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

by Jonah Goldberg

  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 in an interview in 1932, "It is faith that moves mountains, not reason. Reason is a tool, but it can never be the motive force of the crowd." This kind of thinking has been commonplace on the left ever since. Think of Al Sharpton when allegedly confronted by the fact that the Tawana Brawley "assault" was a fake. "It don't matter," he's reported to have said. "We're building a movement."22

  Even more impressive was Sorel's application of the idea of myth to Marxism itself. Again, Sorel held that Marxist prophecy didn't need to be true. People just needed to think it was true. Even at the turn of the last century it was becoming obvious that Marxism as social science didn't make a whole lot of sense. Taken literally, Marx's Das Kapital, according to Sorel, had little merit. But, Sorel asked, what if Marx's nonsensicalness was actually intended? If you looked at "this apocalyptic text... as a product of the spirit, as an image created for the purpose of molding consciousness, it...is a good illustration of the principle on which Marx believed he should base the rules of the socialist action of the proletariat."23 In other words, Marx should be read as a prophet, not as a policy wonk. That way the masses would absorb Marxism unquestioningly as a religious dogma.

  Sorel was deeply influenced by the Pragmatism of William James, who pioneered the notion that all one needs is the "will to believe." It was James's benign hope to make room for religion in a burgeoning age of science, by arguing that any religion that worked for the believer was not merely valid but "true." Sorel was an irrationalist who took this sort of thinking to its logical conclusion: any idea that can be successfully imposed--with violence if necessary--becomes
true and good. By marrying James's will to believe with Nietzsche's will to power, Sorel redesigned left-wing revolutionary politics from scientific socialism to a revolutionary religious movement that believed in the utility of the myth of scientific socialism. Enlightened revolutionaries would act as if Marxism were gospel in order to bring the masses under their control for the greater good. Today we might call these aspects of this impulse "lying for justice."

  Of course, a lie could not become "true"--that is, successful--unless you had good liars. This is where another of Sorel's major contributions comes in: the need for a "revolutionary elite" to impose its will upon the masses. On this point, as many have observed, Mussolini and Lenin held almost identical views. Central to their common outlook was the Sorelian conviction that a small cadre of professional intellectual radicals--who were prepared to reject compromise, parliamentary politics, and anything else that smacked of incremental reform--were indispensable to any successful revolutionary struggle. This avant-garde would shape "revolutionary consciousness" by fomenting violence and undermining liberal institutions. "We must create a proletarian minority sufficiently numerous, sufficiently knowledgeable, sufficiently audacious to substitute itself, at the opportune moment, for the bourgeois minority," Mussolini channeled Lenin in pitch-perfect tones. "The mass will simply follow and submit."24

  JACOBIN FASCISM

  If Mussolini stood on Sorel's shoulders, then in an important respect Sorel stood on Rousseau's and Robespierre's. A brief review of the intellectual origins of fascist thought reveals its roots in the Romantic nationalism of the eighteenth century, and in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who properly deserves to be called the father of modern fascism.

  Historians have debated the meaning of the French Revolution for centuries. In many respects, their contending views of this event embody the fundamental difference between liberal and conservative (compare Wordsworth and Burke, for example). Even our modern distinction between "left" and "right" derives from the seating arrangements in the revolutionary assembly.

  Whatever else it may have been, however, one thing is clear: the French Revolution was the first totalitarian revolution, the mother of modern totalitarianism, and the spiritual model for the Italian Fascist, German Nazi, and Russian Communist revolutions. A nationalist-populist uprising, it was led and manipulated by an intellectual vanguard determined to replace Christianity with a political religion that glorified "the people," anointed the revolutionary vanguard as their priests, and abridged the rights of individuals. As Robespierre put it, "The people is always worth more than individuals...The people is sublime, but individuals are weak"--or, at any rate, expendable.25

