First of all, I would like to present the argument that fascism is a movement generally of the right.
I am not sure, however, that all of these people here would necessarily belong to the right.
Certainly Peron would not, given the fact that he stripped the middle class of their means
and engaged in all sorts of wild and predatory and ultimately destructive social experiments.
movements, Mussolini perhaps would come a little closer to what I understand is the
right. Hitler definitely would not. Franco is part of the right, but I'm not quite sure
that he would fit the fascist model. He's somebody who is forced to take over some of
the trappings of fascism because he becomes willy-nilly the leader of the phalange, which
with the Spanish Fascists, and then he does all he can to throw philanderists in jail.
But I am willing to make the argument that fascism, particularly in its paradigmatic
Italian form, is a movement of the right.
That is to say, it is one that is organized to deal with the problems of a very violent
left, although not necessarily in a way that solves economic problems effectively.
I would agree with Professor Higgs that the kind of corporatist model that is thrown together,
that is improvised as a way of dealing with economic problems has been a kind of millstone
around our necks ever since.
But nonetheless, I would say in terms of the initial impulse of the fascist movement, the
reason that it is able to attract followers, it has this momentum because it is seen as
as an anti-leftist movement.
I think that despite all the political correctness that prevails in our universities and the
anti-fascist insanity that seems to have gripped Europe, which has nothing to do with fascism,
but rather with an attempt to suppress politically incorrect opinion, there has been a lot of
scholarship done on fascism in the last 40 years in an attempt to sort of make sense
or provide a kind of taxonomy for this phenomenon.
And there are different kinds of fascisms or things that are called fascists that arise
in the interwar period, going, I suppose, from something like clerical fascism in Austria,
in Spain, in Portugal, to the Spanish phalangist, Hungarian arrow cross, which is an extremely
Vicious form of fascism closely allied to the German phenomenon.
The connections among these variations of fascism is something that has been discussed.
Also the question of whether they do form, in fact, some kind of hole, common hole, whether
they partake of the same sufficiently large number of characteristics to be seen as part
of the same general movement.
One of the ways by which, I suppose, one can deal with this problem is by looking at the
original fascism, the primordial fascism, which is Italian, and then seeing how many
of these characteristics get passed on to other forms of fascism that develop later.
There also is an attempt, and I think this is an entirely justified attempt, to which
which Ralph Reiko suggested between the Italian model and the very radicalized form of fascism
that takes over in Germany.
I think the two probably have about as much in common as Swedish social democracy and
Soviet communism.
And the attempt to sort of throw them together is a problem which I think mars the work of
of a great historian of fascism, Ernst Nolte, whose work I generally agree with, but who
is entirely wrong in seeing German fascism, what he calls German fascism, as simply a
subgenus of European counter-revolutionary thinking which manifests itself in generally
similar ways in Italy, France and in Germany.
I think the German form is different, it is much more virulent, it is much more radical,
and in a sense it is less right-wing, because it absorbs so much Stalinism.
It not only claims, as Nolta, I think, argues with varying degrees of cogency, it not only
is a reaction against Stalinism, it absorbs a lot of Stalinism, the concentration camps,
the mass murder, the wild experiments, the hysterical expansionism and so forth, much
of which it takes from the communist model.
Now there is of course in Germany a form of something like Italian fascism, the black
front, the national Bolschwicks, the movement around Kurt Schleicher to create a kind of
and something which may in fact influence Mussolini's decision to throw in his lot with Hitler with the events in Austria in the mid-30s where the clerical fascists under Engelbert Dolfus are going to be undermined by the Germans.
The Germans actually are going to kill off Dolfus and then in 1938 they occupy the country and send all these people to concentration camps.
The clerical fascists were a kind of Catholic authoritarian regime that depended upon Italian fascist support and they were very decidedly against the German Nazis.
But that model of fascism obviously is not going to work.
It was sort of corporatist, clericalist, authoritarian, anti-socialist and enjoyed at least some sort of tacit approval from apparently from Ludwig von Mises.
This model is going to be replaced by the far more virulent German model after 1938 and this is very important because wherever that German model travels and wherever the Third Reich will establish its power, you'll have Jews dragged off the concentration camp, virulent anti-Semitism, all of the other features of Hitlerian fascism or Nazism, which
not only creates a kind of alternate model to an earlier, much more bland form of fascism,
but will also take over these other forms of fascism and radicalize them.
So I think there is an argument to be made that the German situation, the German case,
which becomes the dominant form of fascism because of the economic and military power of the Third Reich,
will corrupt all the other forms of fascism, and in many cases impose their own forms of alternate fascism,
where there are other authoritarian rightist movements that had existed.
