Fascism
The 20th century's deadliest political invention — and a label still worth applying precisely.
The short version
- Fascism emerged in Europe after World War I as a violent, nationalist response to liberal democracy and the perceived threat of communist revolution.
- Its core elements include a cult of the leader, the subordination of individual rights to the national collective, glorification of violence, and the destruction of independent political opposition.
- Mussolini's Italy (1922) and Hitler's Germany (1933) are the defining cases, but fascist movements emerged across Europe, Latin America, and Asia in the 1930s.
- Scholars debate how precisely to apply the term to contemporary movements, but most agree the word has analytical content — it is not simply an insult.
What it is
Fascism is a revolutionary authoritarian nationalist ideology that emerged in Europe in the aftermath of World War I. Its foundational insight — if it can be called that — was that the modern world could be remade through the unleashing of organized national will, expressed through a mass movement, disciplined by a charismatic leader, and willing to use violence as a political instrument. The Italian word 'fascio' means bundle or group — a reference to strength through unity — and Benito Mussolini's movement took the name when it seized power in Italy in 1922. The Nazi variant that took power in Germany in 1933 added race as the organizing principle of national identity, producing a system of racial hierarchy whose logical endpoint was genocide.
Historian Robert Paxton's definition remains among the most analytically rigorous: fascism is 'a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.' Each element is load-bearing. The victimhood narrative justifies the violence. The mass movement distinguishes it from ordinary dictatorship. The collaboration with traditional elites explains how it achieves power legally. The abandonment of ethical restraint explains the scale of the atrocities.
Fascism rejects both liberalism and Marxism, positioning itself as a third way. Where liberalism centers the individual and Marxism centers class, fascism centers the nation or race as the supreme collective entity to which individual claims must be subordinated. It does not seek to abolish capitalism as such — Mussolini and Hitler both made accommodations with industrialists and landowners — but it subordinates private economic activity to national or state purposes. Fascist economics are opportunistic: nationalization where useful, private ownership where useful, with the state setting direction. The unifying principle is not economic doctrine but national power.
The term is sometimes dismissed as too historically specific to apply beyond 1930s Europe, or as too casually weaponized in political rhetoric to retain analytical value. Both concerns are legitimate. But most serious scholars of fascism — Paxton, Umberto Eco, Jason Stanley, and others — maintain that fascism names a family of political features that can recur in different national contexts. Eco's 1995 essay 'Ur-Fascism' identified fourteen properties of fascist thinking, including the cult of action for its own sake, the fear of difference, contempt for the weak, and the selective populism of a leader who claims to speak for 'the people' against corrupt elites. These properties do not require jackboots or death camps to be present.
Why it matters
Fascism killed tens of millions of people in the 20th century. The Holocaust alone killed six million Jews and millions of others — Roma, disabled people, gay people, political prisoners, Soviet POWs. World War II, which fascism in Germany and Italy helped ignite, killed an estimated 70–85 million people globally. These numbers are not abstractions. They are the empirical record of what happens when a political movement organized around national purification and therapeutic violence achieves state power.
The question of whether fascism can return — in recognizable form — is not academic. Political scientists who study fascism argue that its emergence required specific social conditions: a democracy perceived as weak and corrupt, a mass movement prepared to use violence, traditional elites willing to make common cause with extremists, and a charismatic leader capable of translating grievance into political energy. None of these conditions are unique to interwar Europe. Several scholars have argued that they are visible in contemporary politics in the United States, Brazil, Hungary, India, and Italy itself, where the Fratelli d'Italia party with roots in post-WWII neofascism governs as of 2024.
The interpretive difficulty is real: calling contemporary movements 'fascist' risks either inflating the term beyond usefulness or understating genuinely dangerous trends by reserving the label for a historical moment that will never repeat exactly. Paxton himself, notably cautious about applying the label, wrote in 2021 that the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack came closer to a fascist moment than anything he had previously observed in American politics. The utility of the concept is not that it predicts a repeat of the 1930s but that it names a political logic — the redemptive use of violence, the subordination of law to will, the demonization of an internal enemy — that can activate in different national idioms.
Understanding fascism as a historical and conceptual category matters because its rise in the 1930s was not a freak accident. It was enabled by the failure of democratic institutions to address economic catastrophe (the Great Depression), by the willingness of conservative establishments to partner with extremists they believed they could control, and by the gradual normalization of rhetoric and tactics that seemed outrageous until they didn't. Each of those dynamics is legible in the present. The historical record is the clearest warning available about where those dynamics lead.