How Populism Is Repeating Fascism's Fatal Mistakes
When You Declare War on the World, the World Tends to Win
In 1935, a version of Cole Porter’s hit song “You’re the Top” featured the lyrics “You're the top! You're the great Houdini! You're the top! You're Mussolini!” Historian John Lukacs writes that Mussolini was then “the most respected statesman in Europe.” His accomplishments included restoring law and order after the threat of communist upheaval, building the world’s first automobile superhighways, draining the marshlands around Rome, and suppressing mafia rule in Sicily. Yes, Mussolini was a dictator who ended freedom of the press, created a one-party state, and imprisoned political opponents, but as Lukacs notes, “This cost seemed to Italians and others to be worth paying because his achievements were impressive.” Yet in 1945, Il Duce (in Italian, “the Leader”) was shot by Italian partisans, his corpse dumped in a heap and mutilated by an angry crowd. This, after being reduced to a Nazi stooge ruling over the rump Italian Social Republic in northern Italy. How did Mussolini, and the fascist movement he once personified, fall so far, so fast?
I ask not just out of historical interest. The 2024 reelection of Donald Trump as US President marked a vibe shift in which right-wing populism seemed ascendant. Just as fascist parties in other countries sought to mirror Mussolini’s example, populism has now become a global phenomenon. Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary, Giorgia Meloni’s in Italy, and populist parties ranging from France’s National Rally to Alternative for Germany all share a common resistance to mass migration, cultural progressivism, and technocratic institutions. Definitions of populism, like those of fascism, vary widely. But by any reasonable standard, the two are historically distinct phenomena. For example, Meloni’s Italy, unlike Mussolini’s, is a functioning democracy. Nor are MAGA Blackshirts pouring castor oil down liberals’ throats, as was the style with Il Duce’s thugs. Nevertheless, right-wing populism, in its standard-bearing American form, is starting to make the same mistakes that ultimately doomed fascism. Here, then, are three downward spirals that populists should avoid if they want to escape Mussolini’s fate.
1. Blaming the Jews
For most of its history, Italian fascism was not antisemitic. Around 230 Jews took part in Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome, which secured him the prime ministership of Italy. Slightly over 10% of the Italian Jewish population joined the National Fascist Party, comparable to the rate among non-Jewish Italians. Mussolini himself dismissed antisemitism as a “German vice,” declaring that “Italy knows no antisemitism, and we believe that it will never know it.” He even flirted with Zionism, helping to develop a naval training school for Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionists. But the “Jewish question” was a dividing line for international fascism, with Mussolini representing one side and Adolf Hitler the other. Nazi propagandists accused the Italians of “kosher fascism,” while Mussolini said of Nazism that “Thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines which are preached beyond the Alps by the descendants of those who were illiterate when Rome had Caesar, Virgil, and Augustus.” A 1934 pan-European fascist conference was typical of the movement’s Groyperizing tendency:
At the Conference the Iron Guardsman postulated, and clung to his point that every Gentile ought to ask himself in dead earnest what is his attitude toward the Jews. It is [Romanian fascist] M. Motza’s contention that if the issue is ever thus faced results will be stupendous. With a tenacity maddening to [Italian fascist] President Coselschi and [Irish fascist] General O’Duffy, who fought against facing the issue, the Rumanian, Danish and Swiss delegates chorused: “We must discuss the Jews! We must discuss the Jews!! WE MUST DISCUSS THE JEWS!!!”
Ultimately, the conference unanimously resolved that “the Jewish question cannot be converted into a universal campaign of hatred against the Jews”—a conclusion that would undoubtedly be dismissed as cuckservative by today’s rightoids.
Like Italian fascism, MAGA has plenty of Jewish representation, including top Trump aide Stephen Miller, omnipresent envoy Steve Witkoff, and influencer/firebrand Laura Loomer.1 But the movement is also beset by a rising antisemitic wing, exemplified by Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens. Unlike Mussolini, who adopted antisemitic racial laws in 1938 in order to placate Hitler, Trump—who has Jewish family members—won’t bend to the antisemitic rabble. But his likely successor, JD Vance, may be less willing to resist the online chorus of “We must discuss the Jews!” Fortunately, America is much closer to Italy, where Mussolini’s racial laws were widely unpopular, than interwar Germany or Romania.2 Most Americans are fine with Jews, and certainly aren’t pining for a party monomaniacally focused on the Jewish question. As Charles Fain Lehman writes, “It is electoral poison to be on the 30 percent side of a 70/30 issue; open Jew bashing is being on the 5 percent side of a 95/5 issue.” The electoral record of pro-Hitler American politicians—remember North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, who called himself a black Nazi?—doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. A Groyperized MAGA would be more likely to lose power than to bring America, and the world, down with it.
