I provide a challenge to modern interpretations of Fascism primarily through deep historical and philosophical analysis of Italian Fascism’s own intellectual roots. Fascism was a reaction against Renaissance individualism, liberalism’s decadence, and interpreted these changes in history through Vico’s Cycles of the “Age of Men.” There is not a single aspect of Fascism, which emerged magically.
All ideas and thinkers that have emerged thus far who also tried to present a critique against what was once seen as the last and only ideology in the West in Liberalism, are shifted under the floorboards of the modern definitions of Fascism — definitions and interpretations built almost entirely to comfort those who are trying to defend the post-war international order.
REFUTATION OF MODERN DEFINITIONS OF FASCISM
Fascist Philosophy is rooted in several primary sources in contrast with today’s distortions. I have already provided a list of them in Post-Risorgimento Idealism: Historical Context of Giovanni Gentile’s Fascism, Mazzini and Carbonari Theosophists.
- The Manifesto of San Sepolcro
- The Verona Manifesto
- The Constitution of Fiume (and Fiume’s history and D’Annunzio’s view on it)
- History and Ideas on Giuseppi Mazzini and his disciples
- History on French Revolution, English Republicanism, and the Italian Risorgimento
- Giambattista Vico’s ideas and critique of Renaissance Individualism
- Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism
- Gentile’s The Philosophic Basis of Fascism and The General Theory of the Spirit.
- The Diary of the Will
- The Fascist Movement in Italian Life
- Palmieri’s The Philosophy of Fascism
If you study these primary sources and its historical contexts, you will come away with a more accurate and superior interpretation of Fascism outside of the caricatures. The caricatures represent an immature political thinking.
Modern “fascists” (neo-fascists, Third Positionists, internet or alt-right spaces) also get Fascism wrong and are brought into a large ethno-national eco-system, that is built around superficial aesthetics. They too reduce Fascism to propaganda reels, aesthetic racism, or selective borrowing without reading the philosophy or its historical and ideological development. Actual Fascist Philosophy does not exist as a collective in the United States. There are merely Neo-Fascists, Third Positionists and those who reduce Fascism to what appeals to them aesthetically. No one knows who Vico is. The moderns lack Stoic discipline, collective metaphysics, anti-individualism, and ethical totality of historical Italian Fascism. They are products of algorithmic pipelines.
Mainstream liberals, historians, and academia distort Fascism through omission or conjecture., ignoring Gentile’s radical humanism, which framed Fascism as the evolution and perfection of liberalism itself. The Fascist understanding of the Renaissance uncovers myths about the Renaissance, and the layered qualities and notions of selfhood in the Renaissance, which challenges limitations in notions of identity in our time. The early development of Fascism also demonstrate its relation to Catholic social teaching and the authority of the Church.
Scholars treat Fascism as selective “reclamation” of Italian thinkers in a “game of roulette” for regime legitimacy, or reduce it to thuggery and conspiracies, missing its early ennobling spiritual metaphysics, Mazzinian progress, duty, and anti-individualistic “organic state.” Vico is the true birthplace of Fascism’s turn against individualism and the liberal tradition.
In its developmental stages, we must distinguish Italian Fascism’s early philosophical inclusivity and ethical totality (subordinating Church to the ethical State through CORPORATIVISMO) from its later pragmatic dilutions (e.g., 1938 Racial Laws under Mussolini’s Nazi alliance) and must be understood as separate from the National Socialists first.
PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMING OF FASCISM IS SUPERIOR TO MODERN MISREADINGS OF FASCISM
Vico and Gentile represent a portion of the real foundation of Fascism, which embodies Vico’s prophetic cycles as a reaction against the individualistic “Age of Men” as leading to a return to barbarism and Gentile’s Actual Idealism (Attualismo). Gentile’s Attualismo is an anti-individualist radical humanism preserving Catholic and Italian spirit through the ethical State.
Modern interpretations (left or right) strip away the philosophical depth, turning fascism into either a political weapon or an aesthetic cosplay. True understanding requires engaging Gentile, Vico, and the Risorgimento historical and political philosophical contexts developing at the time. Without that, today’s discourse (including 2026 U.S. “fascism” warnings or neo-fascist revivalism) is philosophically empty.
