cults of the culture wars: benito Mussolini's 1930s Fascism and Corporatism model. Rebranded and reabsorbed into the American Far Right 1990-2000s. (part2)

By the late 1920s, with Benito Mussolini's Fascism now firmly in place in Italy, and both Western Europe and America showed interest in a possible system of authoritarian rule, that would celebrate technological superiority and advancement over social democracy, while keeping Marxism at bay.  And it was Mussolini's Corporatism which held an attractive promise to countries already socially economically exhausted from the Great Depression, and with encroaching Marxism appealing to the working class, Corporatism offered an offset to the State, rather than distribution of wealth and resources under Socialism, Corporatism allowed private companies, as individual entities to operate, yet were all subordinate to the State.  Encouraging private enterprises to flourish under State supervision, without the issues of labour strikes, unions and workers rights.

The Fascist model of Corporatism, and its influence on Western Europe and America was striking.  From Adolf Hitler emulating Benito Mussolini's Fascists aesthetics as a prelude to Nazism, with his Roman era grandiose, imperialist aspirations, to the 'Austrian Corporate State' in 1934 under Engelbert Dollfuss and his "Austrofascist" dictatorship.  The Portuguese Estado Novo ("New State") ruled by the authoritarian António de Oliveira Salazar.  And of course the Spanish Civil War in 1936, lead by the Fascist Francisco Franco, where Mussolini sent in 70,000 Italian troops, aircraft and financial assistance to ensure Franco claim power in Spain.  And despite the rise of the Far Right in Europe as a foundation to World War Two, across the Atlantic, during the 1930s, America also began to warm to Mussolini's Fascism.

Fascism shelved, and its Corporatism on hold.  The post World War Two American rebrand.

After a devastated Europe post World War Two, America and its allies had, in its tragic irony, defeated Fascism removing most of its Corporatism and ideological aspirations, and promptly began to divide the West and East Europe under Russian and Western influences and control.  All the while the Fascist rebrand begun in earnest within American domestic and international policy as an anti-communist bloc, with remnants of the pre WW2 Far Right, Fascist ideology circling about the business and political world awaiting to reattach itself as an ideological and societal model for mid-century America.   Encouraged by American productivity during the war, and corporatism emerged under a term known as "Industrial pluralism" by reworking, major corporations, government and officials began planning wages, the economy, productivity, stifling unions, and even offering 'social' improvements.  With the remnants of the 1930s "Technocracy Inc", a cult like anti-democracy futurist group, which Elon Musk's grandfather (and closet Nazi) Joshua Norman Haldeman was a staunch member, later forming the conspiracy theory political group, the "Social Credit Society" which was filled to the brim with anti-Jewish rhetoric and conspiracy theories; the proto-Fascist underpinning within America 50s, to devise 1950s "Organization Man" culture, was thankfully rejected by the late 1950s early counterculture manifestations and the three decades that followed.

The Neoconservative pushback and the Paleoconservative revolt.  And the Right Wing purge of America to Proto-Fascism 1989-early 2000s. 

The conservative thinker William F. Buckley Jr (1925-2008), who was America's answer to a 'Centralist' neoconservative, despite the oxymoron, he was a product of his time, when the shift from Right Wing Nationalism after pre and post World War Two, swung towards America as an international vanguard against communism so did Buckley's attempt at aligning majority of the conservatives in Washington under a term he coined called "Fusionism".  Utilizing the Cold War as a backbone to the political theory he was able to create a Right Wing alliance, inspiring all facets of the conservative camp to unite, while expelling Far Right Nationalists, conspiracy theorists and proto-Fascists, which were, at the time, the growing paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians (prelude to the 2000s Alt-Right).  When the Cold War officially ended in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Far Right Nationalists, who at the time branded themselves, as discussed, as Paleoconservatives, began to activate, dismantling the more 'Liberal' elements of the American neoconservatives, and when the so called grandfather of neoconservatism Irving Kristol wrote in 1989 "My Cold War", as a battle cry to begin the next target for the Right in America, which was the Left and remnants of the counterculture lifestyles of the previous three decades, he inadvertently dropped his Far Right script into the hands of the paleoconservatives under Pat Buchanan, the first MAGA ("Make America Great Again") advocate, who scavenged every Far Right/Fascists doctrine you could think of, for the next rebrand, with its enemy/target firmly set on the domestic, rather than international 'villains'  of the last Cold War.

And Pat Buchanan's infamous "Culture War" speech at the Republican National Committee, debate with George Bush in 1992, echoed a proto-Fascist retake from the Right, masked as isolationism, and very much a call to arms for the Far Right of America, dormant since the 1930s, he called for what we now know and are familiar today: Anti-Immigration, Anti-Free Trade, and Anti-Foreign Intervention, very much the calling card phrases that has solidified Right Wing political extremity throughout the decades.  Which can be traced back to Benito's Mussolini's "National Syndicalist" blueprint of 30s, an enduring primer for the Far Right, that being:  "Anti-Immigration" = Xenophobia and cultural purity over migration, then later, expansion and colonisation, re: Mussolini's Mediterranean and North African territorial land grabs and resource plundering.  "Anti-Free Trade" = Mussolini’s "Autarky" (economic self-sufficiency), and as we have discussed, Corporatism.  "Anti-Foreign Intervention" = "Sacred Egoism" (Egoismo Nazionale).  Anti 'globalist' wars and United Nations intervention into global conflicts.  Viewed with our current proto-Fascist inspired wars under Donald Trump as purely as National interest driven, resource plundring, via land steals, blockades, and leverage transactions against the 'other' superpowers.

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(A.Glass 2026)