let us move on to clarify the meaning of fascism as it relates to the ideas of Benito Mussolini and their exemplification in Italy.

EVOLUTION OF THE DOCTRINE

While it is true that Marxism did not emerge full-blown from the pen of Karl Marx at any particular date, we have argued that the development of Marxist doctrine fol-lowed a rather consistent pattern, at least from 1844 onward. Such is not the case with fascism. Although there is a parallel between the two doctrines in that they were both articulated largely by one person—a founding father, so to speak—Mussolini’s ideas seem to have undergone considerable change during his lifetime. He began his political career as a confirmed Marxist socialist, added some rather vague voluntarist (emphasizing willful action) and elitist elements at an early date, took a seemingly abrupt turn from international socialism to Italian nationalism during World War I, and emerged from that war proclaiming the existence of something called fas-cism—from the Italian word fascio, meaning a tightly knit bundle, and referring to a unified political group. Even then, the doctrine was only beginning.

Further developments included the emergence of an “ethical” dimension to the conception of the state, the creation of the idea of corporativism (or corporatism), and the insertion of Social Darwinism, which can take the form of nationalism or racism. What, then, are we to do with such a grab bag of ideas? To most com-mentators, the critical change in Mussolini’s intellectual development occurred in 1914 when, as editor of the major socialist paper Avanti!, he abandoned the social-ist line of international class war and called for the intervention of Italy in the “bourgeois” World War. Whatever the reasons for this change, or however great a change it actually was, it provides us with an excellent vantage point for viewing the evolution of his ideas. Let us, then, look at the socialism of Mussolini prior to 1914, and then attempt to determine how orthodox a Marxist he was, with an eye toward partially explaining his radical change during World War I. First, however, let us take a brief look at the man and his historic age.

Il Duce Benito Mussolini

Benito Mussolini was born in 1883 in the Italian town of Predappio. His father, who the young Benito admired, was a blacksmith whose political views can best

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be described as radical: socialist, anticlerical, republican. Most scholars of Mus-solini believe that his early home environment, coupled with local customs and traditions, had a profound and lasting effect on him. Whatever his basic character, the young Mussolini’s early life was beset with rebellion. His formal education was interrupted several times because of acts against authority figures; nevertheless, he did graduate in 1902 and was certified as an elementary school teacher. He pursued that career off and on, but it seemed to be somewhat of a sidelight to his grow-ing political involvement. The first decade of the twentieth century saw Mussolini becoming more and more prominent in socialist circles, culminating—after several terms in prison for revolutionary agitation—in his 1912 election as editor of the socialist paper Avanti! This brief sketch of him gives an indication of some of his personality traits. But what of Mussolini’s ideas?

Even today, after years of scholarship, one still can evoke cries of surprise (or at least raised eyebrows) by calling Mussolini a Marxist, yet of this there is no doubt. Indeed, it can be argued that his early Marxism was in many ways similar to that of Lenin. The intellectual battle against the revisionist tendencies within the interna-tional communist movement found Mussolini and Lenin on the same side. They were uncompromising in their advocacy of the necessity of violent class warfare. Both were disgusted by the nationalist sentiments that seemed to be undermining the internationalism of classical Marxism, and both thought the adventurism of capitalist armies to be but a device for delaying the revolution. During the period between 1902 and 1914, Mussolini constantly used Marxist terms, cited Marx as an authority for his actions, and thought in categories that can only be called Marxist. Having said this, however, we must recall that there were many different varieties of Marxism existing during the first decade of the twentieth century. Ranging from the outright revisionism of Eduard Bernstein to the radical revolutionary position of Lenin, Marxism was many things to many people. Where did Mussolini fit in this ideological spectrum? As mentioned earlier, his position was rather close to that of Lenin; he too opposed revisionism and called for revolutionary agitation, but, most important, he also shared Lenin’s distrust of a mass spontaneous revolu-tion.

Recall that Lenin advanced the conception of a small, tightly knit revolutionary party as a solution to proletarian apathy and as a device for fomenting revolution in a largely underdeveloped country. Although we did not emphasize the term elitist in the prior discussion, there is little doubt that Lenin’s party was an explic-itly elitist organization. Its purpose was to utilize the latent energy of the masses of people and direct it toward appropriate Marxian ends. Mussolini shared this skepticism concerning the leaderless revolutionary potential of the masses, and he argued with increasing frequency for the need for a force to guide the supposedly

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spontaneous revolution. Numerous times during this early period of development Mussolini spoke with a good deal of contempt for the apathetic masses, and he emphasized the need for elite leadership. In doing this, he was reflecting the current thinking in Italian intellectual circles.

Two of the most prominent advocates of elitist theories of the state, Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941) and Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), had advanced theories of political participation that denied any important role for the masses in politics; they thought government was best seen as the rule of successive elite groups. Pareto, in particular, had a direct influence on Mussolini, who enrolled in two of his courses at the University of Lausanne and later called Pareto’s theory of elites “the most ingenious sociological conception of modern times.” Although this reliance on elite leadership was by no means uncommon with Marxists of this period, it does pro-vide us with an early indication of a doctrine that later became central in fascist thought. If mass participation in political life was to become a fact of the twentieth century, there must be an elite leadership group to mobilize and to guide the masses. Here, then, is an initial deviation from classical Marxism in Mussolini’s thought.

Voluntarism

Another facet of Mussolini’s early thought, which was to have important conse-quences in the development of fascism, was his emphasis on human will. This is a difficult concept to describe in that, for the dedicated fascist, human will is more of a way of approaching reality and an affirmation of action than it is an intellec-tual category. Mussolini was desperately concerned with creative action and firm in his belief that it was well within the power of properly directed human beings to create their own history. Rather than being mere pawns in the hands of some superhuman Hegelian historical process or limited in their power by an economic system, human beings were capable of making and reshaping the world to fit their image of what it ought to be.

Looked at from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, this may be seen as a significant deviation from Marxist doctrine. By asserting that human will is itself capable of altering the environment by the sheer determination to change it, Mussolini was implicitly undermining Marx’s “scientific” laws of development. For Marxism-Leninism, human consciousness and will are in large measure shaped and deter-mined by objective economic conditions and the class circumstances obtaining in particular periods of history. To recall this point, consider how difficult it would be to act according to the rules of feudalism while living in capitalism, or think about how conditions of wealth shape or constrain the wants, desires, and choices of persons of different class positions. It is not that Marx dismissed the will, only

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that he understood it to be conditioned or structured by material conditions. Marx-ist revolutionary consciousness is indeed a form of willful determination, but it is said to take shape under very specific conditions of crisis for capitalism. A revolu-tion cannot simply be willed into existence, as desirable as that may be for many Marxists. In implying that the creative acts of human volition could radically alter history, Mussolini was saying that human will was independent of economic condi-tions. There is, then, an extreme emphasis on voluntarism in the young Mussolini, which is distinctly un-Marxian, and it emerges full-blown in later fascism. Perhaps this reliance on will can be attributed to Mussolini’s interest in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, who believed that a truly human person could transcend his or her environment, throw off one’s chains, and reconstruct the world according to that person’s own image of what it should be.

Whatever the case, this voluntarism led Mussolini to an interest in the role of myth in human affairs, and specifically to the question of how myths could be used to mobilize masses to engage in acts of change and creation. Here Mussolini could rely on the authority of the French philosopher Georges Sorel (1847–1922), who in investigating human motivation came to the conclusion that myths were the prime force in human affairs, and that violent activity in pursuit of the fulfill-ment of a myth is not to be feared. Whether Sorel had any direct influence on the development of Mussolini’s ideas is a matter of conjecture, but we do know that Mussolini claimed he was influenced by him. These difficult notions of will and myth are more fully explored later in this chapter; for the moment it is sufficient to note their presence in Mussolini’s early thinking.

CHARACTERISTICS OF FASCISM

Despite being bound by treaty to Germany, Italy remained neutral during the early stages of World War I. Socialists in Italy were more ideologically consistent than their counterparts in other countries, for they agitated for neutrality and continued to proclaim the international solidarity of the working class. While the German proletariat and many of its leaders were rallying around the banner of nationalism, Italian socialists remained firmly neutral. Given this, imagine the surprise when Avanti!, under Mussolini’s editorship, appeared in October 1914 and called for the abandonment of neutrality and the entry of Italy in the war on the side of the Allies. It was to be Mussolini’s last editorial. He was forced from his position as managing editor and eventually drummed out of the party.

How can we explain this public flouting of a basic tenet of Marxism by a dedi-cated Marxist? Before concluding that Mussolini was simply jumping aboard the

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bandwagon of growing nationalist sentiment in Italy, we must recall the dilemma that World War I caused dedicated socialists throughout Europe: the war provided the first real test of Marxism’s internationalism, and, in general, the human subjec-tive component of Marxism failed to produce radical change. There were excep-tions such as Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, but for the most part European social-ists supported their respective countries in the “bourgeois” war. In a sense, then, Mussolini was in the mainstream of socialist action. Further, we have already noted some early tendencies toward voluntarism and violence in Mussolini’s thinking, where human will was seen capable of performing tremendously heroic actions, even remaking history. Given this, it must have been extremely difficult for a man of Mussolini’s temperament to sit back calmly and assume a neutralist posture while the world-shaking events of the war were occurring all around him. Listen, for example, to the tone of that famous editorial in Avanti!:

We enjoy the extraordinary privilege of living at the most tragic hour of the world’s history. Do we wish to be—as men and Socialists—inert spectators of this grandiose drama? Or would we prefer to be, in some way, its protagonists?6

Whatever the reasons for this change, the idea that forms the keystone of fascist ideology was gradually being established, and the concept of the nation-state was to dominate Italian political thinking for the next thirty years.

