Do they?

In July 1943 Benito Mussolini was removed from office – after serving over twenty years as Prime Minister, and then Duce of Italian Fascism. Almost two years later, after a painful conflict between partisan forces and the puppet State of Salò – a lesser civil war on the grand scene of the conflict between the Allied armies and the Nazi occupation forces – Italy returned to social, institutional and ethical peace. One year later the Italian population voted for the Republic and opened the path to a democratic Constitution under the leadership of the unlikely alliance of the "constitutional arc", spanning everyone from the Communists to the old liberal-conservatives; leaving out just the few remnants of the old fascist regime, who had managed to gain a few seat at the new constitutional Assembly.

By then, "historical fascism" – the Italian Regime, the movement which had given Mussolini's rise its first impulse – were thoroughly and completely dead. So were the Nazi armies, their allies and companions in an unprecedented genocidal campaign over Europe. Their remnants – what remained of them, even from an ideological perspective – had to adapt and change to new circumstances, to “evolve” in some way, in a struggle to remain relevant through a mutating world; in no way differently from any other social or political group.

The idea that one should look at Fascism (Italian Fascism, I mean – but, it works almost the same in general) like we do with any other political formations is a rather sensible one, if we want to understand how it came to be and why it took root. And, despite certain historiographical currents being more fond of claiming a right of primogeniture in this regard, it is – with the exception perhaps of the strictest physio-psychological and “moral” interpretations – common to most interpretive threads. The Marxists themselves (Candeloro, Catalano, Castronovo, Quazza, etc.) – albeit often stressing the elements of continuity (the idea, that is, that Fascism was ultimately absolving the same functions of the old liberal State before and of the new republican State after it) – by force of their very own interpretation treated Fascism not as an exception but as a particular form in the imperialistic stage of capitalism, and therefore subject to the same conditioning of any other political force. As a movement, to draw impulse from unresolved social issues and tensions; as a political body, to find and secure legitimacy in the satisfaction of structural needs (from economical development, institutional reforms, protection of vested interests, etc.).

Catholic authors – even ones contemporary (Sturzo) to Fascism, or almost so (Del Noce) – albeit at times exaggerating the totalitarian “anti-religious” zeal of the Regime, acknowledged its existence within the world of ordinary politics, including religious politics; and interpreted its challenge to the institutions, and to the institutions of the Church, as a perhaps fundamental and ethical, but still “political”, one.

Liberal historians (or liberal-conservative ones) didn't differ much in this regard. Authors like De Felice differed in the extent of ideological or “movement” autonomy ascribed to Fascism – an expression, that is, and at least in its “original” (pre-institutionalized) form, of an expanding middle class which sought to take a more active role in the institutions of the liberal State, which had been to that point an almost exclusive feud of the upper bourgeoisie, and that in doing so brought forward a charge of violent renovation (of “revolutionarism”) but also a legacy of petty-bourgeois abrasiveness in its less than inspired ideological expressions. In doing so, the new class aspired to a more or less complete renovation of the State, which also meant that it embarked into the resolution of certain structural needs of Italy's post-unitary State. That they ultimately failed (whether because of Mussolini's last political blunders, intrinsic shortcomings of a state-driven economical system, exhaustion of the authoritarian-capitalistic cycle, or merely because of the inevitable military defeat) doesn't change much in the fact that Fascism, either embarking into a quest to “remake” Italy or merely to “last”, had to contend with the ordinary business of any other government. Education, society, infrastructure, labor organization, center-periphery relations, international politics, finance, international trade, import-export; all aspects that Fascism could attempt to address in its own particular way (displaying at times a proclivity for a more belligerent escape strategy), but that ultimately conditioned it like they would with any other political force.

I reckon this answer so far might be less than satisfactory to you – as it appears to leave out some of the most striking traits of fascism (this time, as a broader European phenomenon). If I were to hazard a comparison, the radicalization process that swept through Europe in the 1940s appeared somewhat like a rainfall – not really out of thin air, even if it might appear so at a first glance. Rain comes from the clouds, and the clouds from water that's held on into the air under the right circumstances, only to coalesce into raindrops even at the smallest changes of a few parameters. This apparently sudden and unexpected coalescence of “eliminationism” (Kallis) should not be understood – I think – as a process of spontaneous generation of “hate”; even if it's certainly true that many fascist movements promoted and sought an affirmation in their somewhat distinctive ability of “reframing” negative impulses into positive elements of “identity” - death into self-sacrifice, murder into cleansing, genocide into purification.

In 1945, Europe stopped murdering Jews. There is no reason to assume that antisemitism disappeared. Nor there is a particular reason to invoke a return to “normalcy” as if the pre-fascist era was blissfully free of prejudice, hatred, violence. No one expects the end of a rainfall – even of a truly dreadful deluge – to signify the end of humidity in the air.

Yet it's also true that the two things aren't the same; that you can deal with damp air much better than with drowning in a flood. I would recommend Kallis' work to get an understanding of certain modes of “escalation” from mere racism, antisemitism, intolerance, into the envisioning of a “world without others”, a true “anti-liberal” utopia; and then into a concrete political project. Fascism, in its various more or less “authentic” incarnations certainly played a role in this process – so did various particular circumstances of the European system at the time. Some of which might have also facilitated the rise of “fascist” movements in various countries; their more or less marginal political incorporation within the existing system, and their ability - in Germany and Italy at least (Paxton) – to gain a direct control of the institutions of the State.

It might be that those circumstances have simply not returned yet; or perhaps the memory of the Holocaust is truly too horrifying for us to ever walk that path again. Maybe we – and hopefully our institutions as well – have become expert at drying out enough “hate” from the world we live in that we shall endure at worst a few sparse clouds. To my knowledge, there is no certain way – nor I am familiar with any piece of literature suggesting one, apart from the obvious one of doing our very best (I suppose).

If this is still less than satisfactory, I can only apologize. I am growing old myself, and fond of thinking that people who ask about the past also think about the past, like I do. We have had our score of “post-fascist”, “neo-fascist” and supposedly “fascist” groups since 1945. I am not too fond of that interpretive line; in part because it usually tends to forget the original context of the “fascist” interpretation itself (of interest, the work of Franco – who's not Renzo – De Felice, in the 1970s), and perhaps more so because, at least in observance to my almost “historicist” sensitivity, I feel that ascribing too similar traits to different social and political phenomenons leads one to (at least) implicitly disregard the particular value of the lives, moral and material existences, of the people who – for better or worse – partook of that social and political phenomenon, or suffered the consequences of it. Others – I admit – have voiced less “sentimental” concerns over this issue of classification.