And yet, it’s impossible not to approach Qatar with a sense of unease. This is the first World Cup since 1934 to be hosted by a nation that has not previously played in it; why is Qatar so keen to be involved that it has spent an estimated $220 billion on staging the event?

The answer is timeless: hosting the World Cup has always been a political act. When Uruguay staged the first tournament in 1930, Juan Campisteguy’s government underwrote the costs of travelling teams because it believed the tournament would promote the country’s centenary of independence. The gamble paid off; Uruguay went on to beat Argentina 4-2 in the final.

This was nothing compared to what happened in Italy four years later. Mussolini was well-aware of the propagandistic potential of sport, often being photographed riding a horse or skiing. In 1933, when he met Engelbert Dollfuss at the beach resort of Riccione, he donned a pair of swimming trunks while the diminutive Austrian Chancellor wore a sober suit. “When you compete abroad,” Mussolini told Italian athletes, “the honour and sporting principle of the nation is entrusted to your muscles and above all your spirit.”

No doubt the Antwerp Olympics of 1920 were at the back of his mind, when the Italian athletes who turned up were a dishevelled bunch who sang the “Red Flag”. Twelve years later, they arrived in Los Angeles dressed in matching black shirts and singing “Giovinezza”, the hymn of the Italian Fascist Party. They went on to finish second in the medals table. Victories abroad, as Il Littorale noted as early as 1928, “were clear signs of racial superiority that are destined to reflect in many fields outside of sport”.

Whether Italy’s football coach throughout the Thirties, Vittorio Pozzo, was a Fascist remains contested, but he certainly benefited from the regime’s focus on muscular leadership. “The norms that govern the game,” he said, “impose the principles of authority, without which order cannot exist.” His side at the 1934 World Cup was brisk and physical and found referees benevolent. As the journalist Gianni Brera observed in his great history of Italian football, Louis Baert, the Belgian who oversaw the quarter-final against Spain, “behaved as if he were well-aware where the game was taking place”, while there were numerous rumours about meetings between Mussolini and the Swedish referee Ivan Eklind, who unusually refereed both Italy’s semi-final and the final.

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Not that anybody in Italy much cared about the controversies, as Simon Martin’s Football and Fascism makes clear. In La Gazzetta della Sport, Bruno Roghi wrote of the national team as “little, gallant soldiers who fight for an idea that is greater than them”, while the Florentine Fascist weekly Il Bargello described the World Cup win as “the affirmation of an entire people, an indication of its virile and moral strength”.

It wasn’t, though, just about winning the World Cup. It was also about projecting the idea of Italy as a modern nation. There had been heavy investment in stadiums for a decade before the tournament. Fans from France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland were subsidised to come to Italy. Tickets were printed on high-quality paper to encourage visitors to keep them, and the Fascist insignia they bore, as souvenirs. The Futurist artist Filippo Marinetti was commissioned to design a poster that focused on a powerful, thrusting figure in Italian kit and bore the fasces in one corner. Stamps produced for the tournament pursued a similar theme.

Foreign journalists were impressed, to the delight of the Italian media. “The spontaneous and heartfelt statements of our foreign colleagues,” Roghi wrote in La Gazzetta, “are more than sufficient to show Mussolini’s Italy — that was once little Italy of all improvisations and apologies — has organised the festival of football with the style, flexibility, precision, even the courtesy and meticulousness that indicated an absolute maturity and preparedness.” His response was extreme but not uncommon. It was a similar eagerness to show off the Estado Novo that led the Getúlio Vargas regime to bid for Brazil to host the 1942 World Cup — although by the time that tournament was finally played, in 1950, Vargas had been deposed.

Argentina was chosen as host for the 1978 tournament in 1966, the bid of one military junta ultimately inherited by another. This political chaos was reflected in the official logo, which was based on the arms-clasped-above-head gesture of Juan Perón, who had briefly returned to power in 1973 before dying and being succeeded by his wife, Isabel, who was ousted three years later in a coup. Before the tournament was held, slums were destroyed or hidden from view, dissidents rounded up, and around a tenth of the national budget spent on constructing or redeveloping stadiums. Most important: Argentina won.

