“I am neither right nor left” is what Nazis say to hide that they’re Nazis
Mussolini wasn’t hiding anything. He was drawing out political tendencies from the vulgar militarism of the monarchists and imperialists on his right while pandering and promising to win labor support from his left. Fascism was centrist at its founding. Italy was literally a kingdom governed by a monarch, with a large contingent of aristocrats who believed Mussolini was a DEI Woke Lib for coming out of a working class ghetto.
What’s changed over the last century has been the rise of a wealthy and well-positioned petite bourgeois and professional managerial class. People who predate on their labor peers through rent-seeking without ever rising to the level of unassailable inter-generational wealth. This “middle class” labor contingent has historically been a breading ground for fascism, particularly among military veterans, police, and other security service workers who never got to enjoy the economic windfall of the 70s/80s like their parents and grandparents.
They only stopped identifying with “fascism” explicitly because it fell out of vogue with the defeat of the Axis Powers. But they adopted plenty of alternative titles - Klansmen, Neo-Confederates, Patriots, Anarcho-Capitalists, Constitutionalists, Neo-Conservatives - to white-wash the root ideology through some popular pastiche. And they don’t hide the fact that they want a single party ethnostate. They trumpet it.
Mussolini wasn’t hiding anything. He was drawing out political tendencies from the vulgar militarism of the monarchists and imperialists on his right while pandering and promising to win labor support from his left. Fascism was centrist at its founding. Italy was literally a kingdom governed by a monarch, with a large contingent of aristocrats who believed Mussolini was a DEI Woke Lib for coming out of a working class ghetto.
What’s changed over the last century has been the rise of a wealthy and well-positioned petite bourgeois and professional managerial class. People who predate on their labor peers through rent-seeking without ever rising to the level of unassailable inter-generational wealth. This “middle class” labor contingent has historically been a breading ground for fascism, particularly among military veterans, police, and other security service workers who never got to enjoy the economic windfall of the 70s/80s like their parents and grandparents.
They only stopped identifying with “fascism” explicitly because it fell out of vogue with the defeat of the Axis Powers. But they adopted plenty of alternative titles - Klansmen, Neo-Confederates, Patriots, Anarcho-Capitalists, Constitutionalists, Neo-Conservatives - to white-wash the root ideology through some popular pastiche. And they don’t hide the fact that they want a single party ethnostate. They trumpet it.