The Modern West: Assaults from inside and out
The story of the past 125 years is both terrible and wonderful. The best news was that the world’s poor mostly saw greater affluence. And didn’t the West abandon imperialism and defeat Fascism? Our present modernity – our 21st Century – has plenty of good news. But do we not see new proto-imperialisms, and isn’t it peculiar that Westerners have largely lost their former cheerful, mildly cynical realism under respected governments? They may even have forgotten what personal adulthood and public professionalism look like. But do we really have to believe that Fascism might be making a comeback?
Contents
Introductory
The Liberation of Mankind
Anne Applebaums’ thesis
Some modern Western weaknesses
Some Communists and Fascists
Peter Williamson’s thesis
What’s the modern lesson from Fascism?
“Autocracy, Inc.” and its Western playbook
Easy European targets
Conclusion
What follows is not a jeremiad though it risks being a warning. My point is only that Westerners need to defend their societies against modern threats. We need to keep our wits about us and remember the peculiarities of character which got our societies this far, and made us lucky before. Whatever happens next, being salwart, even staunch, will help.
I am an oldish coward of limited understanding: I claim no moral heft or scholarship. I was lucky, I think, to be brought up just before people were taught to feel themselves to be the victims of their own history and society. I posit that our young ought to be given a chance to see their back-story as worth knowing, and worth living up to.
Two recent books are a great help in seeing our predicaments. Oddly, the one on a Fascist has glimmers of hope in it.
Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc.: The dictators who want to run the world (2024) tells us how widespread and insidious modern strongman rule has become. Its proto-imperialism is as much algorithmic as physically violent.
Peter J Williamson’s Duce: Contradictions of Power (The Political Leadership of Benito Mussolini), 2023, gives us the political history by which we can wonder which if any modern wannabe strongmen in the West will follow the Fascist playbook. Before they do so, they might contemplate what Italy and Spain – not to say, West Germany – did next.
The luckier sort of post-War Baby Boomer was brought up on a Dutch-American account of history that spoke of mankind’s long march toward freedom. (This was just before liberation was hijacked by soixante-neuf Liberation-ism.) It was written down (and illustrated) in Hendrik Van Loon’s The Liberation of Mankind (1926), a version of Macaulay’s or HAL Fisher’s Whig History. Its essence was the growth in appreciation of the individual person. We got the message that there was a corresponding duty of states and empires to become capable of responding to an energised citizenry, whilst persons had the duty to become more widely responsible than serfs had needed or were allowed to be.
Historically, most autocratic rulers – domestic or imperial – have learned the hard way that even vigorous suppression can’t forever silence people. Indeed, it has always seemed safe to assume that widespread education – necessary even in kleptocratic states of any sophistication – merely makes young adults even more aware of their potential. The liberation of mankind seemed to have taken a step forward in the 1990s, what with the fall of Soviet rule in Russia and the rise of affluence in China and even of poverty reduction in Africa. Full bellies and information technology, what could possibly go wrong?
Applebaum shows that the liberation of mankind is now under systematic attack by “Autocracy, Inc.” and its proto-imperialism. One needs to add the gloomy thought that it was already under internal attack in its home bases. Western democracy seems to be gnawing at itself, under our noses, perhaps even in India, its largest single state bastion.
Anne Applebaum’s title is eye-catching but misleading. Autocracy, Inc. is not mostly about autocrats (lone strongmen) nor about the mostly corporate (financial) interests of its main players. It is about some of that, but more about oligarchies (tyrannical rule by self-replicating nests of the few). But Applebaum’s “Autocracy, Inc.” will serve as a moniker for the powerbases in China, Russia, Iran, and elsewhere, who now agree to co-operate to deploy their state power to weaken the liberal democracies of the world. Partly they feel themselves to be in a zero-sum competition with the West. Partly, as the Rest of the World (RoW) they feel the need to loosen the constraints imposed on them by the West’s liberal world order – the UN and international treaties and human rights law and courts.
