The Fascist Left

Below is a repost from October 8, 2017, that discusses the origin and meaning of fascism as a form of socialism, which means it belongs on the left side of the left-right political and economic continuum. Following this repost, I have added a postscript on racism. For a detailed presentation of why the German form of fascism, Nazism, was totalitarian socialism, see George Reisman’s essay, “Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian.” 

 

Slinging unfriendly epithets today has become sport, so I thought I’d throw out a few myself.

Political leftists can be described as intellectually bankrupt, hate-filled, envy-ridden fascists. They’re also postmodern progressives, but, unfortunately, they don't consider those terms to be insulting. I do.

Let me start with the left-right political spectrum. It goes back to the 1789 French National Assembly. Aristocrats and churchmen, supporters of the king, sat on the right, while the revolutionaries, some of whom were legitimate classical liberals, sat on the left.

In the ensuing two hundred years, the terms have varied in nuanced ways, but essentially the left has been understood as home of the good guys (socialists, statists, progressives) and the right as home of the bad guys, especially fascists, reactionaries and other conservatives, and thanks to the communists, capitalists.*

In my undergraduate school days of the late ‘60s, the spectrum was described as a horseshoe. At the top of the curve, in the middle, was democracy, so all of us good guys were middle-of-the-roaders who, of course, believed in voting and compromise. After all, there is and can be no perfectly free society and extremists, especially those who stick to principle, were dangerous.

No distinction between the compromise of principles and options was made (1, 2).
   
As some have pointed out, and I agree, the spectrum is best thought of as a straight-line continuum from the left—total control of life and economy by the state—to the right—laissez-faire capitalism (or liberalism in the classical tradition). In the middle is the so-called mixed economy, a mixture of freedom and dictatorship.

Statism is the general term that identifies the left with its two inconsequential variants, socialism and fascism. This means that fascism is “right” only in the sense that it is on the “right side of the left.”

Socialism, though, is not just control, but ownership, of life and economy. Lenin’s metaphor of the socialist state was that it would be a giant post office and we would all work for and be controlled by, or rather, belong to, the postal service, aka the state, “under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat.” (State and Revolution, p. 44, emphasis added.)

Though its roots go back earlier, fascism came about when Mussolini broke off from the socialist party and had to come up with something different. (Mussolini and Hitler were socialists to their core.) Unlike Lenin, Mussolini, and later, Hitler, inherited an industrial economy with large degrees of private life and property.

The Italian word fascio means workers’ league, which is consistent with Mussolini’s socialism, so Mussolini used it in 1914 and ‘15 and eventually adapted it to fascismo in 1921 to describe his “vision.” The private sector was allowed to continue in name only—he would have destroyed it, as Lenin nearly did, if he had nationalized everything—but it was controlled and regulated by a large and militant “deep state,” i.e., government bureaucracy.

Initially, Mussolini and the fascists adopted guild socialism, modeled on the Fabianism of Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Syndicalism and corporativism were other terms used. All three differ only in who is going to control and regulate the economy, and how the control is to be exercised. None worked, so Mussolini increasingly adopted the Nazi approach to control, as well as Nazi tactics. Both Mussolini and Hitler copied the tactics of Lenin and Stalin.**

Entrepreneurs, as a result, ceased to exist. “In the terminology of the Nazi legislation,” says Ludwig von Mises, they became shop managers. (Human Action, p. 717. See also Planned Chaos, chap. 1, 7, and 8 and Günter Reimann, The Vampire Economy). Fascism, as Mises identified, is socialism of the German pattern, differing only superficially from the Russian version.

Nominal private control and ownership of life and economy is what we have today in the United States, and have had increasingly since the 1890s with the beginnings of the early progressive era (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13).

It is therefore not a stretch to describe our political and economic system as fascistic. It is not a system of liberty, classical liberalism, or laissez-faire capitalism.

Now I say the left is intellectually bankrupt because it has no new ideas to offer. It relies on the postmodern abandonment of reason and logic (Marx’s polylogism updated) to brand anyone who disagrees with them a hate-filled racist, misogynist, and homophobe. No arguments or facts are given. Only the shouting of collectivist clichés.

The louder and longer the shouting goes on, the assumption apparently is, the more their falsehoods will be believed.