Fascism’s own doctrinal totalism (the “organic state” as a totalistic, anti-individualistic ethical organism) cannot be reducible to a vague checklist of observable behaviors or historical “stages.”
Fascism (as Doctrine) does not exist as a Collective Philosophy in the United States
Both left and right accuse each other of Fascism or Nazism as political strategy and propaganda, and the accusations reveal a very limited understanding of history. The patterns observed by others of the political right in the U.S. is actually a homegrown problem, not an external problem infiltrating the U.S. American right-wing thinking predates Fascism with many habits of thinking traced to seventeenth-century English politics and social issues. Traits that look “fascistic” are purely American-born and rooted symptoms of our own history. Fascism is a philosophy with structure, e.g., Gentile’s totalitarianism as all-encompassing political conception of the relationship of the State to the body, mind and social life. Using it the way it has been used prevents substantive thought and new creative solutions. The U.S. is not the organic state, but a republican mixed system prone to degeneration and oligarchic manipulation, but not yet (or inherently) Fascist.
What has been observable? Authoritarianism, adoption of the Heritage Foundation playbook adapting Russell Kirk’s ideas about the Roots of the American Order, 1950s advertisement propaganda of White America, Southern racist rhetoric and late 1890s to early twentieth-century Nordicism with its roots in earlier American aesthetic romanticization of Swedish immigrants. No one needed Mussolini, or Hitler to construct these elements within American culture.
DOCTRINE VERSUS RHETORIC
I agree that there is danger — if any leader makes demands similar to the Mussolinian commandments or demand totalistic absorption, the Republic is compromised, but the U.S. does not meet Fascism’s doctrinal test. There is no single absolutist Hero embodying the ethical State, Corporativismo is not Corporatism, there is no elimination of factions into one obedient organism (though both parties engage in rhetoric that wishes either of them governed the country alone), and our own explicit republican tradition treats the fasces as anti-tyranny rather than totalitarian rule. Neo-fascist aesthetics or authoritarian-performative impulses in MAGA and alt-right spaces may reflect “retrograde” elements, but they are far from the rationale that gave Mussolini, Palmieri, Gentile and others their understanding of Fascism as Bushido was understood in Japan.
The emphasis I think is important for Americans is to fortify American civic republicanism (faith in citizens, classical humanism, anti-arbitrary power) as the superior regenerative path. Immigration or Anti-Immigration won’t matter, because the people’s spirits and civic education is crushed, that those who come here eager to fit into this sliding hill culture will join right in the decline. While I do dissect Fascism seriously to protect the Republic, this is not to declare it already lost to Fascism. This is why, despite any shared warning tone with other authors or scholars, I reject equating the U.S. with historical Italian Fascism.
AMERICAN CASE STUDY
The patterns routinely labeled “fascist” in contemporary U.S. discourse (authoritarian impulses, militant nationalism, strongman leadership, victimhood rhetoric, surveillance tendencies, populist anti-elitism, and partisan militancy) are not imports from Italian Fascism or Nazism. These are purely American-born and rooted symptoms of our own history that long predate Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome or Gentile’s philosophical codification of Fascism in the 1920s. Attributing these growths to a foreign totalitarian doctrine is convenient to throw criticism of American power. The endless left and right accusations of fascism is a sterile “dance of the parties.” It serves as a propaganda tactic that externalizes blame, short-circuits serious thought, and keeps voters in line without addressing root causes.
Giovanni Gentile viewed Fascism as a development from Italian liberalism and a new spiritual and revolutionary ideal of order and progress that fused left and right elements into a totalistic organic state. They drew directly from the history of Italian philosophy. American conservatism and liberalism are “neither.” The American Right’s thinking has been in European politics since Burke and the extremes of imperialism, absolutism and totalism can appear in any political tradition. In the U.S., they manifest through homegrown channels — as a “mixed system” claiming legacies from ancient civilizations rather than Gentile’s ethical totality.