Are RoW leaders making new empires, but by transactional co-operation rather than conquest? And is the West ripping up its own storyline of the march to freedom?
The West was until recently settled in its devotion to democracy and capitalism, with their obvious benefits. But Western rulers and ruled are now far from confident that parliaments are either in charge or usefully representative. And capitalism – like democracy – seems not to be led by responsible grown-ups. Feeding on the unease, a variety of demagogues seem to be making hay, or at least a fair amount of noise.
The Applebaum case is that many RoW countries have fallen prey to leaders who railroad progress for their own ends. These men – or groups – have the old means of state coercion but have also developed new ways of infiltrating their citizens’ minds. They control the old media in the old way, but they also hijack the new personal phones and social media platforms which had seemed likely to be so liberating an influence.
The RoW leaders know they can deploy these modern tricks wherever in the world people are open to fake news and conspiracy theories. They know many Westerners are no longer confident that capitalism or their domestic democracy will deliver for them. Many of these disenchanted citizens place little faith in the United Nations or the “rule-based order” as the new operating system for the world. RoW leaders know the West is ripe for their mischiefs.
The Applebaum case is that many RoW leaderships thrive alongside, and plunder, socially irresponsible capitalism and that they actively despise and undermine UN structures. Except, that is, when it suits their transactional diplomacy. Then, “Autocracy, Inc.” deploys the UN’s own foundational notion of state sovereignty and argues against the UN’s universal human rights apparatus, legal and institutional. “Autocracy, Inc.” simply insists that its sovereign states are legally untouchable and unaccountable, even when they mess within other sovereign states.
Applebaum’s evidence from around the world supports all those cases well and briefly. The strongman leaders of many RoW countries, she says, co-operate with each other where their interests coincide, and are open to wider co-operation with “hybrid liberal democracies” where their interests overlap. This is a geopolitical map of the world with wide Venn overlaps instead of tectonic plates. The BRICS nations and the “Non-Aligned Countries” can discuss things with China and Russia at the table, and North Korea and Iran hovering in the wings. The pariah states even have the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, a formal bloc of like-minded anti-Western nations, with full and associate members.
This is all in plain sight and will go wherever it goes. The bit which is in our hands in these damp, northern off-shore islands – or anywhere with a Western mindset – is to be stalwart, even staunch, in our culture and politics. Luckily, and unluckily, that is in the hands of each of us. The signs are that we are queuing up to volunteer to drop the ball.
So we return to the Western fallibilities “Autocracy, Inc.” can exploit.
Some modern Western weaknesses
Today’s young Western individuals hang on only tenuously to self-reliance or trust in the world they have inherited. They and their society have lost character because of 75 years of socialist provision of welfare, healthcare , eduction, and pensions.1This was what Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher’s brain box, spotted and coined as the Ratchet Effect. The leftward process overtakes the aspirations of “right-wing” governments, and is accelerated by leftish governments. This was an important trend in Mussolini’s story. They have a bundle of modern – modernist, post-modern – disquiets which are assuaged and aggravated about equally by an addiction to short-form digital anti-social media. 2So thank you, Baudelaire and Swinburne – the 19th Century men who most deliberately unhooked the Western mind from the burden of being pro bono and made a cult of self-obsession.Having been taught little about our past, except how to criticise it, many under-50s are only reluctantly connected to Western traditions. Christianity, the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment are at a discount. Instead, Critical Theory, Identity Politics, Fake News, and moral panics variously appeal to the main tribes in the Culture Wars which pre-occupy the Hard Right, the Alt-Right, White Van Man, and the Woke, let alone the plain leftist. Even worse, there are competing moral certainties of entitlement and resentment. These groups or tendencies have it in common that they operate with scant respect for facts, past or present. Instead, they are prone to shrill self-regard with a side order of paranoia.
