Monarchy vs. Fascism

Weighing up the Left’s Worst Nightmares

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Somehow after hundreds of articles on Substack, I have not written specifically about fascism. I did write a whole chapter about it in The Cultured Thug Handbook, but most people didn’t notice because it was titled “Corporatism”. While there are some differences between corporatism (in the proper sense of the term) and fascism, the Venn diagram is for practical purposes a single circle.

Corporatism is a solid idea, and yet I don’t subscribe to fascism. Why not? I get this question quite a lot. In this article, I’ll lay out why I think monarchy is superior, and why it is no less modern than fascism.

First, we should dispel the crude and childish understanding of fascism that you will get from basically everyone who endorses liberalism, including even classical liberals.

Fascism is not micromanagement, it is not tyranny, and it is not big government. No fascist state has ever been about these things. The paradigmatic fascism, Mussolini’s Italy, conceived of itself as a programmatic state, meaning a state with a coherent and explicit goal, a program dictated, yes, from above. But this does not mean micromanaged from above. Organized into what amounted to a series of guilds, each industry was free to regulate itself as long as it met certain targets set by the state, which it had a say in through the guilds. Each firm was free in turn as long as it met criteria set by the guilds, and so on down the line to the individual. This is not big government, this is devolution of authority down to the most local level pragmatically possible—this localism has been an important part of European identity for thousands of years.¹

Liberalism is not without a program. No state ever is. Where liberalism differs from fascism is that the program, the goal, is hidden, not discussed publicly amongst syndicates, corporations, or guilds, but behind closed doors amongst people who have their own agendas. The result is just what we have today, where the goal is erasing the native ethnic stock, carried out by people who understand how power works. We are not in trouble because we abandoned the classical liberalism so dear to conservatives, we are here because classical liberalism reached its logical conclusion—to obscure authority by pretending to do away with it, thereby making it unopposable. Ugo Spirito, one of the foremost Italian fascist theorists, criticized liberalism as too totalitarian and tyrannical, on this very basis.² He described anarcho-tyranny all but in name. There’s a reason you have never been told about him.

There is “fascism”, and then there is “Fascism”. Big-F Fascism generally refers to Italian Fascism of the kind Spirito was defending, whereas small-f fascism refers to a category under which various third position ideologies are classed, such as Italian Fascism of course, but also Spanish Falangism, the Romanian Iron Guard, British fascism, the French Révolution nationale, etc. Very often German National Socialism is classed as fascism along with these, but we have reason to consider it distinct, not a type of fascism except in the mind of centre-right conservatives.

So what is it that all these small-f fascisms have in common? Most mainstream and even academic understandings of fascism are flawed, but you can get a good idea if you look at their social ontology. That is, what do fascisms consider the basic unit of society? What constitutes the ontological ground of a community?

The answer for a liberal will be “the individual”. It’s the individual man acting on his own conscience that constitutes the “stuff” out of which society is constructed. For the communist, the basic unit of society is class. Society is best explained by classes interacting with each other, with the individuals themselves not being decisive, but being rather the tools of class interests. For all their pretenses to disagreement, communists and liberals both agree that the part comes before the whole.

When asked what the basic unit of society is, the fascist will pose an actual alternative, and will say that the whole comes before the part. Society is the basic social unit, and all other possibilities fail to understand the nature of what a society is. And it’s here that the basic principle of corporatism dovetails with fascism. Corporatism is an extended metaphor whereby society is a body (Latin: corpus), and there is no hand without the head, no leg without the lungs, no foot without the fist. You cannot separate these parts, cannot consider one as more fundamental—they must all be in place or else they each individually cease to exist. So far so good.

Now for monarchy, which is much simpler. By monarchy I don’t mean simply any old government of one. The monarchy I have in mind is specifically hereditary monarchy, or at least one where the monarch’s office is not granted to him by another person or body. True monarchy is not subject to repeal or election. Elective monarchy is not really monarchy but a mediated democracy or aristocracy.³

Finally, there is an intermediate term that we have to look at, and this is Caesarism. Wilhelm Roscher sketches out this odd phenomenon:

Yet one of the most important peculiarities, but also strengths, of Caesarism lies in the Janus head it bears, with an extremely monarchical, an extremely democrat­ic face. As Gentz has already noted, the royalists were in favour of Napoleon because they saw him as the tran­sitional dictatorship for the restoration of the old, and the republicans were flattered by the many republican echoes in his forms. When Napoleon created his new nobility, he said to some: j’assure la révolution; cette caste intermédiaire est éminemment démocratique, car à toute heure tout le monde y est appelé [“I ensure the revolu­tion; this intermediate class is eminently democratic, for at every moment everyone is called to it.”]. To the great lords he said: elle appuiera le trône [“it will support the throne”]. To the friends of moderate monarchy: elle s’op­posera à l’empiétement du pouvoir absolu, car elle devient une autorité dans l’état [“it will oppose the encroachment of absolute power, for it becomes an authority within the state”]. To the Jacobins: réjouissez-vous; car voilà l’ancienne noblesse complétement anéantie [“rejoice, for the old nobility is now completely annihilated”]. To the old nobility: en vous décorant de nouvelles dignités, vous faites revivre les vôtres [“by bestowing new honors upon yourselves, you revive your own”]. In theory, the ruler readily recognises the sovereignty of the people.⁴

In the diseased mind of the liberal or the leftist, monarchy and Caesarism are all one thing: “fascism”. But these are all distinct terms and collapsing their meanings creates confusion. That said, fascism almost always expresses itself as Caesarism, even if its essential feature has nothing to do with who the sovereign is or how he is legitimized.