Alternative Proposals to Democracy: The Pattern of Fascism

Abstract

Events of recent months have shown that fascism respects no boundaries, that it is neither associated exclusively with any state or nation, nor is it a peculiar manifestation of the psychology of any one or two peoples, nor the product of the personality of specific leaders. Fascism is instituted in each country in a distinctive manner in terms of the historical backgrounds and political structure of that country, but its basic pattern is the same and its processes are similar. It must be faced as a potential alternative in the United States, not through the danger of foreign conquest, which is remote, nor primarily through imported propaganda which would fall on barren soil were functioning adequately. Its threat comes from the fact that the socio-economic and political situation in the United States parallels in many respects that which led to fascism in Italy and in Germany. Fascism represents the coordination of the ways and means by which business magnates and agricultural landlords have extended their class control and have institutionalized it through the seizure of political power. The outlook and method of fascism is neither new nor fundamentally different from that common to monopoly-orientated business enterprise. It is an extension into the realm of politics of authoritarian approaches to the common man. Whenever dominant economic groups have been in danger of losing control over government by being forced to yield to the demands of organized democratic expression of industrial unions and workers' and farmers' parties (a threat which is characterized as the danger of Communism), they have been willing to scrap the use of the liberal-democratic state or the constitutional dictatorship and to institute fascism. Fascist-minded industrialists and their collaborators, the agricultural landlords, of all countries have long believed that democracy is a lie, equality of opportunity a juvenile illusion, liberalism no more than polite bolshevism, representative government subterfuge, truth a delusion of the naive, science a tool for the strong, life the practice of man preying on man.' Fascism permits them to act upon these premises by the removal of the restraining mechanics of democratic action. Whatever fears, prejudices, discontents and tensions they exploit, whatever insecurities they play upon, whatever symbols and rhetorics they utilize to secure mass support, their fundamental objective is the maintenance and extension of their class control. The suppression of political parties and of trade unions, the extinction of freedom of the press, speech and assemblage, the terrorization of the populace by vigilante action and by murder and mass imprisonment of the opposition has been the fascist method of acquiring class hegemony and of maintaining it. Fascist ideologies are incidental to