Trump is a “fascist”! That’s what Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and a chorus of Democrats told us ad nauseam. When that moniker insufficiently expressed their hatred and fear of losing, the absurd “Hitler” insult was spewed forth.
Most Americans likely can’t
spell “fascism,” much less define it. They
can be excused for the latter deficit since historians have been all over the
political map trying to provide a definition of the doctrine. What these mostly “left-of-center”
professionals conveniently agree on, however, is that fascism is a product of
the political “right.” Never mind that
Mussolini arrived at fascism after spending his earlier years as a committed socialist
(editor-in-chief of Avanti! ) and
that his “totalitarian” (Il Duce’s word) program naturally incorporated many of
the policies embedded in that ideology.
Add to those facts that Mussolini
was greeted more than sympathetically by Progressive “leftists” of the time, including FDR, with whom,
prior to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, there existed a mutual admiration relationship, if not a full-fledged bromance. The pre-TDS Jonah
Goldberg cites in his book Liberal Fascism
a letter from FDR that refers to “that admirable Italian gentleman” who was
praising New Deal initiatives. FDR, in turn, writes that he is also “much interested and
deeply impressed” by Mussolini’s accomplishments. More to the point of
this essay, Goldberg notes that as an FDR ally, Father Coughlin, moved
further to the radical “left” and began criticizing Roosevelt, liberals started
calling him a “right-winger.” In other
words, “In the 1930s, what defined a ‘right-winger’ was almost exclusively
opposition to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.”
Here is a dissertation topic
for an open-minded graduate student: The utility (or lack thereof) of the
left-right political distinction. A
couple of decades ago when I asked Goldberg himself about historians who began linking
fascism to the political “right,” he provided no answer. One likely reason for that linkage, I suspect,
comes from the following quote in Mussolini’s essay, “The Doctrine of Fascism” (1932): “We
are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to
the ‘right,’ a Fascist century.” Note,
however, that Mussolini says “tending
to the ‘right’” and even puts the word “right” in parenthesis. That Mussolini’s fascism “tends” to the right likely
means it is more explicitly authoritarian than the implicitly (but still actually)
authoritarian and totalitarian Soviet Union.
Moreover, Mussolini certainly doesn’t say “far right,” and elsewhere
rejects the whole left-right system, noting that fascism “could also have sat
on the mountain of the center.” He adds that
“these words in any case do not have a fixed and unchanged meaning,” and concludes,
“We don’t give a damn about these empty terminologies.”
As many readers know, the
left-right ideological terminology arose from the seating arrangement in
France’s National Assembly at the time of the revolution (1789). Traditional monarchists sat on the right while
more liberal and radical members sat to the left. Using this same schema to describe modern
political systems would presumably put fascism to the “right” of traditional monarchists—an
absurdity.
George Orwell in 1944
correctly observed that the word “fascism” had become almost “entirely meaningless,” a term for
which “almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym.” Later he declared that fascism had “no meaning
except in so far as it signifies something not desirable.” As evidence of the accuracy of Orwell’s
statement one can note that the term has been applied to Communist regimes
themselves. Red China claimed the Soviet
Union was “fascist” and the Soviet Union returned the linguistic favor by using
the slur to insult the Chinese. Not
surprisingly, Stalin labeled Trotsky a “fascist” before having
him murdered. And in 1946 even the
always fashionably “left” New York Times pondered the
applicability of the term “fascist” to Stalin’s Russia, thereby linking the Soviet regime to Hitler’s Germany.
Anyone who wants to know
what “fascism” is, at least in Mussolini’s mind, can read Il Duce’s own
description noted above, though a philosophical background is helpful, especially
to understand his use of the term “State” (capitalized!). Though Mussolini never explicitly mentions
Hegel in his essay, his theory of the State is largely borrowed from the
philosopher, with a passionate Italian twist. Mussolini firmly rejects Marx’s materialistic,
class-based reinterpretation of Hegel’s philosophy, arguing that an organically
vital and united nation is impossible in a government arising from competing
class interests or from the individualistic principles embraced in democratic
societies. Only persons whose lives are
viewed in terms of their relationship and contribution to the state are truly
free or fully human. Put succinctly, “The
Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or
spiritual values can exist, much less have value.” And as Rousseau asserted in 1762, those who don’t accept what is good for society as a whole will
be “forced to be free.”
Just as fascism doesn’t fit
neatly on a “left-right” scale and has become little more than a political
pejorative, so also the whole “left-right” schema for categorizing political
systems has become little more than a way of denigrating so-called “right-wing”
groups. Indeed, this stigmatizing of
“conservative” or “populist” movements is, I believe, the primary reason
fascism was placed on the “far right” by historians largely sympathetic to
“leftist” socialist regimes. That
placement was an easy way to obliterate the obvious similarities between two
“totalitarian” political ideologies, fascism and communism, as well as the
socialist or state-directed economic systems each employs. The “far-right” fascist absurdity also had
the value of distancing communists and socialists from the horrors of the
Holocaust as well as the pact Hitler and Stalin made in 1939 that allowed them to pillage and divide Poland between
themselves.
In sum, the “left-right”
paradigm is itself an ideologically-biased construct that obscures, more than
illuminates, political realities. Putting Stalin and Castro on the extreme
“left” simply because their ideology touts a non-existent egalitarianism while
ignoring the dictatorial, totalitarian traits those regimes share with
Mussolini on the “far right” is absurd.
One must also close one’s eyes to the state –centered elements of
Mussolini’s regime that were so attractive to FDR and his advisors. Quoting Rexford Tugwell, a leading
Roosevelt advisor, “It’s the cleanest . . . most efficiently operating piece of
social machinery I’ve ever seen. It
makes me envious.”
It is this fatally flawed
schema that’s employed to provide intellectual cover for socialist and Democrat
propagandists to throw absurd “fascist” or “Hitlerite” insults at Trump as well as previous GOP POTUS candidates going back as far as Barry Goldwater--even including,
less vociferously, Mitt Romney! I doubt
the left-right paradigm will be discarded any time soon, but we’ll all be more
enlightened when that aforementioned dissertation is written and becomes a
transformational best seller.
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California
whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to
Say?" is also available on Kindle
