The word fascism has become so widely used as a term of political condemnation that it often loses its analytical value. It is applied to nationalism, censorship, authoritarianism, political violence, and sometimes merely to policies someone considers objectionable. Although each may be associated with fascism, none alone is sufficient to define it.
The term did not originate merely as an accusation. Italian Fascists adopted the name for themselves and presented Fascism as an affirmative political ideology. Opponents soon used it pejoratively, especially as Fascist violence and dictatorship developed, but it continued to identify a recognizable movement, doctrine, and regime. Over time, its negative associations overwhelmed its original function as a political self-description, turning fascism into a generalized epithet applied far beyond its historical meaning.
Fascism did not present itself to adherents as a rejection of morality. It promised unity, dignity, belonging, and collective empowerment. That belonging was bounded: recognized members were incorporated into a common project, while those declared outside the legitimate community were denied equal standing. Adherents could therefore view themselves as participating in a moral cause even as individual standing became conditional upon membership and service.
The original 1919 Fascist program illustrates the ideological fluidity of the movement’s beginnings. It elevated the experience of the recently concluded war while proposing measures now commonly associated with progressive politics, including an eight-hour workday, minimum wages, worker participation in industrial management, nationalization of arms factories, and a progressive taxation on capital. It also endorsed women’s suffrage, proportional representation, and a constituent assembly. These commitments make it misleading to read the later one-party dictatorship backward as fully formed at Fascism’s inception.
Nevertheless, its political logic was already substantially collectivist, confrontational, and at odds with liberal individualism. Anti-pluralist impulses were evident in its hostility toward political compromise, institutional restraints, and the legitimacy of competing parties, even as it endorsed proportional representation and a constituent assembly. Yet these impulses coexisted with democratic commitments. Over the following several years, these tensions were resolved against liberalism and pluralism. Political violence became systematic, opponents were increasingly treated as enemies of the nation, and the movement’s claim to exclusive political authority hardened into one-party rule. By the end of 1926, opposition parties had been effectively outlawed and a one-party dictatorship established.
Fascism is therefore better understood through its distinctive anti-liberal political morality than through isolated policies or conventional labels such as conservative and progressive. It organizes politics around a moral hierarchy in which a supposedly unified people is treated as the supreme source of moral and political authority. Historically, that people has most often been understood as the nation, although it may also be defined through race, ethnicity, ancestry, or civilization and need not correspond to an existing state or its borders. The individual derives standing from membership in and service to that people, while the collective’s claimed identity and destiny take precedence over individual judgment and rights. Once this hierarchy is enforced through the suppression of pluralism, censorship can be recast as protection, conformity as solidarity, exclusion as preservation, and violence as collective self-defense.
The Individual as a Conditional Being
Liberalism begins with the individual as the primary bearer of rights and moral value. This does not mean that people have no responsibilities to their families, communities, or nations. It means that a person’s worth cannot be reduced entirely to membership in a group and that neither the state nor the collective possesses unlimited authority over individual conscience.
Fascism reverses this relationship. In The Doctrine of Fascism, published under Mussolini’s name and substantially shaped by Giovanni Gentile, the individual was recognized only insofar as the individual coincided with the state. They described the fascist state as encompassing the moral and intellectual life of the people and seeking to reshape human character and consciousness.
The distinction between subordination and subjugation helps clarify this process. To subordinate the individual is to place the individual below the collective within a hierarchy of moral and political value. To subjugate the individual is to bring that person under effective control, usually through coercive political or social power. Fascism begins with the moral subordination of the individual and, when fully institutionalized, culminates in the individual’s political subjugation.
This does not mean that fascism suppresses every form of individuality. Fascist movements frequently glorify exemplary individuals—soldiers, cultural figures, martyrs, movement activists, and political figures—when they are believed to embody the virtues or advance the destiny of the collective. Their individuality is celebrated conditionally: they may become exceptional in service to the collective and its perceived destiny but cannot legitimately stand apart from it.
At the apex of power, classical fascist movements have demonstrated a strong, though not universal, tendency to concentrate authority in a supreme leader. Where this occurs, the leader is presented not as an ordinary individual pursuing private interests, but as the authoritative interpreter or embodiment of the collective will. The resulting paradox is that an ideology subordinating individual autonomy can grant one person nearly unrestricted political discretion because the leader’s judgment is treated as indistinguishable from the will of the people.
No single characteristic, including the concentration of authority in a supreme leader, is sufficient to make a movement fascist. Censorship, political violence, racial prejudice, leader worship, mass mobilization, and state control have appeared under many different political systems. Fascism is more accurately identified through the convergence and institutionalization of several features: a conception of the people as a unified whole, the moral subordination of the individual, hostility toward pluralism, political and social hierarchy, centralized leadership, coercive mobilization, and the enforcement of collective unity. A movement may exhibit fascistic tendencies without becoming fully fascist, but that description becomes more warranted as these features reinforce one another and extend across political, cultural, and civic life.
