Fascism

Fascism commonly refers to a deeply illiberal political ideology, movement, or form of government that glorifies national strength and hence strictly subordinates the rights of the individual to the needs of the party, state, or people. The term acquires more precise connotations, however, when it is applied only to a revolutionary form of nationalism that in all its many different permutations seeks to combat the forces of decadence that it sees as causing the current degeneration and breakdown of society. Its ultimate goal as a movement and regime is thus to induce the rebirth of the nation's entire political culture, a project that includes regenerating not just its power as a state and military force, but its social, moral, and artistic achievements as well as other signs of society's cohesion and vitality. When generic fascism is approached in this way, the aspiration to create a healthy community thus becomes a defining feature of its utopia, its central goal being the transformation of the nation into an organic entity to which each individual is bound through the supra-personal ties of ancestry, culture, and “blood.”

Unlike ultra-conservatives, fascists do not want to restore a lost age, but to create a new type of community fully adapted to the modern age, yet firmly rooted spiritually in the past and steeped in the allegedly healthy values of the nation or people that prevailed before its decline. It was this vision that the Italian Fascisti attempted to realize, largely unsuccessfully, from the 1920s until their defeat in World War II, through a variety of policies designed to create the new “Fascist Man.” The same thinking placed the creation of the morally and genetically healthy Volksgemeinschaft (“racial-national community”) at the center of Nazi domestic policies. Both regimes, though for different historical reasons, identified the parliamentary system and the liberal society it purported to serve with everything that fascism abhorred: egotistic individualism, soulless materialism, life-sapping rationalism, identity-eroding cosmopolitanism, class division and factionalism, loss of national solidarity and purpose, and a marginalized role within the arena of international politics. In the Third Reich, the anti-Semitism so central to Nazism's diagnosis of the crisis of Germany generated a pervasive conspiracy theory according to which the nation's very being was threatened by (Jewish) finance capitalism and (Jewish) Bolshevism operating both internationally and from within.

The solution to the national community's weakness in both Italy and Germany was to establish a single-party state ruled by a leader whose charismatic authority was underpinned by an elaborate program of social engineering designed to mobilize popular enthusiasm for the new order at all levels of society (another point of contrast with conservatism, which is content to appeal mainly to the middle and upper strata who would benefit from the defense of the existing system against radical change through the suppression of alleged “radicals” bent on subverting it). This process of total national regeneration involved not just totalitarianism in the negative sense [Page 491](propaganda, censorship, coercion, and, in the case of the Third Reich, an extensive apparatus of state terror), but also in the positive sense. In Italy, the educational system was restructured and the economy reorganized on corporatist principles; in Germany, the culture (though not the economy) was reorganized on similar principles. In both countries the state sought to harness work, youth, and leisure to the cause of the nation through the creation of mass organizations, and social and demographic measures were introduced for increasing the population and raising its level of physical and moral fitness.

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