Whether, as is widely believed, the success sustained the junta in power is difficult to assess, but two details seem telling. First, about ten minutes’ walk from El Monumental, the stadium where Argentina beat the Netherlands in the final, is the ESMA (the Navy School of Mechanics) which, under the junta, became a notorious torture centre. When the prisoners, hearing the roars of the crowd, celebrated in the cells, General Jorge Acosta, one of the most brutal torturers, took out three of them in his car and wound down the windows so they could see the celebrations on the streets — to show them that their protests against the regime meant nothing beside the eruption of patriotic joy. Second, four years later, after the invasion of the Falklands, Argentinian TV broadcasts were dominated by two things: news from the war, and reruns of the glory of ‘78.

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Qatar, then, is not unique. Every country to have hosted the World Cup has done so with some sort of soft-power objective in mind. Even England, in 1966, saw their triumph blend with the idea of Swinging London: to project an image of a vibrant, modern nation emerging from the gloom and stuffiness of the Fifties and the loss of influence both politically and in football (the 6-3 defeat to Hungary in 1953 was essentially football’s Suez).

But this World Cup does feel different. This is partly down to the corruption that surrounded the award of hosting rights for 2018 and 2022. There is no evidence Qatar did anything wrong, but 16 of the 22 delegates who made the decision have either been convicted or credibly accused of wrongdoing, while many have wondered what was discussed at the lunch, nine days before the vote, between Nicolas Sarkozy, the then-French president, Tamim al-Thani, who has since succeeded his father as Emir of Qatar, and the French then-Uefa president, Michel Platini.

Then there are the well-reported human rights issues, and the fact that, ever since the Gulf states bought up major football clubs and the rights to stage major fights and Formula One races, both the British media and fans are more aware than ever about “sportswashing” — the way sport can be used to present a certain picture of a nation and garner influence. The phenomenon of certain fans backing the stance of the state that owns their club against its critics — see Newcastle fans criticising the fiancée of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi; or Manchester City fans insisting on the guilt of Matthew Hedges, who was accused of spying in Abu Dhabi — was familiar even before news broke that Qatar is actively paying fans from certain countries to sing on demand and help police social media.

Meanwhile, for those fans who do stay home, there is a prospect of a winter sitting huddled under blankets, struggling to afford rising energy prices (caused by a war started by the last World Cup hosts), hoping the power cut is over in time to watch the next game, beamed live from a country that is only staging the tournament because of the profits it has made from selling gas. Geopolitics has a sudden immediacy.

The Fifa president Gianni Infantino and secretary general Fatma Samoura wrote this month to each of the 32 competing football federations, urging them not to allow “football to be dragged into every ideological or political battle that exists”. Which is not, on the face of it, unreasonable — were it not for the fact that Qatar hosting a World Cup is itself part of a political battle, and that certain issues cannot be casually dismissed as differences of ideology. The letter speaks of the opportunity “to welcome and embrace everyone, regardless of origin, background, religion, gender, sexual orientation or nationality” — and yet homosexuality is outlawed in Qatar. An existential threat to a group of people is not “an ideological or political battle”; indeed, it runs directly contrary to Article 3 of Fifa’s own statutes, the value of which is now exposed as nil.

Finally, there is the decision not to hold the World Cup in June-July. Perhaps there is a case to be made that the European off-season should not dictate the timing of the World Cup. Why should a raft of countries be disbarred from hosting just because their climate does not fit? But this does not alter the realisation that the bidding process for 2022 was for a tournament to be staged in June and July, and that the rules were changed after Qatar had won when it was decided that maybe trying to play — or watch — football in 40-plus degrees wasn’t a great idea, even with whatever speculative cooling technology was being proposed.

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Covid-related changes to the schedule also have not helped, but the rejig to the Premier League calendar necessitated by the November start means there are just seven days between the final domestic league game and the opening match of the World Cup. There should have been eight, but three months ago the start date was suddenly moved forward by a day, apparently so Qatar could play Ecuador with the eyes of the world upon them, undistracted by three other matches on the same day. The change was made just as a global advertising campaign was launched marking 100 days till the start of the World Cup and immediately rendered inaccurate — the problem perhaps of a society in which royal whim can override years of diligent planning.

