Why Fascism Fails

• Blue-shirted Portuguese Legion, corporatist labour, youth movement — borrowed from fascism
• But no paramilitary street violence swelling from below — much more elitist, Catholic, conservative
• Survived 36 years — far longer than Hitler's 12 or Mussolini's 21
• Take the madness out of Hitler — is fascism as discredited as it is today?

The key difference between fascists and authoritarians: fascists are dynamic. They are driven by an engine of rebirth, populist energy, expansion — they seek to change people, boundaries, the earth. They are conservative revolutionaries underpinned by the spiritualisation of violence.

• Without the dynamic drive, fascism becomes simple authoritarianism
• Fascism is apocalyptic — us vs. them, existential threat
• When the threat diminishes, the dictator needs new promises to survive
• Paxton: "Fascism is, in the last analysis, destabilizing"

Corporatism — 22 sector councils of employers, workers, and officials — never really worked. Workers had no real power. Agriculture was skewed towards grain at the expense of crops Italy was better suited for.

• Italy grew 1.5–2.2% — lowest of all major nations
• Mussolini: "Enough of the railroad state, the postal state" — but then intervened more than anyone except the USSR
• Autarky starved Italy of raw materials
• Biographer Bosworth described Mussolini as "a weak dictator"

The economy was already recovering in 1932 — before the Nazis took power. The autobahn was a pre-existing scheme; the Nazis increased funding from 500m to 600m Reichsmarks and took the propaganda credit.

• Housing in 1936 (310,490) was still below Weimar's 1929 figure (317,682)
• Flour, butter, fruit, coffee rationed before the war even started
• 1939: no fresh meat at Berlin's Hertie department store — only weekly fat rations
• Jewish businesses plundered; exit tax rose from 1m to 342m Reichsmarks
• Evans: "The economic history of the Third Reich is inseparable from its expropriation of the Jews"

The Nazi economy was not a normal economy — it was a violence-based economy, a theft-economy, and a corrupt one. No financial oversight. Jobs and contracts to loyalists. Hitler, Goebbels, Göring became multimillionaires.

• Göring's home renovated for 15 million marks
• All was gambled on victory in the coming war
• In 1938, ALL metal garden fences were confiscated; Hitler Youth searched attics for scrap
• When the Reichsbank president warned of inflation, Hitler sacked him

Hitler designed banners, helped design rally sets, worked with filmmakers, sketched buildings, suggested roofs for motorways to protect tanks. He was a Napoleonic figure — but Napoleon could know everything about France. Today, no one can.

• Hitler took over the military from the generals
• He helped design the Volkswagen, sketched grand buildings, planned the autobahn route
• He dismissed military leader after military leader
• He didn't listen to weapons scientists or economic advisors

Historians call it "polyocracy" — rule by multiple competing power centres, all second-guessing the Führer's will. A Hobbesian war of all against all, dressed up as unity.

Despite this, Göring led the Hermann Göring Ironworks. Loyalty was promoted over expertise.

• The Allies won by building plans through negotiation, deliberation, debate, and consensus
• Rauch: knowledge requires validation by others — open-ended, depersonalised checking
• 47% of authoritarian regimes collapse when the leader dies or needs replacing
• Order was promised. Chaos was the reality.

Fascism was an attempt at a great synthesis of everything — through the iron will of one person. Early victories couldn't make up for later hubris. Hitler dismissed economists, generals, scientists. Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia bankrupted Italy.

Modern genetics: variation within "races" is greater than variation between them. All humans share 99.9% of DNA. The idea of a pure Aryan archetype is scientifically absurd.

• The idea the state should decide who breeds has become "unfashionable"
• No one serious argues Englishness or Americanness are biological
• Nationalism has moved from biological to cultural — still powerful but different
• It's much harder to essentialise a people and justify doing things to them

Before WWII, violence was more limited — soldiers choosing to fight small wars with less powerful weapons. A "chivalrous" attitude was possible. The nuclear bomb and the Holocaust changed the stakes permanently.

• Economics shifted from zero-sum to positive-sum thinking — cooperation can benefit both sides
• National borders are more static and defined than ever in history
• National expansionism transferred to multinational corporate economics
• It would take real desperation and horror for paramilitary violence to return — nothing since has come close

A crucial irony: mid-century ultranationalism came from the weakness of nationalism. Italy had just unified, only 2.5% spoke Italian, borders were porous. Today, nation-states with fixed borders are more entrenched than ever.

• It's harder to justify dynamic domination when nations are stable
• Putin's territorial claims are ridiculed in ways that Hitler's weren't in the 1930s
• Cultural nationalism has replaced biological nationalism — but remains powerful
• Big universalist claims (EU, globalisation) still provoke strong nationalist responses

Derrida and Mark Fisher's concept: ghosts of the past — lingering ideas, philosophies — that haven't been laid to rest. We're haunted by dreams of the right as much as by spectres of Marx.

• Ghosts haunt when causes remain; they're laid to rest when times change
• Similarities spell risk; differences mark change
• History exists on two planes: what happened, and what we think about it now
• As liberalism falters, the stories it told us become questionable too

Mann's point: resentment, revenge, honour, greatness, unlimited power — timeless qualities. And worse: there is something of an artist in Hitler too. The laziness, the vague intuition of being reserved for something greater.

George Mosse pointed to idées-forces: ideas that aren't intellectual — they come from something somatic, bodily. Hunger can be an idea. The thrill of violence. The clarity of order. Jealousy. Nostalgia. Glory.

• The desire to dominate is universal — a conversation, a project, a situation
• Fascism was the latest technological instance of using power unchecked
• The continuous thread: Italian MSI (1946), UK National Front (1970s), Aryan Nation, skinheads
• Given the right conditions, it's burning in all of us — or at least in someone we love

René Girard argued humans are driven by spirals of jealousy, rivalry, and scapegoating. The cult of personality may be an evolutionary inheritance we can't escape.

• The key: sort similarities and differences into a framework
• Similarities spell risk; differences mark change
• Some ingredients are eternal: charisma, the desire for order, fear of chaos
• But fascism's specific conditions — WWI, racial science, weak nationalism — have changed
• It won't return as it was. But it could feasibly return as something new

• Order promised → chaos delivered
• Corporatism promised rational order → reality was vague, toothless, ineffectual
• Unity promised → polyocracy delivered: competing fiefdoms, sycophancy, waste
• Self-sufficiency promised → autarky starved the nation of raw materials
• Succession is near-impossible: 47% of personalist regimes collapse at transition
• It takes continual conscious effort to know the failures — to answer when someone says "but Hitler built the autobahn"