While it seems that (on paper at least) democracy is about people choosing those who will govern them, and socialism/communism is about people working together for the greater good, what was fascism actually about? What was Hitler, Mussolini and Franco actually saying about how government should work?
Fascism is in itself not a political philosophy, it is a political ideology. For that matter, "Liberalism" or "Communism", as we imagine them in the context of fascism, also describe ideologies rather than philosophies, although there are liberal and communist philosophies that are closely related if not mutually inclusive with the ideologies in question.
Alright, enough of that fancy talk.
Fascism is an ideology, fair enough - but what political philosophy does it build on? Well, it is dependent on just what school and flavor of fascism you're talking about.
Historically speaking, fascism knows three main schools: Classical Fascism, National Socialism and Falangism, often strictly associated with their respective leading figures, Mussolini, Hitler and Franco respectively.
We will for the sake of this piece (and the limit of 10,000 characters) skip fascistic states like Austria, El Salvador, Brazil, Portugal and Japan.
So, let's take a look.
#Fascism, Italy
The Italians feel that the state alone is the irreplacable guarantor of Italians' unity and independence; that the state alone secures the future of the Italian people and their history.
For Fascism, the growth of Empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence.
Speeches made to the people are essential to the arousing of enthusiasm for a war.
Benito Mussolini in Italy was well aware that what he was creating with his blackshirts could be the jumpstart to a new political model like the one that Lenin's bolsheviks had brought to the world's attention in Russia just five years prior.
The "Duce" orchestrated a personal cult of various historical figures, including Julius Caesar and Augustus, the two main fathers of the transition of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire.
Politically speaking however, ideological ties to far-off historical figures were not quite as important, favoring instead more recent figures like Niccolò Machiavelli, whose "might makes right" approach and whose idea of state and society being separate from a mere individual collective were very dear to Mussolini.
A more recent contributor to Italian fascism was Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian-born sociologist who had the idea of a humanity inherently divided by barriers like intellectual ability, where there always must be an elite and a lower class for society to function properly. This sort of "anti-marxism", if you will, has been appropriated as inherently fascistic and Pareto has been marked a fascist by historical figures as well as contemporary far-right outlets, even though Pareto's stance is unknown and he often landed more on the scale of radical market liberalism rather than an endorsement of a fascist-style all-encompassing super state. In fact, Pareto's thought paints itself as meritocratic through and through; the elite (sometimes the "aristocracy", the two terms are used interchangably) is not necessarily determined by wealth or birth (although that too can play a factor), but by skills as well - the best chess players or the best prostitutes would also be "elite" in this meritocratic world view.
Either way, Italian fascists like Luigi Amoroso claimed Pareto, who died in 1923, as one of their own and Pareto's view of a meritocratic society as Italo-fascistic.
#National Socialism, Germany
If democracy is stupid enough to give us the access and the money necessary to dismantle it, that is democracy's choice.
Women have no place in the political public.
I want war. To me all means will be right.
Let's move on to Germany now. The idea of Germanic supremacy and racial thought in general is present in Italian fascism as well, but Hitler and his NSDAP pushed that narrative far harder than Mussolini ever did. Whereas Italian fascism can be seen as an ideology of vengeance where a disappointing past shall be turned into a glorious future through meritocratic deeds, German nazism is built on a supposedly glorious (distant) past that just needs to be restored. This distant past was the past of the Aryan super race's rule - with the Aryans for example being supposedly present in early historical societies like the ancient Greek city state of Sparta.
When it comes to political thinkers, Hitler has the same love for Machiavelli that Mussolini also shares (and, in fact, Lenin too - Machiavelli was quite a popular guy among leaders who needed to justify to themselves their taking away of other people's liberties and rights).
But Nazi German philosophy also included several German thinkers that the Italian fascists lacked, whereas Hitler's movement in turn did not endorse quite as many Italian thinkers - Pareto for example was mostly unknown in Nazi Germany.
So we first have to look at Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), a German philosopher who hopped on board of the Nazi hype train when the NSDAP took power in 1933. Schmitt was more on the falangist side of things, being a devout catholic trying to connect nazism with a strong religious-clerical component. Schmitt was in his work inspired by Machiavelli (again) as well as Pareto (again), but also Aristotle, Rousseau and Hobbes.
Schmitt had been a market liberalistic radical quite like Pareto before Hitler took power, but then in an moment of opportunism was willing to ally with the Nazis instead, denouncing Jewish collegues he had been in regular contact with before.
He then began writing up political thinkpieces to justify Hitler's takeover under his pretext of personal legalism: the rise of the NSDAP and things like the enabling act were in line with "German discipline" and with the previous constitution, he also was one of the leading endorsers of the "Führertum" and "Führerprinzip", a strict top to bottom hierarchy where each inferior owes complete obedience to their superior who in turn owed obedience to their own superior, that one might find odd with a man previously associated with liberalism.