The Nation-State

We must now leave the historical development of Mussolini’s intellectual and political career to concentrate on the major ideas and concepts that comprise the ideology of fascism, remembering that these doctrines emerged only gradually. It is also important to remember the political context of Italy in the first quarter of the twentieth century. World War I was an exceptionally bitter experience for most Ital-ians. In addition to the economic problems of acute inflation and high unemploy-ment, there was considerable social dislocation as a result of the war. As if this was not enough, the Versailles Treaty failed to grant Italy her share, as co-victor, of the spoils of war. Years of strikes and violence along with an ineffective parliamentary system created a general mood of disillusionment and discontent.

When the government failed to act on the social problems, Mussolini emerged with promises and plans for a glorious unified, Italian future. If there is one single authoritative statement of fascist ideology, in all probability it is Mussolini’s The

6Benito Mussolini, in Alan Cassels, Fascist Italy (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968), p.19.

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Doctrine of Fascism. Published in 1932, it characteristically emphasizes the notion of the nation-state. We shall initially address the meaning of this by examining the centrality of the concept of the nation to fascism.

The conceptual shift from class to nation constitutes a major ideological shift of emphasis from Marxism to fascism, just as the change from individual to class constituted a major shift from liberalism to Marxism. In Marxism, the fundamental unit of analysis is class. Everything is defined in terms of its class base: a person is, for example, proletarian or bourgeois; institutions are bourgeois or revolutionary; and consciousness is defined largely by class. In fascism, the fundamental unit of analysis is the nation. One is either a member of it or one is not; values are national values; one achieves the realization of human potential only in and through the nation.

To be sure, there are conceptions of the nation that are not necessarily fascis-tic. To many social scientists, the term nation is itself neutral. It suggests a picture of humanity that is divided into particular groups called nations that are defined by a variety of common attachments: a shared language, sense of history and destiny, geographical center or homeland; shared cultural tastes, rituals and memo-ries, and so on. The age of nationalism is said to correspond partly to the decline of large, divinely ruled monarchies and empires, the rise of the nation-state, and the secularization of societies, such that persons have historically come to iden-tify themselves less in terms of their inherited religious traditions, and more in terms of their national identity. Some combination of these sentiments is also pos-sible. Nation-states are said to accommodate, preserve, and protect the existence of these groups: nations. Members of these groups might have once had other identifications (either very local or much grander), but in the course of the age of nationalism have come to see themselves as members of a nation.

There is controversy around the term as well, much of it centering on the ide-ological meanings with which it may be invested. There are liberal conceptions of nationality that stress common membership in a national community of free individuals; there are ethnic, culturally non-chauvinist, cosmopolitan, multicul-tural, and socialist conceptions of nationality; there are more or less conservative conceptions of the nation; and so on. There are debates about the relationship between the political and cultural dimensions of belonging to a nation, between one’s national and other identifications, between the nation and other nations, and between the nation and humanity at large. Our discussion of fascism need not be delayed by identifying all these issues of debate. We simply must point out that the fascist view of the nation and nationalism is one particular view, not the only one.

In fascism, the nation is not simply the numerical summation of the individu-als or multiple cultures comprising it; nor is it defined by the living traditions of a

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particular society. It possesses a distinct and singular history, a postulated unity and cohesiveness, and a destiny of its own. The nation is thus an entity that is both real, in the sense that it is based on concrete cultural and historical achievements, and ideal, in the sense that it is imagined or constructed to have a singular, uncompli-cated, and unique identity—what Mussolini called a personality of its own. It has a distinct past that differentiates it from other nations and a future potential that may or may not be achieved. For fascism, the nation may also be physically defined in terms of national boundaries and the size of its population, but its idealized characteristics make it more than just these two features.

Fascists constantly use organic metaphors in referring to the relationship of the nation to the individuals who comprise it. The nation is seen as a biological organ-ism that lives, breathes, grows, and presumably dies. It has its own virtue, its own honor, its own soul, spirit, and conscience. Its history can be told through its heroic moments of survival and triumph. It is the primary subject of that history; its life is more significant and more meaningful than the lives of the individual humans who comprise it, who gain meaning by belonging to the nation. The nation constitutes the highest ethical entity—not the individual, not even the history and cultural tra-ditions of the people, as a more conservative nationalist might insist. The individu-als who comprise it are seen less as participants in time-embedded traditions than as cells of the national body that perform their function and achieve fulfillment only insofar as the entire organism is healthy and strong. They are tied together by more than just language, history, and culture. They are tied together through their organic, blood, and spiritual ties to the nation. The nation’s blood and spirit flow through the individuals who, in turn, realize the nation’s life in their activities on its behalf. The individual, quite simply, does not exist without the nation. Humans are by nature intensely social and organically connected animals who realize their potential as members of a collectivity with an idealized set of purposes that tran-scend those of any of its members.

If the nation thus constitutes the highest ethical entity, the state (here, best understood as the nation’s-state) becomes its political manifestation, the expression of its will and power. Here is how Mussolini explained it:

The State, as conceived of and as created by Fascism, is a spiritual and moral fact in itself, since its political, juridical, and economic organization of the nation is a concrete thing; and such an organization must be in its origins and development a manifestation of the spirit. The State is the guarantor of security both internal and external, but it is also the custodian and transmitter of the spirit of the people, as it has grown up through the centuries in language, in customs, and in faith. And the State is not only a living reality of the present, it is also linked with the past and

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above all with the future, and thus transcending the brief limits of individual life, it represents the immanent spirit of the nation.7

This conception of the nation-state can be more completely explained by fur-ther examining fascist arguments against liberal democratic thinking.

Anti-Liberalism

We discussed the intellectual origins of liberal democratic thought in the earlier chapters, but we must briefly restate some of its basic assumptions so that we may understand fascist opposition to it, for its rejection of liberalism—its anti-liberal-ism—is itself an important fascist value. In general, as we have seen, the liberal democratic tradition saw people existing as rational individuals prior to the estab-lishment of political institutions. Further, they possessed certain rights—as indi-viduals—granted to them by God or nature. Because of certain inconveniences of this pre-social, pre-political situation (recall the state of nature), individuals banded together and gave up certain of their natural rights to a collectivity so that they could, as individuals, live a more comfortable existence. State and society are thus established for specific purposes, have limited powers and functions, and may be abolished if they exceed their granted powers. The state and society are, in liber-alism, artificial creations of sovereign individuals. They are the work of free and independent individuals; they do not have a life of their own outside the powers that individuals give to them; this is the essence of liberal democratic govern-ment. Democratic representative institutions (parliaments, congresses) are gener-ally designed to translate the desires of individuals in the society, normally on a majority-rule basis, into public policy. Representative institutions are, therefore, by their very nature, intended to express the particular wills of individuals within the society. The preferences of a majority of individuals on any issue are simply that—a summation of individual preferences totaling more than fifty percent. Finally, lib-eral democratic thought is quite clear about the locus of ultimate sovereignty: it lies with the individuals who have acted together to create institutions that will serve them all as individuals. Any actions the state undertakes ultimately must be based on the agreement or consent of those individuals—gathered into what Locke called “the people.” Liberal democratic power gains its rightfulness, its legitimacy, from the consent of the governed. Recall that it aimed to take power out of the hands of the absolutist king and place it squarely in the hands of free individuals.

7Benito Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism,” in Social and Political Philosophy, John Somerville and Ronald E. Santoni, eds. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), p. 44.

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To the fascist, this is simply absurd. The mainstream liberal tradition defines freedom as an absence of restraint on individual action, yet it requires humans to give up some freedom (in the movement from the state of nature to society, and the formation of a social contract) to attain freedom. Think of how, in Hobbes and Locke, naturally free individuals give some of their natural powers to the gov-ernment, agreeing to be restrained by law, to secure their right to liberty. How, fas-cism asks, does one become free by giving something up?

Indeed, a fascist would argue, in talking about giving up natural rights to achieve a more commodious (Hobbes) or convenient (Locke) situation, the individualistic liberal exposed the fallacy of the entire enterprise. As fascists view it, what liberal democrats are really saying is that freedom cannot exist without a stable body of laws and political institutions—Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s neutral arbiter of natural law—and the only way true freedom can exist is through obedience to those laws. It is, therefore, law and a framework of order that ensures freedom as obedience. It is not “the people” or “free individuals.” The myth of the isolated sov-ereign individual is just that: a myth that distorts the reality. The so-called individual can exist only in, through, and—to use Mussolini’s term—within the state. So the emphasis must be on the State (the capital s State), not the individual. The State is the possessor of right and of morality, and, in turn, it gives meaning to individuals who are part of it as members of the nation. In this regard, the State is the institutional manifestation of the nation. Without either, the individual human being would simply not exist. As Mussolini stated:

Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity. It is opposed to classical liberalism which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical functions when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual. And if Liberty is to be the attribute of living men and not of abstract dummies invented by individualistic liberalism, then Fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State.8

Any rights that individuals possess are granted, and may be removed, by the State; similarly, the private interests of individuals can only make sense within what the State makes possible as “privacy.” Indeed, the terms individual and state are incorrect abstractions insofar as they indicate separate entities. In fascism, they are

8Ibid., p. 426.

