REJECTION OF PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY AS A SHAM AND A FRAUD
After socialism, Fascism trains its guns on the whole block of democratic ideologies, and rejects
both their premises and their practical applications and implements. Fascism denies that
numbers, as such, can be the determining factor in human society; it denies the right of numbers
to govern by means of periodical consultations; it asserts the irremediable and fertile and
beneficent inequality of men who cannot be leveled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device
as universal suffrage. Democratic regimes may be described as those under which the people are,
from time to time, deluded into the belief that they exercise sovereignty, while all the time real
sovereignty resides in and is exercised by other and sometimes irresponsible and secret forces.
Democracy is a kingless regime infested by many kings who are sometimes more exclusive,
tyrannical, and destructive than one, even if he be a tyrant. This explains why Fascism –
although, for contingent reasons, it was republican in tendency prior to 1922 – abandoned that
stand before the March on Rome, convinced that the form of government is no longer a matter of
preeminent importance, and because the study of past and present monarchies and past and
present republics shows that neither monarchy nor republic can be judged sub specie aeternitatis,
but that each stands for a form of government expressing the political evolution, the history, the
traditions, and the psychology of a given country.
3
Fascism has outgrown the dilemma: monarchy v. republic, over which democratic regimes too
long dallied, attributing all insufficiencies to the former and proving the latter as a regime of
perfection, whereas experience teaches that some republics are inherently reactionary and
absolutist while some monarchies accept the most daring political and social experiments.
In one of his philosophic meditations, Renan – who had prefascist intuitions remarks, “Reason
and science are the products of mankind, but it is chimerical to seek reason directly for the
people and through the people. It is not essential to the existence of reason that all should be
familiar with it; and even if all had to be initiated, this could not be achieved through democracy
which seems fated to lead to the extinction of all arduous forms of culture and all highest forms
of learning. 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, which care only for the
species and seem ready to sacrifice the individual. It is much to be feared that the last word of
democracy thus understood (and let me hasten to add that it is susceptible of a different
interpretation) would be a form of society in which a degenerate mass would have no thought
beyond that of enjoying the ignoble pleasures of the vulgar.”
REJECTION OF EGALITARIANISM
In rejecting democracy, Fascism rejects the absurd conventional lie of political equalitarianism,
the habit of collective irresponsibility, the myth of felicity and indefinite progress.