But perhaps more telling, more important and more deadly than even Schmitt was one Alfred Ernst Rosenberg, a man who had witnessed the 1917 Moscow revolution and had seen in it clear signs of Jewish global conspiracy, a man who from 1920 onwards (long before men like Carl Schmitt jumped aboard the Nazi movement) wrote about evil Semitic influences in Germany and Europe, a man who was one of Hitler's earliest supporters and who during World War II assisted the Nazis in their theft of various cultural artifacts throughout the occupied territories. Where Schmitt was a small light on the Nazi train who increasingly fell into insignificance from the mid 1930s onward, Rosenberg was carried by his commitment to the Nazi cause straight to the Nuremberg trials where he was found guilty of conspiracy for crimes against peace, planning a war of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity and subsequently sentenced to death by hanging.
Rosenberg actively and often wrote for the Nazi mouthpiece, the "Völkischer Beobachter" and he wrote the "Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts", the 'myth of the 20th century', his own political book about Jewish-communist conspiracy against civil society, about the necessity of replacing Christianity with a more militaristic and Germanic-minded belief (interesting sidenote: both Rosenberg and Hitler were known admirers of Islam, a religion they deemed as more masculine and strong than Christianity, and both deemed it regrettable than the muslims of the Medieval Era failed to convert Europe).
#Falangism, Spain
One thing that I am sure of, and which I can answer truthfully, is that whatever the contingencies that may arise here, wherever I am there will be no Communism.
Now, with Falangism we have less to work with than the other two, as Falangism was more of a short-term creation in reaction to the left-leaning political climate in Spain at the time - the Falange (FE de las JONS; political party) was only founded in 1933.
Still, we have a few persons to work with, like José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Spanish aristocrat and founder of the Falange and later the overseer of its main newspaper, Arriba. Rivera (and Franco with him) was convinced of a conspiracy of Jews, Communists and Freemasons to wipe out religious and cultural values, and that Roman Catholicism in particular sat in the crosshairs of these malicious forces intent on destroying the Spanish way of life. Rivera and Franco did not racialize the anti-semitism like the Nazis had done, instead opting for a more theological anti-judaism that was more in line with historical Catholic stances (like the one of the Spanish Inquisition, as it happens).
So, to sum it up.
Fascism values "order" in society. Fascists endorse a mental and ideological collective, but stay clear of a collective of wealth.
Fascism is bigoted in nature, having a certain enemy to point to. With the examples we looked at, we saw Jews, freemasons and communists as frequent examples.
Fascism is a top to bottom society, a concept called "Führerprinzip" by the Germans. Democracy and Liberalism meanwhile are bottom to top societies, whereas communism at least pretends to be bottom to top.
Fascism is militaristic, obsessed with darwinistic principles applied to competing nation states. Might makes right in international politics.
Fascism views war as acceptable or even good.
Fascism has a self-image of meritocracy, where the good and the talented get to rule over those not as blessed.
Fascism is misogynistic, although often under the pretext of valuing traditional society and protecting women. Where men are to be soldiers, women are to be mothers.
Fascism is totalitarian in nature, working against what more liberal societies view as fundamental freedoms, with examples being free speech, free expression, freedom of religion or a free press.
The political and philosophical foundations of Italian Fascism do not consist necessarily of a complete philosophical system. Fascism had a syncretic approach that allowed it to refurbish or just to appropriate pre-existing themes and ideas; to adapt by claiming ownership of those elements that appeared necessary in the face of contingent reasons. Therefore it is not simple to discuss in detail the fascist political philosophy, as many aspects in it would appear contrasting; things put together.
Nonetheless, if something existed resembling a theoretical background of fascist politics, that would be the work of Alfredo Rocco. I'll begin there, with a necessary observation that the “idea” of the state, government and their purpose would differ significantly in Italy and Germany – and perhaps Spain – and analogies between the “fascist” regimes should be looked for within the practical development and resorts, rather than in a symmetric doctrine.
Rocco was an Italian Nationalist - in fact the most prominent ideologist of Italian Nationalism since the immediate pre War. His belief, following that of the other nationalists (the word here is not used in a generic way but to discuss the specific features of the nationalist movement founded around the beginning of the XX Century by E.Corradini, F.Papini, G.Prezzolini^1 ) was that the new forces of industrial production, unleashed by the momentous growth of technology, had determined a breaking point in the established tradition of “political authority” as well as in social, moral, individual values. First manifestation of this was the crisis of the parliamentary system: if many within the liberal establishment, either conservative or progressive, agreed on the existence of such a crisis, favoring either an authoritarian or “democratic” reform of the system, Rocco's take was more extreme. The parliamentary system - as he wrote in 1914 - was dead and the Giolitti system which had followed was the proof that it was gone for good. And with it had gone all that small, arcadic world of sensitivities, that one could not conceive without nostalgia, for it had had its beauty and its poetry: the cult of reason, love of freedom, faith in justice […] The parliamentary system, which was to say the political predominance of assemblies of delegates elected by the people, of intermediaries non governing and irresponsible, born, for specific reasons, in England, had spread in Europe during the primacy of the rationalistic philosophy and of idealism […] [Rocco] believed that parliamentarism had absolved its purpose; what was coming next? No one could say. The Giolitti system had only been a moment of the great evolution, that would result in the new political regime of tomorrow.