To put the lack of break in context, there has never previously been fewer than 16 days between the Champions League final and the first game of the World Cup, so most players have had three-to-four weeks beforehand. This means not only a greater likelihood of fatigue and injury for players, but also a lack of preparation time for national coaches; with the usual two-to-three weeks of build-up reduced to three or four days, how can they work on anything but the most basic planning?

There will be those who question how much this all matters. Football, after all, is only a game. It is just 22 players chasing around an inflated polyurethane sphere. Compared to persecuted minorities and workers toiling in abject conditions, who cares about the football? But the World Cup does matter. It matters to those who play it and those who watch it and those who believe, along with Jules Rimet, that, despite it all, the tournament can be an event that fosters understanding between peoples. And yet, once again, perhaps more than ever, the World Cup finds itself a tool of propaganda, with all that is good about it sublimated to the needs of an authoritarian state. At its heart, the World Cup is an idealistic phenomenon, and those ideals have rarely felt so threatened.

Not all Italians are making the pilgrimage to Predappio, of course. The “true believers” who do are an exiguous minority, even if groups such as Casa Pound and Forza nuova register a growing popularity. More numerous are those “post-fascists”, many of whom undoubtedly helped Giorgia Meloni to become Italy’s first female Prime Minister. But to ascribe Meloni’s victory to a widespread revival of fascism would be mistaken; there are many factors that have pushed voters to support the extreme Right, not least the current economic crisis. Even so, the spectre of fascism continues to haunt Italian politics. It is a reminder that, unlike Germany, Italy has never really come to terms with its fascist past. Whereas in Germany, Nazi monuments were torn down and Holocaust memorials constructed to remind people of their crimes, in Italy monuments glorifying the Duce — such as the Dux obelisk in Rome — are still there for all to see. There is no suggestion that they should be removed.

Monuments, in themselves, may not be a problem; it is how people interpret them that is important. When the comparison with German denazification is made, the stock Italian reply is: “But Mussolini was not Hitler.” While undoubtedly true, the implications of this statement are far-reaching. The “lesser evil” argument has been manipulated by those such as former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who insisted that “Mussolini never killed anybody”, and the former vice-President of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, who claimed that “Mussolini did many good things” — this last a common phrase, referring usually to the draining of the Pontine marshes south of Rome or the extension of the welfare system. From being the lesser evil, Mussolini has become no evil at all.

This rose-tinted view of Mussolini has several causes, but much can be explained by the way in which the Second World War ended for Italy. After the Armistice with the Allies in 1943 and the subsequent German invasion of the peninsula, the Italian Resistance movement played a great part in the liberation of the country. In order to obtain the best possible post-war settlement, the role of the Resistance was emphasised in the peace negotiations; Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler was played down as much as possible. It was as if Italy had always been a nation of anti-fascists; as if the Italians had been victims of fascism. Although it was not at all clear who exactly the fascists had been, as victims of fascism it was evident that Italians had no need to come to terms with the past. The responsibility belonged to others. We had, essentially, anti-fascism without fascism.

One consequence of this interpretation of Italy’s past was that many fascists were never tried or imprisoned, much less executed for their crimes. There was no Italian equivalent of the Nuremberg trials; on the contrary, there was an amnesty declared for many fascist crimes. At the administrative level, continuity rather than change was common. Many former fascists simply blended into the woodwork and got on with the job, covered by the rhetoric of anti-fascism and Italian “victimhood”.

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For several decades this reading of the past held. The Italian Republic, explicitly founded on the values of the Resistance, made anti-fascism its official discourse. Positions were forced to change in the Seventies when the victim paradigm was challenged by an Italian historian, Renzo De Felice, who said in his massive biography of Mussolini that there had been a “mass consensus” among Italians for fascism. Italians had been complicit with the regime — perpetrators, not victims. Here, surely, was the moment for Italy to come to terms with its past. Strangely though, it didn’t happen. What happened instead was that mass consensus for fascism was seen as legitimising the regime. The argument went: “If we were all fascists, and if, as we know, Italians are ‘good people’, then fascism cannot have been so bad.” Again Italians were off the hook. If, as victims of fascism, they bore no responsibility, as supporters of what was now cast as a benign dictatorship, they had nothing to explain. Germans had a past that could never pass; Italians a past that presented no problems.

