Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

parochial power politics and the uniqueness of Italian culture (Germany had no such handicap, as we will see). The Catholic Church understood what Mussolini was up to. In its 1931 encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno, the Vatican accused the Fascists of 'Statolatry' and denounced their effort 'to monopolize completely the young, from their tenderest years up to manhood and womanhood, for the exclusive advantage of a party and of a regime based on an ideology which clearly resolves itself into a true, a real pagan worship of the State.'³¹

The idea of priests and leaders representing the spirit or general will of the people is modern to the extent that it dethrones traditional religion. But the impulse to endow certain classes of people or individual rulers with religious authority is very ancient and may even be hardwired into human nature. Louis XIV's (probably fictional) declaration 'L'etat, c'est moi' summarized the idea that the ruler and the state were one. The revolutionaries' accomplishment was to preserve this doctrine while displacing the source of legitimacy from God to the people, the nation, or simply to the idea of progress. Napoleon, the revolutionary general, seized control of France with just such a writ. He was a secular dictator committed to furthering the revolutionary liberation of the peoples of Europe. His victories against the Austro-Hungarian Empire prompted the captive nations of the Hapsburgs to greet him as 'the great liberator.' He beat back the authority of the Catholic Church, crowning himself Holy Roman Emperor and ordering his troops to use cathedrals to stable their horses. Napoleon's troops carried with them the Rousseauian bacillus of divinized nationalism.

Thus tumbles both the glorious myth of the left and the central indictment of the right: that the French Revolution was a wellspring of rationalism. In fact it was no such thing. The Revolution was a romantic spiritual revolt, an attempt to replace the Christian God with a Jacobin one. Invocations to Reason were thinly veiled appeals to a new personalized God of the Revolution. Robespierre despised atheism and atheists as signs of the moral decay of monarchy, believing instead in an 'Eternal Being who intimately affects the destinies of nations and who seems to me personally to watch over the French Revolution in a very special way.'³² For the Revolution to be successful, Robespierre had to force the people to recognize this God who spoke through him and the general will.

Only in this way could Robespierre realize the dream that would later transfix Nazis, communists, and progressives alike: the creation of 'New Men.' 'I am convinced,' he proclaimed in a typical statement, 'of the necessity of bringing about a complete regeneration, and, if I may express myself so, of creating a new people.' (To this end, he pushed through a law requiring that children be taken from their parents and indoctrinated in boarding schools.) The action-priests of the Revolution, wrote Tocqueville, 'had a fanatical faith in their vocation — that of transforming the social system, root and branch, and regenerating the whole human race.' He later recognized that the French Revolution had become a 'religious revival' and the ideology that spewed from it a 'species of religion' which 'like Islam [has] overrun the whole world with apostles, militants, and martyrs.'³³

Fascism is indebted to the French Revolution in other ways as well. Robespierre appreciated, as did Sorel and his heirs, that violence was a linchpin that kept the masses committed to the ideals of the Revolution: 'If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs.'³⁴

'For the first time in history,' writes the historian Marisa Linton, 'terror became an official government policy, with the stated aim to use violence in order to achieve a higher political goal.' The irony seemed lost on the Bolsheviks — self-proclaimed descendants of the French Revolution — who defined fascism, rather than their own system, as an 'openly terroristic dictatorship.'³⁵

The utility of terror was multifaceted, but among its chief benefits was its tendency to maintain a permanent sense of crisis. Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency. Across the West, this was the most glorious boon of World War I.

WAR: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

Both Mussolini and Lenin are reported to have had the exact same response to the news of the war. 'The Socialist International is dead.' And they were right. Across Europe (and later America) socialist and other left- leaning parties voted for war, turning their backs on doctrines of international solidarity and the dogma that this was a war for capitalism and imperialism. After a reflexive two-month period of following this party line, Mussolini started moving into what was known as the interventionist camp. In October 1914 he penned an editorial in Avanti! explaining his new pro-war stance in terms that mixed Marxism, pragmatism, and adventurism. A party 'which wishes to live in history and, in so far as it is allowed, to make history, cannot submit, at the penalty of suicide to a line which is dependent on an unarguable dogma or eternal law, separate from the iron necessity [of change].' He quoted Marx's admonition that 'whoever develops a set program for the future is a reactionary.' Living up to the letter of the party, he declared, would destroy its spirit.³⁶

David Ramsay Steele suggests that Mussolini's switch in favor of war 'was as scandalous as though, 50 years later, [Che] Guevara had announced that he was off to Vietnam, to help defend the South against North Vietnamese aggression.'³⁷ It's a good line, but it obscures the fact that socialists throughout Europe and America were rallying to the cause of war, largely because that's where the masses wanted to go. The most shocking example came when the socialists in the German parliament voted in favor of granting credits to fund the war. Even in the United States the vast majority of socialists and progressives supported American intervention with a bloodlust that would embarrass their heirs today — if their heirs actually took the time to learn the history of their own movement.

This is a vital point because, while it is most certainly true that World War I gave birth to Fascism, it also gave birth to anti-Fascist propaganda. From the moment Mussolini declared himself in favor of the war, Italian Socialists smeared him for his heresy. 'Chi paga?' became the central question of the anti-Mussolini whisper campaign. 'Who's paying him?' He was accused of taking money from arms makers, and it was hinted darkly that he was on France's payroll. There's no evidence for any of this. From the beginning, fascism was dubbed as right-wing not because it necessarily was right-wing but because the communist left thought this was the best way to punish apostasy (and, even if it was right-wing in some long forgotten doctrinal sense, fascism was still right-wing socialism). It has ever been thus. After all, if support for the war made one objectively right-wing, then Mother Jones was a rabid right-winger, too. This should be a familiar dynamic today, as support for the war in Iraq is all it takes to be a 'right-winger' in many circles.

Mussolini on occasion acknowledged that fascism was perceived as a movement of the 'right,' but he never failed to make it clear that his inspiration and spiritual home was the socialist left. 'You hate me today because you love me still,' he told Italian Socialists. 'Whatever happens, you won't lose me. Twelve years of my life in the party ought to be sufficient guarantee of my socialist faith. Socialism is in my blood.' Mussolini resigned his editorship of Avanti! but he could never resign his love of the cause. 'You think you can turn me out, but you will find I shall come back again. I am and shall remain a socialist and my convictions will never change! They are bred into my very bones.'³⁸

Nevertheless, Mussolini was forced to quit the party organization. He joined up with a group of pro-war radicals called the Fascio Autonomo d'Azione Rivoluzionaria and quickly became their leader. Again, Mussolini had not moved to the right. His arguments for entering the war were made entirely in the context of the left and mirrored to no small extent the liberal and leftist arguments of American interventionists such as Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, and Walter Lippmann. The war, he and his fellow apostates insisted, was against the reactionary Germans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a war to liberate foreign peoples from the yoke of imperialism and advance the cause of socialist revolution in Italy, a true 'proletarian nation.'

Mussolini founded a new newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia. The name itself — The People of Italy — is instructive because it illustrates the subtle change in Mussolini's thinking and the first key distinction between socialism and fascism. Socialism was predicated on the Marxist view that 'workers' as a class were more bound by common interests than any other criteria. Implicit in the slogan 'Workers of the world, unite!' was the idea that class was more important than race, nationality, religion, language, culture, or any other 'opiate' of the masses. It had become clear to Mussolini that not only was this manifestly not so but it made little sense to pretend otherwise. If Sorel had taught that Marxism was a series of useful myths rather than scientific fact, why not utilize more useful myths if they're available? 'I saw that internationalism was