"We're all fascists now"

You've talked about Mussolini remaining on the left and remaining a socialist, and in your book you've got a lot of quotes from the 1920s about that, but I'm wondering -- how does that fit in with what he wrote and said later, especially "The Doctrine of Fascism" in 1932?

I'd need to know specifically what he wrote in "The Doctrine of Fascism." It's been about three years since I've read it.

He says, for example, "Granted that the 19th century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the 20th century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right ', a Fascist century."

Yeah, I'm perfectly willing to concede there's a lot of stuff Mussolini says, but you've got to remember, by '32, socialism is starting to essentially mean Bolshevism. And if you get too caught up in the labels, rather than the policies, you get yourself into something of a pickle. The right in Europe back then was authoritarian; the right was a kind of right-wing socialism ... What was dead, according to intellectuals across the ideological spectrum, was 19th century classical liberalism.

But in the book you say, "Mussolini remained a socialist until his last breath," and in 1932 he's writing, "When the war ended in 1919 Socialism, as a doctrine, was already dead; it continued to exist only as a grudge," and he also says, "Fascism [is] the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism."

Yeah, but that's the point. Scientific and Marxist socialism, and certainly the people who subscribed to that stuff, was international socialism. That's what made Mussolini a right-winger, because he was against international socialism and he was for national socialism.

But [Mussolini] never gave up on the program of socialism, he never gave up on this idea that the state was the ultimate arbiter and director of economic arrangements. He never gave up on the idea that the rich should be brought under the heel of the state. And there's this funny thing -- we still live with these categories where nationalism and socialism are supposed to be these opposite things. This is sort of a hangover from the days where socialism was defined as international socialism and nationalism was defined as national socialism. But at the end of the day, nationalism and socialism are essentially the same thing. When we nationalize an industry, we're socializing it. And when we say we want socialized medicine, we're saying we want nationalized medicine. We need to understand that that's the context Mussolini was coming from.

And he said a lot of stuff. He was sort of a buffoon in that sense; he was constantly changing his definitions of fascism and talking out of one side of the mouth, then out of the other side of his mouth, largely because of the sort of pragmatic idea he had about politics. But in terms of the policies he implemented and where he came to, once again, at the end of his life, he always clung to the policies that were associated with the left side of the political spectrum.

That brings up something else I wanted to ask you -- if I'm reading this right, one of the things you're saying about the student radicals in the 1960s is that they were essentially fascist even if they might have called themselves Marxist.

Yeah.

But isn't it easy to distinguish, since Mussolini repudiated the central doctrine of Marxism?

Well, I mean, I bet you if you gave me an hour I could find places where he once again says nice things about Marxism in 1933 or 1937.

But he repudiated historical materialism, dialectical materialism.

Yeah. But I think the problem is you get into one of these sort of overly doctrinal, "let's go to the text" approaches where words get confused for things. Stalin never repudiated Marxism, but in almost every way, the checklist for the anatomy of fascism applies to Stalinism ... Saying that you still believe in the dialectic and the cold impersonal forces of history found in "Das Kapital" or "The Communist Manifesto" isn't an abracadabra thing where all of a sudden that means Stalin was really a Marxist or wasn't a fascist in terms of how he actually operated.

And I think the same thing applies to the radicals in the 1960s; quoting the Port Huron Statement doesn't really change what the radicals did in the streets when they were actually fighting, when they were blowing things up, when they were supporting the Black Panthers, who wanted to assassinate police, when they were taking over universities. The fact that they said they were in favor of peace and Marxism is almost meaningless when compared to their actual actions, and their actions were fascistic.

What I thought was interesting about your definition of fascism was that nationalism seemed to be missing ... Stanley Payne, whom you quote and say is "considered by many to be the leading living scholar of fascism," in his definition of fascism, the first thing he says is that it's "a form of revolutionary ultra-nationalism." How does that fit with contemporary liberalism, which is often derided as being unpatriotic, anti-American?

That's a perfectly legitimate question. I think classical fascism, the fascism that we all think of when we hear the word "fascism" -- Italy, Germany and to a certain extent Spain, they were ultra-nationalistic, I don't dispute that, I think that is absolutely the case. I just would want to emphasize that that ultra-nationalism comes with an economic program of socialism. There's no such thing as a society undergoing a bout of ultra-nationalism that remains a liberal free-market economy. The two things go together.

I don't say that contemporary liberalism is the direct heir of Nazism or Italian fascism. I say it's informed by it. It's like its grandniece. It's related, they're in the same family, they share a lot of genetic traits, but they're not the same thing.

I think that you do have nationalism percolating up in the form of left-wing economic populism, the John Edwards branch of liberalism, which is for raising trade barriers. He says time and again, the first thought of every economic decision of a president should be what protects the American middle class, which -- according to some fairly doctrinaire understandings of fascism, it's an ideology of the middle class, nationalist economics and all that kind of stuff -- there's some meat there. So I do think you do see nationalism in that regard, in terms of economics.

Today's liberalism, there's a strong dose of cosmopolitanism to it, which is very much like the H.G. Wells "Liberal Fascism" I was talking about ... These trans-national elites, the Davos crowd who really want to get beyond issues of sovereignty so they can organize and guide the planet on issues like global warming, invest a lot more in the U.N. I think that is much more of the threat coming from establishment liberalism today, but I do think there is a lot of nationalism there too.

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