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Beyond the Liberal Narrative: Rethinking Anti-Fascism and Mass Society
Ishay Landa
In the last decade we have witnessed a renewed outbreak of far-right radicalism all over the
world, which in some cases seems to fit the label, even, of neo-fascism. In Germany and the
United States, Israel and Brazil, Hungary and India, to name just a few notable examples,
narrowly nationalistic, xenophobic, and unabashedly authoritarian political parties have
significantly increased their power. These electoral successes seem to vindicate the old liberal
admonitions about mass democracy as a hotbed of dictatorships. As Hannah Arendt famously
contended in the aftermath of World War II, modern totalitarianism was predicated on “the
rise of the mass man and the coming of a mass age.” She directed her readers’ attention to
“the wisdom, so familiar to the ancients, of the affinity between democracy and dictatorship,
between mob rule and tyranny,” an affinity that accounts for “the emergence of demagogues,
for gullibility, superstition, and brutality.”1 The conclusions drawn from this classic matrix is
that anti-fascism must perforce be wary of the masses as a political agent. If tyranny is to be
averted, ways must be devised to keep the political domain sheltered as far as possible from
mass pressures.
Liberalism’s Authoritarian Underbelly
Fascism is habitually presented by mainstream commentators as a fierce populist onslaught
on “liberal democracy,” a concept that implies a harmonious relationship between its two
components—liberalism and democracy—almost an identity between them. Historically,
however, this is a highly tenuous notion, since classical liberals were never particularly keen
about democracy. Liberalism, as it emerged toward the end of the 17th century and continued
to evolve until the end of the 19th century, contained in fact a strong exclusionary and
antidemocratic tendency. While such a tension is not totally ignored by scholars and in
political commentary, it is usually construed in such a way as to flatter the liberal
antidemocratic sensibility, making it appear fairly compelling: mass democracy is said to
open up the danger of “the tyranny of the majority,” whereby a religious, ethnic, or cultural
majority can suppress minorities, denying them their basic rights and liberties. In view of this
peril, liberalism emerges less as a companion of democracy and more as its responsible, adult
1
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1960), 316.
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custodian. Conversely, the people are seen as a minor: they are not sufficiently educated,
impartial, or rational to manage the affairs of the nation. This is the common view of the
people as a mass: illiterate, sentimental, brutal, prone to be swayed by demagogues. The
responsible adult is thus an elite, a more or less small group whose responsibility it is to make
sure that democracy remains liberal rather than degenerate into demagoguery and populism.
What this account usually obscures is the antidemocratic interest of the liberal elite itself. The
elite, one might say, is thought of as a referee in a soccer match, whose role is to prevent the
players from running wild, protecting brilliant little magicians such as Lionel Messi from
clumsier but stronger physical bullies and ensuring that the game is not decided by brute force
(dictatorship) and does not fall into chaos (anarchy). It is assumed that the referee has no
vested interest in the outcome of the match; yet the liberal referee was himself, and so he
remains, a player in the match, with a clear interest in its result. This is a fact that the liberals
did not entirely conceal, at least to begin with. Their interest was expressly that of protecting
their wealth and ensuring that their property is not encroached upon by either the king, from
above, or the propertyless demos, from below. This is evident already in the theories of the
central thinker of classical liberalism, John Locke, who was a very rich person. Locke’s
political theory was centered on the sanctity of private property, fending off any attempt to tax
the wealthy and even justifying their violent resistance in cases this could not be otherwise
averted. This meant that liberals were mostly opposed to expanding democratic franchise
beyond the fairly limited circles of property owners, so that in Europe democracy had
expanded throughout the 19th century mostly in opposition to liberalism, especially after the
big bourgeoisie obtained the right to vote, following the French Revolution of 1789.
