Ideology

Fascism

Core Beliefs

Fascism is a radical authoritarian ultranationalist ideology that emerged in Europe in the early twentieth century, most fully realized in Benito Mussolini's Italy (1922–1943) and Adolf Hitler's Germany (1933–1945). The term derives from the Italian "fascio" (bundle or fasces — the ancient Roman symbol of strength through unity). Mussolini's Fascist movement gave the ideology its name and initial form; Nazism represents a particularly extreme variant combining fascist organizational and aesthetic principles with racial ideology and genocidal antisemitism.

Fascism's core commitments are: the absolute supremacy of the nation-state (or in Nazi Germany, the race) over individuals, classes, or universal moral principles; the necessity of a charismatic leader who embodies and expresses the national will (the Führerprinzip — leader principle); the glorification of struggle, violence, and war as purifying and regenerative forces; the rejection of liberal democracy as decadent, divisive, and incompatible with national strength; the suppression of political opposition, free press, and independent civil society; and a dynamic, revolutionary politics aimed at national rebirth rather than conservative preservation of tradition (which distinguishes fascism from traditional conservatism).

Unlike socialism, fascism does not call for the abolition of private property or the nationalization of industry — instead it maintains capitalism while subordinating it to state and national purposes, with the state directing the economy through corporatist structures in which business, labor, and government formally collaborate under state authority. This distinguishes it from both liberal capitalism (where markets operate independently) and socialism (where private ownership is eliminated). The syndicalist and socialist left of Italy and Germany were among fascism's primary targets, and fascist movements were frequently supported by business elites fearful of communist revolution — a relationship that shaped both their financing and their anti-left violence.

Policy Examples

Fascist governments in power produced distinctive policy patterns that combined totalitarian control of politics and culture with selective economic interventionism and systematic violence against designated enemies.

Political repression was the most immediate policy of fascist seizures of power. Mussolini's consolidation (1922–1928) eliminated opposition parties, suppressed independent trade unions, abolished free elections, imposed press censorship, and created the OVRA secret police. Hitler's consolidation (1933) was faster and more violent: the Reichstag Fire Decree (February 1933) suspended civil liberties, the Enabling Act (March 1933) gave Hitler dictatorial authority, and the Night of Long Knives (June 1934) demonstrated that the regime would murder rivals within its own movement. Both regimes built massive security apparatus structures (SS, Gestapo in Germany; MVSN, OVRA in Italy) to monitor, arrest, torture, and execute opponents.

Economic policy in fascist states was corporatist rather than socialist or liberal. In Italy, the corporatist system divided the economy into sectors with employer and worker organizations nominally negotiating under state supervision — in practice, state control with suppressed labor rights and no genuine worker power. In Germany, the Nazi economy combined state direction of rearmament, autarky (self-sufficiency) ambitions, and public works (the Autobahn) with retained private ownership subordinated to party and state priorities. Both economies performed relatively well by GDP metrics through the 1930s — which fascist propagandists cited as evidence of the system's superiority — though much of the growth was military-driven spending that would require either war or economic crisis to sustain.

The racial and ethnic persecution of the Nazi state — culminating in the Holocaust (the systematic murder of six million Jews and millions of others including Roma, disabled people, homosexuals, and political prisoners) — represents fascism's most extreme and historically unique policy, though Mussolini's Italy also implemented racial laws against Jews from 1938. Colonial violence (Italy's genocidal campaigns in Libya and Ethiopia) pre-dated and paralleled the racial persecution of European fascism, connecting fascist ideology to the longer history of European colonial brutality.

Notable Examples

Italian Fascism under Mussolini (1922–1943) was the original model. The March on Rome in October 1922 — when Mussolini's Blackshirt militia threatened to seize power and King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini as prime minister rather than risk civil war — established the political template of fascist seizure of power through threatened violence combined with elite accommodation rather than outright coup. Mussolini spent the following six years consolidating dictatorial control while maintaining a nominally legal framework, creating the Fascist state's institutions, building a cult of personality around his image as Il Duce (the Leader), and pursuing an aggressive foreign policy aimed at Mediterranean and African empire.

German National Socialism (Nazism) under Hitler (1933–1945) is the paradigmatic case of fully realized fascism — both its most extreme form and the one that ended in the most catastrophic defeat. The Holocaust was planned and executed by the Nazi state as a systematic industrial genocide, qualitatively different in intent and scale from other fascist violence. The Second World War, which Hitler's Germany initiated through the invasion of Poland (1939) and the subsequent conquest of most of continental Europe, ended in Germany's unconditional surrender, Allied occupation, and the Nuremberg trials — the first major international prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Post-war fascist movements and regimes took different forms in different contexts. Francisco Franco's Spain (1939–1975) was fascist in its origins (victorious in the Civil War with Nazi and Italian Fascist support) but evolved over decades into a more traditional right-wing authoritarian nationalism. Portugal's Estado Novo under Salazar (1933–1974) was a conservative Catholic authoritarianism with fascist elements. Argentina's Juan Perón incorporated fascist aesthetics and organizational forms into a hybrid left-nationalist populism. The Greek Junta (1967–1974) was military authoritarian rather than mass-movement fascist.

Contemporary application of the "fascism" label is contested. Scholars of fascism are divided on whether contemporary far-right parties — Marine Le Pen's National Rally, Georgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy, the Sweden Democrats, the Alternative for Germany — constitute "fascism" or a distinct "radical right" phenomenon that borrows aesthetic and organizational elements without the totalitarian, violence-glorifying, anti-parliamentary core. The distinction matters practically: parties that accept democratic competition and parliamentary legitimacy, even with reactionary positions on migration and multiculturalism, differ structurally from movements that seek to end competitive politics. The mainstream scholarly consensus treats most current European far-right parties as "radical right" rather than fascist, while acknowledging that the boundary is contested and that individual politicians within these movements sometimes express genuinely fascist positions.

The Sunday briefing, from North

Fascism

Fascism

Core Beliefs

Policy Examples

Notable Examples

Connections

Trust & Coverage