Italy, you actually had, partly because the socialist party radicalized much more under the inspiration and influence of the Russian revolution, you had much more widespread challenges.
A lot of land takeovers in the Northern part of Italy and with a lot of labor unrest in the industrialized Northern part of Italy, factory occupations, all these kinds of things. And so that allowed for these fascist movements to come up bottom-up financed by landowners, financed by businesses.
Kind of a bottom-up movement where people in society took things into their own hand to combat the left. Kind of like what you had in Columbia. You have these paramilitaries forming little self-help groupings that crack down on the radical left.
And so, that led to fascism. That is the origin of fascism. So, in some sense, the comparatively widespread left-wing challenge provoked a comparatively wide spread bottom-up rightwing challenge. And that led to a much more totalitarian movement and much more mobilization and a much more bottom-up movement led by, of course, a personalistic charismatic leader.
At the time of the inter-war period, you have Gramsci writing his famous essay about the Southern problem, how to be able to get the South on board with far left ideas, because really the communists really only had support up in the North in Italy, at least widespread support.
Did fascism arise in the North or did it have widespread support throughout the entire country? In the North. And you see this. You know, here the left tries to pull things off with these land seizures, these factory occupations, and then the right emerges and cracks down. And fascism emerges and is most powerful only in kind of countries of middling level of modernization. Their democracy was developed enough.
Civil society was advanced enough, developed enough. The party system was consolidated enough that when they had right-wing movements like in France and Belgium, they never really got a ton of support that could kind of contain them and limit them. So, in the developed countries, democracy survived. In the really backwards regions, Eastern, Southern Europe, and Balkans their society was so backward, left-wingers never got strong enough.
That established kind of elite and the state and the military took care of the problem. And so, fascism emerged kind of in between, Germany and Italy, in countries that were more modernized than the East and where you had left-wing challenges.
But where that modernization was, one reason that fascism emerged because you had a society that was mobilized. You had people who had been, freed from kind of elite control, from clientelism who were in cities, mobilized by these fascist paramilitary groupings, fascist parties that could form a mass movement that then would take power. And so, you see, of course, the interesting thing is fascism only came to power in the democracies, because it was a mass movement that then used democratic mechanisms to turn that mass movement into, especially in the German case, increasing electoral support and in the Italian case, at least get a foothold in the party system and then rise.
Where authoritarian regimes that close the electoral arena and that was strong enough to crack down, not only the left-wingers, but also on the right-wingers, the fascists never came to power. And so you see fascism, the only two countries where fascism came to power, Germany, and Italy, are sort of in the middle of Europe, in that constellation, not modernized enough to maintain democracy, not backward enough for the established elite to keep turmoil under control.
Instead, it took a massive totalitarian movement to bring it down and replace it with a brutal dictatorship. You just introduced it. I find it fascinating the way that you describe it like that. Nazism rose up in the Weimar Republic.
Not because Weimar was too weak, but because it was just strong enough to require a totalitarian movement to overcome it. And it was just not viable. Germany is too modernized. There are too many leftwingers, right-wingers. The Nazi movement was already strong enough. And so essentially the relative modernization of German society precluded the imposition of an authoritarian regime. And which of course means that then Hitler pushed away the conservatives as well.
Now you described Nazism as a very extreme form of fascism. So, Mussolini, it took some time. And in order to do so, Mussolini, for example, had to make an agreement with the church, some agreement with business.
Mussolini always was under a King. Hitler comes to power, within weeks and months, he turns Germany into a totalitarian dictatorship. He comes to power and he cracks down right away on the left. He rounds up the communists, puts them in prison. After the Reichstagsbrand, they have the new election, they clean up, and they resolutely, brutally take power.
So much more dramatic, much more determined, Macht Ergreifen, grab power, you know? Yes, he was handed it in the beginning, but then he really took power. And after, President Hindenburg died, there was nobody else. It was Hitler who ran the place and then in addition to the atrocities of the Holocaust, which of course are the clearest indication of the enormous brutality and very distinctive nature of German Nazism. You know, that very idea of essentially unleashing a race war against Poland and the Soviet union, where the idea was to wipe out millions of Slavs and then turn the other remaining ones into slaves and somehow recreate some kind of German warrior peasant farmer state in the vast expanses of that territory.
I mean, totally different from the Italian case, you know, Mussolini had colonial adventures in Ethiopia, but it was kind of, sort of belated brutal European style colonialism. The Hitler project, for example, under external expansion was a different order of magnitude, of a different order of kind of qualitative transformation. I mean, something that was unheard of. I mean, he definitely cracked down on the opposition and put them into prison.