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but two sides of the same coin. From a liberal perspective, this can only look like domination, as the “naturally free individual” gets absorbed within and subordi-nated to the general interests of the collectivity. But fascism responds that liberal democratic thought is predicated upon assumptions of selfishness and conflict, and as such prevents human beings from living in “moral” and nationally cohesive association with one another. It contends that individualistic liberal thinking leads to conflict, disunity, chaos, and even decline in society. As Mussolini declared in 1929, “When the conception of the State declines, and disunifying and centrifugal tendencies prevail, whether of individuals or particular groups, the nations where such phenomena appear are in their decline.”9

Within fascism, there is no naturally free individual. There is the member of the organic nation whose range of experience in terms of “freedom” is shaped by and within the nation’s moral entity: the State. This contrasts sharply with the role of political institutions in liberal democratic societies, or in nation-states where the dominant ideology is liberalism. In the latter, representative institutions (parlia-ments, congresses), political parties, and all of the other trappings of parliamentary democracy are designed to reflect the interests of individuals (particular wills). In fascism, such institutions must be discarded and replaced by institutions—perhaps under the same names of parliament, party, state—that will determine and reflect the general will of the nation. This will is not based on the liberal notion of the par-ticular wills of the individuals. As we have said, the nation’s will has its own life, and it stands above anything willed by individuals. Indeed, any “particular” individual will in a fascist society is defined by the state, as the institutional manifestation of the nation’s will for its members. The properly constituted state thus becomes the articulator of the general will of the nation for the nation—meaning for all those who belong to it. We cannot underscore this point more: fascism is anti-individual-ist as conceived by liberalism.

To illustrate the contrast, consider one of the more common ways of describing liberal democratic political institutions as authoritative allocators of values for the society as a whole—meaning that the state and its bureaucratic organs are thought of as gathering, organizing, and dispensing functions that are assigned to it directly by individuals or through other institutions in society. Think, for example, of how a department of education is seen as organizing the interests of society in terms of learning: the subject matter that is taught, the criteria for advancement from one grade or level to the next, the allocation of resources for particular research projects, and so forth. The department of education may be seen as an allocator of the educational values of society that, in liberal contexts, belong to society. The

9Mussolini, Anthology, p. 44.

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department is said to function on behalf of the society. Fascist ideology takes this notion of the state, expands it, and adds a “national-ethical” dimension to the state’s role. The values it assembles are not those of the constituent members of society; rather, the nation is the source of ultimate values for all members of the community, and the political arm of the nation—the State—gives articulation to those values. The fascist department of education allocates values that come from, and exist for, the nation. The “individual” in liberalism is insignificant. Similarly insignificant are the values of any particular class in society. This helps explain fascism’s equally vehement rejection of another dominant ideology of the age: Marxism.

Anti-Marxism

If the basic fascist premise is that the nation-state is the ultimate authority in all matters, it must, of necessity, be in direct opposition to Marxism-Leninism, provid-ing us with another basic fascist value: anti-Bolshevism or anti-Marxism. To the Marx-ist, nationalism is not the natural, eternal, and necessary form of association that it is to nationalists, fascists or otherwise. Rather, it is another capitalist trick—like the naturally existing egoistic individual of liberalism—designed to divide people of different societies and prevent the formation of an international proletarian move-ment. For Marx, after revolutionary communists overthrow capitalism in their own countries, they will next build a revolution with truly global dimensions. They “labor everywhere,” Marx and Engels underscored in The Communist Manifesto, “for the union and agreement of the democratic forces of all countries.”10

Fascism rejects the idea that nationalism is divisive, and responds to Marxism with the same charge. From the fascist point of view, communism is one of the prime sources of national disunity because it preaches unending class conflict, and therefore divides the people rather than unites them. Pitting worker against capitalist within the same nation is morally wrong for the fascist. They both belong to the same group—the nation—not different groups. Further, communism is particularly threatening to fascism in that it asserts that nation-states are but pass-ing phenomena on the path toward a world society. To the fascists, the nation is an integral, autonomous, and eternal unit. It has a certain past, a certain present, and a certain future. Dividing it by encouraging forces within it to attack one another, or by claiming it is nothing but an intellectual fiction, constitutes a direct assault on its integrity. For fascism, Marxism is immoral and treasonous. It was thus almost

10Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, by Robert C. Tucker, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 500.

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inevitable that fascism would adopt a radically anti-Marxist stance—manifested in brutal suppression of the left—regardless of the intellectual origins of its founder Mussolini.

One more fundamental reason for this lies in competing conceptions that Marxism and fascism offer for the emancipation or salvation of the human being. Recall that Marxism claims to emancipate the entire species from class oppression through a communist revolution. It stakes a claim on saving all of humanity by eliminating class and societal distinctions. After the revolution, all members of the species would come to see themselves as sharing in a single, universal, emancipated existence. Fascism sees little value in this notion of world emancipation, especially when all the means of salvation—physical, moral, spiritual, political—are available through the particular experiences of the sublime nation and its organs. For this reason, and even though Italian fascism had little use for the excessive individual-ism of liberal democratic theory, it was especially polemical about Bolshevism. Indeed, at many points fascists thought of themselves, or at least let it be thought, that they were improving on the liberal democratic form of governance to combat more effectively the Bolshevik menace.

Nonetheless, it is one of the strange contrasts in Mussolini’s career that, early on, he both attacked and adopted some of Marxist doctrine. At the same time that he was calling for national strength to resist the “red menace” of Bolshevism, and his fascist squads were violently attacking and punishing Italian socialist groups, he was adopting many policies in the economic realm that can clearly be called social-ist. From his early appeals for the destruction of the monarchy and his battles with the Catholic Church, to the nationalization of many sectors of the economy, there was a definite socialist thread in his thought. But to call the mature Mussolini a socialist would certainly be a mistake, for he was quite tolerant of particular aspects of capitalism as an economic system, and the fascist movement received consid-erable support from big industry. Fascism, which has appeared as socialist (or, probably better, cloaked itself with socialist rhetoric) is not anti-capitalist. Indeed, it is still quite common to hear that it was Mussolini who not only “made the trains run on time” (no doubt a major accomplishment in strike-prone Italy), but also saved Italian capitalism from the Bolsheviks. Moreover, Mussolini eventually reached an accommodation with both the Catholic Church and the monarchy. On the other hand, frequent references were made to a “national-socialist” state. The fascist regime often intervened in economic affairs, and the authority of the state to control totally all aspects of life was constantly emphasized. Still, as is obvious by looking at the United States, among many other examples, state intervention in the economy does not make a state socialist. How, then, is one to understand fascist economics?

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We can make sense of this only by reemphasizing the prime goal of fascism: the creation of a more productive, powerful, and autonomous nation. Autonomy is a crucial term here. In every sphere of life, it is the power, success, and prosperity of the radically independent and sovereign nation that is most important. Anything that helps to bring about these ends is acceptable and desirable. Fascist economic policies should be seen in this light. National prosperity gives more power to the nation, and so whatever helps to bring about that prosperity is morally right and necessary. This includes private property and the accumulation of capital. Even seemingly socialist economic policies (planning, collectivization, and nationaliza-tion) were to be utilized where they seemed best suited for the pursuit of the nation’s economic productivity and power. Thus, when the state appeared socialist, it is more proper to say that it was using socialist means toward fascist ends, just as it could use capitalism to those ends. It is here that the comparison with the state socialism of Soviet Marxism, particularly that of Lenin, may prove useful.

Corporativism (or Corporatism)

We have seen that in the transfer culture of Marxism the state and party may be viewed as temporarily assuming control of all facets of national life for the pur-pose of building a strong socialist state. When Mussolini stated that the goal of fascism was to create a greater and more powerful nation, and that the state must have total power to pursue that end, he was articulating a not dissimilar doctrine. Indeed, in 1925 Mussolini and the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile began describing the state as a totalitarian (totalitario) entity that would aspire, in Stan-ley G. Payne’s words, “to an organic unity of Italian society, economic activity, and government… [exercising] total guidance of national goals.”11 Of course, for a Marxist-Leninist, such a concept of the nation-state was to be a temporary measure, necessitated by the special circumstances of the Soviet revolution and an exceptionally hostile capitalist world, while the ultimate goal of international communism remained the same. For Mussolini’s fascism, the powerful nation was the ultimate goal, and in pursuit of it a policy of corporativism, or corporatism, was adopted. In Mussolini’s words:

The Corporation is established to develop the wealth, political power and welfare of the Italian people. Corporativism means a disciplined and therefore a controlled, economy, since there can be no discipline which is not controlled. Corporativism overcomes Socialism as well as it does Liberalism: it creates a new synthesis.12

11Stanley G. Payne, Fascism: Comparison and Definition (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1980), p. 73.12Herman Finer, Mussolini’s Italy (New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1935, 1965), p. 502.

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How does the corporate state work? What kind of “discipline,” “control,” and “synthesis” does it require? Herman Finer, writing as these approaches were applied in 1935, stated that there was “considerable mystification” about the ideas of “the Corporation, and State tonics for private enterprise,” not only abroad but in Italy itself.13 Much of that “mystification” about the nature of corporativism remains. But insofar as Mussolini declared the notion of the corporate state to be the “keystone of fascist doctrine,” we must try to understand at least what it was designed to accomplish.

The idea is relatively simple. Corporativism is designed to remove all conflict within the nation’s economic sector in such a way as to avoid liberalism’s uncon-trolled and individualistic competition and Marxism’s revolutionary class warfare between workers and owners. Corporativism has thus been described as a “third way” between liberalism and Marxism—a way of conceptualizing society and orga-nizing production within it so as to avoid social fragmentation. The economic sphere of society is seen as being comprised of different, functionally distinct units, like the agricultural sector, the industrial sector (itself made up of sepa-rate industries), and various professional associations (teachers, lawyers, doctors). These units or sectors are referred to as “occupational groups” or “corporations.” Within each corporation, labor and management, rather than attempting to win gains for their respective groups, should work together to achieve a unity of pur-pose in pursuit of the goal of greater productivity. To this end, the state arranges various corporations representative of the different segments of the economy (for example, the steel industry, the transportation industry) that will contain represen-tatives from both workers and management. These will be organized vertically, rep-resenting all of the persons within an entire industry, rather than the more familiar horizontal organization, wherein a group or class of workers confronts a group or class of owners. The corporations of corporativism make decisions on wages and production quotas on an industry-wide basis.

