Fascism and the Left-Right Political Absurdity

November 29, 2024 by Richard Kirk

Trump is a “fascist”! That’s what Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and a chorus of Democrats told us ad nauseam. When that moniker insufficiently expressed their hatred and fear of losing, the absurd “Hitler” insult was spewed forth.

Most Americans likely can’t spell “fascism,” much less define it. They can be excused for the latter deficit since historians have been all over the political map trying to provide a definition of the doctrine. What these mostly “left-of-center” professionals conveniently agree on, however, is that fascism is a product of the political “right.” Never mind that Mussolini arrived at fascism after spending his earlier years as a committed socialist (editor-in-chief of Avanti!) and that his “totalitarian” (Il Duce’s word) program naturally incorporated many of the policies embedded in that ideology.

Add to those facts that Mussolini was greeted more than sympathetically by Progressive “leftists” of the time, including FDR, with whom, prior to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, there existed a relationship of mutual admiration, if not a full-fledged bromance. The pre-TDS Jonah Goldberg cites in his book Liberal Fascism a letter from FDR that refers to “that admirable Italian gentleman” who was praising New Deal initiatives. FDR, in turn, writes that he is also “much interested and deeply impressed” by Mussolini’s accomplishments. More to the point of this essay, Goldberg notes that as an FDR ally, Father Coughlin moved farther to the radical “left” and began criticizing Roosevelt, whereupon liberals started calling him a “right-winger.” In other words, “[i]n the 1930s, what defined a ‘right-winger’ was almost exclusively opposition to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.”

Here is a dissertation topic for an open-minded graduate student: the utility (or lack thereof) of the left-right political distinction.

A couple of decades ago, when I asked Goldberg himself about historians who began linking fascism to the political “right,” he provided no answer. One likely reason for that linkage, I suspect, comes from the following quote in Mussolini’s essay “The Doctrine of Fascism“ (1932): “We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the ‘right,’ a Fascist century.” Note, however, that Mussolini says “tending to the ‘right’” and even puts the word “right” in quotation marks. That Mussolini’s fascism “tends” to the right likely means that it is more explicitly authoritarian than the implicitly (but still actually) authoritarian and totalitarian Soviet Union. Moreover, Mussolini certainly doesn’t say “far right,” and elsewhere, he rejects the whole left-right system, noting that fascism “could also have sat on the mountain of the center.” He adds that “these words in any case do not have a fixed and unchanged meaning” and concludes, “We don’t give a damn about these empty terminologies.”

As many readers know, the left-right ideological terminology arose from the seating arrangement in France’s National Assembly at the time of the revolution (1789). Traditional monarchists sat on the right, whereas more liberal and radical members sat to the left. Using this same schema to describe modern political systems would presumably put fascism to the “right” of traditional monarchists — an absurdity.

George Orwell in 1944 correctly observed that the word “fascism” had become almost “entirely meaningless,” a term for which “almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym.” Later he declared that fascism had “no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable.” As evidence of the accuracy of Orwell’s statement, one can note that the term has been applied to communist regimes. Red China claimed that the Soviet Union was “fascist,” and the Soviet Union returned the favor. Not surprisingly, Stalin labeled Trotsky a “fascist” before having him murdered. And in 1946, even the always fashionably “left” New York Times pondered the applicability of the term “fascist” to Stalin’s Russia, thereby linking the Soviet regime to Hitler’s Germany.

Anyone who wants to know what “fascism” is, at least in Mussolini’s mind, can read Il Duce’s own description noted above, though a philosophical background is helpful, especially to understand his use of the term “State” (capitalized!). Though Mussolini never explicitly mentions Hegel in his essay, his theory of the State is largely borrowed from the philosopher, with a passionate Italian twist. Mussolini firmly rejects Marx’s materialistic, class-based reinterpretation of Hegel’s philosophy, arguing that an organically vital and united nation is impossible in a government arising from competing class interests or from the individualistic principles embraced in democratic societies. Only persons whose lives are viewed in terms of their relationship and contribution to the state are truly free or fully human. Put succinctly, “the Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.” And as Rousseau asserted in 1762, those who don’t accept what is good for society as a whole will be “forced to be free.”

Just as fascism doesn’t fit neatly on a “left-right” scale and has become little more than a political pejorative, so also the whole “left-right” schema for categorizing political systems has become little more than a way of denigrating so-called “right-wing” groups. Indeed, this stigmatizing of “conservative” or “populist” movements is, I believe, the primary reason fascism was placed on the “far right” by historians largely sympathetic to “leftist” socialist regimes. That placement was an easy way to obliterate the obvious similarities between two “totalitarian” political ideologies, fascism and communism, as well as the socialist or state-directed economic systems each employs. The “far right” fascist absurdity also had the value of distancing communists and socialists from the horrors of the Holocaust as well as the pact Hitler and Stalin made in 1939that allowed them to pillage and divide Poland between themselves.

In sum, the “left-right” paradigm is itself an ideologically biased construct that obscures, more than illuminates, political realities. Putting Stalin and Castro on the extreme “left” simply because their ideology touts a nonexistent egalitarianism while ignoring the dictatorial, totalitarian traits those regimes share with Mussolini on the “far right” is absurd. One must also close one’s eyes to the state-entered elements of Mussolini’s regime that were so attractive to FDR and his advisers. Quoting Rexford Tugwell, a leading Roosevelt adviser, “It’s the cleanest ... most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious.”

It is this fatally flawed schema that’s employed to provide intellectual cover for socialist and Democrat propagandists to throw absurd “fascist” or “Hitlerite” insults at Trump as well as previous GOP POTUS candidates going back as far as Barry Goldwater — even including, less vociferously, Mitt Romney! I doubt the left-right paradigm will be discarded any time soon, but we’ll all be more enlightened when that aforementioned dissertation is written and becomes a transformational bestseller.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: “Who’s to Say?” is also available on Kindle.