The Holocaust is just unimaginable and for good reason. But is the type of racial ideology, the very racist policies that went out to create genocide, is that a natural consequence of taking fascism to the next level? I do not think that the racial angle as such, is a necessary part of that radicalization of fascism that is seen in Germany. It could have gone in other directions, other goals. So I think that was more kind of the more peculiar feature of German fascism, but in order for it to really mobilize society to the extent that a totalitarian regime does, you need in some sense an enemy.
Now you have fascist movements across Europe. And conservative authoritarian coups, their attempts to be able to consolidate power are oftentimes using these fascist movements in the short-term to install their authoritarian rule. Can you describe how that happened? The interaction between conservative authoritarian elites and regimes and fascists, I think I distinguish two paths or two ways in which this happened. There are cases like Brazil, Portugal, and Spain where conservative authoritarians maneuver and use fascists to essentially establish their own predominance.
Put themselves into the top positions of power. And then when they are on the top, of positions of power, they discard their erstwhile allies and impose their authoritarian control over those guys, and they dupe them sometimes. And they even make a little rebellion and he cracks down. So, you have that. Literally duped and used and you see that relationship between conservative authoritarians and fascism is very calculated, even both sides want to use the other side for their own purposes and the conservative authoritarians win and they impose their demobilizational authoritarianism on those former fascist auxiliaries.
You have a different pattern in countries like Austria, Romania, Estonia where you have fascist movements emerging, and you have leaders of conservative parties that arose in democratic ways and that come from democratic parties and making itself close down democracy, establishing an authoritarian regime in order to keep the fascists out of power and partly under the pretext of keeping the fascists out of power.
But, you know, like in Austria, Dollfuss, was a christian social kind of a conservative authoritarian, but a conservative. Initially, he rose through democratic ways, but he saw in especially German and Austrian Nazism as a huge, huge threat. And so, he closed down democracy.
He established himself as a dictator to keep that threat out of power. And so, you see the transformation of conservative, initially democratic leaders, into authoritarians in a preemptive way of blocking the ascent of fascism, because they are worried that the fascists would win the next election. These are oftentimes, democratic countries that are collapsing. And you make a critical insight there that in the East, many of these conservative authoritarians are doing these autogolpes, these self-coups in order to prevent the fascists from taking power.
Now fascism is an ideology of the right, just like how their conservativism is an ideology of the right. Why are the conservatives afraid of fascists?
Because the conservatives, they want to establish their control. They want to cement hierarchy. They want to exclude the population and the fascists. The fascists were in some sense anti-conservative. They wanted to push them out of the way. They wanted to establish the preeminence of their personalistic leader, their equivalent to Hitler and Mussolini.
And so, there was a significant conflict and the fascists had a much more dynamic transformational project. They had a much more of kind of bottom-up support, whereas the conservative authoritarians were kind of top-down and hierarchical.
There was also a social difference because many of the fascist leaders and the fascist movements essentially came from lower, lower middleclass groupings and different from the elitist authoritarians. And there were a number of disagreements.
And of course, what you see is the conservative authoritarians were scared by the precedent of Hitler. Hitler had established brutal predominance and he had pushed aside the conservatives as well. I mean, when you think of it what was a special shock is when in that infamous night of the long knives when Hitler cracked down on the SA, he also killed some of the former conservatives, he killed general Schleicher who had been a long-standing leader of the German military, had been the chancellor before him.
So, there was a significant fear, significant concern among conservative authoritarians, you know. You say, yes, they were both ideologically on the right, in their shared anti-leftism, their shared anti-liberalism, their shared anti-communism, their shared nationalism, all these kinds of things. And so, conservative authoritarians in cases like Brazil and Spain and Portugal use the fascists, but they always like trying to make sure we want to be on top.
This is not going to be an independent movement that then gets powerful enough and pushes me aside. Populism shares a lot of similarities with fascism.
We see charismatic leaders in both. We see people being mobilized within both. Is populism just a less radical form of fascism or is it truly something distinct? He admired Mussolini. The U. They downgraded liberalism, they cracked down on the opposition, they screwed the playing field, they became over time authoritarian, but they always maintained elections.
They never had mass terror. Very different from German Nazism and Italian fascism. But I do think as Finkelstein used to emphasize in this academic work that this is a qualitatively different phenomenon. That populist leaders get their way in their eternal hunger for power and their effort to establish their own hegemony. I think the worst that can happen under populism is what Levitsky and Way call competitive authoritarianism.
So, you have an authoritarian leader who still uses elections and parties and there are opposition parties allowed and all these kinds of things. And that is totally different from fascism where there was no opposition party and there were no elections. And there was mass violence and a profoundly transformational impulse and they were much more ideological. So, I think the big difference that I see between populism and fascism is that they both mobilize the population, but populists try to mobilize them within a political system whereas fascism literally ignores the concept of law and glorifies a sense of violence, almost vigilantism.
Now, recently, on January 6th, we had the storming of the capital. This is not on the level of a fascist state right now. Not fascist yet. Do you see a possibility that some of the populist movements could evolve into fascism over a period of time?