The historical roots of today’s indulgence, sometimes even nostalgia, towards Mussolini lie in the belief that, at the end of the day, he did “many good things”. It is a view often purveyed — perhaps unintentionally and possibly because of the lack of other materials — by the media, which continues to show images of the regime that are drawn from fascist propaganda and are, therefore, very obviously, favourable to the regime. The self-representation of fascism remains very much the lens through which the regime is viewed. It is, of course, a world of one success after another: of marshlands drained, trains on time, healthy babies, and smiling faces. It all looks very convincing. The violence of the regime has been airbrushed out of the picture. The constant police repression is glossed over. We rarely see signs of the half-a-million Italian casualties whose deaths in the course of the Second World War were directly attributable to fascist policies, even less so of the tens of thousands of Africans killed in the colonial massacres of the Thirties. In these circumstances, psychological removal becomes easy.

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The centenary of the March on Rome took place against this backdrop. Some may ask why it was commemorated at all, but the real question is: what is the significance of the March today? Here, the answer is less clear-cut than one might expect. Italian attitudes to fascism are often ambivalent: collective memory of Mussolini’s regime reflects what many people would like to believe rather than the harsh reality. It is a distortion which seems to run in parallel with the current drift to the Right in both European and American politics. Many of those factors that have helped the French, Hungarian, and Polish Right (all friends of Meloni) to preach and, where possible, practice an “illiberal democracy” are present in Italy. Dissatisfaction with what all too often looks like political drift, the mounting problems of representative democracy, economic instability accompanied by constant cuts in social services, immigration — these are all factors that serve to fuel a “memory” of a dictator who, as the slogan went, “was always right”.

It is a surprising destiny for a man who, in 1945, was execrated and reviled by Italians, but not so surprising in the history of dictators. Stalin, Ceaușescu, Franco all have their supporters nowadays. It suggests that, even though Meloni may denounce (unconvincingly) Italy’s fascist past, the admirers of Mussolini are likely to flock in ever greater numbers to Predappio.

It’s why I’m sceptical about any discussions regarding the prospect of American fascism. The latest trigger was Italy’s general election, which swept the ambiguously populist Right-wing party Fratelli d’Italia into power. But this is only the most recent. Before that, President Biden himself singled out segments of the GOP as “semi-fascist”, and while he didn’t elaborate, a number of commentators doubled-down on it. Earlier still, scholars in highly-coveted positions, such as Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder have created veritable cottage industries out of a moralised analysis of what they treat as a global surge in fascism.

The fascism discussion is increasingly taking on a meta dimension, in which half of the arguments now circle around the usage itself, and whether disputing its usage perhaps makes one, if not fascist, then insufficiently dedicated to the spirit of democracy (as well as pedantic, and so on).

But why do we keep returning to this subject, and why do we find it so difficult to even agree on the terms of the debate? The second question is the easier to answer. For, despite being one of the major forms of modern political organisation, fascism is probably the least well understood. The great Italian historian of fascism Renzo de Felice remarked that unlike liberalism or communism, fascism had no defining texts — no Second Treatise of Government, no Das Kapital. And while it attracted major thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, neither produced a work that served to systematically define it for future generations.

It is the least systematic of the major ideological tendencies of the 20th century, and generating an inductive understanding is complicated by the confounding factors in each country’s specific manifestation. In Italy — the original incarnation of fascism — you have inter alia the particular character of Mussolini, but also the unique role of the Vatican, the country’s geopolitical situation, the recent and still ongoing colonial ventures, and the rising importance of diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, other Right-wing regimes of the 20th century — Spain, Portugal, Greece, Argentina, Syria — all incorporated elements or factions of fascism without necessarily embracing fascism tout court. And over all this hangs the shadow of Nazism, which is of course a variant of fascism, but one whose most salient features — race worship and Jew-hatred — are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions of fascism.

All of which is to say that confusion surrounding the term is probably inevitable, though this has hardly limited its usage. On the contrary: it has by now become an almost obligatory grace note of disapproval, regardless of how far removed from the subject at hand (nor is this dynamic limited to the Left — cf. Jonah Goldberg’s lazy manifesto Liberal Fascism). Of course, this is demonology, not political analysis. As George Orwell put it: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.” It is in this sense, the domestic equivalent of bringing up the Munich Agreement in foreign policy debates.

