In the days when antifascist meant what it actually means and hadn’t been turned into a scare word by the fascists whom antifascists exist to oppose, there was Benedetto Croce.
Born in 1866, Croce was an Italian philosopher, famous for his 1938 work History as the Story of Liberty. His case against fascism was straightforward. Fascism, he wrote, is “the debasing of men until they are either a flock to be led to pasture, or captured, trained animals in a cage.” He served in the Italian government, as an antifascist liberal, from 1910 to 1952.
Croce the philosopher considered himself an idealist. His passion was for the human imagination. But as fascism under Mussolini aimed to stifle imagination in the 1920s and 1930s, Croce began making a vigorous, even relentless, case for its opposite—liberal democracy, which he considered the best guarantor of free minds.
In 1937, while a senator in what was then the Kingdom of Italy, Croce made this case in the pages of The New Republic. His article was assigned by Bruce Bliven, who edited this magazine from 1930 to 1946 and moved its editorial stance leftward, from neutrality and bothsidesism to strong support for FDR and the policies of the New Deal. “The Future of Democracy” ran as a symposium on April 7, 1937, and Croce wrote the lead article.
Above all, Croce was impatient with those who pitted fascism against antifascism as if they were soccer teams: “The choice between liberty and suppression of liberty is not on the same plane as a choice between things of different values, one of which may reasonably be preferred to the other.” Liberty, he wrote, means human dignity. The suppression of liberty degrades and demeans us.
To New Republic readers in the United States at the time, this case for freedom must have seemed self-evident. Americans regularly pledged allegiance to a nation of liberty and justice for all; an ideal of liberal democracy should have been mother’s milk. What kind of barbaric European tyrant would ever sic masked thugs on the people, stifle speech and journalism, and hedge the people’s fundamental rights? Not here.
But European antifascists at the time sorely needed Croce. They clambered for an imported copy of the April 7 issue of The New Republic, which was hard to come by. Tuning early radios to staticky reports from France or England, both of which Mussolini derided as “democracies,” was as good as it got. All of Europe was on tenterhooks. The vibrating fear that something was about to happen—authoritarianism, tyranny, war, the apocalypse—made it hard to see what was already happening. The leaders of the Fascist and the Nazi parties held dictatorial power in Italy and Germany. And still Italians and Germans were asking, in effect, “Has fascism happened here?”
So when young Italian antifascists managed to score a copy of Croce’s article they shared it around with other antifascists, like a 1980s zine. In her 1937 diary of wartime Italy, Iris Origo describes “a small but ardent group of university students determined to find out what is being thought, felt, and taught in other countries.” One of them “had smuggled in one of Croce’s articles (from The New Republic) and … he and his friends sat up at night copying it, to hand on to other people.”
In his article, Croce first called on readers to stop wondering “Is this fascism?” To him, the question was a passive desire for a weather forecast or stock market speculation. He wrote, “We need solely to make up our own minds and to act, each one according to his understanding and his capacity … to work unremittingly under whatever conditions prevail, with every means at hand, and continuously, to work for the preservation and strengthening of the liberal spirit.”
He considered it “mental decadence” when people gave up and blamed the uneducated masses for the fascist slide, just the way people today sigh and blame the MAGA rank and file. Croce’s respect for the public is something we should emulate in the United States right now. In a democracy, he wrote in a stern reminder, the people are not an economic class. They’re a citizenry “capable of governing.”
The problem is not the people, he went on. It’s the governing class. “If evil there be, [it] is in ourselves”—elites like Croce himself—“and in ourselves alone is the remedy.”
Antifascists everywhere took Croce’s article as a shot of adrenaline. In Italy, young antifascists were helplessly watching their peers lose their minds, don black shirts, regurgitate fascist doctrine, and worship Mussolini like a god. Finally, in Croce, they had a philosopher and legislator empowering them to resist.
If The New Republic is not yet samizdat here, that’s only because our own Il Duce, Donald Trump, doesn’t read. He shakes down visual media instead, while letting collaborationist billionaires strangle newspapers, including, most recently, The Washington Post. The takeover of CBS News by Trump’s ally David Ellison now means the network is best understood as captured. On TikTok, under the new control of Trump’s closer ally and David’s father, Larry Ellison, new pro-Trump censorship meets never-ending ads, optimization, surveillance, and data gouging. Signs of originality, imagination, and resistance get pushed into corners or extinguished. Croce, who believed laissez-faire capitalism hampered freedom while pretending to promote it, would have been horrified.
Right-wingers have managed to conflate liberal democracy with elitist posing. Some leftists see liberal democracy as Mussolini did: nothing but rapacious capitalism. But liberalism at baseline really is the best guarantor of liberty. It’s time, evidently, for Americans to go back to the old gym, where the case for liberal democracy must be stripped down to basics. Right now, in our own illiberal society, Americans who hold political office—or have any capacity, platform, or resources at all—must stop yielding to idle anxiety, and fight with everything they have to get our civil liberties and our free minds back.
