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Fascism’s Centennial Legacy
Over the course of this century, “illiberal” democracy has been growing.
Posted October 25, 2022 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Part I of II
One hundred years ago, in late October 1922, Italian Fascists under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, a former socialist newspaper editor and politician, marched into Rome and onto the world stage. The goal was to make Italy and its capital great again, as under the Caesars. When the fascist supporters and Blackshirt militia entered the city, King Victor Emmanuel II, transferred power to Mussolini to avoid fascist promises of violence should rule be denied them. The New Order’s watchwords were “belief” and “obedience.” Belief in fascism’s spiritual values, rooted in religious readiness to sacrifice the self for the Nation to save it both from the materialism of socialism’s egalitarian descent to mediocrity and from democracy’s apparent weakness, chaos, and corruption; and obedience to the cult of the leader, Il Duce (or Der Fuehrer, El Caudillo, and the like), who alone could impart revolutionary enthusiasm to the people, imbuing them with the faith to overcome and even despise rational doubts, the country’s existing institutions, and the indiscipline of dissent that comes with disbelief.
Lost in the haze of collective euphoria as supporters exulted in their leader’s incendiary oratory, and as other leaders and peoples took up the call, were its potentially horrific consequences for Italy and a world that would corrode into total war.
Fascism as a coherent political philosophy – authoritarian, ultranationalist, and supremacist – was rooted in developments during the First World War, when the citizenry and industry of most European societies, whether democracies or monarchies, were mobilized in mass and militarized to an extent not seen since the revolution in France more than a century before. The post-revolutionary European order collapsed that had more or less held from Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 until the onset of WWI in 1914, and de-globalization of the international economic system and of information exchange owing to deep ideological fissures began a run that would last through World War II and into the Cold War.
From the ruins of WWI and the subsequent economic deterioration, political disarray, and popular bewilderment at the passing of familiar social structures and moral norms, such as class hierarchies, centralized militaristic autocracies began emerging across the continent under dictatorial leaders. From Poland to Portugal, these totalitarian one-party states aimed to achieve national self-sufficiency (autarky) by subjugating labor and industry to the state and by forcibly suppressing opposition. Except for the equally totalitarian and dirigiste pro-Soviet communists, they also promoted political violence against peoples alleged to be racially perverse (Jews, Romani) or inferior (Slavs, non-Indo Europeans) as a means of national rejuvenation and colonial expansion.
Nazi Germany emerged as the most brutal, aggressive, and dominant of these states as it endeavored to forge a world-conquering alliance of Fascist-friendly nations that ultimately torched much of Europe and parts of Africa and Asia before succumbing to overwhelming US-led firepower and Soviet-led manpower. Yet, as George Orwell noted in his review of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf:
[T]he situation in Germany, with its 7 million unemployed, was obviously favorable for demagogues. But Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality… [H]e has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. Hitler… knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, birth control, and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags, and loyalty parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.
Here’s a telling anecdote: During a showing of Leni Riefenstahl’s visual paean to National Socialism, Triumph of the Will (1935), at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Charlie Chaplin laughed but French film-maker René Clair was terror-stricken, fearing that, if it were shown more widely, all might be lost in the West. Indeed, Hitler’s inspiration and his party’s success in inculcating youth into the Nazi worldview as a sacred cause made German soldiers more willing to fight and less willing to surrender than allied combatants in World War II.
Today, liberal democratic values increasingly appear to be losing ground as the middle class, the mainstay of liberal democracies, shrinks. In a World Values Survey, the majority of Europeans less than 30 years old think their living in a democracy is not “absolutely important.” In one US survey, almost half of Americans lacked faith in democracy, and more than one-third of young people with high incomes approved of military rule, presumably to arrest growing social agitation tied to vast income inequality (now surpassing the 19th-century’s Gilded Age), political polarization, and unrelenting problems of cultural assimilation, racial integration, and lack of consensus in an era of identity politics.
An October 2022 New York Times-Siena College poll found that 71 percent of Americans see democracy in jeopardy but only 7 percent consider rescuing it an election priority. America’s constitutional structure allows the Electoral College and composition of the Senate to presently advantage the party of candidates who deny the legitimacy of the last presidential election; however institutional advantages and political success at gerrymandering and voter suppression cannot explain why a clear majority of Americans also express willingness to vote for election deniers as long as the candidates support voters’ other economic and socio-cultural priorities. According to another nationwide survey, more than 90 percent of US Republican Party supporters believe in America as a force for moral good in the world, with one-third of party supporters willing to condone political violence even against fellow citizens thought to hinder the pursuance of that moral good and so undermine national identity.
Over the course of this century, “illiberal” democracy has been growing, where constitutional limits and elections are acceptable only if they affirm the legitimacy of one political party or faction usually associated with, or at least tolerant of, the far-right. Illiberal democracies tend to evolve into ever more authoritarian and intolerant “tight” societies rather than into open societies respectful of divergent opinions and diverse cultural traditions and preferences.
Far-right extremism and attendant violence have been rising steadily in the US and across Europe. Relegated to the political fringe after World War II, with practically no legislative representation, the far-right today has become the strongest political force in Italy (Brothers of Italy), the second largest in France (Rassemblement National), the third most powerful in Spain (Vox) and Austria (Freedom Party), and a viable force in Germany (Alternative for Germany). Far-right parties now wield power in the ruling coalition in Sweden (Sweden Democrats) and in opposition in the Netherlands (Party of Freedom), while effectively ruling Hungary (Fidesz) and Poland (Law and Justice). Although these political formations reject an overtly fascist philosophy, they borrow many of the exclusionary ethno-nationalist elements first popularized by fascism, and they embrace a decidedly illiberal agenda.
This is Part I of II
