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

tolerated it in their children should be expelled from the party. Mussolini demanded that party members renounce religious marriage, baptism, and all other Christian rituals. In 1913 he wrote another anti-Church book on Jan Hus, the Czech heretic-nationalist, called Jan Hus the Truthful. In it, one could argue, lay the seeds for Mussolini's Fascism to come.

The second major theme in Mussolini's life was sex. At the age of seventeen, in 1900, the same year he joined the Socialist Party, Mussolini lost his virginity to an elderly prostitute 'who spilled out lard from all parts of her body.' She charged him fifty centesimi. At the age of eighteen, he had an affair with a woman whose husband was away on military duty. He 'accustomed her to my exclusive and tyrannical love: she obeyed me blindly, and let me dispose of her just as I wished.' Boasting 169 mistresses over the course of his sexual career, Mussolini was also, by contemporary standards, something of a rapist.¹⁴

Indeed, Mussolini was one of the first modern sex symbols, paving the way for the sexual deification of Che Guevara. The Italian regime's propagandistic celebration of his 'manliness' has launched a thousand academic seminars. Countless intellectuals celebrated Mussolini as the ideal representative man of the new age. Prezzolini wrote of him, 'This man is a man and stands out even more in a world of half-figures and consciences that are finished like worn out rubber bands.' Leda Rafanelli, an anarchist intellectual (who later slept with Mussolini), wrote after hearing him speak for the first time, 'Benito Mussolini...is the socialist of the heroic times. He feels, he still believes, with an enthusiasm full of virility and force. He is a Man.'¹⁵

Mussolini cultivated an impression of being married to all Italian women. The investment paid off when Italy faced sanctions for its invasion of Ethiopia and Mussolini asked Italians to donate their gold to the state. Millions sent in their wedding rings, 250,000 women in Rome alone. Nor were the ladies of high society immune to his charms. Clementine Churchill had been quite smitten with his 'beautiful golden brown, piercing eyes' when she met him in 1926. She was delighted to take home a signed photo as a keepsake. Lady Ivy Chamberlain, on the other hand, treasured her Fascist Party badge as a memento.

Because Mussolini trifled with men's wives, owed money, enraged the local authorities, and was approaching the age of conscription, he found it wise to flee Italy in 1902 for Switzerland, then a European Casablanca for socialist radicals and agitators. He had two lire to his name when he arrived, and, he wrote to a friend, the only metal rattling in his pocket was a medallion of Karl Marx. There he fell in with the predictable crowd of Bolshevists, socialists, and anarchists, including such intellectuals as Angelica Balabanoff, a daughter of Ukrainian aristocrats and a longtime colleague of Lenin's. Mussolini and Balabanoff remained friends for two decades, until she became the secretary of the Comintern and he became a socialist apostate, that is, a fascist.

Whether Mussolini and Lenin actually met is the subject of some controversy. However, we know that they were mutual admirers. Lenin would later say that Mussolini was the only true revolutionary in Italy, and according to Mussolini's first biographer, Margherita Sarfatti (a Jew and Mussolini's lover), Lenin also later said, 'Mussolini? A great pity he is lost to us! He is a strong man, who would have led our party to victory.'¹⁶

While in Switzerland, Mussolini worked quickly to develop his intellectual bona fides. Writing socialist tracts wherever he could, the future Duce imbibed the lingo of the international European left. He wrote the first of his many books while in Switzerland, Man and Divinity, in which he railed against the Church and sang the praises of atheism, declaring that religion was a form of madness. The Swiss weren't much more amused with the young radical than the Italians had been. He was regularly arrested and often exiled by various cantonal authorities for his troublemaking. In 1904 he was officially labeled an 'enemy of society.' At one point he considered whether he should work in Madagascar, take a job at a socialist newspaper in New York, or join other socialist exiles in the leftist haven of Vermont (which fills much the same function today).