We need not go into the institutional details of this conception of the corpora-tivist state. For our purposes, it is primarily important to see the coporativist idea in ideological terms as a way of eradicating the influence of selfish interests, whether expressed by a single capitalist or by a working class seeking to overthrow the capi-talist order. The idea was laid out in the early twentieth century by the renowned sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) in the “Preface to the Second Edition” (1902) of his classic work, The Division of Labor in Society (1893). Durkheim sug-gested that society should be understood neither as a collection of individuals nor as consisting in economic classes. Rather, it was best understood as contain-ing “corporations” or “occupational groups” within a broader societal division

13Ibid., p. 492.

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of labor. This idea itself was not original, but its application in the context of the socially fragmenting tendencies of capitalism was. Durkheim said the state should avoid fragmentation and the upheaval of norms and values (anomie) brought about by capitalist modernity through actively socializing individuals within their occu-pational groups and organizing these corporations so that they performed their respective functions in harmony.

Corporatism need not be fascistic. Although it is very difficult to establish Marxist corporatism (because of the Marxist aim to abolish permanent class divisions), one can imagine cooperative arrangements between labor and capital wherein the rela-tions are established in more or less liberal ways. The members of the corporation may be viewed as free individuals who are temporarily organized (not controlled and disciplined) for certain social purposes. Those purposes may be collectively decided through more or less representative institutions. Representation may be multi-tiered such that workers may form unions, and so forth. Indeed, such arrangements have occurred in many European countries (the Scandinavian countries are seen as the best models) and in the United States, where industry-wide decisions concerning wages and profits are made in many sectors of the economy under state supervision. Theorists of corporatism thus speak today of many kinds of corporatism.

A key distinguishing feature of the different types concerns the relationship between the state and the corporations. In authoritarian contexts tending towards fascism, the state may use corporatist arrangements as part of its larger aim of controlling activity in society. In more liberal contexts, the emphasis will be on ensuring productivity and efficiency within the legal framework of ensuring rights of liberty and property. Although it is difficult to generalize, it seems to be the case that the more independent the decision-making power of the corporations, includ-ing the freedom of labor to organize and influence effective decisions, the more liberal democratic the arrangements tend to be; and herein lies the distinguishing feature of fascistic corporatism.

Fascistic corporatism conceives of the organization of labor and management within the supreme objectives of the great nation, and organizes it all within the nation’s political arm, the state. Hence the famous motto: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” This saying is, to the liberal, nothing but a guise for total domination. To the fascist, total control is precisely what is needed. “Corporativism means a disciplined and therefore a controlled, economy, since there can be no discipline which is not controlled.”14

It is important to see this arrangement as drawing upon, but ultimately under-cutting, the Marxist critique of capitalism. In general, corporatist ideologies are said to steal the thunder of the Marxist analysis: the corporatists see the alienating

14Ibid., p. 502.

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and socially destructive tendencies of modern capitalist economies, but rather than attacking the problem by attacking capitalism, they seek to reorganize the relation-ships within it. This is what Mussolini meant when he described corporativism as a “new synthesis.” He aimed not to eliminate capitalism; he wanted to hold it together in a different way. Indeed, fascism saw this solution as providing a higher rationale for social progress than that provided by its ideological forerunners, and it can have a certain appeal to both workers and capitalists. Moreover, it must be emphasized that the goals of corporatism are increased productivity, social unity, and collective strength, not necessarily greater redistribution of wealth to the people. The idea behind the logic of fascism is that, as the productivity of the nation rises through cooperative action, all Italians, whatever their economic status, will benefit. Given this argument, the old “socialist” in Mussolini could accommodate his support of Italian capitalist elements in the name of making things better for everyone.

In institutional terms, the state organizes, in place of parliament, a national corporative chamber wherein the most important economic decisions are reached through a process in which representatives from the various corporations par-ticipate. Because all sectors of the society are “included,” the decisions of such a chamber would be, from the fascistic corporatist vantage point, the decisions of and for the entire nation. Looked at from another perspective, the corporate state was Mussolini’s answer to the five-year plans that the Soviet Union had established to set production goals, centralize economic decisions, and rationalize the alloca-tion of resources for the entire country. Thus, one thing stands out over and over again: all fascistic institutional arrangements are carefully constructed by the state (and the fascist party that controls it) to achieve the goals of prosperity, strength, and national unity. Those aspects of capitalism and socialism that support these goals are maintained and used by the nation for its higher purposes; those that detract are discarded. In this way, corporativism is the economic dimension of fas-cism. It solidifies the state’s control over the entire society. As Mussolini succinctly put it, “We control the political forces, we control the moral forces, we control the economic forces, thus we are in the midst of the corporative fascist state.”15

NATIONAL GOALS, ELITISM, AND LEADERSHIP

We have seen that one of the major goals of fascism is to supplant the selfish indi-vidualism of liberal democracy with national solidarity, expressed in the form of the will of the people or nation. We must now inquire as to the source of that will, what it is, and how it is to be found. Asking such questions immediately involves

15Mussolini, quoted in Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), p. 219.

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us in voluntarism, anti-intellectualism, and elite leadership, three additional doctrines in the constellation of fascist ideas.

If the nation is seen as a type of organism, it must possess certain functions, a purpose, and goals that it is to accomplish. Although it is true that Italian fascists constantly spoke of the spirit of the nation and invoked the concept of a will that was general in nature, there was little in the way of systematic articulation of the goals of the Italian nation. Vague references abounded to the glories of ancient Rome and the potential greatness of the Italian people, as well as aspirations to Empire, but nothing as specific as the goal culture that we shall find in Nazi Ger-many. Perhaps it was inevitable that the concrete form of these vague references to Italian power resulted in various attempts to expand the influence of the nation-state in foreign affairs. Italian colonial adventurism in Libya and Ethiopia and, for that matter, in World War II can be seen as an attempt to provide the material resources and physical boundaries necessary for national greatness. The lack of specificity of goals to be reached by a great Italy, however, should not surprise us; Mussolini’s celebration of action for its own sake is an important element here.

Fascism was not the nursling of a doctrine worked out beforehand with detailed elaboration; it was born of the need for action and it was itself from the beginning practical rather than theoretical; it was not merely another political party but, even in the first two years, in opposition to all political parties as such, and itself a living movement.16

Of course, as we stated above, the idea that fascism is more practical than theoretical is an idea about fascism. It is a part of fascist ideology, specifically its voluntarist and anti-intellectual emphases. Mussolini later declared that the fascist movement of the early 1920s had no specific goals, and surely did not possess a well-formulated program for political action. What, then, are we to make of fas-cism’s goal of emphasizing action over ideas and of its view of itself as “a living movement?” The absence of a political program does not mean the absence of ideas that drive the action, including the idea that action is everything! Would it make a difference if that had been written down? Probably not. The emphasis on action was the underlying, constitutive idea of early fascism.

Another underlying idea was Social Darwinism, a general name to describe social theories that applied Charles Darwin’s biological theory of evolution to the social world, viewing life as an ongoing struggle and competition for the survival of the most naturally fit—be they individuals, classes, races, or other groups. In fascism, this idea gives the concept of the nation a competitive dimension and supremacist

16Mussolini, Anthology, p. 40.

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goals. The nation is seen as engaged in a process of struggle and survival among other nations, a process that will lead to some of them coming out on top of the historical struggle, while others succumb. And this is how nature wants it to be. This idea merges with the emphasis on action. In an almost Hegelian fashion, the nation and its people come to know what they can be only by constantly testing themselves through ceaseless action. The ongoing, active exercise and display of national will is an important goal itself, perhaps more important than the fulfill-ment of any set of recorded, programmatic goals.

Fascist Violence

This kind of fascist action includes the forceful display of the nation’s will through violence on micro as well as macro scales. It might mean making public threats against “traitors” or “enemies of the nation,” carrying out an assassination, or a brutal back alley beating of an immigrant. Or it might, and frequently does, mean war—both in the actual sense of the term and in the militaristic sense of coercively subduing opponents and always being ready to activate the nation’s will in actual battle and conquest. For fascists, war is the ultimate experience, a demonstration of the national will on the largest scale and the supreme display of the nation’s power. Emphasizing what we might today call an excessive amount of unflinching “machismo,” fascism views forceful and violent actions as indicators of a strong and healthy movement. The nation affirms itself and its personality freely to oth-ers by continually testing itself through conflictual struggle. The advocacy of what Mussolini called “controlled violence,” the seemingly unnecessarily violent actions of fascist groups against perceived enemies, and the frequent will to war, even when that will is sometimes checked, seem to support this conclusion.

Many analysts of fascistic violence stress its seemingly purposeless character. It is said to be violence for its own sake. However, from the perspective of the fascist, the violence has a purpose: to affirm and display the identity, power, and supremacy of the nation against others. The group is determined to visibly assert its strength and glory, especially against those who appear to be threats to it. Such threats are not understood to be “personal” to individual, violent fascists. They are national, and the nation can only live by having its members face those threats forcefully, prepared to kill and be killed. Of course, the death—sacrifice, martyr-dom of a member—of one fascist may inflame the rage of the nation as a whole and feed the need for further violent expression of the nation’s will against those who have done it harm. Fascist violence expresses the nation’s energy gathered in the bodies of the members, who then unleash it once more on others viewed

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as having assaulted the nation. In this light, it frequently takes on a punitive and humiliating character. Ernst Nolte describes events in the small Tuscan village, Roccastrada, Italy, in July of 1921, when, under threat by the leader of the fascist movement in Florence, the socialist mayor of the town refused to resign. Fascists unleashed violence not only against the mayor and not only against his supporters, but against the entire village.