Where, however, I would agree with Ernst Nolte, who was probably the major historian of fascism,
and one of the most controversial, by the way, is that fascism is a secondary phenomenon.
It is a reaction against the left. It might come up with goofy economics. It may put corrupt opportunistic people in power to replace other corrupt opportunistic people, in the case of Italy.
But it is a reaction against the left, given the balance of forces that exist within those particular societies.
I think it also is sort of an interesting game in counterfactual history to imagine what would the fascist, the Italian fascist, have been like if Hitler did not come along.
And I think we could imagine, and this is not unreasonable given the assumption, Italy had remained a fascist country and had passed on its model to its European neighbors.
Would anyone except for the descendants of Italian anti-fascist exiles, the Fuori Ushiti, care enough to call themselves anti-fascists?
Or would the neoconservative press today be conjuring up the bugaboo of Islamofascism?
And even in this counterfactual narrative, if we still had the misfortune of having to put up with the neoconservative press, would it be calling its right-wing enemies fascists?
More likely we would learn of how the Italian Duce helped to launch the Israeli nationalist right, also known as the bearers of global democracy, on their later rise to political importance in the Middle East.
After all, as the leading historian of Italian fascism, Renzo de Felice, has shown in Michael O'Deen, the neoconservative in his dissertation, many of the right-wing Zionists, Zeb Jabotinsky, the revisionist Zionists, were usually attracted to Mussolini.
Mussolini.
Indeed, before the Duce threw in his lot with Hitler in 1936, he had gone out of his way
to cultivate Zionist admirers and to deplore Hitler's anti-Semitism.
His fascist party structure was full of Jews, as Ralph pointed out, and as Felice reminds
us by the mid-20s, over one-tenth of Italian jury had taken the initiative to apply for
fascist membership.
At that time Mussolini was denouncing Bolsheviks and Freemasonry and barbaric Germans, but
had nothing to say against Jewish ministers like Luigi Lozati or fascist, what do you call
the fascista di adattamento, the opportunistic fascist, the one who joins, and the head of
the Italian industrialist confederation, Gino Olivetti, who was a Sephardic Jew and who
What I am suggesting is that it is altogether possible to imagine a benign, historically
insignificant fascism in a way that it is harder to do for communism, or dare I to say
for social democracy, or Wilsonianism.
That is because those who, like Benedetto Croce and Luigi Naudi, thought fascism was
One reason for this is that classical fascism generally prevailed in relatively weak countries,
places that enacted fascist or quasi-fascist experiments, usually involving the invocations
of corporate state economies, at least on paper, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, Austria,
were places that lacked the means to engage in cataclysmic military adventure.
In fact, most of them, unlike Mussolini, after his partnership with Nazi Germany, had no
interest in doing so.
By contrast, the advocates of global democracy, like the advocates of world communist revolution
and of Islamic revolution, have had larger armies and better weapons systems to work
with.
Surely no one in this room would be worried if the world's major advocate of a global
democratic revolution, advanced by force of arms, were the Prime Minister of Liechtenstein.
But a second reason is that classical fascism in practice, looking at the Italian case as
our illustration, did very little to change the socioeconomic structure of the country.
In this instance, one has to look beyond the American depictions of Italian fascism, which
which had more to do with taking positions in American politics than what was going on
in Italy.
As John Patrick Diggins documents in his book Mussolini's Italy, the View from America,
1922 to 1941, up until the turn toward Hitler, Mussolini enjoyed remarkably good press in
the Anglophone world.
The New Republic, not only Winston Churchill, but the New Republic saw Italy as a model
of Economic Reform, brought about through a strong centralized state, and while the New
Republic contributors did not give up on the usability of the Soviet experiment, they were
quite happy to celebrate the Italian National Revolution.
The Columbia University professor and disciple of John Dewey, Herbert Schneider, often referred
to the ideal of early America as Jefferson's fascism.
In any case, it was not Ezra Pound who thought up retrospectively, thought up this retrospectively
In a provocative study in German and found to Favon Schaff, fascism was, National Socialism was, New Deal, German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch has documented the extent to which FDR and his brain-trusters were enamored of the language and putative achievements of the Italian road to state planning.
While FDR always despised the Germans, which may have contributed to his immediate estates
for Hitler as an advertised German nationalist, he admired Italy's authoritarian government.
He adopted its military analogies for economic planning and for public works.
Defenders of the NRA, as Chauvin shows, did not shun the comparison then drawn between
American emergency measures and fascism, but they did point out that the U.S. can incorporate
It is important to clarify this leftist affinity from Mussolini, as Diggins does, with the
obvious intent of separating the American left from their documentable association with
Italian fascism, which I think he's actually embarrassed by this.
