Fascismo e populismo. Mussolini oggi

The alarm over a hypothetical return of fascism is misplaced. The attention of alarmed democrats is focused on the most conspicuous signs: identity gestures (Roman salutes, Celtic crosses), physical violence, manifestations of racial hatred. These are reprehensible phenomena, but precisely because they are so blatant, they are perhaps less dangerous than those that are less immediately obvious: political movements which, while rejecting the use of physical violence (but not verbal violence) and operating within the rules of democracy, clearly display characteristics inherited from 20th-century fascism. These are parties – often difficult to classify as right-wing or left-wing – that are conventionally defined as populist or sovereignist. While those who openly express nostalgia for Nazism and Fascism are nothing more than a niche phenomenon, European and American populists descend, consciously or unconsciously, not from Mussolini, the founder of the Fascist Party, but from Mussolini, who was the first to understand the mechanisms of political seduction in mass society. After years devoted to a historical and literary grappling with the protagonists of 20th-century fascism, Scurati rises above this burning issue and, in these pages, identifies its laws and eternal pitfalls with crystal-clear precision, giving us a fundamental text for dealing with the troubled times we are living through.