A number of houses were set on fire, the peasants fled into the fields. Finally the Fascists left, the inhabitants returned. But within a few minutes the engines roared again, the brakes screamed, the Fascists jumped down [from their trucks] ready for action, it was too late for another escape. On the way back a [Fascist] ‘squadrist’ had been killed by a bullet from an unknown hand, and the wrath of the gods broke over the unfortunate village. Summary executions and brutal arson transformed the peaceful little place not into a battlefield but into a scene from Dante’s Inferno…. [Fascist violence is] cynical, systematic, purblind, devoid of any human relationship to its own people.17

The world has seen such kinds of fascistic violence in many places in recent history. The details of such punitive slaughters may vary, but the fascistic char-acter of the violence need not. The distinction between guilt and innocence is blurred, if not lost. Enemies of the nation, those who reject its great will, are treated with contempt—the nation’s contempt. National values trump any values of so-called humanity. There is no universal right to be treated with respect and toler-ance. There is the will of the nation to be applied unflinchingly and courageously against those who threaten it. Even when fascism does not manifest itself directly as violence, the character of its feeling toward treasonous threats remains the same. This is the disposition that the fascist leadership cultivates. Why are doctrines nec-essary? Action is sufficient. Action is the doctrine. There is no substitute for Mus-solini’s own words:

The years which preceded the March on Rome [to take power in 1922] were years of great difficulty, during which the necessity for action did not permit of research or any complete elaboration of doctrine. There was much discussion, but what was more important and more sacred—men died. They knew how to die. Doctrine, beautifully defined and carefully elucidated, with headlines and paragraphs, might be lacking; but there was to take its place something more decisive—faith.18

17Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, p. 201.18Benito Mussolini, in Sources in Twentieth Century Political Thought, Henry S. Kariel, ed. (Glencoe, Ill.:

The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), p. 89.

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It should be apparent from the above that fascism has little use for the “ratio-nal” quibbling of intellectuals. If action is what it desires, there is little point in spending a lot of time debating or spelling out logical systems of ideas. In fascism, inquiry and analysis, reason and reflection, and thought itself are cast aside in favor of human capacities that reside in the gut and that may be directed through the motor functions of the body. These are then tied to “morality,” such that what a disciplined fascist feels in relation to the nation’s will is “right” or “wrong.” There is a distinct and deep strand of anti-intellectualism here, accompanied by the belief that human emotions provide the true seat of wisdom and truth. Human beings, while they are thinking animals, find true wisdom in their heightened emotional responses to words and actions, and they show that wisdom through committing their collective will to further activity. As such, speeches and written statements by the leadership are not used to passionately persuade the people to think differently on a particular issue or to communicate information, so much as to induce certain and specific emotional responses in the audience and stir them to action.

Fascist Communication

To a cynical observer, it appears that the speaker or writer is merely using symbols for their propaganda effect. There is, however, evidence to indicate that both Mus-solini and Hitler believed that the interchange of emotion that occurred during their speeches and at mass rallies was actually a fundamental method of directly communicating with the people. By communicating in the fascistic context, we mean using words and all the sights, sounds, and symbols of public rallies—the uni-formed leader on the raised podium, carefully timed and familiar sayings, flags, microphone and speakers, uniformed guards, radios, airplanes—to convey the nation’s will in an abstract, dramatic, and emotional sense to the nation. The key to fascist communication does not reside in the content of the ideas or “the validity of the point”; it resides in the power of those ideas to compel the nation to act according to its general will. Here again we encounter the elitist element in fascist doctrine, for if the spoken word is seen as an almost theatrical device for induc-ing emotional response and is a fundamental method of communication between people, the person who is speaking those words becomes most important indeed. Hence, to appreciate fully the notions of emotionalism, will, and mass action, we must look at the person who is to be the source of all these—the leader.

The fascist leader is the person who discovers and knows the general will of the nation, interprets it, and communicates it to the people in a way that they will understand and be led to fulfill its commands. As such, the leader is in many ways the key to all fascism. To return to the organic analogy, the leader is literally the

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living personification of the nation; the leader’s body and will express the will of all of the people. We must emphasize that fascist doctrine asserts that the leader does not act out of personal interest; that is, all of the leader’s words and actions are supposedly dictated by the general will. The success of the leader depends on the leader’s ability to produce the nation’s feelings in the audience, and to have the audience feel that this is the case.

Importantly, the spirit of the nation exists throughout the entire life of the nation independent of any particular person, so the leader is really discovering and being led by a national will, which already exists. Thus, we must ask how an individual person such as the leader comes to know what that will is. Fascist doc-trine provides us little in the way of an explanation of this discovery process. The leader’s communication with the general will is shrouded in mystery; the leader simply knows it and is chosen by history to be the one person who gives verbal form to the national spirit. The national spirit always exists in potential, but it requires a great person to know it, translate it for the rest of the nation, and mobi-lize the people to ensure that the national will is fulfilled. How do people know when a particular person such as Mussolini or Hitler is the authentic manifesta-tion of the general will? Fascists assert that the true greatness of the people and the leader is manifested when the people recognize the leader, when the leader emerges from the struggle for political power and they agree to follow all of the leader’s commands. The regime’s propaganda machine works to create this agree-ment. The regime produced hundreds of biographies, for example, that “sought to distance [Mussolini] from the Italian people by portraying him as a ‘man alone,’ a godlike figure who directed the masses from on high.”19 Again we see the emo-tional, irrational, Social Darwinist base of fascism. How does the leader know that he (or she) is chosen to articulate the will of the people? The leader simply knows it! How do the people recognize the leader when he (or she) appears? They simply do, and thereafter follow the leader’s commands! There just is no simply rational explanation for these phenomena, for they arise from the will and emotions of the people or, as Mussolini said in the passage just quoted, the process is based on faith.

From another vantage point, one can see the tremendous power that fascism gives to the leader, particularly when this concept is combined with other doc-trines. If, as we stated earlier, the nation is the final authority in all matters and the leader is the personification of the nation, that person’s commands are by definition law (no messy political deliberations necessary). Ultimately, the leader is accountable only to the will of the nation. The masses show their wisdom and

19Anthony L. Cardoza, “Recasting the Duce for the New Century: Recent Scholarship on Mussolini and Italian Fascism,” Journal of Modern History, 77 (September 2005), p. 723.

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demonstrate their greatness by acknowledging and following the leader. Here we can see with greater clarity the elite-mass distinction that we observed in the thought of the young Mussolini. The leader possesses the truth, and it is the leader’s his-toric duty to communicate that truth to the masses and to ensure that the nation fulfills its destiny. Fascism sees the masses as possessed of great potential energy; the task is to mobilize them toward the proper goals. Thus, the method of com-munication between the leader and the masses takes on great importance. Here the elite finds the use of myth and propaganda extremely useful. Much as in the “noble lie” of Plato, myths are used to communicate to the people a simplified version of the general will, and all sorts of emotionally arousing propaganda is used to direct their energies. Note that, according to the doctrine, this does not mean that the leader is manipulating the masses for the leader’s own personal power. Rather, what the leader is doing is leading them on their proper path of personal and national greatness. If successful, the entire nation will be mobilized in pursuit of national glory, and the will of the people, however vaguely defined, will be achieved. What could be more “democratic?” We are now in position to look again at Mussolini’s judgment contained in the first quotation of this chapter:

Fascism is therefore opposed to that form of democracy which equates a nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of the largest number; but it is the purest form of democracy if the nation be considered—as it should be—from the point of view of quality rather than quantity, as an idea, the mightiest because the most ethical the most coherent, the truest, expressing itself in a people as the conscience and will of the few, if not, indeed, of one, and tending to express itself in the conscience and the will of the mass, of the whole group ethnically moulded by natural and historical conditions into a nation, advancing, as one conscience and one will, along the self-same line of development and spiritual formation. Not a race, nor a geographically defined region; but a people, historically perpetuating itself; a multitude unified by an idea and imbued with the will to live, the will to power, self-consciousness, personality.

It is important to underscore that within the fascist experience, the significant relationship of power is not simply between the leader and the nation. It is between both of those and the nation’s will—what Mussolini calls “an idea” in the above quotation—which is superior. This idea is not a thesis to be examined and studied. It exists as a truth for the nation, embodying all that it is and should be, providing it with a “will to live, the will to power.” The leader is a captive of the nation’s will and could not act arbitrarily or on the basis of personal whim. Benito Mussolini is unimportant; Il Duce (Italian for the leader) is everything. And the German for Duce is Fürher, the title Adolf Hitler adopted. Note how they dispense with the liberal democratic trappings of titles used by those who hold formal institutional power:

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party chairperson, president, prime minister. To fascists, those terms are too bound to the will of the people, not that of the greater nation.

Here, then, are some of the central traits of Mussolini’s fascism: corporativism, irrationalism, emotionalism, will, leadership, action for its own sake—all within the confines of that supreme value of national fulfillment and greatness. Before moving to a more explicit summary of the ideas of Benito Mussolini, we must talk briefly about the role of racial doctrines in Italian fascism, for it provides one of the most important distinctions between fascism and Nazism.

FASCISM AND RACE

Race and racism are topics that require great care in the context of the study of political ideologies. While fascism tends to be much more race conscious (or racial-ist) than the ideologies we have studied thus far, the meaning of race in fascism is very much linked with the primary category of the nation. We shall discuss this shortly, as we shall also examine the concept of race in even greater detail in the next chapter.

