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

critics. Yes, the socialists and communists he was fighting were often just as bad as the Fascists. And on other occasions the Fascists were much worse. At the end of the day, however, the salient fact was that in a nation torn by economic and social chaos as well as political bitterness in the wake of the Versailles Treaty, Mussolini's message and tactics triumphed. Moreover, his success had less to do with ideology and violence than with populist emotional appeals. Mussolini promised to restore two things in short supply: pride and order.

The precipitating events in his rise are controversial for reasons not worth dwelling on. Suffice it to say that the March on Rome was not a spontaneous, revolutionary event but a staged bit of political theater designed to advance a Sorelian myth. The violence between Fascist and other left-wing parties reached a crescendo in the summer of 1922, when the communists and socialists called for a general strike to protest the government's refusal to clamp down on the Fascists. Mussolini declared that if the government didn't break the strike, his Fascists would do it themselves. He didn't wait for — or expect — a response. When the 'Reds' launched their strike on July 31, Mussolini's squadristi — made up largely of skilled ex-military troops — broke it within a day. They drove the streetcars, kept the traffic moving, and, most famously, got the 'trains running on time.'

Mussolini's strikebreaking tactics had a profound effect on the Italian public. At a time when intellectuals all over the world were growing cynical about parliamentary democracy and liberal politics, Mussolini's military efficiency seemed to transcend partisan politics. Just as many today say we need to 'get beyond labels' in order to get things done, Mussolini was seen as moving beyond the 'tired categories of left and right.' Similarly — like certain modern liberals — he promised what he called a 'Third Way' that was neither left nor right. He just wanted to get things done. With the public largely behind him, he planned to break a different sort of strike — the parliamentary deadlock that had paralyzed the government and, hence, 'progress.' He threatened that he and his Blackshirts — so named because Italian special forces wore black turtlenecks, which quickly became a fashion among Fascists — would march on Rome and take the reins of state. Behind the scenes, King Vittorio Emanuele had already asked him to form a new government. But Il Duce marched anyway, reenacting Julius Caesar's march on Rome and giving the new Fascist government a useful 'revolutionary myth' that he would artfully exploit in years to come. Mussolini became prime minister and Fascist Italy was born.

How did Mussolini govern? Like the old joke about the gorilla, however he wanted. Mussolini became a dictator, less brutal than most, more brutal than some. But he was also very popular. In 1924 he held reasonably fair elections, and the Fascists won by a landslide. Among his achievements in the 1920s were the passage of women's suffrage (which the New York Times hailed as a nod to the pressure of American feminists), a concordat with the Vatican, and the revitalization of the Italian economy. The settlement of the long-simmering schism between Italy and the pope was a monumental accomplishment in terms of Italy's domestic politics. Mussolini succeeded where so many others had failed.

We will deal with many of the ideological issues and policies swirling around Italian Fascism in subsequent chapters. But there are some points that are worth stating here. First, Mussolini successfully cast himself as the leader of the future. Indeed, he was brought to power in part by an artistic movement called Futurism. Throughout the 1920s, even if he implemented some policies that Western intellectuals disliked — anti-press laws, for example — his method of governing was regarded as quintessentially modern. At a time when many young intellectuals were rejecting the 'dogma' of classical liberalism, Mussolini seemed a leader at the forefront of the movement to reject old ways of thinking. This was the dawn of the 'fascist century,' after all. It was no coincidence that Fascism was the first politically successful, self- styled modern youth movement, and was widely recognized as such. 'Yesterday's Italy is not recognizable in today's Italy,' Mussolini declared in 1926. 'The whole nation is 20 years old and as such it has the courage, the spirit, the intrepidity.'⁴⁴ No leader in the world was more associated with the cult of technology, particularly aviation, than Mussolini in the 1920s. By the 1930s world leaders were trying to fit into Mussolini's mold as a 'modern' statesman.