It is vital to bear in mind that this opposition to “pure democracy,” in which the majority of
the poor can effectively mobilize against the affluent minority, remained a staple of fascism,
too. The idea that the best way to keep fascism at bay is to curtail the influence of the masses
makes for a marked historical irony: for curtailing mass influence was a primary goal of
fascism. Contrary to the common view of fascism as driven by the frenzied masses—a view
to whose wide proliferation liberal historiography has diligently contributed—fascists saw
themselves as providing the ultimate cure to mass unrest. The fascists were strongly opposed
to the masses and, with remarkably few exceptions, conceived of their task as one of
eliminating mass power and transforming the threatening masses into other, presumably
superior and benign, collective forms, notable among them “the people,” “the nation,” “the
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race,” or “the community.” Massification they associated with an array of attributes and
developments that were seen as deeply pernicious: democratization, greater equality, the
emancipation of women, formation of unions, urbanization, social subversion and
disobedience, the spread of lurid and sensationalist mass culture, internationalism, the pursuit
of peace and comfort, and so on and so forth. The people/nation/race, by contrast, were seen
as hierarchically ordered, rooted in the soil, obedient, respectful of tradition and of leadership,
firmly nationalistic in their allegiances, and willing to make sacrifices, et cetera.
Fascism framed its mission very much in terms of delivering the nation from mass politics,
rescuing the state from the grip of democratic and socialist demagogues, and placing it in the
hands of responsible leaders who would no longer be at the beck and call of a foolhardy and
unruly populace. Only by reinstating social hierarchy, resubordinating the masses, and
quelling their revolt could the urgent task of national regeneration resume its course.
Examined anew, interwar fascism thus emerges as the culmination of an effort on the part of
the upper-class élites and their middle-class allies to subdue mass politics and its broader
social, cultural, and economic implications. Let us listen to the founder of fascism: in an
important article published some eight months before the March on Rome in the fascist organ
tellingly titled Gerarchia—hierarchy—Benito Mussolini tolled the death knell of the
democratic age of mass predominance:
The century of antidemocracy commences. ... Capitalism may have needed democracy
in the 19th century: today, it can do without it. ... The orgy of indiscipline is at an end,
the enthusiasm over the social and democratic myths is finished. Life turns to the
individual. ... Gray and anonymous democratic egalitarianism, which had banished all
color and leveled down all personality, is about to pass away. New aristocracies come
forward, now that it has been demonstrated that the masses cannot be the protagonists
of history, only its instruments.2
The case was no different with German fascism, which was equally committed to dethroning
the masses. This is how Hermann Rauschning explained the reasons that he and other
conservatives initially supported National Socialism:
There was also the phenomenon of the masses. How was it to be got rid of, as a
political force and a menace to any pollical order? We hoped for help from Nazism in
2
Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia (Florence: La Fenice, 1958), 18:71.
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this. We proceeded from the reflection that the masses ... must be made non-political
by a mass movement. They must, so to speak, “come into power” in a mass movement
and then ... give themselves a new form, in which they are no longer masses but an
articulated, ordered community with a political function, though a restricted one.3
This passage nicely encapsulates the fascist aspiration to move from the mass to an allegedly
superior X, some other collective entity; to engage in mass politics, by all means, but only in
order to abolish the mass.4
The opposition to mass politics is thus a joint feature of both liberalism (in some of its
variants, at least) and fascism. This makes for the curious paradox that indictments of
majority rule can be found across the fascist-liberal divide, which proves a surprisingly blurry
one. Consider the following, textbook formulation of the “tyranny of the majority” trope:
Furthermore, the practice of majority rule provides the basis for the worst sort of
tyranny. ... [N]o limit can be set to the majority’s power, or even to its right, to coerce
the minority. ... Indeed, it is this that makes democracy so superb a schooling for the
dictatorship to which it always succumbs. The would-be tyrant has but to win a mass
following, and the people will both accept and assist his most ruthless elimination of
his opponents.
Could the liberal case against the fascism gestating in mass democracy have found a clearer
expression? Yet the author is no liberal but a fascist, indeed could be described as a neo-Nazi
of a quite ultraist nature: the American white supremacist, Nazi apologist, and Holocaust
denier, William Gayley Simpson.5
This is not an isolated case of convergence between the supposed opposites of liberalism and
fascism.6 Given their shared desire to see the power of the masses curbed, it is not surprising
that many notable liberals espoused dictatorial regimes, up to and including fascist ones.
3
Hermann Rauschning, Make and Break with the Nazis (London: The Right Book Club, 1942), 181 (emphasis
added).
