“To the barricades,” the soon-to-be founder of the Italian Empire heroically thundered, waving his rifle, but no one appeared to attack them. “The barricades were beehives and bedlam,” American reporter George Seldes laconically recorded. “But on the other side, there was nothing but sunshine and dead quiet…The police kept away, the enemy kept away.” True, one shot did graze Benito Mussolini’s ear, only just missing his head. Even pro-fascist newspaper editor Margharita Sarfatti, though, admitted it had been fired from behind by an over-excited supporter.
As former United States President Donald Trump’s election campaign reached its bizarre climax—a rally in New York punctuated by crude racist comments and even a lewd oral sex joke about Vice-President Kamala Harris—some around the world have been struggling to understand if the man who could become America’s next leader is best understood as a fascist or a clown.
True, the moral clucking over Trump’s language might be overblown. Literature students, after all, learn early on that talking dirty is a well-established part of the high canon, from classical Sanskrit poetry to Turkish erotic literature to Geoffrey Chaucer’s sexually and scatologically scandalous The Canterbury Tales.
Less easy to laugh away, though, is the charge of fascism. Trump’s own chief of staff, General John Kelly, after all, has alleged the former President thought Adolf Hitler “did some good things”. Trump’s relationships with white supremacists, his undisguised racism, and his alliance with extremist Evangelism — all make Kelly’s claims hard to dismiss.
Facilitated by the helpful retreat of Italy’s Generals into their barracks and some gentle assistance from the country’s anti-Communist establishment, Il Duce’s stormtroopers seized power in the autumn of 1922. To many contemporary observers, like the author Israel Zangwill, the coup appeared to resemble comic opera more closely than tragedy.
The Duce did succeed in establishing itself in Italy less than a decade after that farce, though, reordering not just the country’s political life but also its social life and culture. Few poorly aimed shots have been quite so historically consequential—until, possibly, now.
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A religious experience
Like post-Enlightenment Europe, America has been the site of rapid secularisation. Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, the secularisation of American society has accelerated. Two years ago, for the first time, less than half of Americans said they were members of a church, synagogue, or mosque, down from 50 per cent in 2018 and 70 per cent in 1999. Americans are more likely than Europeans to believe in some form of God. This is a profound change: From its earliest years, scholars like Mark Edwards have argued, the American republic saw itself as an instrument of God’s will.
Today, journalist TM Brown reports, abandoned churches litter the American heartland. Some have been converted into private homes, and others into recreation centres, schools, and daycare facilities.
Even to contemporaries, it seemed evident that fascism in Italy cast itself as new faith. Fascism, philosopher HW Schneider observed in 1929, “has the rudiments of a new religion”. “There can be no doubt that already this new cult has taken some hold of the Italians’ heart and imagination.” Likewise, the great historian of fascism, George Mosse, wrote in 1966 that it “was a new religion (not afraid to use traditional religious symbols) and gave its followers a feeling of transcendence”.
Traditional religion, historian Walter Adamson observes, was by no means under threat when fascism rose in the 1920s. The processes of industrialisation, the rise of the political Left, and dramatic changes in social mores, though, all contributed to an urge for a new kind of culture. The formation of the Italian State in 1861 had been brought about by diplomatic manoeuvre rather than mass politics, Adamson points out. Thus, having made Italy, a new culture was needed to make Italians.
In 1932, historian Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi writes, the fascist regime put up an exhibition hailing its martyrs, modelled closely on a Sacrario, or chapel containing holy relics. Every party branch also kept a shrine where the memory of the dead rested.
Historian Emiolo Gentile argues that fascism, like Nazism in Germany, created an entire system of rituals, myths, and beliefs that installed the state and the nation as objects of worship. Fascism drew deep into both the country’s Catholic heritage and the values of its 19th-century nationalist movement to abolish the distinction between religion and politics.