Violence, Confrontation, and Coercive Mobilization
Fascism’s relationship with violence extends beyond the instrumental use of force. Governments of every kind sometimes employ coercion, although liberal orders ordinarily justify it as a limited necessity required to enforce the law, preserve order, or defend the population. Historical fascist movements, however, frequently assigned a positive moral value to organized struggle and confrontation. Political conflict was portrayed not merely as a means of obtaining power but as a test of loyalty and a way of forging collective unity.
At its most revealing, fascist violence can become a celebration of violence against those whom the collective has declared unworthy. Once individuals are classified as traitors, contaminants, degenerates, or enemies of the people, their rights no longer carry independent moral weight. Violence against them can then be presented not as cruelty but as courage, necessary defense, or an assertion of the collective will. The victim’s alleged unworthiness converts brutality into virtue, while participation in or approval of that brutality becomes a demonstration of loyalty. In this sense, fascist violence is not incidental to the subjugation of the individual; it is one of its clearest embodiments.
Political violence also played a practical role in the rise of historical fascist movements. Italian Blackshirts and Nazi Stormtroopers assaulted political opponents, disrupted meetings and speeches, intimidated voters, and used organized force to prevent opposition movements from campaigning and operating freely. These actions did more than influence political competition; they progressively deprived opponents of the ability to compete. They also created solidarity and complicity among participants while helping to normalize intimidation as an accepted instrument of politics.
This violence formed part of a broader system of coercive mobilization. A conventional authoritarian government may principally demand obedience and political passivity. Fascism instead seeks active and visible participation through rallies and public rituals. The individual is expected not merely to obey but to demonstrate loyalty and participate in the collective struggle.
Such participation should not be confused with individual agency or democratic engagement. Fascist mobilization does not permit autonomous individuals and independent institutions to pursue competing political visions. It directs activity toward a collective purpose already defined by the movement. The population is mobilized, but only within approved organizations and toward approved ends; refusal to participate can itself become evidence of disloyalty. Fascism can therefore generate intense political activity while simultaneously extinguishing meaningful political freedom.
Violence alone does not make a movement fascist. Revolutionary, religious, nationalist, and authoritarian movements of many kinds have employed or glorified force. The more specifically fascist pattern arises when political violence and coercive mobilization are joined to a conception of the people as possessing a unified identity and destiny, moral subordination of the individual, hostility toward pluralism, enforced unity, hierarchy, and the identification of internal enemies. Under those conditions, violence becomes not merely a tool of political power but an expression of the collective’s supposed right to impose its will.
Liberalism and Pluralism
Fascism is fundamentally anti-liberal because liberalism denies that any collective possesses an unquestionable monopoly over moral and political truth. Liberalism is a broad tradition containing substantial internal disagreements, but its principal commitments include individual rights, limited political authority, freedom of conscience, open competition, and pluralism.
Pluralism is the principle that different beliefs, political movements, cultural communities, and independent institutions may coexist within the same society without any one of them claiming exclusive authority over every part of life. It does not require believing that every idea is equally true or every practice equally acceptable. It requires recognizing disagreement as a permanent and legitimate feature of a free society.
Liberalism does not deny the importance of groups. Individuals form families, religions, communities, businesses, unions, political parties, and cultural organizations through which they pursue shared purposes. The liberal distinction is that these associations do not entirely define the individual or automatically extinguish individual rights. A person remains more than a representative of a race, class, sex, religion, or political faction.
Fascism is anti-pluralist because it treats competing sources of identity and authority as obstacles to collective unity. Independent institutions may continue to exist, but their independence becomes conditional upon their service to the collective project. Those that refuse alignment are portrayed not as legitimate alternatives but as sources of division, contamination, or corruption.
James Madison articulated an early pluralist response to this problem in Federalist No. 10. He recognized that differences in belief, interest, ability, and property would inevitably produce competing factions. Eliminating those differences would require either destroying liberty or forcing people to possess the same opinions and interests. His solution was not to manufacture a unified public will, but to establish a system in which multiple interests would restrain one another.
Competition and Human Progress
Competition forms an important part of this liberal arrangement, although it should not be treated as an unqualified good. It can encourage innovation, experimentation, and accountability, but it can also produce deception, short-term thinking, and monopoly. Whether competition generates progress depends heavily upon the rules under which it operates.
The stronger liberal claim is that well-ordered competition is one of the most reliable mechanisms for discovering better alternatives and correcting error. Competition among businesses can produce innovation, competition among political parties can prevent permanent rule, competition among institutions can limit concentrated authority, and competition among ideas can expose weaknesses that a dominant consensus might otherwise conceal.
Competition and cooperation are not necessarily opposites. Scientific progress depends upon researchers competing over explanations and recognition while cooperating through shared standards, evidence, institutions, and accumulated knowledge. Markets similarly require legal rules, enforceable contracts, reliable information, and restrictions against fraud and coercion.
The liberal value of competition lies partly in its resistance to monopoly. It denies any single institution the permanent authority to determine in advance which product, policy, belief, or social arrangement must prevail. Although particular forms of competition can undermine progress, competition conducted within fair and stable rules has generally proved a powerful engine of adaptation and improvement.