But it is true, as Diggins and Frederico Chabot, the Italian historian, explain, that Italian
fascism's typical routers in the United States and in England were the commercial and at
least part of the professional class who did admire Mussolini because the trains were running
on time, arrivando in orario, and because the horrible strikes which had torn Italy
apart after World War I had ended.
Italian Americans who had generally encountered social discrimination, especially at the hands
of their fellow Catholics, Irish Catholics, view the Italian National Revolution with
exuberant sympathy.
This remains so beyond the invasion of Ethiopia and despite the noisy presence of the exiles,
at least some of whom in Paris became the targets of Italian fascist assassins.
One might imagine that southern Italian peasants settled in American city had no way of relating
According to anti-fascist intellectuals, who had their own agendas, which were usually
Marxist and emphatically anti-Catholic.
Another group that generally favored the Italian regime were strong self-identified Catholics,
particularly after Mussolini made his peace with the Vatican in 1929, thereby ending disputes
going back to Italian unification.
In one of Clifford Odette's plays that I saw as a teenager, I recall a devoutly Catholic
But prominent socialist intellectuals, including George Bernard Shaw, John Dewey and FDR's advisors, found fascist Italy equally congenial for their own reasons.
This may explain why the anti-New Deal side in American politics, including Professor Higgs, has become so anti-fascist.
Almost all critics of FDR and his New Deal seized on comparisons between European fascism and an American centralized welfare state.
The anti-fascist line of criticism going from Garrett Garrett, John T. Flynn, Isabel Patterson, down to many seated in this room today has focused negatively on the connection, which I think in some cases are real, between FDR and Mussolini.
It is also a key topic of a meticulously researched thick study by libertarian historian Howard Dickman, Industrial Democracy in America.
of America.
Dickman explores the conceptual and policy overlaps between fascist documents, particularly
Mussolini's Carta del Avro, the workers' chart put together in 1927 by Alfredo Rocca, Italian
minister of justice, and the Wagner and Norris LaGuardia labor acts.
Dickman is correct to call attention to certain shared tendencies.
For example, the dogged attempt by Italy and the United States' Central States to determine
work relations, partly by taking or pretending to take the part of compulsory unions against
the captains of industry.
He is also right to suggest that the New Deal is a move toward incorporating the economy
into the state, in accordance with the fascist motto, tutto nello stato, niente fuori dello
stato, nulla controllo stato, everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing
against, nulla controllo stato, nothing against the state.
Still, it might be asked, which regime moved on the economic front toward state control
more decisively?
In my book, After Liberalism, there is an implied answer to this question that I was
too timid to state directly.
Let me amend that cowardly oversight.
The more ambitious move towards social democracy took place in the United States.
What happened in Italy, and in fact in most fascist countries, was by comparison small
beer.
Dickman notes that in both countries, as a result of centralized control of working and
and Bargaining Relations, compulsory unionization was enforced and the statutory agreements between
labor and industry encouraged while the state employed mass industry unions to maintain
economic peace by taking their side.
One critical difference between the two situations analyzed, however, warns some attention.
In Europe and quite conspicuously in Italy, fascist movements came to power as reactions
Against Violence Strikes that often paralyze the economy.
In this painfully modernizing economy, characterized by sharp social polarity, the fascists became
Volans, Nolans, willy-nilly a force of order.
While they claimed to be opposed to bourgeois decadence as well as Bolsheviks and anarchist
strikers, they typically enjoyed broad support from the commercial and professional strata.
The confederazione delle industriale italiane, the confindustria, as it's called, the confederation
of manufacturers led by Giovanni Olavetti, as shown in Franklin Adler's monograph on
confindustria during the fascist era, generally had very cordial relations with the ducce.
Large industries were not required under the Carta to organize themselves into syndicate,
and the unions under state control.
The owners of industry thereafter called the dottori del lavoro, the givers of work, at
all levels had vast leeway in the matter of the right to fire.
Mussolini hesitated to do more than send a letter of rebuke to Giovanni Agnelli, the
head of fiat, when he laid off large parts of his workforce in 1926.
for Conta Industria, as Felice indicates in his book Mussolini al Fascista, helped draft
the Carta, and those who, like Giovanni Bottai, Edmondo Rossoni, and other radical left-wing
fascists, pushed for economically radical forms of fascism, allied to the trade union
movement, were thoroughly defeated in the discussions.
