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How Liberalism Enables The Rise Of Fascism
A system built on individual liberty might just become the death of it
Comrade Drew
March 14, 2025
Introduction
What if I told you that the very system designed to protect democracy ends up enabling its own destruction? In the United States and Europe there is chaos brewing, a chaos that has been quietly building its strength, biding its time, and waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike. Unfortunately, that moment is now. In order to fully understand what is going on and what allowed this to happen, we need to go through the history of liberalism–from its inception, to its evolutions, to where it is now. This will provide us with a clear picture of what exactly liberalism is and how it is the perfect ideology to enable the rise of fascism.
The Early History of Liberalism
Liberalism is an ideology that has its historical roots traced back to John Locke & the Age of Enlightenment–Locke was the first philosopher to unify liberal ideas such as the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property, the social contract where people voluntarily surrender certain rights in exchange for the aforementioned natural rights, the consent of the governed and the right to revolt against tyranny into one coherent ideological theory. Locke’s work Two Treatises (1692) is considered the foundational text of liberal ideology as it outlined his major ideas.
French thinkers Montesquieu & Voltaire developed upon the theory of Locke advocating for things such as a constitutional system of government, separation of powers, right to due process in accordance with the law, the right to a fair trial, freedom of religion, separation of church and state, and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty.
The founding fathers, after the victory of the United States in their revolution against Great Britain, whom they viewed as tyrannical, wrote the Constitution of the United States, after the weak and ineffective Articles of Confederation showed the need for a federal government which could do the work of governing over a union of states and providing the states with certain power to govern their individual populations, while limiting the power of all government entities as to not become too strong. They took the many ideas of these thinkers and formulated them into one governing document which is the oldest liberal governing document still in use to this day. It was around this time that liberalism was taking the political and economic shape into what we know as Classical Liberalism.
Classical Liberalism
Classical Liberalism states that the main problem within politics is the protection of individual freedom. It expands upon the idea of individual liberty by holding that the government is necessary in protecting individuals from the harm of others while providing public services that private businesses are incapable of performing fairly and effectively. This form of liberalism seeks to provide a system that gives governments enough power to protect individual freedoms and provide efficient public services while preventing those who govern from abusing their power and violating the rights of the individual.
While the political foundations of classical liberalism have their origins in Great Britain, the economic foundations have their base in France. The French physiocrats made the argument that instead of the prevailing mercantilism, which was understood to be a dying economic system, the best way to generate wealth was to allow unrestrained economic competition.
They gave the advice that the government should “laissez faire,” or let it be. It was Scottish economist Adam Smith who expanded upon the laissez-faire doctrine in his work The Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith saw free trade as a benefit to all involved parties because, according to Smith, competition leads to more goods and better quality goods at lower prices. He saw the exchange, or market, economy as an exchange between commodities–a good or service in exchange for money. Smith also viewed the pursuit of self-interest within the economy as a positive thing as it meant that those individuals interested in themselves would necessarily become bound to the good of the public because in an exchange economy they’d have to serve others in order to serve themselves–this is known as the “invisible hand.”
He saw this as only being possible with a free market. Within a market economy the price mechanism is what determines the goods to be produced and how those goods are to be distributed throughout society. The choices of individuals buying and selling determine how capital is to be deployed. These choices manifest themselves as offers which determine the price of a commodity.
Theoretically, when demand for a certain commodity is high, producers will increase the supply of that commodity to match the desire for it, and thus the price goes down until demand falls and it is no longer profitable for a producer to keep the supply high. It is preconceived within the idea of the free market that the individual knows their own interests better than anyone else does, and as such their interests would only be hindered, and never enhanced, by any sort of government intervention in economic activity.
It is through the later works of English economists David Ricardo & John Stuart Mill that these economic ideas expanded and became widely popular throughout the world as Britain would be the first country to undergo their Industrial Revolution.
