There are significant parallels between Fascism and National Socialism in this regard; I'll focus mostly on the Italian case but I'll also try to highlight those parallel elements where present.

 

Strictly speaking, as a political force, the conservatives were incorporated into the fascists and ceased to exist as a autonomous entity, carrying to term their long process of decline; yet, more broadly speaking, the conservative forces behind those political structures were able to exert their influence on the Fascist Regime in the following years.

As it is in itself not easy to establish what those conservatives forces were, it might be helpful to review the main political forces in post war Italy, to put the conservatives in their right place among them.

 

By the time of the 1919 elections, the political scene was led by two relatively new mass parties, combining for roughly the 50% of the votes: the Socialist Party and the Popular Party (the Catholics).

The Socialists faced the 1919 elections as a united political force (with exception for some minor splinters, accounting for a 2% of preferences) gaining 32.28% of the votes, or 1,834,792. Their split leading up to the 1921 elections was followed by a minor decrease in their combined support (24.69% for the Socialists and 4.61% for the Communists, but the percent decrease is also due to increased affluence, as the combined votes reached 1,936,154 ).

In 1924 the effect of both the fascist violence and the internal crisis of the socialists saw the two socialist formations and the Communists gain respectively 5.90%, 5,03% and 3,74% for a combined total of 1,051,842 votes.

The Popular Party fell perhaps even more dramatically, going from 20.53% (1,167,354) and 20.39% (1,347,305) to 9.0% (745,789). And by the 1924 elections the eventual dissolution of the Popular Party was already a point of discussion.

There were various instances where the Catholic forces supported politics that would appear conservative – yet overall the Popular Party was a progressive force. First for its nature of a mass party alternative to the socialist forces, which was in itself a novelty on the Italian political scene; second for its links to catholic trade unionism and youth organizations, typical of the social democratic tradition; third for the mere fact that direct participation to the representative system of an explicitly Catholic force (the Popular leader in the 1919 and 1921 elections was and ordained priest, Don Luigi Sturzo) was still a new and even controversial fact.

The third force in the 1919 elections was that of the Liberal groups; a few lists in fact, made of the survivors of Giolitti's Liberal Union that had gained – but with a large portion of the Catholics – 47.62% of the votes (2.387.947) in the 1913 first universal suffrage elections. Already in a marked decline, their leading group (that of former war time Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando) gained 15.91% of the preferences, while Gioitti's rump Liberal Union (now Liberal Party) gained 8.63% for a combined total of 1,394,579. The Democratic Party rounded the score with another 622,310 votes or 10.95%. Even if they had been able to find an agreement, the old liberals could not form a government of their own.

In fact, for the first time in the history of the Kingdom, a lasting Government would have had to rely on the support of one of the new political forces: either the Socialists or the Catholics; or to resort systematically to the King's decree.

And old the liberals were for sure: for the most part born during the unification years or in the immediate following (Giolitti in 1842, Salandra in 1853, Orlando in 1860), they were the last remnants of an aristocracy of administrators that saw the process of governing a country along the lines of taking care of a land estate on behalf of the owner. They aspired neither to lead nor to follow the masses – rather they believed that, under proper political administration, the people would have eventually found their right place within the State and the Nation.

Even those – like Giovanni Giolitti himself – who had repeatedly taken a progressive stance, supporting the introduction of male universal suffrage or the principle of equal distance for the state in the laborers-owners conflict, had done so in light of their understanding of the government purpose. A view that, even if its perhaps closer to our contemporary than that of the Fascists or even the early Century Socialists, was by the time hopelessly stuck in the past.

And more so their old age, old style, was strikingly in contrast with the new climate of the post war ages: an era of machines, movement, new apparently irreducible social forces, class divisions and new prospects of unity in the war generations, the new Nation of men reborn in the trenches or in the factories. None of them had served on the front: they were an easy target for scathing propaganda pieces: old, weak, inadequate.

In the post war years the Liberals had a mostly conservative function, at least for they were attempting to steer the ship away both from the banks of extreme authoritarianism and the rocks of Bolshevik revolution. But even as a conservative force, their gradual decline proved their inability to properly represent the conservative forces within Italian society.