Relationship between liberalism and fascism

Picture of the 1938 Munich conference. Fascist dictators Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler alongside British prime minister Neville Chamberlain. This event is an example of liberal collaboration with fascists.

Liberalism and fascism are both right-wing capitalist ideologies representing different solutions to the problems of reactionary and revolutionary opposition to capitalist society. Although fascism is openly opposed to liberal political thought, fascist ideology and practice are drawn directly from 19th-century liberal concepts, including colonial repression and extermination, violent suppression of workers and the poor, White supremacy, imperialism, chauvinism, anti-communism, anti-Semitism, and elitism. Fascist states initially courted positive relationships with liberal powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom and received lukewarm or open support from various sectors of liberal society, especially for their anti-communist bona fides; however, Marxists argue that imperialism is an inevitable material force which brings capitalist states into conflict, leading in part to the liberal turn against fascism represented by Winston Churchill and the later presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After the total victory of the liberal Allies (and the Soviet Union) in the Second Thirty Years' War, modern, compromising liberalism or "embedded liberalism" was developed and sanctioned in the West in order to prevent a resurgence of anti-liberal challenges from the left and the right. In 1945–1948, the Allies tried fascist and Imperial Japanese officers for war crimes with limited degrees of severity among the Western Allies, including the completely novel legal concept of "crimes against humanity", in order to further distinguish fascism from liberal bourgeois democracy. However, the liberal Western Bloc would continue to support anti-democratic repressive regimes around the world during the Cold War, leading the anarchist author Noam Chomsky to famously state that, were the legal standard at Nuremburg fairly and consistently applied, all US presidents since 1945 could be found guilty.

Unsorted list of fascist sympathizers

People

• Winston Churchill until the mid-1930s
• Joe Kennedy, Sr.
• Henry Ford
• Ludwig von Mises (collaborator)
• Vilfredo Pareto
• Edward, Duke of Windsor (aka King Edward VIII)
• Ex-president Herbert Hoover
• Henry Luce

See also

• Authoritarianism
• Totalitarianism
• Anti-communism
• List of atrocities committed by the United States
• Fishhook theory

General sources

• "The Americans Who Embraced Mussolini". Boston Review. 2024-04-19. Retrieved 2024-05-29.

• Magazine, Smithsonian (2016-12-13). "How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2024-05-29.

• Tooze, Adam (2016-08-18). "When We Loved Mussolini". The New York Review of Books. Archived from the original on 2017-01-29. Retrieved 2024-05-29.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)