Homegrown domestic populists and RoW proto-imperialist interferers can stir up all sorts of mischief in the West not least because many people fail to filter the hubub they see and hear in the privacy of their home or commute. Western populists and RoW proto-imperialists can hijack people’s phones, and therefore their minds, at small cost and nugatory risk.
The vulnerable Westerner has been condemned to despise authority, not least because even meritocratic professional elites are now prone to anti-elitism. For at least 50 years post-modern politicians have reflexively been working out what narratives electorates might, just, be prepared to hear. The electorate cannot now remember when it was respectable to admire the West or its structures. The more educated they are, the more modern youngish voters have been steeped in varieties of mind-rot. As toddlers, teenagers and young adults they were schooled in post modernity’s distrust of a fact-based world, and Critical Theory taught them to loath – or at best to sort-of pity – every white generation before their own. Identity Politics taught them to privilege their own lived-experience as an operational or performative point of view.
The young were set up for emotional and intellectual difficulties. From their mother’s breast they were primed with ideals of empathy and kindness. Screens and earbuds became the pacifers of solitary, sedentary childhoods. The young were required to affect to be milk-sops, with a side-order of Western self-hatred, and no obvious route back or forward to anything like confidence, or a means of producing it in their own offspring.
Thus we see the Blob Centrism which runs much of the West. It is so soft an authoritarianism that very few note that it has disabled individuals and society alike.
Western enfeeblements accrete. The harder authoritarians of RoW “Autocracy, Inc.” eye us up, and set the dark arts against us.
“Autocracy, Inc.” is mostly run by people whose parents or grandparents were revolutionaries or anti-imperialists, or were the victims of those disruptives. Their forebears might be awe-struck at the new power of their birthplaces. They might even celebrate the new moves being made by Russia, China and Iran and their looser allies. They can hardly have imagined how the old West would have nobbled itself.
The two great 20th Century bogeys within the West, and beyond, were Communism and Fascism. If Marx’s large brain lurked behind Russia’s 1917 soviet revolution, it was mostly Mussolini’s equally busy if rather smaller one which lurked behind Italy’s Fascism five years later. Communism was on the verge of grabbing power in 1922 when the king invited Mussolini to take over, thus avoiding a very violent revolution. So it was Lenin and Stalin, and Mussolini (and later, and for longer, Franco in Spain) who embodied their competing creeds and who became strongman rulers in their bailiwicks. It is Mussolini who makes the closest parallels with what we may be seeing in modern populism if things go very sour. 3German Nazism, like Fascism, had its roots in its country’s imperial ambitions and post-WW1 anger. But its demonic deployment of ancient and modern anti-semiticism makes Hitler less useful to our discussion of modern populism than Mussolini. Though their circumstances, ideologies and methods overlapped, Mussolini’s are more recognisable and more informative to us than Hitler’s.
The old ogres loom large in the minds of the discontented who are preyed-upon by those seeking to be voted into power in democratic institutions they disparage. Because American discourse is always a little inclined to demagogic Manichaeism, plenty of Republicans call Kamala Harris a Communist. Plenty of Democrats – including Harris – call Donald Trump a Fascist. Kamala is presumably not a born-again Marxist.
But has Trump the makings of a Mussolini? Is the US so desperate as to want, need or deserve to replicate one?
I have always quite liked reading about Mussolini, though it is a nervous business.4RDN Mussolini booklist: Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, Mussolini: Study of a demagogue, Odhams, 1964; Otto-Ernst Schuddekopf, Fascism (in a series, Revolutions of Our Time), Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973; Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A history, Vintage, 1996. Plus: a little RJB Bosworth at Internet Archive
I suppose him to be an accident of history. He was, in a way, history’s fool. He was by no means ordinary, but not a monster either. His was a turbulent, unsettled nature, which had been drenched in too many books and been over-impressed by them. (Peter Williamson is excellent on Mussolini’s reading list.) One mustn’t and can’t forget that violence was inherent to his conception of what Italy needed. He was a fool to himself but not just a thug and a murderer. Mussolini’s was in some sense a reign of terror, but much less so than Russia’s under the communist Stalin or even Chile’s under the neo-liberal Pinochet. He perpetrated fewer atrocities than either of these, and fewer, of course than savage, nihilistic Hitler.