Large industrials were left in charge of the national economy once they had made minimal
phrasiological concessions to the authors of the Carta. In the final draft produced
by Roca, the workgivers promised to consult national employment centers in the course
of hiring workers. There was one small line there, which is sort of very indicative of,
you know, at least the rhetorical direction in which the owners of industry were referred
or private enterprise, I'm sorry, was referred to as uno strumento più perfetto e più utile
delle interesse sociali. It is a more perfect and more useful instrument of the social interest
and it becomes instead of nel interesse della nazione, the interest of the entire nation.
The reason I mention this to you is that in the Sharon Statement drafted by Bill Buckley in 1961,
He defends private enterprise for exactly the same reason given in the Cate de Lavro, that it is in the interest of the nation to a private enterprise.
I don't know whether he went there and borrowed this, you know, from this document, but it is the same, it's exactly the same language.
And, you know, I looked at it, I think, about a month ago, and I was very struck by the fact that this was simply a translation from the Italian phrase.
There was in fact a project pushed by the more extreme fascists in Italy, the Arditi,
as they were called, for a carta syndicalista, for a unionization chart in which everybody,
including industrialists, would have to organize as a labor union, you know, under the fascist
state.
And this would have integrated the managers, the owners of industry into a corporate state
framework and would have placed state commissars of labor, the fiduciari, in charge of social
Social Relations within every factory in Italy. This went absolutely nowhere. Not only because
Mussolini spent his energy convincing Italian industrialists that property is a sacred right
under fascism. Now, I could not imagine, you know, even President George W. Bush saying
anything like that, you know, under our global democracy, whatever he calls the government
of the United States today, that private property is a sacred, I couldn't even imagine anyone
The media would beat up on him as a Nazi the next day, but Mussolini, in his letters, keeps saying that fascism considers private property a sacred right.
But also, finally, because Confindustria had the upper hand in Italian government's plan for industrial growth, there was nothing that went into that card that did not have to be signed off on by Olivetti and other leaders of the Italian Manufacturing Union.
Education.
They had to agree on all the wording and nothing could get by without them.
Now one reason for this, as Felice points out, is that fascism is made up of two groups
which one would think would not really get along, but they're forced into the movement
together.
And I think both Ralph and Bob mentioned these groups.
One is the middle class, the people who don't want socialist revolution.
And they are referred to unceremoniously in Italian as fianchegi attori, holders, hangers-on,
the hangers-on.
But they make up the vast membership of your party, they're paying the dues, everything
else, the hangers-on, the fianchegi attori.
And they do not want any movement towards socialism.
I mean, they're determined to sort of keep things as they are, sacredness of property,
the owners of the industry of right to hire, do anything they want.
Then you also have the non-unionized labor force.
The people who do not like this, the workers who do not want to be in the socialist, they
do not want to be part of the socialist movement, and the result of this is you have to find
some kind of economic arrangement in which these workers are shown that you made the
right choice, we're not going to really just deliver you to the wolves and so forth, but
and at the same time do nothing to make the industrialist, the industriale, feel uncomfortable
with the fascist government.
A detail that Dickman, by the way, in his book, does not really deal with is that what
frames the discussion about the Carta in Italy that he quotes are the economic policies leading
up to it.
In 1926, Mussolini and his economic minister embarked on wide-ranging deflationary measures intended to make the lira more competitive with the dollar and the pound sterling, and these measures, which have occasioned volumes of commentary, exacted enormous costs from the Italian working class.
The deflation contributed to high unemployment, at least in the short term, and had the overall effect of reducing wages, a process that took place with government prodding.
A purported value of this deflationary program was higher exports, but it took a while before even this benefit could be seen.
There was also a plan then brooded about to put Italy on the gold standard from which Mussolini and Volpi, his Minister of Finance, gradually retreated, but not before giving it considerable thought.
The Carta, which was also in the works, was viewed as a concession to the unions, the working class generally.
Those who had borne the burden of deflation were being rewarded, but as it turned out, mostly with high-flown rhetoric.
In the U.S., it was altogether different.
The United States, under Franklin Roosevelt, moved in the direction of a new social order being constructed by a democratic welfare state.
FDR's labor legislation did represent a decisive taking of sides for centralized administration and for mass labor unions
against what Arthur Schlesinger has dismissively called the old order.
As far as I know, the ones who drafted such laws did not quake in their boots,
as the Duce did, about offending the upholders of private property.
Nor do they worry about counter-revolutionary hangers-on,
who might come to see them as the mere fear-weather friends
who only pretended to care about private property.
The new dealers move with wind in their sails
toward creating a post-liberal, post-bourgeois regime that was suitable for a mass democracy
governed by a managerial state.
In comparison to this opera bouffe, Descartes de Lavereau, in a showcasing of the principles
of fascist doctrine, the New Deal was indeed history of the first order.