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But fascism is not just an empty ideological vessel; it describes a programmatic way of organising political society that differs from either liberalism or communism. Fascism is a totalising project — one that channels all subsidiary institutions from the family to business corporations to the nation toward the interests of the absolute state. And as Adam Tooze has pointed out, this almost always operates in concert with extraordinary military and economic mobilisation against perceived threats, both foreign and domestic.

If this doesn’t sound very much like any major political phenomenon today (and it doesn’t), why then do we obsess over it so? It is clear that the idea of fascism — however nebulous — continues to exert a unique, dark fascination for us (alas, poor communism, with its nearly 100 million dead, apparently lacks a certain je ne sais quoi). And perhaps this is nothing new. Almost 50 years ago, Susan Sontag noted how: “For those born after the early 1940s, bludgeoned by a lifetime’s palaver, pro and con, about communism, it is fascism — the great conversation piece of their parents’ generation — which represents the exotic, the unknown.”

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But I think there’s something more at work in the collective quasi-obsession with identifying and rooting out fascism in our own society. Machiavelli has a great line where he notes how Roman writers would “praise Caesar but blame Catiline” as a coded way of talking about what were in effect Caesar’s crimes. Something similar seems to be at work with respect to how we discuss the defects of democracy — assigning those tendencies we least like to some external phenomenon that we call “fascism”. Overweening executive power? Militarised deep state? Consolidated corporate authority working hand-in-glove with centralised bureaucracies? Immigration restrictions? Political demagoguery? The truth is that all of the elements that we have seen fit to attribute to the external threat of fascism are perfectly compatible with democracy.

Some of this is simply a function of the phenomenon identified many decades ago by the philosopher Alexandre Kojève: that diverse ideological tendencies are submerged under the overarching form of the modern state. But it is also the case that democracy itself — like Whitman — contains multitudes. And our insistence on associating all political virtue with democracy and vice with various opponents (authoritarianism, autocracy, fascism, etc.) has blinded us to this fact. Like it or not, our ongoing political disputes ultimately remain family disputes, and we will— not for the first time — have to work them out among ourselves.

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By treating fascism as kind of eternally recurring political tendency, rather than a historically distinctive phenomenon, we have elevated it into an Aristotelian taxonomy of political life, but without anything like Aristotle’s philosophical rigour. The result is that our political understanding is reduced to a sliding scale with democracy in the middle, and communism and fascism at either end, serving as permanent tendencies against which we require constant warning from the great and good among us. This account is both too small and too big: on the one hand, this represents an impoverishment of our political imagination; but on the other, it needlessly introduces external ideological categories in lieu of a serious analysis of the political tendencies distinctive to democracies themselves.

In the end though, does any of this matter, beyond its importance to the egos of a handful of public intellectuals? I think it does. First, because — as the motto of Faber College has it — knowledge is good. The “everything is fascism” discourse presents an impoverished understanding of political possibilities, and leaves its audience less informed than when they started. But it also matters because, if you think as many do that our democracy is in a bad way, then a misdiagnosis is practically and not just intellectually dangerous. Getting it right is a concern for citizens, not just scholars or “Historian here!” types on social media. Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed doctors of democratic society, having diagnosed the disease as fascism, lambast anyone who disagrees with them as being a partisan of the disease itself, even as the patient grows sicker and sicker.

The interview, understandably, caused pandemonium after it was published — as Italian media piled into Berlusconi, the fascist vilifier of the country’s heroic justice warriors. Il Cavaliere — The Knight, as Berlusconi is known — responded by telling the world that the signori inglesi had got him drunk on champagne; in reality, he had forced us to drink ice-cold lemon tea.

Berlusconi has always been a crazy and colourful figure, but outrageous as his pronouncements and behaviour have been over the years, no one would ever have accused him of being actually mad. Until now. In the latest development afflicting Italian politics, judges in Milan have ordered the four-times prime minister to undergo psychiatric tests to prove that he is not mad.