Mussolini’s being reprehensible is a good reason to read about him, the better to learn from him, and to avoid replicating him. But his being recognisable is what makes the lesson more palatable, if a little shaking.
Peculiarly, the point is not merely whether a man wants to a Fascist dictator but whether his society wants him to be one. Italy in some sense volunteered to become Fascist.
Peter J Williamson and his Duce: Contradictions of Power (The Political Leadership of Benito Mussolini), published in 2023, goes a long way to seeing the good and bad about Mussolini’s rule. Williamson’s account is comprehensive and readable. It is a political biography which is designed to tell us about Mussolini’s government. Italy’s psycho-dramas are present and correct, but feature for what they show us about Mussolini’s efficacy in statehood.
In brief, Williamson’s case is that Mussolini wanted to run a hands-off state but got bounced and bumped into beefing-up state intervention in industrial policy and welfare provision. This is crucial (see below).
Williamson paints the background very well and has been plundered wholesale and lightly larded in what follows. I take him to be more or less gospel as to fact, nuance and message. 5Peter Williamson’s wide use of quotes and references is a driving force and reinforcing structure for his case and narrative.I have risked spotting one positive about Mussolii that isn’t in the Williamson.
Italy went into WW1 as a newish nation state which was long on regional identity but short on national coherence. It was a middle rank European country: long on civilisational treasures and a little short on literacy and industry. It picked the “right” side in the war (alongside the British allies against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany). Its soldiers suffered greatly in the war, and came home to share the national grievances about its outcomes. Chastened by the difficulty of raising fit and trainable troops for the war effort, Italy’s pretty normal sort-of liberal-minded government set themselves to modernise the Italian economic and education systems. The economy was suffering post-war blues, and socialist politicians were gaining ground against their right-ish liberal opponents. By the early 1920s, communist revolution looked probable. Large sections of the bourgeois capitalist and landowning classes, and some workers, were deeply alarmed.
Mussolini had read widely in all the intellectual traditions of the day, and seemed to have found things to agree with in all of them, however contradictory they were. He was in the upper echelons of the small Fascist Party. It was thuggish in part, and would never have gained and maintained power without the deployment of strong, well-targeted violence – including murder. At a crucial moment Mussolini gained ascendency in his group, and – a quite short story told very short indeed – he was invited to form a government. Mussolini only abolished democracy. Othere realities (sectional interests, the Church, the monarchy) were left intact as being functionally or theatrically handy.
Mussolini wanted above all to leave a mark on history. He decided his best move would be to invite Italy to imagine itself great again. If that could not be achieved in real policy outcomes, it might succeed as a mass performance, a sort of national pageant. He deliberately fore-grounded Italy’s history as the birthplace of the Roman Empire, and its people as warriors. He invited, even forced, Italians to desire to be worthy of this history-reborn, as Fascists. Since he had abolished politics, this was the nearest he could offer to a national drama. In the end, he took Italy into WW2, not least to give the Italians one more chance to be warriors.
Mussolini’s vision of Fascistic leadership was that a strongman should embody the nation state. It would have been very dangerous to assert that Mussolini was a touch absurd, and so he became more so.
Here’s politics with the boring bits. Mussolini’s vision of education was to have lots of it, the better to indoctrinate the young as Fascist Italians. His vision of health care was that there should be more of it, initially paid-for by private insurance and delivered by private hospitals, the better to have such perks to hand out to biddable supporters. He was diligent in taking care of the interests of capitalists and land-owners, and quite tough on their workers. But the country did not plunge downhill. Even an attempt at imperialism in Ethiopia did not scupper it.
Economic circumstances kept pushing Mussolini toward enlarging the state’s role and tax-raising efforts. He began Small State and ended up Big State in what became the 20th Century way everywhere.