4
For many more examples of the fascist enmity to the masses and a detailed exploration of this theme, see Ishay
Landa, Fascism and the Masses: The Revolt Against the Last Humans, 1848–1945 (New York, London:
Routledge, 2018).
5
William Gayley Simpson, Which Way Western Man? (William and Harriet Simpson Estate, 1978, digitalized
PDF file), pp. 193–94.
6
For a book-length exploration of the elective affinities between fascism and liberalism, see Ishay Landa, The
Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2010).
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Thus, the two beacons of 20th-century free-market purism, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich
von Hayek, condoned far-right dictatorships (Italian fascism and Augusto Pinochet’s regime
respectively) and quite recently The Economist could tweet that “Jair Bolsonaro is a
dangerous populist, with some good ideas.”7 By the same token, it should not shock us that
many fascists have seen their political affiliation as a culmination of liberalism, purged of its
servility to the masses. Thus Giovanni Gentile, the court philosopher of Italian fascism,
argued that Mussolini was the genuine interpreter of “liberalism as I understand it and as the
men of the glorious right who led Italy in the Risorgimento understood it.”8
Exposing the authoritarian underbelly of the liberal opposition to mass democracy, it is
important to clarify, is not meant to reduce democracy to the principle of “majority rule” or to
dismiss the vital importance of minority rights, of legal restraints on the power of the
executive, and of other mechanisms devised to offset the abuses and caprices of those in
power. Historically, liberalism has played an important part in conceiving such diverse
“checks and balances,” which—whatever specific amendments and modifications they may
require—remain crucial for the functioning of any genuine democracy. But a historical
account also allows us to see how these very same laws, rules, and mechanisms have become
a hindrance for liberals themselves, as they often moved from an early defense of liberties vis-
à-vis absolute monarchs, to a curtailing of liberties vis-à-vis the masses. There is thus a need
to conceptually uncouple so-called liberal rules—many of which remain indispensable—from
liberal political agents, such as liberal parties, politicians, ideologues, or constituencies.
Liberal political agents often prove themselves poor defenders of liberal rules, precisely
because the latter turn against them and imperil their socioeconomic prerogatives. To avoid
this terminological confusion, these should therefore be called simply “democratic rules.”
Fascism and the Challenge of Mass Society
To extricate the masses from their perennial association with fascism is to move beyond the
liberal narrative and its ingrained suspicion of the masses. This conceptual shift allows us to
consider the possibility that “mass society” may actually represent a very high stage in the
evolution of human civilization. Far from being the nadir of human history—“The mass is the
7
The Economist on Twitter, January 3, 2019, 10:27 a.m.
8
Gentile in a letter to Mussolini, as quoted in Alastair Hamilton, The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals
and Fascism. 1919–1945 (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 42.
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end, the radical nothing,” avowed Oswald Spengler9—mass society emerges as the
culmination of modernity, as understood by Ulrich Beck, or of the civilizing process
conceptualized by Norbert Elias: a society characterized, considered from a bird’s-eye view
and in the longue durée of its formation, by destabilization of traditional hierarchies,
increasing social inclusion, growing equality, and expanding democracy.
Yet for such an alternative view to inform a new kind of anti-fascism, hopefully capable of
more vigorously resisting the new right that increasingly flaunts its alleged “populism,” the
left would have to reconsider its own deeply entrenched mistrust of the masses. It turns out
that the left is often a weak defender of modernity, which it tends to reduce to capitalism. For
all its capitalist linkages and affinities, fascism should not be seen as a procapitalist force pure
and simple—in truth there is nothing “pure and simple” about capitalism itself. Here Karl
Marx’s dialectical analysis of capitalism can be of great help, ultimately having strong
implications for our understanding of fascism. As analyzed by Marx, capitalism is an
extremely discordant mode of production, containing vectors running in disparate and
sometimes opposite directions. That is why he referred to capital as “the living contradiction”
and “the moving contradiction.”10 While his denunciation of capital’s barbaric aspects—such
as ruthless competition, exploitation, inequalities, class hierarchy, or militarism—is well
known, one tends to forget that he often called attention to capital’s “civilizing aspects,”
civilizing mission, or historic mission. While Marx should by no means be seen as a
protoaccelerationist, irrationally celebrating production for production’s sake or condoning
the destruction entailed by the compulsive accumulation of capital, he nonetheless
acknowledged the progressive tendencies and emancipatory potentialities of capitalism, such
as the socialization of labor, the increase in cultural democratization, or the expansion of
needs and of mass consumption, et cetera. He also acknowledged the fact that capitalism
opens up the possibility, perhaps inevitability, of its self-abolition. All of these elements were
highly distasteful for most fascists, who resented the materialism and hedonism of capitalist
societies and obviously were deeply concerned that capitalism might be transcended
altogether.