Thus it can be stated in concrete terms that the classical-liberal economists called for the abolition of mercantilist restrictions on manufacturing and commerce and the end of tariffs and other restrictions placed on foreign imports by governments to protect domestic producers, create a system of free trade, and allow for the market to self-regulate through the “invisible hand.” Free trade appeared to be the solution to impoverishment for everyone as it was these political and economic ideas that dominated the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
And with that, we now have an understanding of the early history of liberalism and its first major form–Classical Liberalism. It can be summed up that the guiding principles of the classical liberal were an insistence on limited government power and limited government intervention within the economy. While classical liberals acknowledged that government was needed to provide public services such as sanitation, education, and law enforcement, they generally believed that, apart from the functions listed above, the government should stay out of the way and let the individual take care of themself.
From Classical to Modern Liberalism
By the end of the nineteenth century, the consequences of Classical Liberalism and the Industrial Revolution in Europe & North America had become transparent. The promise of the market economy to spread prosperity to all had been revealed as a false promise.
The profit motive meant that the majority of wealth became concentrated in the hands of a small number of industrialists and financiers. This was a great thing for them–the robber barons as they’re known–as they became unimaginably wealthy and, consequently, garnered immense political power. The vast majority of people, however, suffered as the incredible wealth flowing out of major industrialization did not find its way into their pockets.
The majority of the masses were poor and lived in poverty, in slums and tenements with terrible living conditions. Overproduction combined with low wages meant that most people could not afford to purchase many goods and services. As a result, goods and services flooded the market that people weren’t buying which caused the economy to go through periods of depression.
The robber barons used their unimaginable wealth to influence and control local, state, and federal governments, manipulate the electorate to get the politicians they bought–the ones who’d pass bills that would allow them to get even wealthier while denying bills that would limit their economic power–elected, limit their competition by literally buying their competitors and consolidating monopolies, and, of course, obstruct progressive social reform by any means necessary. Liberalism was showing that it couldn’t keep the promises it made.
It made the few very, very rich while the many were suffering and teetering the line of poverty. To everyone, except the robber barons for whom this system was working out incredibly well for, it was obvious that the limitation of government had caused a terribly unequal distribution of wealth, mass poverty, disease, discrimination, prejudice, and ignorance–things that the individual simply can not overcome without positive and effective assistance from the government.
Thus, the aim of the liberal shifted from limiting the government to protect the rights of the individual to enlisting the government and its powers in the service of promoting individual freedom. A philosophical shift had occurred into what is known as social liberalism.
This led to an era of progressiveness–although it was really a movement of social democratic ideas which had different names across the world (the Progressive Movement in the U.S., New Liberalism in Britain, etc.)–in which the government took an active hand in building new public school and health facilities, aiding the impoverished through government assistance, improving slums and destroying desolate tenement halls, and providing much needed regulation in the economy to improve working conditions, bust up monopolies, support the organized labor movement, and improve unemployment. This movement based on social democratic ideas would come to an end with the imperialist World War I.
As a result of going back to the free market with little government interference, in 1929, the worldwide Great Depression struck causing unforeseen disaster with thousands of banks collapsing and, in turn, destroying the life savings of millions of people, record high levels of unemployment, and general economic turmoil. The Great Depression called for state control over economic affairs to get them in order.
The response was given by the British economist John Maynard Keynes who stated that government intervention could stabilize the economy and advocated for increased government spending and lower taxes & interest rates to stimulate demand and pull the global economy out of the Depression. Keynesian economics, as it became known, worked in stabilizing the global economy and, therefore, it became the prevailing economic policy of liberalism.
What we know as Modern Liberalism was born out of the social liberal principles of the Progressive Movement of the early twentieth century and the Keynesian economic principles which came about during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Modern Liberalism was the prevailing ideology throughout the world after the Great Depression and it led to the largest amount of growth in the United States between 1940 and 1970. However, Keynesian economics simply did not have the answer for every economic situation.
The Revival of Classical Liberalism in the Form of Neoliberalism
During the mid 1970s, the United Kingdom and United States were going through a period of slow economic growth, called stagnation, in which the social benefits being offered were accruing more debt and meant higher taxes. As a response to this, Classical Liberal economics were beginning to see a renewal in the form of economists such as Friedrich von Hayek, who argued that intervention within the economy would inevitably lead to totalitarianism, and Milton Friedman, who advocated for free-market capitalism and monetarism–arguing that the sole responsibility of corporations is to maximize profits.
