Fascism (
/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a radical, authoritarian nationalist political ideology.[1][2] Fascists seek to purge forces, ideas, people, and systems deemed to be the cause of decadence and degeneration, and to produce their nation's rebirth based on commitment to the national community based on organic unity, in which individuals are bound together by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood.[3] Fascists believe that a nation requires strong leadership, singular collective identity, and the will and ability to commit violence and wage war in order to keep the nation strong.[4] It advocates the creation of a totalitarian single-party state that seeks the mass mobilization of a nation through indoctrination, physical education, and family policy (such as eugenics).[5] A fascist state's government is led a supreme leader who exercises a dictatorship over the fascist movement, the government, and other institutions of the state.[6] Discipline and obedience to the leader is demanded by the fascist movement to followers and subjects of a fascist state and is promoted through encouraging comradeship and commitment of followers and subjects.[7] Fascist governments forbid and suppress opposition to the fascist state.[8]Fascism promotes violence and war as actions that create national regeneration, spirit and vitality.[9] It views conflict as a fact of life that is responsible for all human progress.[10] It exalts militarism as providing positive transformation in society, in providing spiritual renovation, education, instilling of a will to dominate in people's character, and creating national comradeship through military service.[11] Fascists commonly utilize paramilitary organizations for violent attacks on opponents, or to overthrow a political system.[12]
Fascism was founded during World War I by Italian national syndicalists who combined left-wing and right-wing political views, but fascism gravitated to the right in the early 1920s.[13][14] Italian Fascists described fascism as a right-wing ideology in the political program The Doctrine of Fascism.[15][16] Fascism holds opposition and negation to many ideologies, groups, and political systems: it is anti-anarchist, anti-communist, anti-conservative, anti-democratic, anti-individualist, anti-liberal, anti-parliamentary, anti-bourgeois and anti-proletarian.[17] It entails a distinctive type of anti-capitalism and is typically, with a few exceptions, anti-clerical.[18][19] It rejects egalitarianism, materialism, and rationalism in favour of action, discipline, hierarchy, spirit and will.[20]
In economics, fascists oppose liberalism (as a bourgeois movement) and Marxism (as a proletarian movement) for being class-based movements.[21] Fascists present their ideology as that of an economically trans-class movement that promotes resolving economic class conflict to secure national solidarity.[22] They support a regulated, multi-class, integrated national economic system.[23] Fascist economics supports the existence of private property, the existence of a market economy and the use of the profit motive,[24] however state directed,[25] as they reject laissez-faire.[26] They also support government nationalization of a significant amount of businesses.