9
Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (Munich:
DTV, 1999), 1004.
10
Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1993), 706, 421.
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Fascists were opposed to specific attributes and manifestations of capitalism even as they
wished for the system in its totality to endure. This explains why many fascists considered
Marxism and capitalism as somehow related. Take the case of the Spanish fascist José
Antonio Primo de Rivera, aristocratic founder and leader of the Falange Española. Writing in
1935, José Antonio expressed his conviction that capitalism was heading toward realizing
Marx’s transformative project:
Notice well that ... that we are anti-Marxists because we are terrified ... of being an
inferior animal in an ant nest. And we are terrified by it because capitalism gives us a
hint of such a condition; capitalism, too, is internationalist and materialist. That is why
we want neither the one nor the other; that is why we wish to avert—since we believe
in their accuracy—the realization of Marx’s prophecies.11
Capitalism and Marxism were thus seen as deeply related phenomena, jointly leading to the
same egalitarian, massified and soulless condition. The fascist goal, correspondingly, was to
save capitalism from itself: create a capitalism shorn of what Marx referred to as the
“civilizing aspects” of capital, leaving in place only the barbaric elements and drives, indeed
distilling and intensifying them. Fascism, one might say, justified capitalism on account of its
barbarism. That is, it embraced a tragic-heroic conception of capitalism’s history and
dismissed the notion that pain, suffering, exploitation, and war can ever be transcended.
Examining fascism—both in its classical forms and its current reincarnations—tells us
something important about modern society and history. Yet fascism was, and remains, not
simply an indication of the failures of that society and its inherent dangers. It equally
underlines the strengths, the achievements, and the values of the social order it is striving to
supersede: namely, mass society. A reaction by its very nature, fascism flags these
achievements, such as the expanding rights of LGBT people, the discursive restraints placed
by “political correctness” on racism and bigotry, the democratization of culture, or the broad
anti-racist consensus that has taken hold in the post–World War II era. The far right furiously
reacts to all these progressive conquests of modernity and goads its supporters to assault and
abolish them. By doing so it indicates the battle line to its would-be opponents, telling them
what is at stake and what they should be defending. Unfortunately, however, anti-fascists are
11
José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Escritos y Discursos: Obras Completas (1922–1936), ed. Agustin del Río
Cisneros (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1976 [digitalized file, 2004]), 484–85.
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not always sufficiently aware of the flags placed by fascism; what is worse, some of these
flags are overlooked not because of any ambiguity in the fascist discourse, but because of the
hesitations and blind spots of the progressive outlook.
The most salient case in point is the notion of the masses. If indeed the final nemesis of
fascism was “mass-man,” then it is a good idea to rally to this human specimen and offer her
some relief. The best way to preempt fascism, contrary to common wisdom, would be not to
restrain massification but to unleash it, not to embrace paternalism but to create a society that
is truly, and for the first time, governed by the masses.
Anti-fascism would be well advised, therefore, to shield modernity from those who are
determined to run it into the ground, to point to its fundamental achievements, no matter how
incomplete and constrained they must remain under capitalism. Yet instead of defending mass
society from its right-wing detractors, the left recurrently echoes the latter’s concerns: few
convictions are more central to the worldview of the far right than the harangues against
“decadence,” the conviction that modernity signifies the very reverse of progress: a steep
decline in the vigor of the nation or the race. Yet the left, too, tends to debunk progress as a
vacuous myth and, often under the aegis of such intellectual heroes of the right as Friedrich
Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, assumes an elitist and judgmental position vis-à-vis the
masses, whereby mass culture and mass consumption are undialectically decried.12 All this
strangely confirms the conservative diagnosis.