Racism

We must begin our discussion here by pointing out that the previous ideologies we have examined are not free from problems of racism. By this we mean positing supremacy and inferiority between groups on the basis of some concept of race, and using those divisions as the basis for devaluation, discrimination, domination, prejudice, hate, attack, enslavement, persecution, or annihilation. Experiences of racism are almost beyond comparison, such that even making distinctions between them is a highly delicate matter. There are differences and similarities between different forms of racism; by no means can we resolve general questions about racism within the scope of this discussion. Of special importance in the context of ideologies that emerged out of European experience are two specific racist phenomena: that of anti-Semitism (meaning racism directed at persons who are Jewish) and that of imperial racism directed at non-European peoples, considering them as backward and inferior to those of modern Europe. At the time of this writing, both forms of racism endure as broad cultural phenomena. Well before twentieth-century fascism, the European ideologies of liberalism, conservatism, and Marxism displayed various forms of anti-Semitic orientation towards Jews and racist attitudes towards non-European peoples. We have seen the latter in our discussions, for example, of the relationship between liberalism and colonialism, as

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well as in Hegel’s denial of historical agency to non-European peoples. Indeed, the scholar of historical fascism, Stanley Payne, has observed that “it was the Enlight-enment which began the practice of classifying mankind racially, drawing distinc-tions between races which subsequently in the nineteenth century would become sharp racial hierarchies.”20 Anti-Semitism against Jews as a group had an especially long pre-fascist history in Christian religious prejudices. We shall have more to say about these prejudices in the following chapter. One example in the context of nineteenth-century ideology is Marxism’s anti-Semitic view of “the Jew” as a worshipper of capital and money that Marx himself expressed in his essay On the Jewish Question. Historically, the modern liberal concept of equality for all citizens emancipated the Jews of Europe in political terms (as it potentially emancipated non-Jews from historic anti-Semitism in political terms), but enduring religious and social differences continued to differentiate Jewish persons from the major-ity Christian societies they inhabited. We shall pick up these particular theoretical considerations in the next chapter.

Italian Fascism and Race

With specific reference to fascism in Italy, it is difficult to encapsulate its racial doctrines, because the issue remains a matter of serious debate among observers of the period. Most early research viewed Mussolini’s rejection of the concept of race in favor of “the people” (as in the quotation above) as evidence that neither he nor his regime was racist. This was the case despite Italy’s officially naming itself a racist society after 1936 and the anti-Semitic legislation of 1938 that stripped Jews of rights and excluded them from public service and employment, banking, com-merce, and education. The common interpretation saw the absence of systematic racist ideology and policies, along with a history of favorable relations between non-Jewish Italians and Italian Jews, as evidence that Italian fascism and its leader were more nationalist than racist. Whatever racism the regime manifested, includ-ing the 1938 legislation, was more, it was said, a strategic effort to appease Italy’s new Nazi allies than a statement of the anti-Semitism of the regime’s or the Duce. Moreover, several of the major theoreticians of the fascist movement, notably Giovanni Gentile, explicitly denounced German National Socialist racial doctrines as simplistic and unproved, and there was also evidence that, although there had been a history of anti-Semitism in fascist movements throughout Europe, there were many Jewish members of the Italian Fascist Party as well as Italian fascist

20Stanley G. Payne, “Fascism and Racism,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought, Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 125.

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figures who gave covert assistance to Jews escaping the expanding Nazi-controlled territories. More recent research has altered this picture considerably, leading us to see Italian fascism as exemplifying, especially in the mid 1930s, a brand of fascistic racism. This racism did not reach the level of the Nazism, which emphasized an international campaign to kill all Jews as “the final solution.” Nonetheless, it exhib-ited both forms of racism that we described above: anti-Semitism and European imperial racism.

In fact, both forms seemed to have emerged on distinct, but related tracks, as Mussolini sought in the 1930s to infuse race consciousness into the Italian people as part of his ongoing drive for unity and national greatness. A fascistic racist concept of race emerged vis-à-vis racial groups the regime deemed “lesser”—both domestically in policies of “Aryanization” in relation to Jews, and abroad in Ethio-pia in the passing of racist legislation forbidding contact between Italians and the indigenous population. The historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat describes “the start of the official anti-Semitic campaign” with the publication, in July of 1935, of a “Mani-festo of Racial Scientists:”

Written by the Duce in collaboration with a group of scholars, the manifesto estab-lished an irremediable divide between Jews and Italians. The former were now defined as an “unassimilable population composed of non-European racial elements,” and the latter as a “pure” people of Aryan origin and civilization. While the document warned that Italian racism recognized only racial differences, as against German ideal of racial superiority, it legitimized anti-Semitic prejudice by inviting Italians to “pro-claim themselves openly racist.”21

Against this background of an “irremediable divide” between an “unassimi-lable population” and the “pure” nation—a fascistic racialist distinction that reso-nates in rightist political discourse over eighty years later—the notion of “supe-riority” seems to have evolved quickly. The following month, in August of 1935, the regime passed a decree in what it described as “Italian East Africa” requiring “avoidance of all familiarity between the races.”22 Aaron Gillette shows the con-nections between the developing race consciousness of fascist Italy and its imperi-alism. He quotes Mussolini twice, in September and October of 1935, respectively, discussing Mussolini’s view that a “severe racial consciousness” was necessary for the nation’s “prestige”:

21Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 149.

22Benito Mussolini, in Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 57.

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The racial problem… is in relation to the conquest of empire; since history teaches us that the empires are conquered with armies, but are held by prestige. And for prestige it is necessary to have a clear, severe racial consciousness, that establishes not only the difference, but also the clear superiority [of the imperial race].

This is why the racial laws of the empire will be rigorously observed and that all who sin against them will be expelled, punished, imprisoned. Because for the empire to be preserved the natives must be clearly and forcefully aware of our superiority.23

Several scholars emphasize that the leadership saw a connection between these imperial racist views and the anti-Semitic legislation passed during the same time, in September 1938. Some document Mussolini’s own anti-Semitism.24 The impor-tant conclusion of much of this research is that the racism of Italian fascism was not simply a strategic move made to cement relations with Nazi Germany. It was Mussolini’s effort to “harden,” to use Gillette’s term, Italian national conscious-ness by making it a racial consciousness as well. In bringing nation and race into a closer relationship, Mussolini hoped to further instill in Italians (non-Jews) a sense of their greatness both inside and outside the territorial boundaries of the nation: over their colonial subjects and against their formerly equal Jewish citizens. Ital-ian national identity became defined in relation to what the Duce and his regime defined as its external and internal “Others.” As Ben-Ghiat puts it:

[T]he 1938 anti-Jewish laws and “reform of custom,” which formed part of a cam-paign to ‘Aryanize’ Italians, were not merely the result of the German alliance… they were the culmination of a decade of efforts designed to create a more “civilized” Italian who, Mussolini claimed, would “speak little, gesticulate less, and seem driven by a single will….” In a dazzling display of deductive logic, Mussolini told his offi-cials that “we are not Camites, Semites, or Mongols. And if we are none of these races, we are evidently Aryans, and we came from the Alps, from the North. We are therefore Aryans of the pure Mediterranean type.” Armed with this knowledge, he argued, Italians could manifest their “racial dignity” and fulfill their function as colonizers. On the homefront, too, the Italians must act as conquerors; any sympathy shown towards Jews was out of place.25

In Mussolini’s Italy, even if the anti-Semitic policies had been for strategic pur-poses, they nevertheless had the outcome, by stripping Jewish citizens of their equal rights, of making life demonstrably more difficult for Italian Jews (some of

23Ibid., p. 58.24Georgio Fabre, “Mussolini and the Jews on the Eve of the March on Rome,” in Joshua D. Zim-

merman, Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922–1945, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 55–71.

25Ben-Ghiat, p. 157.

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whom were sent to Nazi concentration camps or forced to hide and flee after the Nazi occupation in 1943).26 It is difficult, therefore, not to think of the Italian fas-cist state’s racial laws as racist. The laws “were aimed at all those who were termed “of the Jewish race,” and “served,” in Michelle Sarfati’s words, “also the purpose of de-Judaizing and of racializing the country.”27

In saying that the regime became racist, we are not saying that it became any less fascist. The racist developments demonstrate how Mussolini’s general will of the Italian nation discovered its racism as part of the unfolding of its great his-tory, threatening and directly acting against even some of the members of its own movement. This is but a more complex way of saying that the growth of racism and anti-Semitism did not necessarily render the fascist dimension less significant. Although fascism need not be explicitly racist, fascistic racism is one of several pos-sible fascist tendencies. The Italian fascistic experience suggests, moreover, that racist tendencies in fascism sometimes manifest themselves in very subtle ways, as in a comment made by Mussolini after the alliance with Germany was concluded and a policy of racism was officially announced. Speaking in defense of that policy, he said:

Jews possessing Italian citizenship who have unquestionable military or civil merit in the eyes of Italy and the regime will find understanding and justice.28

Mussolini gestured toward accommodating Jewish persons who are good Italian fascists. They have “military or civil merit” and “will find understanding and jus-tice” as good fascist nationalists. Insofar as this gesture implies that a Jewish person must be a good fascist, not simply Italian and Jewish, to find understanding and justice, the comment is not without classically anti-Semitic, racist dimensions. In this light, the central conceptual category of Italian fascism was certainly the nation—a nation whose leader made European imperial racism and anti-Semitism part of the national will. The nation did not need to be racist, but it could decide whether or not it wanted to be. And, that is what it did in the mid 1930s.

The difficulty of specifying a distinction between nation and race is to be found in many manifestations of fascism. As we have seen, a fascist ideology need not speak of itself as a race in order for the nation to feel itself superior to other

26Iael Nidam-Orvieto, “The Impact of Anti-Jewish Legislation on Everyday Life and the Response of Italian Jews, 1938–1943,” in Zimmerman, pp. 158–181.

27Michele Sarfati, “Characteristics and Objectives of the Anti-Jewish Racial Laws in Fascist Italy, 1938–1943,” in Zimmerman, pp. 72, 77.

28Benito Mussolini, in S. William Halperin, Mussolini and Italian Fascism (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1964), p. 175.

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nations. But when race and nation are both used, the entire conceptual repertoire of fascism takes on additional hierarchical meanings: the superior nation-race is superior to other nation-races in racial, not only national, terms. Even mixing the term race with a concept like “the people” gives the term the people both distinct and superior connotations. In short, when a group whose understanding of its nation is fascistic also defines itself as a race, it crosses the line to racist thinking about the nation by promoting that group’s additional, racial sense of superiority, greatness, chosenness, and even holiness through racial language. This may be too much of an intellectual attempt on our part to bring coherence to the irrationality of fas-cism. As we stated above, these matters are part of ongoing research and deserve further, very careful consideration.