Americans blame an external ideology as the root of their troubles, but Hitler was inspired by the Americans, e.g., Jim Crow law. The U.S. itself supplied models (segregation, eugenics practices) that influenced European Fascists and Nazis. Overuse of “fascist” since at least the Nixon and Reagan eras (echoing Orwell’s 1944 observation) turns the word into an emotional gut insult rather than analysis — akin to calling something a “bastard.” It ignores pre-existing U.S. patterns: democratic masses driven by raw emotion (“the democratic Will of the People”), populist uprisings, police-state tendencies, and community victimhood rhetoric. These are not fascist imports. These are domestic habits that predated and even shaped the ideologies we now project onto them.
WWII-era framing of “Fascism vs. Democracy” protects power and operates as a stabilizing myth that has obscured America’s own root ideological struggles rather than diagnosing them accurately. Populism, strongman politics, and nativism trace to the nineteenth-century include Andrew Jackson’s 1828-36 “war on the bank” and spoils system, the Know-Nothing Party’s 1850s anti-immigrant militancy, the People’s Party of the 1890s, or even Lincoln’s wartime executive expansions. Racial hierarchy and segregation (Jim Crow, from the 1890s Plessy era onward) demonstrably inspired Nazi legal theorists. Conservative skepticism of radical democracy on the American Right is expressed exactly in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Federalist/Whig traditions, not Gentile’s Actual Idealism or Mussolini’s writings. Surveillance and police tendencies have roots in the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), Civil War-era repression, Red Scare (1919-20), or even earlier colonial-era controls decades before Fascism.
American polarization, truth erosion in the Press lacks the totalistic organic-state doctrine that defines historical Fascism, but the label merely functions as rhetorical club rather than precise diagnosis.
I do not claim America is immune to authoritarian drift. We are living in it. My deeper point holds, which is that treating them as “imported fascism” distracts from the harder work of diagnosing and repairing America’s own republican traditions.
REACTION TO RUTGER BREGMAN’S VIEW ON THE TERM FASCISM
The modern definition of Fascism is way too vague, attributes ways of thinking long before Fascism not unique to Fascism even existing in early Liberalism. This prevents the emergence of any other political philosophical solution besides Liberalism, Progressivism or Leftism. If I engage in ideas of mythic past/national rebirth or focus on the classical periods, this is seen as conservative or Fascist. It is a biased redefinition that stifles political competition by creating a bogus definition of Fascism based on patterns and the illusion of scholarly authority.
Loose, trait-based applications (drawing on Paxton’s “stages,” Eco’s “Ur-Fascism,” Stanley, Snyder) turn “Fascism” into an empty verb or emotional slur. This: (1) attributes pre-existing, non-unique patterns of thought that long predate 1920s Italian Fascism; and (2) functions as a biased rhetorical weapon that locks discourse inside liberalism/progressivism/leftism, stifling any genuine political-philosophical competition or alternative (such as civic republicanism).
Anything can manifest ‘fascist tendencies’ in this loose use of the term.
Fascism is a reaction within the liberal and Risorgimento tradition against what was believed to be a decadent and limited sense of individualism that emerged out of the Renaissance.
“Make America Great Again” as mythic rebirth is not Fascist. One would have to refer to the American Founders’ invocation of Roman republican virtue, the Jacksonian “common man” revival, the Progressive Era’s “New Nationalism,” or even Enlightenment liberalism’s own classical revivalism as Fascism! These are patterns of any political movement facing decline — left, right, liberal, or republican. By retrofitting them onto a 1920s Italian doctrine, the modern definition erases history and American specificity. The endless “fascism” accusations keep people in line. You can’t really think, because it is implied that stepping out of the boundaries of our political thought leads to rejected knowledge. It creates a false binary: stay inside liberalism and progressivism or be labeled fascist.
I think of my project as the antidote to do this problem: reviving American civic republicanism as a philosophy that transcends the left-right spectrum. By inflating fascism into a vague pattern list, modern definitions (under the “illusion of scholarly authority”) prevent exactly this kind of competition: any call for national strength, tradition, hierarchy of virtue, or anti-liberal critique gets pathologized as “fascist,” leaving only liberalism’s variants as acceptable. What is claimed as neutral scholarship on Fascism is nothing more than a partisan tool that externalizes America’s homegrown problems, erases Fascism’s actual doctrinal history (and its liberal roots), and enforces intellectual conformity. Recognize the real doctrinal totalism if it appears, but the vague checklists should be thrown away, otherwise you cannot think, cannot compete politically and philosophically.
The American Minervan 
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