For fans of political history, few things annoy more than the misuse of terms. Americans are particularly bad about this, but I think for understandable reasons – our revolution (an un-conservative term) was “conservative” in that our strange mixture of Greco-Roman civic republicanism, therapeutic deism, and Enlightenment thinking came to be successfully at peace with market liberalism. And alongside traditionalism and religiosity, sympathy for this economic viewpoint is a workable model for what it means to be of the right, or in our terminology a conservative. It is rather odd, then, that fascism has come to be thought of a rightist phenomenon. It certainly was labeled as such shortly after Italian socialists popularized the term – but only within the socialist movement! The fascists were national socialists, opposed to the internationalists who submitted to Moscow. Deviations to nationalist sentiment, as opposed to class, were labeled “right wing.” Yet the view of what was to be done internally was remarkably similar – “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State,” according to Mussolini. To nationalize is to socialize, and to socialize is to nationalize, as Jonah Goldberg points out in his new book. (It’s a serious and rather dense work despite the designed to sell cover and title). Fascism should not be a synonym for “war lust” or “racism” however defined, cheaply imported as a modern epithet. It was a serious intellectual and global project, usually hyper-nationalist and always utopian.
Mussolini, a socialist editor deeply committed to overturning the old order, for a time enjoyed extensive and mutual admiration with his American and European counterparts. All shared a common vision: state organized unity. The bloodbath came to be in the details. Yet among early Twentieth Century socialists like H.G. Wells (who gave us the term “Liberal Fascism” at Oxford in 1932) there was always a distrust of the religious, of the traditionalist, and above all of the capitalist – those stubborns that must somehow come to the unified vision of secular religiosity which is greatness through the state. Fascism is the cult of state organized unity. This movement was committed to a modernist building of heaven on earth, and its rallying cry was to a singular purpose served by the living organism of the state, the end manifestation of a purified and perfected people. For Goldberg, there are indisputable roots in the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey, the historicism of Hegel, the Nietzschean drive to power, social Darwinism, the eugenics movement, and the Social Gospel. The mixture of these within the umbrella of fascism is that state has no limits in principle; the people and the government are bound to one another by constant political struggle, not by family and certainly not by God. Fascism is an extremity of our tribal impulse, and liberal democracy was an imposition on the natural human desire to live clannishly. Citizens of fascism were to derive their personal worth from their relation to the all-encompassing and holistic state. The political history of fascism is tragic, misunderstood, and necessary for greater political literacy. Goldberg’s contribution is an important one. Learn more here and here. Michael Leeden, who knows Italy intimately, offers a somewhat critical look here.
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