In a turning point for liberalism major conservative leaders Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. embraced these ideas and starting during the early 1980s, neoliberalism dominated the game. Neoliberalism is prevalent to this day with corporations still following the ideas of Friedman in the aim of maximizing their profits.
There was a slight renewal of Keynesian Modern Liberalism during the 2008 Great Recession as his ideas were used to stimulate the economy in order to save it from falling into a full-blown Depression. Since the days of Thatcher and Reagan, except for times of economic crisis, neoliberalism has been the way liberal countries have ruled. Limited government, as unregulated a market as possible, and natural boom-bust cycles that “self-regulate.”
Neoliberalism is modern-day classical liberal economics with a less-progressive social liberal political stance that advocates for some social reform such as the legalization of gay marriage and the push to legalize Cannabis. Neoliberalism has dominated for over 40 years now and it's shown time and time again that it doesn’t work for everybody. It is precisely neoliberalism that has enabled the modern rise in fascism that we are seeing today.
How Neoliberalism Fails
Remember those issues that were very prevalent with Classical Liberalism by the end of the nineteenth century? Those issues–wealth inequality, poverty, unemployment, the inevitability of economic depression, the profit incentive leading businesses to cut employees, keep wages as low as possible, poor working conditions, offload costs onto the consumer, going the cheapest route on everything, offshoring employees for cheaper labor, the richest people in the world having significant power and influence in the government and government decisions, etc.–were intensified through neoliberalism and made significantly worse.
Since neoliberalism took hold 40 years ago, worker productivity has skyrocketed to higher levels than ever before while wages, adjusted with inflation, have stayed stagnant. Everything is getting increasingly more expensive while the majority of people are getting poorer. In the United States there are an estimated 500,000 homeless people while there are an estimated 15,000,000 vacant homes–the government and corporations say that homelessness is unsolvable because these people don’t deserve homes since the corporations wouldn’t make a profit.
The profit motive of classical liberal economics, ever intensified in the modern world through neoliberalism, has failed to provide for the majority of people while there are a handful that have more money than they could ever spend in ten lifetimes. Neoliberalism has failed just as classical liberalism failed before it. We saw a rise in fascism when classical liberalism failed in the 1930s, we are now seeing a rise in fascism as neoliberalism has failed us in the twenty-first century.
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Three Places Where Fascism is Rising & How it Happened
The United States
Ever since Reagan took office in 1981 and transformed the economy into neoliberalism we have seen a rise in inequality–both economic inequality and racial inequality. Reagan declared “war on drugs” while also declaring war on the working class. He introduced a number of tax reforms within two years and by 1983, the federal tax paid by most Americans had decreased, but it decreased by far the most for high-income individuals. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 reduced the number of tax brackets and the top tax rate while almost doubling personal exemptions.
Reagan’s “trickle-down economics,” the belief that invigorated spending spurred on through tax cuts by the wealthiest would trickle-down to the rest of Americans, was a lie. The tax policies benefited the wealthy and never trickled-down to the poor. Reagan vetoed the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987, but Congress overrode his veto. He appointed Clarence Pendleton Jr. as chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights–a known opponent of equal pay for men and women and affirmative action.
Reagan significantly intensified the war on drugs which led to the FBI, DEA, and the Department of Defense all seeing increases to their anti-drug budgets. Reagan signed into law the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988 to specify penalties for drug offenses–these bills definitely promoted racial disparity in relation to drug crime with Black communities being hit the hardest. During Reagan’s presidency the share of employees who were apart of a labor union decreased from ¼ of the labor force to ⅙ of the labor force. I could talk about Reagan for a while–he seriously dismantled this country and made it much of what it has been since he left office–but we must move on.
Clinton oversaw a pretty successful economy, but he alienated workers when he sided with Wall Street over them by dropping the 28% tax rate to just 20% which meant that, after exemptions, stockbrokers would be paying less than 20% in federal income tax. Another win for business, another big loss for the working class.
Obama had a slight return to Keynesian economics during the 2008 Great Recession, but didn’t do much for the people after that. Politics was becoming increasingly divisive as the working class felt alienated by both parties as they’d seen no real, no effective change that had bettered their lives and eased the economic burden. People were tuning out of politics and they were becoming disenfranchised with the political landscape.