Let us look very briefly at one of the classical anathemas of left-wing cultural analysis:
consumerism. Few tropes are more deeply ingrained in left-wing discourse than the complaint
against the materialistic and hedonist frenzy unleashed by capitalism, resulting in the
widespread conviction that socialist criticism must take a resolute stand against the insidious
ethical, political, aesthetic, and environmental implications of consumerism. This critique is
not leveled at capitalism alone but often also at fascism, which is likewise construed as a pro-
consumerist force. For instance, in the introduction to a book on Japanese fascism, the
anthropologist Marilyn Ivy, subscribing to Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s
12
For two studies exploring the paradoxical embrace of Nietzsche and Heidegger by many left-wing
intellectuals see Geoff Waite, Nietzsche’s Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular
Technoculture of Everyday Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996) and, more recently, Ronald Beiner,
Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
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analysis of the culture industry, wrote about “the virtual fascism of the consumer.”13 Such
criticism appears oblivious of the fact that fascism and Nazism were themselves steeped in
anti-consumerism. Consider the following critique of the way “the frantic circulation of
capital” induces false new needs in the masses “so that consumption may increase”:
Modern civilization has pushed man onward; it has generated in him the need for an
increasingly greater number of things; it has made him more and more insufficient to
himself and powerless. Thus, every new invention and technological discovery, rather
than a conquest, really represents a defeat and a new whiplash in an ever faster race
blindly taking place within a system of conditionings that are increasingly serious and
irreversible and that for the most part go unnoticed.
Appearances to the contrary, this anti-consumerist lamentation was not written by
Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, or Herbert Marcuse, but by Julius Evola,14 one of the most
extreme far-right ideologues of the 20th century, aptly described by Roger Griffin as “a
vociferous pro-Nazi fascist.”15 This posture continues to characterize far-right ideology to the
present day. As Götz Kubitschek, one of the leading figures of the German Neue Rechte,
explained to an American interviewer:
You had only to go to the shopping center on a Saturday morning, [Kubitschek] once
told me, and observe people in their “consumption temple” to see how there is
“nothing at all there, spiritually.” For Kubitschek and other New Right thinkers,
[American-style materialism] is perhaps the most corrosive force eating away at the
identity of the Volk, replacing a sense of “we” with individualism and profit-seeking
self-interest.16
To some readers,the proposition contained in these pages for a recalibrated anti-fascism might
seem questionable: why should we endorse the mass, rather than realize that the goal is
precisely to transform the masses into a class? One might argue that if the aim of the right
13
Marilyn Ivy, “Foreword,” in The Culture of Japanese Fascism, ed. Alan Tansman (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2009), x.
14
Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1995), 335–36.
15
Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke
and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 39.
16
James Angelos, “The Prophet of Germany’s New Right,” New York Times, October 10, 2017,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/magazine/the-prophet-of-germanys-new-right.html.
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was to transform the mass into a nation, people, or ethnic group, the left during the 19th and
20th centuries wanted to displace it in favor of a superior X of its own: “class.” Yet this
would overlook the decisive differences between the way the left has approached the masses
and that of the right.
To begin with, the left never approached the concept of the masses with the same hostility as
the right. In fact, the mass was often regarded favorably, as an ally of egalitarian politics,
sometimes as its very subject. For example, in Italy at the start of the 20th century the writer
Paolo Valera founded a progressive and socialist journal called La Folla (The Crowd). At
roughly the same time radical American socialists published a journal called The Masses
(1911–17) subsequently called The New Masses (1926–48). Even when other socialists
insisted, as they continue to do, on the need to move from mass to class, class was conceived
not as the antithesis of mass, let alone its dispossession or destruction; on the contrary, class
was regarded as an upgraded mass, the mass fulfilling its inherent potential, maturing,
empowering itself. As Marx famously claimed, a class was a mass for itself.17
So, for one, class is an organized, potentiated mass. But there is another, even more important
difference between the left and the right in their respective approaches to “the masses.”