This was a, you know, a clear paramilitary grouping of an organized party that upon the orders of the leader made their moves. This Washington DC event, there was no real coordination.
They have a variety of groupings they all do their own different thing. I mean, to me, what was one of the most striking things about the storming of the capital. I mean, this is a totally different phenomenon. I understand that clearly in the German case, anything sounding like just having the slightest trace of their terrible past causes concern, but the AFD, for example, is a heterogeneous disparate hodgepodge of different factions and groups. And you can always spin out dystopian scenarios.
In many countries, you have a radical fringe, but this is very different from like the black shirts in Italy or the Nazis that have a constant kind of deliberate provocation of mass violence. And I think, I indicated in the beginning, when you think that during the interwar years there was so much enormous trouble and strain on society, it had undergone a ton of challenges and transformations, and that gave rise to fascism.
I mean, it takes something very unusual for so many people to, for example, resort to mass violence. And so, in the interwar years under these tremendously, unusual coincidence of massive problems you had that. But nowadays, I mean, you know, in our societies and in societies that are so pluralistic, so heterogeneous, so differentiated, everybody does their own thing. You know, people talk, but like sort of acting in terms of mass violent movement. I think it is very rare.
You want to watch it. You want to contain it. You want to do whatever you can. But the main victim was political liberty.
Oh, I think much less fragile for two main reasons. I mean, in retrospect the interwar years were unusual, not only in the accumulation of bombs and crises, but also in the enormous ideological extremism and polarization. I mean, people thought you could just should imitate something like a Russian Revolution.
And on the other hand, you had fascists. And so, I mean, in some sense the challenges that liberal democracy faces are much, much, much more limited. The trouble and turmoil and disorder and accumulation of bombs and crises that, for example, Ian Kershaw again reminded us in his book, but then second also kind of the ideological alternatives and challenges.
There were extremes and there were very, very radical groupings. While liberal democracy can get exhausted and tired and apathetic, I think there also is and continues to be a significant learning effect. You know, like I mentioned in the book, the Baltic States, they have essentially assembly democracies without any real, strong executive power. In the German case, you had that strange construct of having tremendous decree powers of the president, you know, and you had just being able to block chancellor prime minister by a vote of no confidence.
So, Germany learned. And now they have to construct a vote of no confidence and have different type of presidential powers. And so, I think there has been a lot of learning and consolidation of democracy. And that we have some amount of say and some amount of voice. So, if democracy was seriously threatened, I think you would see what in many ways, in my analysis of populism emphasized in the U. Totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and fascism are all forms of government—and defining different forms of government isn't as easy as it might seem.
All nations have an official type of government as designated in the U. The USSR is more correctly classified as a socialist republic. In addition, the boundaries between various forms of government can be fluid or poorly-defined, often with overlapping characteristics.
Such is the case with totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and fascism. This control extends to all political and financial matters as well as the attitudes, morals, and beliefs of the people. The concept of totalitarianism was developed in the s by Italian fascists.
Still, most Western civilizations and governments quickly rejected the concept of totalitarianism and continue to do so today. One distinctive feature of totalitarian governments is the existence of an explicit or implied national ideology—a set of beliefs intended to give meaning and direction to the entire society. Examples of characteristics that might be present in a totalitarian state include:. Typically, the characteristics of a totalitarian state tend to cause people to fear their government.
An authoritarian state is characterized by a strong central government that allows people a limited degree of political freedom. However, the political process, as well as all individual freedom, is controlled by the government without any constitutional accountability. The government controls nearly all aspects of the economy, politics, culture, and society. Education, religion, the arts and sciences, and even morality and reproductive rights are controlled by totalitarian governments.
While all power in an authoritarian government is held by a single dictator or group, the people are allowed a limited degree of political freedom. Rarely employed since the end of World War II in , fascism is a form of government combining the most extreme aspects of both totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Even when compared to extreme nationalistic ideologies like Marxism and anarchism , fascism is typically considered to be at the far-right end of the political spectrum.
Fascism is characterized by the imposition of dictatorial power, government control of industry and commerce, and the forcible suppression of opposition, often at the hands of the military or a secret police force. To this end, fascists encourage the growth of cults of national unity and racial purity.
Historically, the primary function of fascist regimes has been to maintain the nation in a constant state of readiness for war. Fascists observed how rapid, mass military mobilizations during World War I blurred the lines between the roles of civilians and combatants.
In addition, fascists view democracy and the electoral process as an obsolete and unnecessary obstacle to maintaining constant military readiness. They also consider a totalitarian, one-party state as the key to preparing the nation for war and its resulting economic and social hardships. Today, few governments publicly describe themselves as fascist.
Instead, the label is more often used pejoratively by those critical of particular governments or leaders. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products.
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