Book Review: Dinesh D’Souza’s “Big Lie” On the Ideological Links Between Italian Fascism & American Progressivism

I recently listened to the audio book of Dinesh D’Souza’s “Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left“.

I picked this up a few months ago mainly because I was interested in the content he put forth on the leftist Marxian roots of Fascism, information that you don’t often find because Marxists have spent decades trying to obscure these links in order to distance themselves from fascism.

The book is essentially an attempt to “pin the fascist tail on the Democratic donkey”. D’Souza sets out to prove that the American Left, progressives and the Democratic Party specifically have much more in common with fascism than the American Right represented by himself and people like Reagan. He goes about doing this by showing that fascism is, on an economic level, rooted heavily in Marxist socialism and not capitalism as traditionally championed by American conservatives.

Fascism is rooted in Marxist socialism not conservatism

D’Souza makes a strong case for this in two large chapters titled “Falsifying History” and “Mussolini’s Journey”. He shows that Mussolini’s doctrine was an inversion of the principles that American conservatives have traditionally championed, such as free markets, limited government, property rights, gun rights and traditional Christian morals. Instead, Mussolini’s fascism was based exclusively on attacking the idea of liberty and citizens’ rights, while asserting the supreme unchecked power of a centralized State. D’Souza demonstrates that fascism, in doctrine and practice, is nothing less than a Totalizing Centralized State alongside a socialist economic system that denies citizens rights of any kind.

“Nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” was Mussolini’s famous phrase. Giovanni Gentile, the philosopher of fascism, said the same thing when he declared that individuals only have “rights” if they coincide with the State’s whims, meaning that they don’t any rights beyond mindlessly agreeing with State diktats.

Gentile…believed that the true state – his ethical state – was a corpus – a body politic – hence corporate state – and that the state was more important than the parts – the individuals – who comprised it because if the state was strong and free so too would be the individuals within it: therefore the state had more rights than the individual. Only within the ethical state could individuals realize themselves as proper individuals. – Nicholas Farrell, Mussolini: A New Life

That bit of bafflegab from Gentile is effectively saying that the State decides all and the citizens must obey the rulers. Gentile also announced that the power of the fascist State is “unconditioned” and “not subject to negotiation or compromise”. In other words, the State can take any action it likes and if citizens disagree, then they will be punished for not agreeing with the fascist ruling class. Mussolini echoed that sentiment, writing:

“The Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. It is opposed to classical liberalism [which] denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual. The maxim that society exists only for the well-being and freedom of the individuals composing it does not seem to be in conformity with nature’s plans. If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government.”

The strongest influence on early fascism was Karl Marx, who Mussolini called his prophet. Marx called for a totalizing centralized State with direct control over all factors of economic production (land, capital & labour). Fascism put Marx’s vision into practice:

“Under fascism, the state, through official cartels, controlled all aspects of manufacturing, commerce, finance, and agriculture. Planning boards set product lines, production levels, prices, wages, working conditions, and the size of firms. Licensing was ubiquitous; no economic activity could be undertaken without government permission.” – source

D’Souza then goes on a long historical journey through Mussolini’s life in Italy, showing that he was Italy’s preeminent Marxist socialist/syndicalist activist, intellectual and agitator for decades before he pieced together the ideology of fascism. He led major workers’ strikes and tried to bring down the capitalist enterprises in favour of socialized public ones. He supported Italy’s entry into World War I believing it to have revolutionary potential to bring about Socialist governance. Mussolini and his fascism was thus exclusively a by-product of the political Left, of Marxism, of Syndicalist Socialism. It was a slight revision of Marx, as Mussolini realized that he must appeal to Italian nationality as well as their class to bring about the workers’ revolution that his prophet Marx prescribed in The Communist Manifesto.

Fascism is, in effect, economic Marxism wrapped up in patriotism and a national flag.

Nazis and Fascists Praised FDR

D’Souza digs up quite a bit of evidence that the German Nazis and Italian Fascists loved FDR and his “New Deal,” seeing it as analogous to their own socialistic economic policies. FDR, for his part, reciprocated fealty towards Mussolini but not Hitler.

From Mises.org:

The Nazi press enthusiastically hailed the early New Deal measures: America, like the Reich, had decisively broken with the “uninhibited frenzy of market speculation.” The Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, “stressed ‘Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies,’ praising the president’s style of leadership as being compatible with Hitler’s own dictatorial Führerprinzip” (p. 190).