Still, it’s worth recalling the full self-destructive downsides of antisemitism. We can start with the intrinsic loss of elite human capital. For example, in 1933, Hitler expelled Jews from Germany’s state institutions, declaring that “If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years.” Among the fired scientists were Jews who helped America develop the atomic bomb and win World War II. But antisemitism doesn’t just alienate Jews. It also alienates people who aren’t stupid. Consider how dumb you have to be to believe that, per Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk was assassinated by the Mossad. (Or to listen to Candace Owens in general.) Now imagine trying to build a mass movement in which believing something so stupid is an ideological litmus test. Naturally, you’re going to end up with a movement of stupid people, which will ultimately be defeated by the smarter people. A single-minded obsession with the Jews also necessarily means that other, more practical goals are sacrificed along the way. Consider all the resources that Hitler wasted on committing genocide instead of winning the war he started. In the end, killing as many Jews as possible was more important to him than making Germany great again. So it is with all antisemites, whose patriotism is a pale shadow next to their hatred. Authentic patriots should take note.
2. Making It All About Race
Another, related dividing line for fascists concerned race. The Nazis believed in Nordic (or Aryan) supremacy, which was obviously a hard sell for the swarthy Italians. In 1927, Mussolini even called for “a vast Latin bloc” of France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, which would be based on “civilization and culture,” not “race,” since the latter was “too vague an entity in view of the many mixtures during the course of centuries.”3 But in 1938, Il Duce abandoned his previous Mediterraneanist perspective and adopted a Nazi-inspired Racial Manifesto, which argued rather dubiously that Italians were of Aryan descent and possessed “ancient purity of blood.” The practical problem with Nazi racism was that Germany launched an anti-Bolshevik crusade against the Soviet Union, while also murdering and oppressing potential allies. You can’t encourage enslaved peoples to rise up against communism when you explicitly want to enslave those same peoples. According to Hitler’s ideology, Slavs were subhuman Untermenschen who needed to be cleansed and subjugated for Germany to gain its Lebensraum. As a result of the Nazi reign of terror, hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were tied down fighting partisans instead of the Red Army. Even when captured Soviet general Andrei Vlasov recruited over 900,000 soldiers to join the collaborationist Russian Liberation Army, the Nazis refused to empower him out of anti-Slavic hatred.
In 2024, Trump won the American presidential election by making huge gains among non-white voters. Just as anti-communism could’ve united Europeans of all nationalities in a common front, anti-woke populism brought together Americans of all races. But like the Nazis, the racist right seeks to split a natural coalition in favor of Herrenvolk supremacy. The practical problem for the American right is the same as that facing the Nazis. Just as a minority of Europeans were Aryan by Hitler’s standards, only a minority of Americans qualify as “Heritage.” Charles Fain Lehman estimates that “69 percent of today’s non-black population, and about 55 percent of the non-Hispanic white population, is attributable to post-1860 immigration.” As Mussolini once recognized about the Italians, even American whites are a mixed population. The fact that Fuentes, currently the most prominent figure on the racist right, is a quarter Mexican, speaks to the comedy of errors that is American racism. According to a 2021 poll, only 17% of Americans (including 21% of Republicans) agree that being of Western European heritage is very or somewhat important to being truly American. By contrast, over 90% point to ideals like “believing in individual freedoms” and “accepting people of diverse racial and religious backgrounds.” Heritage Americanism is unpopular even among Heritage Americans—which makes sense, since Heritage Americans were the ones who invented creedal nationalism.4 The right’s flirtation with racial essentialism is likely to end as well as Mussolini’s, except, fortunately, without the collateral damage of bringing the country down with it.