Mussolini’s Fascism hated democracy, quite liked capitalism, partook of a little socialism.
Williamson’s title is bang-on: Mussolini and his rule were a mass of contradictions. He wanted his revolution to be a legal one. He was a hands-off totalitarian control-freak who never really grasped the levers of power. He could not bear to delegate or even discuss things with senior ministers whom he played against each other. He was an insecure strongman. A few senior people adored him, but he tried even their patience. Banging on about Italian virtues, he was venal himself and assumed everyone else was. He allowing his Fascist party to plunder for personal advantage, and enriched himself.
Support for Fascism leached. The public came to dislike his government, but many blamed it, not Il Duce, for Fascism’s failings. He had a Tsar-like impunity, until, like Emperor Nicholas’s, even that went.
Williamson’s account ends with Mussolini’s fall. But Mussolini did serve his country rather well in absentia. After Mussolini, a pretty normal and civilised post-War political process was almost immediately installed in Italy. Mussolini had unwittingly created an appetite for the representative democracy he had aimed to snuff out. He had maintained and even slightly advanced the organs of the Italian state, ready for a fairly smooth resumption of business by successor governments.
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What’s the modern lesson from Fascism?
Let’s assume that a populist politician is considering how to pursue power. Wouldn’t he or she be mad to adopt Mussolini’s play book? How could a modern Mussolini avoid the sort of violence Il Duce is associated with? Wouldn’t a wannabe proto-Fascist fear being lumbered with being thought – or actually being – a comic-tragedy figure with blood on his hands?
A wannabe Fascist leader might recall that no Communist, Nazi or Fascist leader from history is now widely admired for their humanity or even their efficacy. Anyone seeking to emulate them would be wise to give up hope of being held in the regard accorded Alexander the Great, Caesar, or Napoleon.
There is always the possibility that a Mussolini figure in our day might be even more cloaked in self-regard and self-belief than Il Duce. He or she might lack even Il Duce’s smidgeon of self-awareness. And an elected or appointed dictatorship might be seen by many people as the only tenable alternative to an unconscionable blood bath, whether in civil war or revolution.
Is that really where we are now, in the US, say?
But again: the main point is not whether anyone wants to be a Mussolini, but is anywhere in the West so desperate as to want, need or deserve to replicate one?
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“Autocracy, Inc.” and its Western playbook
Anne Applebaum notes but does not anatomise the tendency of various European states to have elements which seriously flirt with “Autocracy, Inc.”. Many also have elements which resist its maw. Still, Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, Italy, France and Turkey are on her at-risk list.
The ghastly elegance of the “Autocracy, Inc.” strategy is that its most serious states do not need to take over weaker states and nations. Each achieves its international goals by co-operating with those who are a close fit. Some of them sponsor terrorism as a means to genocide or general disorder. More broadly, and anywhere, they can insinuate their habits of mind and action into any countries that leave their digital or political backdoors unlocked.
It is almost obvious why there are factions and leaders in East Europe, say, who do believe that it is convenient, wise and even necessary to distance themselves from some western European habits of mind and policy as represented by the EU and the UN and the various international jurisdictions. Perhaps they hadn’t factored-in the encumbrances of the EU embrace when they sought EU membership. I don’t know half enough to opine on the public-spiritedness of their intentions. But since I have a lot of sympathy with those Britons, French, Italians, Swedes or Americans who think their country should resist further mass or uninvited immigration, and Identity Politics wokery in general, I can’t complain about nervous ex-Communist countries who are just as jumpy.
I take it that in all these Western countries there are David Goodhart’s “Somewheres”. These are intellectually unambitious people, some of them economically successful, whilst others are the “left behinds” mourning the weaknesses of the welfare state they thought would be beneficient. They look, perhaps ostrich-like, but stubbornly, to their native country for identity and security. Contrariwise, the global fraternities and sororities of the thrusting, ambitious “Anywheres” place trust in a soft-left, green, liberal internationalist agenda which allows them to stand on the moral, visionary high ground, whilst feathering their nests as best they may. These are the well-heeled Wokes with their Caspar David Friedrich faraway gaze, the world-encompassing smugness of romantics turned Puritan.