Nor was Hitler himself lacking in praise for his American counterpart. He “told American ambassador William Dodd that he was ‘in accord with the President in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people. These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy, which finds its expression in the slogan “The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual”‘” (pp. 19-20). A New Order in both countries had replaced an antiquated emphasis on rights.

Mussolini, who did not allow his work as dictator to interrupt his prolific journalism, wrote a glowing review of Roosevelt’s Looking Forward. He found “reminiscent of fascism … the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices”; and, in another review, this time of Henry Wallace’s New Frontiers, Il Duce found the Secretary of Agriculture’s program similar to his own corporativism (pp. 23-24).

Roosevelt never had much use for Hitler, but Mussolini was another matter. “‘I don’t mind telling you in confidence,’ FDR remarked to a White House correspondent, ‘that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman'” (p. 31). Rexford Tugwell, a leading adviser to the president, had difficulty containing his enthusiasm for Mussolini’s program to modernize Italy: “It’s the cleanest … most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious” (p. 32, quoting Tugwell).

Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) mirrored fascist economic policies of heavy interventionism:

The best example was FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), a fascist program that would have fit perfectly in Mussolini’s fascist Italy. Under the NIRA, federal officials organized private American businesses, industries, and corporations into giant cartels that established “codes of fair competition,” which set prices, wages, and production in their particular sectors, all enforced by federal force. More than 500 codes of “fair practice” were developed.

Not surprisingly, FDR put a military man, retired Hugh Johnson, to run this fascist program. Johnson had graduated from West Point, made the military his career, and ultimately reached the rank of General. According to Wikipedia, “One author claims Johnson looked on Italian Fascist corporatism as a kind of model. He distributed copies of a fascist tract called ‘The Corporate State’ by one of Mussolini’s favorite economists, including giving one to Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and asking her to give copies to her Cabinet.”

FDR appears to have met and schmoozed with British Fascist Leader Oswald Mosley, as you can see them together in this picture.

“Dems Are the Real Racists”

This point is where D’Souza picks up a lot of ridicule from those further to the Right of him on issues like race. D’Souza spends a good portion of this book trying to make the case that the Democratic Party are the “party of segregation, slavery, Indian removal and Jim Crow”. He makes a solid case that Democrats dominated politics in the American South for a long time and supported those policies, but where he fails is recognizing that today, the Democratic Party has moved far away from their White racialist roots and are now the party of anti-Whiteism.

Who can say that today, with Democrats like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, Joe Biden and the like openly spouting vitriolic hatred of White Americans and supporting White demographic replacement policies (Joe Biden himself welcomed White minority status as a “good thing”), are still trekking in the path of Jim Crow? It was a Democrat, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who passed the pro-black Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Hart-Cellar act of 1965 that opened the immigration floodgates to the brown world. Democrats are clearly no longer aligned with White racialism but its opposite: Black and Brown Power. D’Souza seems stuck in a weird time warp where he is describing the Democrats now as they were more than a century ago, despite vast changes in their politics. He would do much better to say that in the current year, the Democrats have moved into the camp of anti-White racism and Brown Power, throwing Whites under the bus entirely.

D’Souza spouts a pretty hard line against racism in this book and it’s clear why: he’s an Indian immigrant married to a Venezuelan, a classic Kalergi Globalist test case in America’s Judeo-Bolshevik stage-managed post-1965 melting pot.

It is in D’Souza’s personal interest as a brown man married to a brown woman with brown offspring to look with disdain on the White in-group preference that used to be prominent in America and the West. His job seems to be to throw the racist and fascist card back at the Left, but he misses the mark by not highlighting the fact that the new and acceptable racism that’s become prevalent today on the Left is racism against Whites not blacks. Why not emphasize this point instead of harkening back to slavery days and Jim Crow era to pin the KKK hood on the Dems?

The Dems are racists…. against White people. Their racial politics today has taken on the characteristics of Black Power not White Power. Democratic politicians are hell-bent on making Whites into a minority, not re-establishing White dominance.

Different types of nationalism

D’Souza spends much of the book trying to exonerate Trump from the charge of fascism while honing in on the similarities that the leftists have with fascism on economic policy and things like hostility to free speech and open debate. He makes a decent case here: Trump is not a fascist because he is not a socialist but rather a traditional capitalist, whereas Democratic politicians attack capitalism and markets quite regularly and call for increased governmental controls in all aspects of life, making them closer to the economic side of fascism than Trump is.