  Robespierre's ideas were derived from his close study of Rousseau, whose theory of the general will formed the intellectual basis for all modern totalitarianisms. According to Rousseau, individuals who live in accordance with the general will are "free" and "virtuous" while those who defy it are criminals, fools, or heretics. These enemies of the common good must be forced to bend to the general will. He described this state-sanctioned coercion in Orwellian terms as the act of "forcing men to be free." It was Rousseau who originally sanctified the sovereign will of the masses while dismissing the mechanisms of democracy as corrupting and profane. Such mechanics--voting in elections, representative bodies, and so forth--are "hardly ever necessary where the government is well-intentioned," wrote Rousseau in a revealing turn of phrase. "For the rulers well know that the general will is always on the side which is most favorable to the public interest, that is to say, the most equitable; so that it is needful only to act justly to be certain of following the general will."26

  That fascism and communism promised to be more democratic than democracy itself was axiomatic for their twentieth-century proselytizers in Europe and America. "The movement" represented, variously, the Volk, the people, the authentic nation and its providential mission in history, while parliamentary democracy was corrupt, inauthentic, unnatural.27 But the salience of the general will is more profound than the mere rationalization of legitimacy through populist rhetoric. The idea of the general will created a true secular religion out of the mystic chords of nationalism, a religion in which "the people" in effect worshipped themselves.28 Just as individuals couldn't be "free" except as part of the group, their existence lacked meaning and purpose except in relation to the collective.

  It followed, moreover, that if the people were the new God, there was no room for God Himself. In The Social Contract, Rousseau tells us that because of Christianity's distinction between God and Caesar, "men have never known whether they ought to obey the civil ruler or the priest." What Rousseau proposed instead was a society in which religion and politics were perfectly combined. Loyalty to the state and loyalty to the divine must be seen as the same thing.

  The philosopher and theologian Johann Gottfried von Herder, credited somewhat unfairly with laying the intellectual foundation for Nazism, took Rousseau's political arguments and made them into cultural ones. The general will was unique in each nation, according to Herder, because of the historic and spiritual distinctiveness of a specific Volk. This Romantic emphasis led various intellectuals and artists to champion the distinctiveness or superiority of races, nations, and cultures. But it is Rousseau's divinization of the community under the direction of the most powerful state ever proposed in political philosophy to which the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century were most indebted. Rousseau's community is not defined by ethnicity or geography or custom. Rather, it is bound together by the general will as expressed in the dogmas of what he called a "civil religion" and enforced by the all-powerful God-state. Those who defy the collective spirit of the community live outside the state and have no claim on its protections. Indeed, not only is the state not required to defend antisocial individuals or subcommunities, it is compelled to do away with them.29

  The French revolutionaries put these precepts into effect. For example, Rousseau had suggested that Poland create nationalistic holidays and symbols to create a new secular faith. Therefore the Jacobins--who had nearly committed Rousseau to memory--immediately set about launching a grand new totalitarian religion. Robespierre argued that only a "religious instinct" could defend the revolution from the acid of skepticism. But the revolutionaries also knew that before such faith could be attached to the state, they had to exterminate every trace of "deceitful" Christianity. So they embarked on a sweeping campaign to dethrone Christianity. They replaced venerated holidays with pagan, nationalistic celebrations. The Cathedral of Notre Dame was renamed a "temple of reason." Hundreds of pagan-themed festivals were launched across the country celebrating such abstractions as Reason, Nation, and Brotherhood.

  Mussolini's Italy in turn aped this strategy. The Italian Fascists held pageants and performed elaborate pagan rites in order to convince the masses, and the world, that "Fascism is a religion" (as Mussolini often declared). "Two religions are today contending...for sway over the world--the black and the red," Mussolini would write in 1919. "We declare ourselves the heretics." In 1920 he explained, "We worked with alacrity, to...give Italians a 'religious concept of the nation'...to lay the foundations of Italian greatness. The religious notion of Italianism...should become the impulse and fundamental direction of our lives."30

  Of course, Italy faced a special challenge in that the nation's capital also contained the capital of the worldwide Catholic Church. As such, the battle between secular religion and traditional religion became muddied by 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.