Fascism and Race: A Contemporary Case

At the time of this writing, we are witnessing a similar dynamic in the context from which we write, that of the United States and the presidential primaries of 2016. Ongoing and simultaneous economic struggles and wars against radical Islamist movements have given rise to American forms of nation-purification vis-a-vis Mexican immigrants and Muslims in the United States. It may be a useful exercise in ideological dialogue to wonder about the current political debates dominating the presidential primaries in the United States from the perspective of fascism. Or, as we have tried to encourage throughout this book, ask how a devoted fascist might look at the American primaries. It is important to keep in mind during this exercise that we are talking about the campaign rhetoric and practices, not the full development of fascistic politics in the United States. Nevertheless, as observers have been pointing out, examples in the campaign are aplenty. Most famously, the highly popular public celebrity and billionaire presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump, has cast Mexican immigrants as criminals and responded to acts of terror-ism inside the United States and Europe by proposing to ban, at least temporarily, all Muslims from entering the country. Such discourse was already in the air of the American conservative right wing, but Trump has gathered in that air with a deep breath and given it prominent, elite dazzle in the context of the Republican Party presidential primary election campaign. These ideas are classically fascistic, with a distinctly American flavor, despite what some commentators think of as Trump’s liberal tendencies. Mussolini sounded like a Marxist at times, but it was a mistake to characterize the totality of either his ideological commitments or his political practice as such. Let us contextualize further and describe what we have in mind.

The racist anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric is only one example of Trump’s characteristic fascistic practice. In pursuit of the mythological goal of

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“Making America Great Again,” he has turned the campaign field into what he describes as war zone between himself and his “enemies.” He promotes himself as the only “strong,” “competent,” “smart,” “religious,” “conservative” “leader.” He is a “doer” and “winner,” while everyone else, whom he dismisses in a similarly militaristic and anti-intellectual fashion, is a “stupid,” “ugly,” “weak,” “low-energy,” “bad,” “loser.” He referred to the Democratic Party candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as “evil.” When “enemies” “hit” him, he “hits back.” As a seasoned tele-vision personality, he uses the theatrics of the modern campaign effectively. With very few exceptions, standing either alone (with no equal) or in front of a row of American flags, each with an enormous eagle atop the flag staff, he takes stage after stage in crowded arenas and promises that strong America will win again, derides and castigates his opponents, and taunts the media in front of large audiences who hoot and holler, stirring them into a frenzy of feeling the “greatness” of America “again.” In his mythological call for a Golden Age America, a return to “greatness,” and his tough looks and chin-up posture, he brings to mind Mussolini in similar contexts. He proudly does not tolerate any dissent or questioning. Remember, the leader is always right. During his rallies, he has his audiences raise their hands and pledge to vote for him—staging, again, the symbolics of mass fascistic rallies. He urges the roughing up of protesters who disrupt his events. “Get’em out of here,” he yells with a smile. So concerned is he that the media display his greatness and popularity that he orders the media camera operators to spin their cameras toward the crowd so that viewers can see and feel his winning greatness.

With regard to the question of race, he has placed himself squarely on the fascist American right by using crimes or acts of war committed by some to cas-tigate entire groups. He does this to non-“Americans,” never to “Americans.” He energizes his nationalized supporters with calls for expelling illegal immigrants, border construction, and intensified surveillance, spreading overgeneralized sus-picion designed to appeal to the raw emotions of a population experiencing fears of economic and wartime stress. Those who wish to enter the country illegally will feel the full force of the nation that is making itself “great again:” “Mexicans” will find a wall—“like China,” as in the “Great Wall of China;” even as “we will beat China for stealing our jobs and money”—and “Muslims” will find border restric-tions and constant surveillance. Defying overwhelming evidence and testimony to the contrary, he claimed that Muslim residents of a city close to New York City publicly celebrated the attacks of September 11, 2001. His proposed ban similarly defies the reality of Muslim American citizens (i.e., already in the country, since its earliest days) and their full participation in life, including politics and the military. While he walks back some of these comments (“Mexicans like and will vote for me,” “I have Muslim friends,” “It’s only temporary,” etc.), the language and prac-

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tices of his campaign are producing in the United States what the fascistic blending of nation and race accomplished in Mussolini’s Italy.

That is to say that, Trump’s words are a conscious effort on the part of the self-styled uniquely “strong” leader to harden American national consciousness by racializing it in relation to “Mexicans” and “Muslims.” His understanding of the American nation is classically and explicitly racist in that he considers “Mexi-cans” and “Muslims,” as a mythologically constructed block, as dangerous threats to America’s life and greatness. We have much to say about racism, Islam, and the relationship between America and Islam in the next three chapters. Here, given the seriousness of these developments, we can point out these ideological contexts within which Trump can be perceived as currently spreading American fascistic rac-ism toward these two groups. In the United States, with a long history of racism, the Trump campaign is loudly mobilizing a “strong” and “great” national identity with racialist aspects, including racist hatred. In fascism, empirical details like the presence of law-abiding immigrants or loyal Muslim citizens are beside the point.

We may add to this Donald Trump’s declared aggressive (“tough”), imperial-ist foreign policy goals of subordinating global competitors to America’s great-ness and, regarding the war with Islamism, his promise to “bomb the shit out of ISIS” and “take the oil.” These are long-time American policies, actually, perhaps somewhat more carefully calibrated than Trump intends. Proudly not “politically correct,” Trump speaks a bit like how many “ordinary” Americans speak when outside polite company. In a campaign rally in North Charleston, South Carolina, in early 2016, Trump illustrated what he meant by being “tough” and “vigilant” against terrorism by repeating a myth, standard usage to motivate the masses in fascism, from the Philippine-American war about a famous American general who executed Muslim anti-colonial fighters in ways that exploited Islamic beliefs:

I think we should go much, much, much further than waterboarding. [Cheers.] I said we have an enemy in the Middle East, ISIS and others, that are chopping off people’s heads and drowning people in steel cages. They leave ‘em under there for forty minutes, then they pull it up, right? Can you imagine these people, when they sit around at night [Trump waves his hand] eating whatever they’re eating, and talking, and they’re talking about the United States, that they’re [in the United States] actually worrying about waterboarding as being a little bit cruel. And these people chop off heads. They must think we are the dumbest and the weakest and the stupidest people on earth. On earth, [clapping] on earth.

You know, I read a story. It’s a terrible story, but I’ll tell you. Should I tell you? Or should I not? [Urged to tell] Early in the century, last century, General Pershing, did you ever hear? Rough guy, rough guy. And they had a terrorism problem. And there’s a whole thing with swine and animals and pigs, and you know the story, they

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[Muslims] don’t like it. And they were having a tremendous problem with terrorism, and, by the way, this is something you can read in the history books, not a lot of his-tory books because they don’t like teaching this. And General Pershing was a rough guy, and he sits on his horse, and he’s very astute like a ramrod, right? [He displays uprightness.] And the year was early 1900s. And this was a terrible problem. They were having terrorism problems just like we do. And he caught fifty terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the fifty terrorists, and he took fifty men, and he dipped fifty bullets in pig’s blood. You heard that, right [pointing to someone in the crowd]. He took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pig’s blood. And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the fifty people [draws imaginary line with hand gesture], and they shot forty-nine of those people. And the fiftieth person, he said, “You go back to your people, and you tell them what hap-pened.” And for twenty-five years there wasn’t a problem, okay? [Applause begins] Twenty-five years, there wasn’t a problem. Alright. So we better start getting tough, and we better start getting vigilant, we better start using our heads, or we’re not going to have a country folks. We’re not gonna have a country. [Applause rises]29

A reporter in attendance noted that, at this point, “A guy in the audience then shouted: ‘This is the greatest country in the world.’”30

There are many fascistic elements to this event, including the most obvious readiness on the part of the leader to use “the enemy’s” sacred practices in vio-lent ways to manifest the “greatness” of the nation. More fundamentally, insofar as none of the events Trump relates are part of the historical record, the telling of the story illustrates fascism’s core disregard for empirical consideration—what we have referred to as its anti-intellectualism or anti-rationalism. The cure for ter-rorism that Trump locates in history is not in history. The story—which echoes European colonial practices in Muslim societies, from which it may be drawn—is a myth. But, in fascism, myths move people to action and connect the leader to the masses. Carrying out violence that insults one’s enemy, Trump claims, will deter the enemy from conflict (although mass American colonial violence in the Philippines suggests many other possible lessons about the efficacy of violence in colonial war-fare). Trump apparently believes the myth to be true, but he also knows that it is excluded from some “history books.” What is in history books is besides the point. History does not matter. What matters is that Donald Trump knows how to resolve

29Video accompanying, Jenna Johnson and Jose A. Delreal, “Trump tells story about killing terror-ists with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood, though there’s no proof of it,” The Washington Post, February 20, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/02/20/trumps-story-about-killing-terrorists-with-bullets-dipped-in-pigs-blood-is-likely-not-true/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_pp-trumpterrorists-942am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory, accessed February 20, 2016.

30Jenna Johnson and Jose A. Delreal, “Trump tells story,” op. cit.

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terrorism. Trump’s telling of the story fits his will-to-power as a tough, all-knowing leader of a country whose “greatness” has been “lost.” He smoothly goes from ISIS beheadings and torture to anti-colonial warfare in the Philippines. But what he says happened in the Philippines did not happen; or, if it did, it did not happen in that way (because it did not happen), but who really knows, besides Donald Trump. According to him, it’s all the “same problem.” So “we better start getting tough.” The story is a total myth, it is violent, it is about colonial superiority, it is threaten-ing to Muslims, and it energizes nationalist sentiments in supremacist terms: You, “the greatest people on earth, on earth,” are being taken for “dumb,” “weak,” and “stupid.” What are we going do about it? We must act ruthlessly. Get “tough.” The fabricated story is told to “ramrod” a “great nation” into a violent posture against its “enemies” who “don’t like swine and animals and pigs.”