But it is the leftists who are hate-filled—because of their seething, hostile yelling. They also are envy-ridden. This last has been well-documented in Helmut Schoeck’s thorough analysis of envy and the motivations for statism. (Redistributionism, after all, means taking wealth from those who have earned it and giving it to those who have not.)

I have a recommendation for the more sincere Democrats who feel uncomfortable with our current Weimar-like culture and are in search of new ideas to promote: look at Grover Cleveland.

A Democrat, Cleveland was the last US president who advocated classical liberalism. He served two unconnected terms, 1885-89 and 1893-97. In 1888 he won the popular election against Benjamin Harrison, but lost the electoral vote. (His supporters, interestingly, did not whine about having the election stolen!)

Cleveland was a strict constitutionalist who vetoed more bills than any president until Franklin Roosevelt’s determined efforts to protect his progressive-inspired welfare state. Cleveland’s vetoes slowed the early progressives’ juggernaut toward statism.

The fascist left is nearly indistinguishable from its socialist and communist brethren. All use state-initiated coercion to achieve their ends.

The liberal right—the liberalism of the classical tradition—repudiates state-initiated coercion of any kind and guarantees protection for those freedoms to take action called individual rights.

The social and economic theory of liberty is a free society of laissez-faire capitalism.


* Recall that communists and fascists in the United States were bosom buddies until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. At that point, communists equated fascism with capitalism and started calling anyone who disagreed with them a fascist. Recall also that Marx, Engels, and Lenin considered communism and socialism to be synonyms.

**And anyone today who wears black clothing and calls themselves “anti-fascists” are, by their apparel and tactics, mimicking Mussolini’s blackshirted goons.

 

Postscript (10/8/2025). “Racism,” Ayn Rand writes, “is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage . . . . Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.” As a form of collectivism, racism will be found in some form in all dictatorships, whether communism, fascism, or socialism. Why? Because dictators need scapegoats, to blame for the country’s problems and “to use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers.”
 
In other words, racism is not an essential distinguishing characteristic of Nazism. It is an essential trait of dictatorship. In today’s postmodern, nihilistic world, the wannabe dictators, without knowledge of or care about history, or of any care of or understanding for the concepts they are using, freely sling the words “racist” and “fascist” at their chosen scapegoats, white males in particular, or anyone who works in or runs a business.

The Communist-Fascist-Leftist Democratic-Socialist-Progressive Totalitarians: A Glossary of Dictatorship

This post can be thought of as a kind of compendium of dictatorship, with many links to previous posts where I have touched on the notions.

All terms in the title represent people who desire to, or do, exercise absolute authority or power over the citizenry. Differences between the terms and the people who espouse them are negligible. The consequences of such absolute power are not pretty.

Let me start with the totalitarians. They are the ones who want to and do use total coercive, governmental control to tell us what we can and cannot do in our personal and professional lives. Like, you know in recent times, to leave our homes, travel, sit down in a restaurant, run our businesses, etc., and perhaps even talk to our neighbors. In other words, covid totalitarianism.

The “left,” as in the left-right continuum, refers to the degree of government intrusion in and control of our personal and professional lives. The “far left” wants to control all, which means they are totalitarians. The right limits the government to self-defensive coercion against those who initiate physical force.

The left is Leninist socialism (there is no other type). It is Lenin’s giant post office that we all work for (government ownership of the means of production), protected by an armed proletariat (or other such “protectors”). The right is laissez-faire capitalism.*

The left wants to and does use physical force to establish and control everyone through a dictatorship. The right wants to and does establish the protection of individual rights, including especially property rights, political freedom, and equality before the (rationally defined, objective) law.
 
The middle ranges of the continuum are varying mixtures of freedom and dictatorship (or freedom and controls, as some say). The societies are also called mixed economies. “Moderates,” so called, fall within these ranges. They apparently like to distinguish themselves from the “extremists” on both ends of the continuum.

The freer countries of today’s world, including the United States, are mixed societies of freedom and dictatorship, the dictatorial control coming from the deep states’ and their governments’ overabundance of overly broad, vague laws and administrative rules (Applying Principles, pp. 81-83).

Putting the word “democratic” in front of socialism does not make it a kinder, gentler Garden of Eden in which the lion lies down beside the lamb, nor does it make socialism more peaceful than Marx’s violent revolution. It just means democrats want to use the vote and discussion to abolish private property and establish Lenin’s post office, in increments by gradually moving the mixed economy to total control. In recent times, note how less gradual and more quickly this move seems to be occurring.