Fascism is not necessarily hostile to every form of competition. A fascist system may preserve limited economic rivalry, reward individual achievement, or encourage competition among subordinate officials and institutions. What it cannot accept is autonomous and open-ended competition whose outcome might displace the movement, divide the collective, or challenge its claimed authority. Political parties cannot be permitted to compete for power, independent institutions cannot remain free to obstruct the collective project, and individuals cannot openly advocate ideas that call the movement’s fundamental claims into question.
Competition therefore becomes conditional upon political usefulness. Private enterprises may compete so long as their activities remain subordinate to collective objectives, while officials may compete for authority or recognition within the established hierarchy.
Freedom of Speech and the Individual Voice
Freedom of speech occupies a foundational position within a liberal order because it protects the individual’s ability to challenge collective judgment. It gives each person a voice that does not depend upon prior approval from the majority, the state, or an officially recognized group. Through speech, individuals can question the prevailing moral order, expose institutional failures, dispute accepted accounts of reality, and propose alternatives.
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty connected freedom of discussion with the fallibility of human judgment. A silenced opinion might be true, partly true, or mistaken in a way that forces accepted beliefs to be defended and better understood. Suppression assumes that those exercising power possess a degree of certainty that human beings rarely possess.
Freedom of speech can therefore be understood as a protective right through which many other rights are defended. A person who cannot speak cannot publicly identify an injustice, persuade others, challenge the government’s explanation, or organize resistance. Censorship also isolates individuals by preventing them from discovering that others share their doubts.
This does not mean that every act of speech is truthful, moral, or harmless. People can use speech to humiliate, deceive, threaten, intimidate, or deliberately injure another person’s reputation. Horrible speech does not elevate the speaker morally. Protecting the right to speak instead recognizes that a person’s voice cannot be extinguished merely because others condemn its content.
The difficult question is who decides which speech is sufficiently harmful to suppress. Even liberal legal systems draw boundaries around threats, fraud, defamation, perjury, coercion, and incitement because words can become part of a direct violation of another person’s rights. The liberal response is not to pretend that no boundaries exist, but to constrain the power to draw them.
A strongly speech-protective liberal tradition, especially the American tradition, begins with a presumption against viewpoint-based suppression. Restrictions should be narrow, established in advance, connected to demonstrable harm, and applied without regard to political viewpoint. The government should bear the burden of justification, those whose speech is restricted should receive due process and independent review, and counter-speech should ordinarily be preferred to prohibition. The greatest danger arises when harmful speech expands from threats, fraud, or coercion into ideas said to injure the collective’s dignity, unity, or moral order.
The American First Amendment reflects the connection between expression and pluralism by protecting speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition together. These freedoms allow individuals to find one another, form associations, and create institutions outside direct state control. They establish alternative centers of authority from which the government and prevailing culture can be challenged.
Fascism is structurally hostile to this arrangement. If the collective is believed to possess a unified will and shared destiny, speech challenging that unity cannot remain merely a different opinion. It becomes disloyalty, contamination, misinformation, or sabotage. The decisive question is no longer whether individuals possess an equal right to speak, but whether their viewpoint advances the collective project. Speech affirming the movement may be encouraged and amplified, while speech challenging the same institutions, identities, or policies is suppressed. Protection consequently ceases to belong equally to individuals and becomes a privilege distributed according to political usefulness.
Viewpoint suppression is therefore accompanied by compelled orthodoxy. Fascism does not merely seek the absence of dissent; it demands visible affirmation through political rituals, public institutions, education, media, art, and organized participation. Even silence can become suspect when loyalty must be demonstrated. The individual is deprived not only of the right to express an independent judgment but also of the right to withhold assent. In this respect, the control of speech becomes one of the clearest mechanisms by which the collective subjugates the individual.
Addendum
In contemporary American politics, the accusation of fascism is frequently directed at conservatives and Republicans. My own experience complicates that narrative. During the seven years I lived in Washington, D.C., I encountered tendencies in progressive political culture that struck me as increasingly hostile to liberal individualism and pluralism. Group identity often took precedence over individual judgment, contested claims were too readily labeled misinformation, and disagreement with prevailing views was hastily dismissed as ignorance.
Over the past decade, many progressive activists and institutions have become aggressively confrontational attempting to prevent speakers from appearing, disrupting meetings, pressuring organizations to withdraw invitations, and treating certain disputed propositions as too dangerous or immoral to be heard. Protest and counter-speech are themselves exercises of liberal freedom. The anti-pluralist boundary is crossed when the objective is no longer to answer an opposing viewpoint but to prevent others from expressing it, hearing it, or associating with those who hold it.
I would nevertheless resist declaring that “the left is fascist.” The left is not a single movement possessing one doctrine, and practices resembling fascism do not by themselves establish the presence of fascism. It is more precise to identify particular conduct as collectivist, censorious, moralistic, or anti-pluralist.
A free society depends upon a culture willing to distinguish a person from a category, embrace nuance and disagreement, and resist quasi-religious certainty. Viewpoint diversity is valuable not because every viewpoint is true, but because disagreement exposes assumptions, reveals errors, and prevents temporary consensus from hardening into orthodoxy. It requires enough intellectual humility to ask ourselves: “What if we are wrong?” Because humility is the sunlight for intelligence and reasoning.