It is a move so bizarre that even many of his Left-wing critics are outraged. Writing in the Left-wing daily, Il Riformista, editor Piero Sansonetti described the ruling against Berlusconi as proof that Italy is not a democracy but a “judicial dictatorship”. Even former centre-Left prime minister Romano Prodi sided with the man who for so many years was his principal political enemy, and pronounced that it was “yet another example of Italian madness”.

The court order demanding that Berlusconi’s sanity be tested came during his ongoing trial in Milan, already in its seventh year with feasibly another five to run — by which time he will be 90. The multi-billionaire is accused of bribing a string of young women with €10 million (£8.6 million) in cash, plus cars and flats, in return for their false testimony at a previous trial on what took place at his famous “Bunga Bunga” parties in 2010; which his accusers said were sex-fuelled romps but which, according to him, were elegant dinner parties.

But, last month, after Berlusconi successfully postponed several hearings on the grounds that he was medically unfit, the prosecuting judges sought a court order to force him to undergo a medical examination, as well as a perizia psichiatrica illimitata (unlimited psychiatric assessment).

It is no secret that the one remaining political ambition of Il Cavaliere, who turned 85 this Wednesday, is to become Italy’s next president when the incumbent Sergio Mattarella’s mandate expires in January. All he needs is the majority of parliamentarians to vote for him.

Sansonetti, editor of Il Riformista, is a former member of the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) — the largest communist party in Europe outside the Soviet Bloc — and no friend of the free-marketeer Berlusconi. Yet even he wrote that the aim of the decision was to prevent Berlusconi from becoming head of state: “The judges said to themselves: with a psychiatric examination we block everything. Either he does not accept it, and then we win the trial, or he accepts it, we get him declared mad and his dream of the Quirinale [the presidential palace] is dead.”

In particular, he urged fellow Italian Left-wingers to stop their traditional applause for the judges’s crusade against Berlusconi, which has lasted nearly three decades and which Sansonetti describes as an “authoritarian assault” on democracy.

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At the heart of the current trial lie allegations of bribery to cover up what Berlusconi allegedly got up to with then 17-year-old Moroccan belly dancer Karima El Mahroug, known as Ruby Rubacuori (“Ruby the Heart Stealer”). Along with other young recipients of Berlusconi’s generosity, she claims that any money, cars or flats he handed over were “gifts”.

In Italy the age of consent is 14 — but it is a criminal offence to pay for sex with a girl under the age of 18. Nevertheless, at the first Ruby trial in 2014 Berlusconi was acquitted on appeal of paying for sex with a minor, on the grounds that he did not know that she was under 18. Berlusconi was also acquitted of abuse of office.

Ever since Berlusconi became a politician in 1994 — to “save Italy from Communism”, as he put it — the country’s prosecuting judges have pursued him without respite. He insists that he is no saint but nor is he a criminal, and that he is the victim of Left-wing judges whose nickname is Toghe Rosse (Red Cloaks), determined to use their extensive powers for political ends.

Italian judges are not like English judges. They are part of the Magistratura, a state institution that is separate from the legal profession. They train as judges, not lawyers; they investigate, prosecute and sit in judgement. And like every institution in Italy, theirs is highly politicised.

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Over the course of his political career, Berlusconi claims he has had to face thousands of court hearings. But such a judicial blitzkrieg has not had a lethal effect on his political career, because so many Italians believe that he has been the innocent victim of a judicial witch hunt. It also failed because Berlusconi has only been convicted once — in 2013 — for tax fraud involving his media empire, for which he was not legally responsible at the time of the offence. He received a four-year prison sentence, but this was commuted to one year’s community service, which was mainly spent playing the piano in an old people’s home.

So even though forced to resign as prime minister in 2011, and even though Forza Italia these days is a mere shadow of its former glory, and he’s been banned from public life for five years, Berlusconi really does have an outside chance of becoming Italy’s next head of state, despite his age and poor health. As for the judicial campaign against him, this has only helped his cause — but not if court-appointed psychiatrists get the chance to declare him insane.

That’s why, rather than risk the psychiatrists, knowing “only too well what the outcome of this unjust trial will be”, he has taken what would be regarded as a suicidal or insane decision in most civilised countries: to be tried in his absence. This means that he is likely now to be found guilty, but given his age he will not go to jail — and a conviction will turn him once again into a martyr.