The problem with democratic socialism, as F. A. Hayek (chap. 10) and George Reisman (part I) have pointed out, is that the democrats’ policies require coercion to enforce. And because the policies violate some citizens’ rights for the favor and privilege of others, sooner or later the citizens whose rights are being violated start thinking about rebelling. Eventually they disobey the dictatorial edicts. To maintain control, the “lions” in the government will gladly sacrifice the lambs to their favor and privilege.

The worst in moral character, as Hayek demonstrated, rise to the top of government leadership because democrats lose their nerve to enforce coercive policies. Reisman, putting it more bluntly, says that armed robbery and murder become necessary to overcome the citizens’ armed resistance to coercive policies. The worst who have risen to the top gladly comply with this requirement. (Motivation? Envy and hatred.)

This is the time when society becomes rather inelegant or unpretty, you know, as in one-party rule, political imprisonment and executions, expropriation of property, and censorship—and often is followed up with gulags and concentration camps.

Democracy (Applying Principles, pp. 101-05) means unlimited majority rule, which is a form of dictatorship. A modest search of the US’s founding fathers will reveal a frequent use of the word “tyranny” in conjunction with democracy. That’s why they called our new nation a constitutional republic, the constitutional part including a bill of rights that restrains the majority. “Democracy” and “free society” only go together if the words “classical liberal” are its modifiers, as in classically liberal democracy.

The significance of the vote in modern history, as identified by Ludwig von Mises (sec. 8, chap. 1), is its use in the transition of leadership, i.e., the vote in place of guns, which means the avoidance of civil war.

The progressives are socialists through and through, though divided into two eras of American history. The early progressives (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13), from 1880s to about 1930, were educated by German professors who were democratic socialists. Back in the US, the progressives’ goal was to replace classical liberalism with the so-called social variety (social liberalism, Applying Principles, pp. 36-39) by establishing an administrative state, i.e., a large bureaucracy of “experts” voting in new laws and establishing regulatory rules to tame the alleged “capitalist beast.” In other words, to establish a mixed economy that would move steadily toward socialism.

The modern version of progressivism, from 1930 to the present, was initially explicit communism or socialism, at least until the mid 1950s. It was Nikita Khruschev’s leaked secret speech about Stalin that caused the leftists to hide behind the banner of progressivism, often dressed up as democracy. (A “soviet is an elected governmental council in a Communist country.”)

Communism and fascism, the final terms to mention, are both forms of socialism, and both decidedly leftist. Marx, Engels, and Lenin all considered communism a synonym of socialism. Fascism (Mussolini’s term) and Nazism (Hitler’s version) were systems that inherited industrial economies with large private sectors. The essence of fascism, as identified by Mises, is a nominal—in name only—private ownership of the means of production, with severe or total control and regulation by the government. Mises’ essentialization (chap. 7) makes it clear that fascism, as “socialism of the German pattern,” belongs on the left in the left-right continuum. It is only the manner of control that differs.

This means today’s mixed economies that have private property and private ownership of the means of production and are controlled and regulated by the government are fascistic. This includes present-day United States. The amount and severity of control pushes the country closer and closer to a de facto socialism.

Other issues associated with fascism, such as racism, militarism, intimidation of voters, concentration camps, and declarations of emergency powers, are either nonessential to the meaning of fascism or are shared with socialism. Not all fascist countries were racist, for one thing, and Hitler learned his tactics from Lenin and Stalin.

Where does this put the United States today? No matter what you call it, we are headed toward a communist-fascist-leftist democratic-socialist-progressive totalitarianism.

Keep in mind, as David Horowitz says (quoted in his website’s masthead), “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.”

And as Ludwig von Mises (p. 52) put it, “Every advocate of the welfare state and of planning is a potential dictator. What he plans is to deprive all other men of all their rights, and to establish his own and his friends’ unrestricted omnipotence.”


* The “right,” traditionally, has been said to be the home of fascistic, military dictatorships, and the notion can be traced to what is called right-Hegelianism and to the French Revolution. This designation is often meant to denigrate capitalism as fascistic and the accusation comes from the communist-socialist leftists.