Part of Mussolini's reputation as a new kind of leader stemmed from his embrace of 'modern' ideas, among them American Pragmatism. He claimed in many interviews that William James was one of the three or four most influential philosophers in his life. He surely said this to impress American audiences. But Mussolini really was an admirer of James (and the James-influenced Sorel), who believed that Pragmatism justified and explained his governing philosophy and governed in a pragmatic fashion. He was indeed the 'Prophet of the Pragmatic Era in Politics,' as a 1926 article in the Political Science Quarterly (and subsequent book) dubbed him.⁴⁵

If at times he would adopt, say, free-market policies, as he did to some extent in the early 1920s, that didn't make him a capitalist. Mussolini never conceded the absolute authority of the state to dictate the course of the economy. By the early 1930s he had found it necessary to start putting Fascist ideology down on paper. Before then, it was much more ad hoc. But when he did get around to writing it out, doctrinal Fascist economics looked fairly recognizable as just another left-wing campaign to nationalize industry, or regulate it to the point where the distinction was hardly a difference. These policies fell under the rubric of what was called corporatism, and not only were they admired in America at the time, but they are unknowingly emulated to a staggering degree today.

Pragmatism is the only philosophy that has an everyday word as its corollary with a generally positive connotation. When we call a leader pragmatic, we tend to mean he's realistic, practical, and above all nonideological. But this conventional use of the word obscures some important distinctions. Crudely, Pragmatism is a form of relativism which holds that any belief that is useful is therefore necessarily true. Conversely, any truth that is inconvenient or non-useful is necessarily untrue. Mussolini's useful truth was the concept of a 'totalitarian' society — he made up the word — defined by his famous motto: 'Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.' The practical consequence of this idea was that everything was 'fair game' if it furthered the ends of the state. To be sure, the militarization of society was an important part of fascism's assault on the liberal state, as many anti-fascists assert. But that was the means, not the end. Mussolini's radical lust to make the state an object of religious fervor was born in the French Revolution, and Mussolini, an heir to the Jacobins, sought to rekindle that fire. No project could be less conservative or less right-wing.

In this and many other ways, Mussolini remained a socialist until his last breath, just as he predicted. His reign ended in 1943, when he became little more than a figurehead for the Nazi regime headquartered at Salo, where he pathetically plotted his comeback. He spent his days issuing proclamations, denouncing the bourgeoisie, promising to nationalize all businesses with more than a hundred employees, and implementing a constitution written by Nicola Bombacci, a communist and longtime friend of Lenin's. He selected a socialist journalist to record his final chapter as Il Duce, according to whom Mussolini declared, 'I bequeath the republic to the republicans not to the monarchists, and the work of social reform to the socialists and not to the middle classes.' In April 1945 Mussolini fled for his life — back to Switzerland, ironically — with a column of German soldiers (he was disguised as one of them) as well as his aides, his mistress, and his acolyte Bombacci in tow. They were captured by a band of communist partisans, who the next morning were ordered to execute him. Mussolini's mistress allegedly dove in front of her lover. Bombacci merely shouted, 'Long live Mussolini! Long live Socialism!'⁴⁶

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Adolf Hitler: Man of the Left

WAS HITLER'S GERMANY fascist? Many of the leading scholars of fascism and Nazism — Eugen Weber, A. James Gregor, Renzo De Felice, George Mosse, and others — have answered more or less no. For various reasons having to do with different interpretations of fascism, these academics have concluded that Italian Fascism and Nazism, while superficially similar and historically bound up with each other, were in fact very different phenomena. Ultimately, it is probably too confusing to try to separate Nazism and Italian Fascism completely. In other words, Nazism wasn't Fascist with a capital F, but it was fascist with a lowercase f. But the fact that such an argument exists among high-level scholars should suggest how abysmally misunderstood both phenomena are in the popular mind, and why reflexive rejection of the concept of liberal fascism may be misguided.

The words 'fascist' and 'fascism' barely appear in Mein Kampf. In seven-hundred-