Like other fascist politicians around the world, it is thus evident that Trump aims to reflect and instill in Americans a sense of their own greatness both inside and outside United States territorial boundaries, over the peoples of the Ameri-cas and the Middle East, and especially against Mexican immigrants, American citizens of Mexican descent, and American Muslim citizens and immigrants, who experience fear and anxiety about the possibility of a Trump presidency, as verbal and physical harrassments against them and attacks on their businesses and places of worship become routine. He has attacked what he and his supporters clearly think of as “unassimilable populations” on behalf of the “pure nation” seeking its greatness “again.” Donald Trump has thus been making racism—as criminal-ized, suspicious hostility and nationalist supremacism toward entire groups of people—part of the national will, a will that must and does, in everyday acts of violence by its true believers, affirm its superiority against its threats and enemies.

FASCIST TRAITS

Before moving to a discussion of German National Socialism, it seems worth attempting a summary of the major themes of Italian fascism, if only to serve as a source of comparison and contrast for further discussion. Fascism’s doctrine of the nation has dominated our discussion throughout the chapter. Much like the notion of “class” in Marxism-Leninism, the “nation” forms the fundamental unit of analysis in fascist doctrine. It is so significant that one is tempted to equate fas-cism with extreme, ultra, or far right nationalism. Yet we have seen that there are several additional components of fascism, certain traits and values that are used to enhance the pursuit of national greatness that should also be associated with

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the term fascism. Not all of these traits always appear to the same extent or in the same degree in every manifestation of fascism, but an ideology is more fascistic the more they are present. Let us proceed to summarize and clarify those themes and traits by looking at several attempts, made over the years, at a systematic definition of the fascist phenomenon. For example, a dictionary definition published in the decade after the defeat of fascism in World War II reads:

Any authoritarian, anti-democratic, anti-socialistic system of government in which economic control by the state, militaristic nationalism, propaganda, and the crushing of opposition by means of secret police, emphasize the supremacy of the state over the individual.31

This definition is accurate in many respects, containing many of the themes we have associated with fascism. Indeed, it is in the complex interrelation of many of the stated traits that fascism achieves its power as an ideology. But the definition suffers, perhaps inevitably, from superficiality. Authoritarian is a term that may be applied to non-fascist anti-democratic governments as well as fascist ones, and fascism is “anti-democratic,” if by that we mean that it opposes classical liberal-ism and the representative institutions associated with it. Yet we know that fascist leaders were fully willing to borrow from the individualist liberal tradition, or leave it undisturbed, when it suited its purpose—as in the corporativist accommodation of capitalism—and we also know that they described fascism as “democratic” in a very different sense. Clarifying these nuances seems important to distinguishing what is precisely anti-democratic about fascist ideology.

Further, fascism is indeed “anti-socialistic,” if that means violent opposition to the internationalism and class analysis of socialism. However, fascism had its intellectual origins in the mind of a confirmed Marxist who relied on quasi-social-ist measures in the economic realm, and who built upon the Marxist critique of egoistic individualism. Mussolini abandoned class analysis, but not the conception of human beings as social animals. This is related to the dictionary’s claim that fascism “emphasizes the supremacy of the state over the individual.” Is this dis-tinct to fascism? Yes, if by that phrase we mean the nation-state institutionalizes the nation’s will for action and admits of no higher authority than that will. Still, a good fascist would declare that the implied opposition of the terms state and individual in the definition is but another example of excessive liberal democratic individualism. The individual alone is a mythical abstraction propagated by liber-

31Charles Earle Funk, ed., New Practical Standard Dictionary of the English Language, Vol. 1 (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1954), p. 481.

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alism (and liberal dictionaries!). Being organically related social animals, humans can fulfill themselves as individuals only in and through the nation; to imply that there is some sort of opposition between the two is to distort the truth of human nature. Finally, the dictionary definition suffers by ignoring other aspects that seem central to fascism. Where, for example, are elitism, leadership, activism, and corporativism?

Another attempt at a “first definition” of fascism was offered by Ernst Nolte in his Three Faces of Fascism:

Fascism is anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always, however, within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy.32

The major virtue of this definition is that it correctly points out the centrality of anti-Marxism and nationalism. These elements remain central to fascist parties and states around the world. Marxism may be on the decline, but fascists are alert to what they see as the dangerous international appeal and class perspective of Marxist ideology. For example, fascist anti-Marxism was on cruel display in the mass murder in Norway in 2011 of over seventy people by the neo-fascist Anders Breivik, when he opened fire on the Youth League of the Norwegian Labour Party at the party’s summer youth camp. Breivik’s writings also evince fascist racist senti-ments against immigrants and Muslims in Europe. That Breivik chose to attack Norway’s Labour Party, and not immigrants or Muslims, underscores the enmity fascists feel toward internationalist socialist movements. In Nolte’s definition, Nolte usefully emphasizes the hostility of fascism toward its enemies, how that is an alteration in Marxist methods, and he links the terms “national” and “self ” such that we understand the category of the nation as central. Still, it seems incomplete and surely suffers from vagueness: not enough of the traits are explicit. More helpful, it would seem, are more extensive summaries of fascist concepts like that offered by Anthony Joes, who organizes the ideology around themes of national-ism, repudiation of parliamentary liberalism, statism, productionism, corporativ-ism, authoritarianism, and elitism. Better still is Stanley G. Payne’s summary that elaborates even more of the themes we have discussed here, as well as captures some of fascism’s apparent contradictory tendencies:

32Nolte, pp. 20–21.

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[F]ascism may be defined as a form of organic revolutionary ultra-nationalism seek-ing national rebirth, based on a primarily vitalist and non-rationalist philosophy, structured on a seemingly contradictory combination of extreme elitism and mass mobilization, emphasizing hierarchy and the leadership principle, positively valuing violence to some extent as end as well as means, and tending to normalize war and/or military virtues.33

Perhaps this sketch of traits, tendencies, and values, along with a perceptive expression of their unique and sometimes puzzling fascistic combinations, is the best we can hope for in trying to come to grips with the complicated phenomenon of fascism. A. James Gregor summed it well when, with regard to a precise theory of fascism, he wrote:

We will have to be content with plausibilities and detailed historical accounts. The best efforts will be “eclectic,” attempting to weave together the most defensible of plausibilities into a narrative in which we can invest some confidence.34

All this is to underscore that the fascistic claim to be non-ideological makes sys-tematic exposition and analysis of the doctrine very difficult, though not impossible. In fascist ideologies and fascist political practice, several, if not all, of the elements we have described are usually at work. Sometimes, only some of them are present, to varying degrees and with varying emphases. Not all fascistic behavior takes place on the “far right.” It may take place across the political spectrum when political speech and action display some of the elements of fascism, without being fully fascistic. Thus, it is not inappropriate to say that a politician or popular journalist who stirs up anti-immigrant, racist, or racialist hatred, or who purposefully distorts reality and denounces reasoned deliberation as silly and unnecessary is being fascistic, or that the horrifying massacres in the killing fields of our era are the outcomes of fascis-tic violence. When we use these terms in these ordinary ways, however, it will not be because fascism lacks ideas, but because these ideas—nationalist racism, myth-making, the anti-deliberative repudiation of reason, and purposeful brutality, among others—are the constitutive ideas of fascism and fascist practices.

The difficulties we had to overcome in understanding fascism as an ideology are not so pronounced in our next subject for discussion: the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was all too explicit about what he intended. The problem was both too few and too many people believed him.

33Payne, 124.34A. James Gregor, p. 261.

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SUGGESTED READINGS

Beiner, Ronald, ed., Theorizing Nationalism. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999.Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, Fascist Modernities, Italy 1922–1945. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2001.Finer, Herman, Mussolini’s Italy. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1965. Gillette, Aaron, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy. New York: Routledge, 2002.Greene, Nathanael, ed., Fascism: An Anthology. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968.Gregor, A. James, The Ideology of Fascism. New York: The Free Press, 1969. ———, Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 2006.Laquer, Walter, ed., Fascism: A Reader’s Guide. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.Lewis, Sinclair, It Can’t Happen Here. New York: New American Library, 1963. Lyttelton, Adrian, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929. New York: Routledge, 2003.Mann, Michael, Fascists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.Mussolini, Benito, “The Doctrine of Fascism,” in Social and Political Philosophy. John Somer-

ville and Ronald E. Santoni, eds. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963.Nolte, Ernst, Three Faces of Fascism. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. O’Sullivan, Noël, Fascism. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1983. Parla, Taha and Andrew Davison, Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey: Progress or Order.

Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004.Paxton, Robert O., The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.Payne, Stanley G., Fascism: Comparison and Definition. Madison: University of Wisconsin

Press, 1980. ———, “Fascism and Racism,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought,

by Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 123–150.

Schneider, Herbert W., Making the Fascist State. New York: Oxford University Press, 1928.Weber, Eugen, ed., Varieties of Fascism. Princeton, NJ.: Van Nostrand, 1964.Woolf, S.J., ed., The Nature of Fascism. New York: Random House, 1969.Zimmerman, Joshua D., ed., Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922–1945. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2005.

CONVERSATION QUESTIONS

1. In what ways does Mussolini alter political discourse on individual ful-fillment and democracy?

2. How do Mussolini’s concepts of will and leadership differ from Mao Zedong’s?

3. What is it about violence that makes it so appealing to fascism, and, in fascism’s view, so convincing to its enemies?

4. How would you evaluate the relationship between nation and race in fascist ideology?

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