While Mussolini would become a fairly inept wartime leader, he was not the bumbling oaf many Anglo- American historians and intellectuals have portrayed. For one thing, he was astoundingly well read (even more so than the young Adolf Hitler, who was also something of a bibliophile). His fluency in socialist theory was, if not legendary, certainly impressive to everyone who knew him. We know from his biographers and his own writings that he read Marx, Engels, Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche, Sorel, and others. From 1902 to 1914 Mussolini wrote countless articles both examining and translating the socialist and philosophical literature of France, Germany, and Italy. He was famous for his ability to speak on obscure subjects without notes and in great depth. Indeed, alone among the major leaders of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, he could speak, read, and write intelligently in several languages. Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler were undoubtedly the better politicians and commanders in chief, largely because of their legendarily keen instincts. But by the standards that liberal intellectuals apply today, Mussolini was the smartest of the three.¹⁷

After Mussolini's return to Italy (and a time in Austria) his reputation as a radical grew slowly but steadily until 1911. He became the editor of La lotta di classe (Class War), which served as the megaphone of the extremist wing of the Italian Socialist Party. 'The national flag is for us a rag to be planted in a dunghill,' he declared. Mussolini openly opposed the government's war against Turkey for control of Libya, and in a speech in Forli he called on the Italian people to declare a general strike, block the streets, and blow up the trains. 'His eloquence that day was reminiscent of Marat,' the socialist leader Pietro Nenni wrote.¹⁸ His eloquence didn't save him from eight counts of seditious behavior. But he wisely exploited his trial — in much the same way that Hitler made use of his time in the dock — delivering a speech that portrayed him as a patriotic martyr fighting the ruling classes.

Mussolini was sentenced to a year in prison, reduced on appeal to five months. He emerged from prison as a socialist star. At his welcoming banquet a leading socialist, Olindo Vernocchi, declared: 'From today you, Benito, are not only the representative of the Romagna Socialists but the Duce of all revolutionary socialists in Italy.'¹⁹ This was the first time he was called 'Il Duce' (the leader), making him the Duce of Socialism before he was the Duce of Fascism.

Using his newfound status, Mussolini attended the Socialist congress in 1912 at a time when the national party was bitterly split between moderates who favored incremental reform and radicals who endorsed more violent measures. Throwing in his lot with the radicals, Mussolini accused two leading moderates of heresy. Their sin? They'd congratulated the king on surviving an attempted assassination by an anarchist. Mussolini could not tolerate such squishiness. Besides, 'What is a king anyway except by definition a useless citizen?' Mussolini joined the formal leadership of the party and four months later took over the editorship of its national newspaper, Avanti!, one of the most plum posts in all of European radicalism. Lenin, monitoring Mussolini's progress from afar, took note approvingly in Pravda.

Had he died in 1914, there's little doubt that Marxist theorists would be invoking Mussolini as a heroic martyr to the proletarian struggle. He was one of Europe's leading radical socialists in arguably the most radical socialist party outside of Russia. Under his stewardship, Avanti! became close to gospel for a whole generation of socialist intellectuals, including Antonio Gramsci. He also launched a theoretical journal, Utopia, named in tribute to Thomas More, whom Mussolini considered the first socialist. Utopia clearly reflected the influence of Georges Sorel's syndicalism on Mussolini's thinking.²⁰

Sorel's impact on Mussolini is vital to an understanding of fascism because without syndicalism fascism was impossible. Syndicalist theory is hard to penetrate today. It's not quite socialism and it's not quite fascism. Joshua Muravchik calls it 'an ill-defined variant of socialism that stressed violent direct action and was simultaneously elitist and anti-statist.' Essentially, syndicalists believed in rule by revolutionary trade unions (the word is derived from the French word syndicat, while the Italian word fascio means 'bundle' and was commonly used as a synonym for unions). Syndicalism informed corporatist theory by arguing that society could be divided by professional sectors of the economy, an idea that deeply influenced the New Deals of both FDR and Hitler. But Sorel's greatest contribution to the left — and Mussolini in particular — lay elsewhere: in his concept of 'myths,' which he defined as 'artificial combinations invented to give the appearance of reality to hopes that inspire men in their present activity.' For Sorel, the Second Coming of Christ was a quintessential myth because its underlying message — Jesus is coming, look busy — was crucial for organizing men in desirable ways.²¹

For syndicalists at the time and, ultimately, for leftist revolutionaries of all stripes, Sorel's myth of the general strike was the equivalent of the Second Coming. According to this myth, if all workers declared a general strike, it would crush capitalism and render the proletariat — rather than the meek — the inheritors of the earth. Whether the implementation of a general strike would actually have this result didn't matter, according to Sorel. What mattered was mobilizing the masses to understand their power over the capitalist ruling classes. As Mussolini said