Naturally, “Autocracy, Inc.” sees the Somewheres of a country as the more likely to vote for a strongman or some variety of fellow-travelling leader. It may well be that “Autocracy, Inc.” is pretty satisfied when the Somewhere extreme right provokes a matching Anywhere liberal-left, which need not be extreme at all. Deep-grained squabbles and stand-offs are almost as useful to “Autocracy, Inc.” as outright disarray or the acquisition of more members for its club. Flakiness of any kind suits “Autocracy, Inc” as a nice alternative to people being stalwart, staunch even, in out-growing the soft-authoritarianism which modern liberal societies seem prone to.
I do not dare opine that Giorgia Meloni is a pretty decent right-wing leader. Gaining power 100 years after Mussolini, and so far as I know, not remotely like him, it would be great if she were the antidote to whatever ambitions “Autocracy, Inc.” has for Italy.
I certainly don’t pretend to know what the success of “far left” and “far right” parties augurs across European countries and in EU governance. 6It is moot, for instance, whether – which – “far-right” politicans in Western Europe or in the Anglosphere would be statist in their approach to welfare spending. The Somewheres are at least as happy with Big State provision as the Nowheres. Nigel Farage’s Reform Party was brash but coy in its July 2024 “Contract With the People. The reliable Institute for Fiscal Studies said Reform’s budget did not add up, but the party certainly seemed keen to keep the socialist welfare state more or less intact.
I can’t even guess whether the local boy Nigel Farage, for instance, is a candidate to be a fellow-traveller of “Autocracy, Inc.”, or to be a follower of the Fascist playbook, or merely a squib. He is a Cheshire Cat of a politician, close to being beyond parody. And yet, he was one of the few leaders to change the weather in post-war British politics. He was on to something. He was almost certainly a decent populist safety valve for what might have been disruptive disquiet before and around the EU Brexit referendum in 2016. Surely he has enough wit to avoid being a Mussolini? But doesn’t he toady around Donald Trump who seems far more “out-there”?
Is Donald Trump a candidate for Mussolini’s mantle, as Kamala Harris insisted he is? Or maybe, more of a gobby Farage? Trump seems to express quite well the anger of many Americans, which may be confected and delusional in parts but is a real “lived experience” en masse and thus potentially powerful. “Somewhere” disenchantment with the “Anywhere” faiths of plenty of Democrats may even be volcanic. If the liberal democrat mainstream Democrats and Republicans cannot assuage this force, then maybe Trump’s the man of the hour, as Mussolini was when liberalism failed in Italy a hundred years ago.
Trump is, in a way, a more absurd figure than Mussolini: less educated, less serious, less impressive. He is more Pulcinella from Italy’s Punch and Judy than was Mussolini.
It is not remotely clear whether Donald Trump wants to be a Fascist. Mussolini and his immediate collaborators were deliberate in their politics and thuggery. They weren’t Accidental Fascists. The odd feature of Trump is that one can believe he might become an unlabelled Fascist (or even adopt the brand), if he gets to feel that’s where the winds of chance take his claim to fame, or whatever it is that he wants.
Trump has at least played at, or toyed with, being a Mussolini. He may have inspired, and sort-of supported, the “January 6” 2021 violent assault on the nation’s legislature, and he has promised that if he became President again he would deploy the state against those who had sought to prove him a criminal when he was out of office. He both rails against Fake News and deploys it. And like Mussolini, Trump likes the car industry, especially in the form of Elon Musk (another man one couldn’t make up.) 7Perhaps the car maker Musk will be able to do the wise service that tyre manufacturer Alberto Pirelli tried to do when he warned Mussolini in 1940, “the truth is, Signor President, that there is an imbalance between your aspirations and the power of the country”. Pirelli also mourned, presumably in private, “the lack of continuity in the man”. Noted by Williamson, 2023Perhaps, though, he is being little more than performative. Ditto his followers, as they imitatively bellow along with him as they might to Trump’s famous – and eclectic – Spotify playlist. This isn’t their first rodeo, and it may just be a rodeo.