The art of fascism
Terrified by the thunder rolling behind her son’s locked door, so Seldes claimed, little Mussolini’s mother became worried: “Are you mad, my son? Only lunatics talk to themselves.” “Do not worry, dear mother,” he replied, “I was practising oratory.” To the grown man, speech-making held the keys to power. “The sculptor sometimes breaks the marble out of rage because it does not precisely mould in his hands according to his vision,” Mussolini told German journalist Emile Ludwig. “Everything depends on that, to dominate the masses as an artist.”
Lewd demagoguery of the kind delivered by Trump—witness his surprising disquisition on a former golf legend’s penis size, delivered apropos of nothing in particular—might not seem to qualify him as a skilled orator, but there’s little doubt it resonates with his audience. The former President, linguist George Laskoff, has observed that he uses a large number of common salespersons’ confidence-building tricks.
This playbook was also used by media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, the politician who brought Right-wing populism to centre stage in the West. Four times Prime Minister of Italy, Berlusconi successfully manipulated aesthetics—using advertising professionals to drive media myth-making and cosmetic surgeons to hide his age—to build an audience, political scientist Paulo Mancini notes. Forza Italia, his coalition, successfully united middle-class anger against discredited élites with working-class rage over deindustrialisation and migration.
Like Trump and Berlusconi, Mussolini was a psychologically complex character. The dictator’s father, blacksmith Alessandro Mussolini, believed the belt was an excellent pedagogical tool. Trump’s father, his niece and psychologist Mary Trump has written, was a “high-functioning sociopath” who revelled in bullying, racism, and sexism.
For all three women, the conquest of women was critical to their image-building. Trump openly womanised, by his own account, because he believed he would never run for office. Fuelled by the German aphrodisiac pill Hormovin, the journalist Roberto Olla tells us that Il Duce used his brutish sexual encounters with several hundred women as a tool for image-building. For his part, Berlusconi engaged—less than discreetly—in drug-fuelled orgies.
There’s some reason to believe that unresolved psychological issues underpinned these behaviours. The Duce’s first serious girlfriend, Rachele Guidi, with whom he moved to Milan and had a child, was the daughter of his own father’s lover.
Left-wing totalitarian rulers of the same period—among them, the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin—kept their private life jealously guarded, it is interesting to note. There is little evidence, moreover, that oratorial skill or performance for their audience was an important part of their arsenal.
The path to disillusion
Even though Mussolini seduced millions, he delivered little. The trains, famously, did not run on time: Bergen Evans, who served as a Franco-Belgique Tours Company guide in the summer of 1930, famously wrote he was “make an affidavit to the effect that most Italian trains on which he travelled were not on schedule—or near it.” Though some significant public investments made in infrastructure appeared during the dictator’s rule, most had been begun before 1922.
Fascist rule saw Italy demonstrate healthy GDP growth early on, data shows, but promises to usher in a new kind of corporate state built on the twin pillars of privatisation and welfarism were unrealised. The 1930s saw GPD growth fall to levels worse than under liberal Prime Minister Giovanni Giotti, Mussolini’s predecessor.
Likewise, journalist Daniel Verdu reminds us that Berlusconi’s promise to Make Italy Great Again ushered in a decade where GDP contracted by 3.1 per cent, consumption fell, and debt grew. For its part, the numbers show, Trump’s economic record fell very far short of the hype.
There is no arguing with a religious experience, though, which is what Trump—continuing in the long tradition of Right-wing populism—offers his supporters. America’s political institutions are nowhere near as weak as those of pre-fascist Italy, lowering chances of an implosion. The truth, however, is that Trump’s rise has meant a hollowing out of both the culture and unstated social agreement on which all democracy rests. Even if Trump loses this coming election, repairing that damage will be a long, difficult challenge.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)
Trump is the bad guy in a good party. Even if he has his character flaws , he is miles better than Kamala in taking the right decisions.
Well, Trump is neither fascist nor a clown.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Mr. Praveen Swami. Mr. Swami, most certainly, is a clown.
It’s weird that Praveen Swami, a strategic affairs and security analyst, should focus on Trump and try his level best to portray him as some kind of danger to American democracy. His personal dislike for Trump has resulted in this pompous, rather flatulent, article. One wonders why The Print would lend itself to such personal opinion pieces which are less about “opinion” and more about character assassination.