Alessandro Sallusti, editor of the Right-wing daily Libero, wrote that without doubt Berlusconi has been persecuted by the judiciary, but added: “There is no need for an assessment to establish if Berlusconi is mad. Berlusconi is mad, anyone who has achieved what he has achieved cannot be anything else.”

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Ironically one of Berlusconi’s favourite books is Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1511) which he used as a manifesto of sorts when he first burst onto the political scene in early 1994 with his new party — Forza Italia — and became prime minister after its shock election victory just a few months later.

At Forza Italia’s first party conference, just before the election, Berlusconi spoke at length about how this book should inspire the new party. In the preface to an Italian edition, he wrote: “What fascinated me about the work of Erasmus was in particular the central thesis of madness as a vital creative force: the more his inspiration springs from the depths of the irrational the more original is the innovator. Revolutionary intuition always makes itself felt when it manifests itself as void of common sense and truly absurd… True and genuine wisdom is thus not found in rational behaviour, which is necessarily complicit with the normal and thus by definition sterile, but in in far-sighted, visionary ‘madness’.”

With that in mind, it is probably just as well that Silvio il Magnifico — as his sympathisers once called him — decided not to subject himself to the psychiatrist’s couch.

Mussolini, a one-time radical socialist, viewed himself as a “revolutionary” transforming society by turning the state into “the moving centre of economic life”. In Italy and, to a greater extent, Germany, fascism also brought with it, at least initially, an expanded highly populist welfare state much as we see today.

Indeed, Mussolini’s idea of an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. In the West, for example, the “Great Reset,” introduced by the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, proposes an expanded welfare state and an economy that transcends the market for the greater goal of serving racial and gender “equity”, as well as saving the planet.

Wherever it appears, whether in the early 20^th century or today, fascism — in its corporate sense — relies on concentrated economic power to achieve its essential and ideological goals. In 1922, for instance, large corporations and landowners helped finance Mussolini’s Black Shirts for their March on Rome. Confindustria, the leading organisation of Italian industrialists, was glad to see the end of class-based chaos and welcomed the state’s infrastructure surge.

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Elsewhere, the German cartels and Japanese zaibatsu both kowtowed to and benefited from fascist state support and contracts. Even today, China, in many aspects the model fascist state of our times, follows Il Duce’s model of cementing the corporate elite into the power structure. Since 2000, a hundred billionaires sit in the country’s Communist legislation, a development that Mao would never have countenanced. [1. See Richard McGregor, The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers (New York: Harper, 2010), 206–8; David S. G. Goodman, Class in Contemporary China (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 26, 86.]

Capitalist countries have historically resisted such concentrations of power, but this process seems inexorable after a pandemic which devastated small businesses yet saw the ultra-rich grow richer and the largest firms record eye-watering profits. A handful of giant tech corporations now account for nearly 40% of the value of the Standard and Poor Index, a level of concentration unprecedented in modern history.

Companies like Amazon are our zaibatsu, with influence over a vast array of industries, from online retail to cloud computing, the health food business, media and even space travel. Once such firms may have adhered to free market capitalism, but they have increasingly grown to see the value of a larger, more centralised and pervasive state.

This parallels with the alarming transformation of the US Democratic Party, the putative “party of the people” , now increasingly a subsidiary of the corporate elite. Among financial firms, communications companies and lawyers, Biden outraised Trump by five-to-one or more. Today’s oligarchs are particularly keen on the progressive non-profit sector, which provides important support for their political and social advocacy — a means for them to make politically correct statements about climate change, gender and race, while still obtaining enormous profit margins and unprecedented wealth.

But whereas the old fascism sought greater prosperity, its new form, at least in the West, supports only an expanded welfare state that keeps the beleaguered middle and working classes both quiescent and stripped of aspiration. Worthies such as former Bank of Canada and Bank of England chief Mark Carney even embrace “de-growth,” a conscious slowing of the economy and embrace of declining living standards.