So far as I can see, Trump was not exceptionally good or bad in the effects of his pantomimic government the last time he was President. Didn’t he call-out China? Aren’t Westerners required to wean ourselves off the Chinese Communist Party and its wiles, which Anne Applebaum has shown to be so various? 8I am not equipped to judge his economic success or rationales.
But intuitively, I do feel that America’s culture wars have to play out somehow. A second Trump presidency may be necessary to shift the dial, end the noisy stand-off, and produce an appetite for measured representative democracy. It might be the only way to vaccinate America against “Autocracy, Inc.” and Fascism , and Trump would not have to adopt much – or any – of the Mussolini playbook to achieve the effect. Even if he was a covert or a declared Fascist, he might turn out to have been useful in spite of himself. Isn’t that what happened to some 20th Century leaders? He might be so odd as to hanker after a seat on the “Autocracy, Inc.” virtual board, but find himself in gaol or made redundant by history.
Conclusion
I dare not say that I think a fretful West or a dysfunctional “rules-based” world order will be a walk-over for “Autocracy. Inc.” or Fascists. It is possible that well shy of giving into the worst that authoritarians and demagogues can throw at us, the West will prove itself stalwart, even staunch. There may be more strength – more old-style merit – in Western democracies than they feel or show just now. It is possible that parents will build new generations of young who can live more in the 3D concrete and natural worlds than in the 2D screen worlds they go in for now. It may be that the West will not allow the industrialised plagiarisms of AI to subborn or scupper civilisation. Western civilisation may shut the virtual backdoor that “Autocracy Inc.” wants to exploit, and laugh wannabe Fascists out of court.
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Footnotes
- 1This was what Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher’s brain box, spotted and coined as the Ratchet Effect. The leftward process overtakes the aspirations of “right-wing” governments, and is accelerated by leftish governments. This was an important trend in Mussolini’s story.
- 2So thank you, Baudelaire and Swinburne – the 19th Century men who most deliberately unhooked the Western mind from the burden of being pro bono and made a cult of self-obsession.
- 3German Nazism, like Fascism, had its roots in its country’s imperial ambitions and post-WW1 anger. But its demonic deployment of ancient and modern anti-semiticism makes Hitler less useful to our discussion of modern populism than Mussolini. Though their circumstances, ideologies and methods overlapped, Mussolini’s are more recognisable and more informative to us than Hitler’s.
- 4RDN Mussolini booklist: Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, Mussolini: Study of a demagogue, Odhams, 1964; Otto-Ernst Schuddekopf, Fascism (in a series, Revolutions of Our Time), Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973; Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A history, Vintage, 1996. Plus: a little RJB Bosworth at Internet Archive
- 5Peter Williamson’s wide use of quotes and references is a driving force and reinforcing structure for his case and narrative.
- 6It is moot, for instance, whether – which – “far-right” politicans in Western Europe or in the Anglosphere would be statist in their approach to welfare spending. The Somewheres are at least as happy with Big State provision as the Nowheres. Nigel Farage’s Reform Party was brash but coy in its July 2024 “Contract With the People. The reliable Institute for Fiscal Studies said Reform’s budget did not add up, but the party certainly seemed keen to keep the socialist welfare state more or less intact.
- 7Perhaps the car maker Musk will be able to do the wise service that tyre manufacturer Alberto Pirelli tried to do when he warned Mussolini in 1940, “the truth is, Signor President, that there is an imbalance between your aspirations and the power of the country”. Pirelli also mourned, presumably in private, “the lack of continuity in the man”. Noted by Williamson, 2023
- 8I am not equipped to judge his economic success or rationales.
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