The crisis of the parliamentary system was not contingent – not treatable through some tweaks of regulations and reform of institutions. It required an entirely new concept of the state to be solved; or rather a modern version of an old concept: the foundation of the state's authority restored to the state itself: an absolute state not of the Monarch but of the Nation. Such a renovation (a “new state”, one of the founding myths of national radicalism of the early XX century) was necessary as, in Rocco's view, the persistent difficulties of the parliamentary system, were in fact evidence of a systemic crisis that had begun with the end of the previous century: the State deprived of its powers, the nation disjointed; public wealth wasted, disorganization deeply rooted everywhere; values turned upside down and on the top of the public thing the most misbelieving, compromising, intriguing men, the most inclined to feed and grow the worst passions of the masses […] the entire active life of the State taken hostage for the gains of the living generation.
Nor would the end of the war change Rocco's belief that the democratic ideology was in itself the ideology of defeat and that the war had confirmed that imperialism (or a policy of power) was the iron cast law that no nation could renounce without perishing as by April 1919 Rocco would again be denouncing that the State was in a crisis; the State was, day by day, dissolving in a multitude of minor aggregations, parties, associations, leagues, unions; that the State was losing, one by one, with an accelerated process, the attributes of sovereignty. But those individuals, amorphous masses, despite dominating the political life of the time, were nothing unless parts, organs of the state body. Organization of society was the quid of the State. Rocco stressed the organizing role of the executive power over the masses, and in fact the prominence of the executive in its own right, as the defining function of a modern state.
This agreed with Rocco's belief in the juridical doctrine of the State: the idea, alternative to that of natural right, that posited that individual rights came from the state, which is to say that every right was a concession of the state to individuals, made for the state's own interest, as it was interest of any organism that its organs functioned properly. The source of individual right was thus a deliberate self limitation of the state right.
In this formal context the Fascist State would rise, according to its main ideologists and architects, to become the summation of all the nation values and of those individual values that found their place within the nation, the ultimate organization of all. As gerarca Giuseppe Bottai explained from the pages of Critica Fascista in 1930, within the State one saw the realization of the highest moral values of their life and thus moved beyond everything within them that was partial: personal gain, interest, life itself if needed. Within the State one could see displayed in act the highest spiritual values: continuity beyond [the limitations of] time, moral greatness, enlightening mission for oneself and for others: therefore [the fascists] said … that the State was the ideal synthesis of material and immaterial values of one's ancestry and was the concrete form of the past and present generations. Thus the State was everything: the organism that served as summary and collection of all individualities. Nothing meaningful existed outside of Fascism: nothing outside of the Regime, everything within the Regime and for the Regime; discussion and critical thinking could exist only within the Regime, within boundaries, within Fascism, not against Fascism, within the Party, not against the Party, within the Fascist State, not against the Fascist State. The Fascist State was the end in itself, the perfect form of the political process in its wider meaning.
One must also observe how the state worked as the socio-biological-cultural totem within Italian Fascism. This was unlike the National Socialist Regime where the state was in fact an instrument in the hands of the party, used to further the goals of the volk, and thus subordinated to both. For men like Rocco there was no difference between the Nation and the State, once the new state had been established to its full authority. And if Bottai had frequently stressed the action of the masses within the state, their evolution towards the state through state education, Rocco stressed the organizing role of the executive power over the masses – the distinction, as it has been called, between “movement Fascism” and “regime Fascism”, with actual Fascism being somewhere in the middle.
As for the Party, that summed up such a large portion of the political life in other totalitarian regimes; the PNF was in comparison quite a puny thing. The functional relations between Party and State had been summarized by Dino Grandi as a progressive “dissolution of the Party into the State”. There was to be no fascist party ruling the liberal state: there was going to be a single entity: the Fascist State. Such a process of course met with resistance from both the Party apparatus and the State bureaucratic structures. Reality was a bit different from the original concept devised by Rocco: he had envisioned a rational state, built from above, resulting from the action of the productive forces of the nation. But the fascist state had begun its life from inside the liberal state, dreaming of shedding it like a chrysalis, but actually retaining a large portion of its structures and institutions. The fascists, once inside the seats of power, had begun painting the walls over, one wall at a time, turning the cocoon in a cocoon of a different color.
There were those who had hoped for a different development, favoring the Party over the State, following from the late 1930s on the National Socialist template – most notable the “party right” of Roberto Farinacci. But the efforts of what was to become the most resilient internal competition to Mussolini were hampered by the lack of anything resembling a theoretical formulation, with Farinacci consistently asking for increased powers to the Party over the course of twenty years.
To add to the existing answers, you might want to take a listen to the excellent AH Podcast from last year on What is Fascism?
There are some good answers already, but perhaps you'll find interesting /u/Klesk_vs_Xaero's very in-depth description of Italian fascism's goals in this earlier question.