Surely, the fact that the left could use terms such as la folla positively cannot be explained
simply on account of the potential attributed to the masses to become something else: one
does not treat a precondition as admiringly as that, nor does one celebrate it. So there must
have been something valuable identified about the masses as such. In the fascist vision, the
people, the race, the nation, and so on, were not just desired stations, but represented the final
destiny, the last horizon. For socialists by comparison, class was definitely not such an end.
Their dream was in fact that of moving on to the classless society. That implies a return, by
way of a Hegelian circle of sublation, to the masses. As Hegel argued, “Progress is not an
indeterminate advance ad infinitum, for it has a definite aim—namely that of returning upon
itself.”18
This was the reason that mass society gave cause to such profound anxieties on the fascist
camp: its promise to transcend classes. This was something Friedrich Nietzsche’s prophet
17
Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 2010), 159–60.
18
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984), 149.
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Zarathustra already bemoaned, expressing upper-class anxieties about the egalitarianism of
modernity embodied in the figure of the dreaded Last Human: “Nobody grows rich or poor
anymore: both are too much of a burden. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both are too
much of a burden.”19 This opposition to the Last Humans continues to inspire right-wing
extremism to our day. One instance will have to suffice, from the American white supremacist
Gregory Hood:
Nietzsche writes of the Last Man, the man who has discovered happiness, “and
blinks.” The democratic age ends with “men without chests,” leading small lives
pursuing petty pleasures, looking down upon the ideas of greatness, struggle, and
accomplishment. But this isn’t what we have. There are many full of passionate
intensity and willingness to sacrifice. But the ideal they sacrifice for is the destruction
of ideals, the promotion of “equality,” the abolition of “racism” or “hierarchy.” And I
found it pathetic.20
The fascists, in truth, were the ones adhering to class as a rigid, insurmountable historical
reality, and dreading its abolition. They wanted vertical class arrangements to persist, and the
horizontal society of the mass to remain at a safe distance. For many of them, in truth, even
the reality of class went too far in reflecting the egalitarian thrust of modernity, since modern
class divisions were too fluid and unstable for their tastes, representing a decline from the
strictly hierarchical societies of premodern ages. Hence their frequent nostalgia for castes, and
their efforts to recreate them (Nietzsche’s admiration for the Indian caste system provides a
prototype of this yearning). Precisely on that account the mass was seized upon by radicals, as
programmatically stated by Paolo Valera in the first issue of La Folla:
The title is our enterprise. Everybody understands that we are of the CROWD, for the
crowd, with the crowd ... . [W]e enter the stockade of the CLASS STRUGGLE to
19
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1969), 46.
20
Gregory Hood, Waking Up from the American Dream (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2016), Kindle
edition, locations 203–08. The author slightly rebukes Nietzsche here, pointing out that the philosopher’s vision
of apathetic individuals has not materialized, and instead the modern masses are infused by egalitarian passion.
But this is a superficial and technical divergence, since clearly what troubled Zarathustra was exactly the fusion
of, and mutual dependence, between mass materialism and the egalitarian ethos of modernity.
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occupy our place as combatants and to affirm the physical and intellectual superiority
of the crowd that yearns for the abolition of rich and poor.21
Here we see how the celebration of the condition of being masses can be at same time “an
enterprise,” a striving toward a new condition, toward becoming a mass. Inasmuch as fascism
was and remains a refutation of that utopia, it unwittingly underscores it.22 Rather than simply
a depressing tale of human wickedness and the emptiness of progress and of civilization, as so
often claimed, there is a surprisingly encouraging lesson in fascism, which should give us
strength to defend modernity and to complete it. But for that to happen it is necessary to short-
circuit the process whereby segments of the masses, in the current political and ideological
vacuum, are being recruited to far-right politics and transformed into other, non-mass,
collective entities. A counter-fascist ethos is required, one that will center on the vision of the
full-fledged mass society. Radical intellectuals can vitally contribute to the formation and
propagation of such an ethos. But to do that, they have to dedicate less effort to attempts at
transforming the masses and concentrate instead on rethinking some of their own
preconceptions.
21
In Roman Rainero, Paolo Valera e l’opposizione democratica all’impresa di Tripoli (Rome: L’Erma di
Bretschneider, 1983), 59.
22
For a fuller treatment of mass society as utopia, see Landa, Fascism and the Masses, 21–24.