3. Declaring War on the World
Norm MacDonald had a great bit in which he said, “In the early part of the previous century, Germans decided to go to war. And who did they go to war with? The world. That’d never been tried before. So you figure that would take about five seconds for the world to win, but no, it was actually close.” Indeed it was, though Germany lost rather decisively in the end. Hitler’s foolish decision to declare war on the world can be traced to the antisemitic and racist stupidity previously discussed. In June 1941, while still battling the British in the west, Hitler broke his nonaggression pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. Famously, he told his generals that “We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.” His naivety regarding the Soviets can be traced back to Mein Kampf (1926), where he wrote:
Lower nations led by Germanic organizers and overlords have more than once grown to be mighty state formations and have endured as long as the racial nucleus of the creative state race maintained itself. For centuries, Russia drew nourishment from this Germanic nucleus of its upper leading strata. Today, it can be regarded as almost totally exterminated and extinguished. It has been replaced by the Jew. Impossible as it is for the Russian by himself to shake off the yoke of the Jew by his own resources, it is equally impossible for the Jew to maintain the mighty empire forever.
Shortly thereafter, in December 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Although Nazi Germany was an ally of Japan, it wasn’t obligated by treaty to join a war that the Japanese started (nor did Hitler take treaties seriously). Rather, Hitler underestimated the Americans just as he underestimated the Soviets, later saying, “Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaized, and the other half Negrified. How can one expect a state like that to hold together?” As it turns out, it held together rather well, and helped bring the Third Reich to its inglorious end. Hitler’s own aggression united the unlikely partners—a communist empire and the world’s greatest market democracy—that ultimately sealed his fate.
But though Hitler declared war on the world, he at least did so with a few allies, even if the hapless Italians were a net drag on the Axis war effort, and the Japanese were preoccupied with an entirely distant front. By contrast, Trump started a trade war with the entire world, including America’s partners. He’s also turned a covetous eye to Greenland, even though America’s annexation of the island would mean the end of the NATO alliance. Trump is certainly not a racial exterminationist like Hitler, and has more of an instinct for self-preservation than the Nazis, who picked suicidal fights with equal or stronger powers. Nevertheless, declaring war on the entire world, even if mostly through economic means, has never ended well. After all, the world is capable of responding in kind. Just as Hitler brought together American capitalists and Soviet communists, Trump’s actions are bringing other Western countries closer to China. Additionally, American belligerence is weakening European populists, whose success Trump’s own National Security Strategy says is necessary to avoid Europe’s “civilizational erasure.” As Mary Harrington writes, “Trump has tainted by association every European populist group that has ever given his regime so much as the time of day.” In the 1920s and 30s, fascism was poised to be the wave of the future, providing an attractive third way between sclerotic liberal democracy and soul-crushing communism. But the horror of Nazi imperialism definitively shattered fascism’s appeal, reducing the proud self-descriptor into the epithet we now know today. In a farcical way, Trump’s geopolitical megalomania may have the same effect on populism.
Avoiding Civilizational Suicide
I suspect that a major reason why American, rather than European, populists are repeating fascism’s mistakes is that America never actually experienced fascism: whether as a homegrown regime or an occupying force. The most lasting devastation that Nazism wrought was on Europe itself. Hitler left the continent physically ruined, demographically shattered, and morally discredited. In short order, the Europeans lost their empires and became subservient to America and the Soviets. There are plenty of territorial claims that European countries could make against each other, but most (Russia excepted) have the good sense and historical memory to refrain. And while the Trump administration uses Nazi-coded memes on social media, France’s National Rally engaged in a dédiabolisation campaign to rid itself of fascist sympathizers. As Ed West writes: “The European Right are not interested in national greatness; they don’t want territorial gains; they don’t want the world to bend to them; they want good relations with their neighbours. They just don’t want their countries to be overrun by foreigners, and in particular violently hostile foreigners.” I’m making Nazi comparisons not to engage in name-calling, but because there’s still time for the American right to learn from fascism’s calamities. Ultimately, Hitler and Mussolini didn’t make Germany and Italy great again. They left their countries, and Europe as a whole, mortally weakened instead. But it’s not too late for MAGA to choose national unity over Groyperism, and to lead Western civilization instead of wrecking it from within.
Mussolini’s Loomer equivalent was Margherita Sarfatti, his Jewish mistress and confidant.
Among fascist movements outside Germany, Romania’s Iron Guard most closely rivaled Nazism in its fanatical antisemitism.
Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (1995), p. 232.
Consider how Vermont, the state with the highest percentage of white people (many of whom are Heritage Americans), is solidly Democratic.
“The most lasting devastation that Nazism wrought was on Europe itself.” I’d say the damage on Jewish world population and collective psyche is more lasting.