The leftist charge of Trumpian fascism seems rooted in his patriotism, nationalism and opposition to immigration. This is where Trump is closer to Hitlerian fascism in the sense that Trump seems to have some tendencies favouring the White-Anglo Saxon roots of the United States and wanting to preserve it in the face of unrelenting immigration waves from black and brown countries. The modern American Left are all for open borders, gay and trans rights, feminism, abortion, and many other things that the Hitlerian breed of fascism was opposed to.

D’Souza is however correct to note that nationalism is not a left or right phenomenon but appears on both sides of the spectrum. Fascism is nationalistic socialism but it is not the progenitor of either socialism or nationalism and nationalism need not wed itself to socialism, as you saw with figures like Franco, Pinochet and even Trump himself. Fascists try to claim ownership of the concept of nationalism with the intent of shoehorning their Marxian economics down the throats of patriots and nationalists who would rather not submit 50% or more of their income to wasteful government over-spending and failed projects. Fascists don’t own nationalism and many of them seem more interested in leftoid egalitarian economics than anything related to identity.

Hitlerian National Socialism was not traditional nationalism because Hitler did not respect borders or nation-states that got in his way. He ran over and annexed multiple countries in his wars of aggression. His chief political objective from the outset was expanding Germany’s borders to achieve Lebensraum (living space) in the East, seizing lands from other ethnic groups and moving them off their historic homelands. D’Souza makes a decent case in the book that Hitler was inspired in these diabolical plans by the Western expansion achieved by the American government in its war with the Indians.

Erasing borders is not nationalism, it’s imperialism. Hitler was thus an ethnic imperialist, not a traditional nationalist. Similarly, Russia’s Putin is a cultural imperialist seeking to achieve a Eurasian empire dominated by the Kremlin. Hitler’s was an attempt at ethnic expansionism and Putin’s is an attempt at cultural expansionism, two sides of the same coin. Like Hitler, Putin tries to negate the existence of ethnic groups that get in the way of his expansion, like Ukrainians, and works to “Russify” them by erasing their own identity and imposing a Russian one over their heads.

We ought not allow these imperialists to adorn themselves with the label nationalist when their policies are profoundly anti-nationalist.

Right on Fascism, Wrong on White Identity Politics

D’Souza is quite erudite in his description of fascism as a phenomenon of the Left. As I’ve come to know them, fascists are indeed economic far-leftists committed to abolishing most private property and establishing an unregulated, totalitarian State with unchecked powers to abuse citizens. Anyone even slightly less Statist than they are is ridiculed as a “libertarian” even if they are not one. Their sinister goal seems to be to hollow out the middle ground between rootless, identityless libertarian extreme individualism and the hyper-Statist, hyper-collectivist economically communist system established by Mussolini and Hitler.

D’Souza is committed to colour-blind conservatism because he is himself not White. It would be against his own personal interest to embrace a form of nationalism that incorporated White ethnocentrism, so instead he extricates race from nation and replaces it with ideas. But ideas alone don’t make nations whole or prosperous, people do, and I would argue that there’s some racial component to the outstanding achievements of Western civilization. If we wish to preserve the high quality of life the West has achieved, I believe that also means preserving the ethnic groups who built it.

Ethnic and national collectivism is not the same thing as economic collectivism. You can easily see a society in which patriotism and ethnic pride play a part in politics and form the basis for citizens’ identity, but that also has an economic system of moderate taxation and free enterprise. Likewise, you have seen the implementation of communist systems of extreme economic collectivism where class consciousness was the center of gravity for politics (USSR, East Germany, Cuba, China), but which dismissed and outlawed racial and ethnic collectivism in favour of anti-racist universalism.

It is not only the role of the State to protect and care for its citizens, but of families and communities themselves who rally together to help each other in times of need. This happens naturally, State or no State. If the State grows too large, it seeks to replace family and community with itself, leading to the erosion of community and familial bonds. I don’t think we ought to become beggars waiting in socialist government bread lines for our daily meal. We must make our own meals or turn to family and community when in need. The State’s essential roles are those of national security, border enforcement, law and order and imposing a moral guide for society. It’s not the role of the State to micromanage everyone’s economic or personal affairs. Nanny statism strips away the personal responsibility that every boy needs to learn on his own to become a real man.

Both libertarianism and fascism are flawed ideologies, extreme ends of the Statist and non-Statist spectrums, and both deserve scrutiny applied to them. Since I reject the precepts of both, each side tries to throw me into the other’s camp. What I actually am is neither a libertarian or a fascist, but a national conservative or conservative nationalist who believes that family, identity and morality are the bedrocks of a successful society. If we focus on getting back to those three things, we can change our current self-destructive course for the better.

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