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How Hitler killed the Devil

By Tom Holland

Indeed, the widely hailed Club of Rome report in 1972 — “The Limits to Growth” — was financed not by green activists but by the Agnelli family from Fiat, once a linchpin of Mussolini’s original corporate state.[2. See “Club of Rome a Worldwide Organization,” New York Times Archives, February 27, 1972; Enclycopedia Britannica Online, s.v., “Agnelli, Giovanni,” accessed May 11, 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giovanni-Agnelli-Italian-industrialist-1921-2003.] The Report predicted massive shortages of natural resources, slower economic growth, less material consumption and ultimately less social mobility.[3. Norman Yoffee, “Orienting Collapse,” in The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, ed. Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), 4–5.]

Fast forward to today’s new economic order, and it’s clear that not all economic animals are equal. There are opportunities galore for Wall Street investors, Silicon Valley tech oligarchs, cobalt miners, electric car manufacturers and renewable energy producers through the massive subsidies for producing green.

And these woke oligarchs, like their fascist counterparts before them, see little use for democracy. Eric Heymann, a senior executive at Deutsche Bank, suggests that to reach the climate goals of Davos, corporations will have to embrace “a certain degree of eco-dictatorship”.[4. Eric Heyman, “What We Must Do To Rebuild,” Deutsche Bank Research, November 2020.] After all, it would be difficult to get elected officials to approve limits on such mundane popular pleasures as affordable air travel, cars, freeways and suburbs with single-family houses, unless they were imposed by judicial or executive fiat.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest losers will inevitably be the poor. Wherever the conventional green policies central to the “Great Reset” have been imposed — California, Britain, Canada, Australia, Greece, Germany, France — the result has been to create high levels of “energy poverty”; the Jacques Delors Institute estimated that some thirty million Europeans were not able to adequately heat their homes during the most recent winter.

But then there are many hypocrisies at the heart of today’s incarnation of Mussolini-style fascism. Our new elites, for example, see no contradiction in supporting claims of “systemic racism” and “social justice” at home, while cooperating with Chinese authorities who abuse basic human rights in Hong Kong or to impose forced labour in Xinjiang. Boldly progressive firms like Airbnb have no problems sharing customer data with China’s security state; nor does Apple show compunction in relying on Uighur labour to build their products.

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But in the battle between the two emergent fascist systems, China possesses powerful advantages. Communist Party cadres at least offer more than a moralising agenda; they can point to the country’s massive reduction of extreme poverty and a huge growth in monthly wages, up almost five-fold since 2006. At a time when the middle class is shrinking in the West, China’s middle class increased enormously from 1980 to 2000, although its growth appears to have slowed in recent years.

Like Mussolini, who linked his regime to that of Ancient Rome, China’s rulers look to Han supremacy and the glories of China’s Imperial past. “The very purpose of the [Chinese Communist] Party in leading the people in revolution and development,” Xi Jinping told party cadres a decade ago, “is to make the people prosperous, the country strong, and [to] rejuvenate the Chinese nation.”

In contrast, the tired capitalism of our corporate elite — who seem to have given up on broad-based economic growth — seems increasingly detached from the interests and aspirations of their own citizens’ needs.

Apple’s Tim Cook, for example, waxes enthusiastically about a “common future in cyberspace” with autocratic China. Wall Street also actively lobbies on behalf of Beijing, hoping to cash in on investments that strip America’s productive capacity but enrich them. Oligarchs like Michael Bloomberg describe China, a country of business opportunity for his firm, as “ecologically friendly, democratically accountable, and invulnerable to the threat of revolution”.

How do we combat this trend towards fascist structures? The answer is straightforward, if unprescriptive: to resist them with liberal ideals and a renewed commitment to upward mobility. That won’t be easy. As of today, the consolidation of oligarchic power is supported by massive lobbying operations and dispersals of cash, including to some Right-wing libertarians, who doggedly justify censorship and oligopoly on private property grounds.

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Yet despite their riches and technical know-how, the oligarchic elites face widespread and growing scepticism towards both the traditional and social media outlets under their control. Similarly, it’s also unlikely many in the middle class will embrace their programme of race indoctrination, or accept a marked decline in living standards.

But building a coalition against the new fascism requires avoiding destructive nativism and instead focusing on how to restore competition and protect consumers from the overweening power, and vast wealth of the corporate elites.

Will a citizenry, dependent on transfer payments and increasingly voiceless, still put up a fight? To slow fascism’s spread, either from China or from within, requires a re-awakening of the spirit of resistance to authority that has long marked human progress and now seems far too rare.