Until Donald Trump came along–by all accounts he was and is not a politician. In 2015 when he was running for President for the first time he defied all traditional standards of the American politician. He spoke out and said whatever came to mind, he was offensive, he was brash, he said that he was gonna deport Mexicans and build a wall on the border and make Mexico pay for the wall. He was something completely different, of that there is no doubt, so it isn’t surprising that so many people who felt abandoned by politics saw this guy as a champion of the people–after all, he was something like we’d never seen. But he couldn’t actually win–right?
His victory was a surprise for nearly everyone, likely even for the people involved in his campaign. He took office in 2017 and began changing the presidency from that very moment. He got rid of NAFTA (The North American Free-Trade Agreement) and replaced it with the USMCA (U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement), he signed an 8 year tax reform act that was in effect all throughout Biden’s presidency which saw tax cuts to the wealthy. He continued his behavior of speaking without thinking even to foreign leaders. He talked out of his ass all the time.
In 2019, COVID struck and his mismanagement of the epidemic was a strong reason why he lost to Joe Biden in 2020. People wanted a no-gimmicks politician again whom they believed they could trust to lead us through that health catastrophe. Biden handled COVID fairly well–likely better than Trump ever could have–and he had an okay presidency in which the economy recovered better than any other economy in the world.
There were concerns from the very beginning about his age and his coherency and in 2022 people were wondering whether or not Biden was going to be able to finish his term, let alone a second one. At the same time, Donald Trump had built a cult of personality around him with his supporters eating up every single word he said, every lie he told them, every false promise he claimed. When Biden dropped out of contention in 2024, it left Kamala Harris with not much time to pull a campaign together. Donald Trump had cozied up to the richest people on Earth while Kamala Harris was trying to come up with a plan and strategy of her own.
People were upset at their taxes, the same taxes that Donald Trump gave them, wealth-inequality had grown even worse after COVID when billionaires saw their wealth grow by 200% while the rest of us were struggling to get by. Donald Trump had built a cult-like following of supporters willing to support his every move while building deep connections with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. It wasn’t all that surprising that Trump won the 2024 election when it was revealed that Musk alone spent $80 million dollars to get him elected. In a supposedly free country with fair elections where the rich are legally allowed to buy candidates and significantly manipulate elections.
Trump took office in January of 2025–nearly two months ago at the time of writing this–and he immediately began stripping the government and acting out of his power under the Constitution. DOGE began mass firings of federal employees–employees that regulate corporations and oversee that they don’t dump their runoff in local lakes and things of that nature. On his first day, he signed an Executive Order that ended birthright citizenship. How could all this happen in the most democratic country in the world?
It’s simple–Trump picked a scapegoat to unleash his followers’ pent up anger and dismay with politics–he tricked people into believing that migrants were responsible for all of America’s problems. Crime, unemployment, inflation, weak economy–all of this, according to Trump, is because of migrants in the United States. He added a second target for his hate: Trans people. He says that Trans people are ruining sports, they’re sexual deviants and subhumans with mental illness.
He is doing the same thing that Hitler did to the communists, Romani-Gypsies, homosexuals, and Jews. And it’s working because people are so upset with the failures of liberalism–expensive goods, shitty wages, massive wealth-inequality, poverty, boom-bust cycles–that it’s caused them to believe the hateful lies he spews every single day. The playbook on how fascism rises was written in the 1930s when a majority of people suffered terrible economic conditions due to the Great Depression so they turned to the guy that was unlike the others, who said he could fix everything, who gave them a target for their anger and his name was Adolf Hitler.
Germany
The last Bundestag election in Germany was held on February 23, 2025. The Alternative for Germany (AfD or Alternative für Deutschland) won 152 seats, received 10,327,148 votes, and won 20.8% of the popular vote. Compared to the Bundestag election before, they won 83 seats and received 10.4% of the popular vote. The AfD is a far-right extremist party with neonazi ties. A far-right neonazi party in Germany doubled its votes and increased its seats in the federal parliament by 69 chairs.
The AfD has their strongest base of support in the former East German states, especially Saxony and Thuringia, largely due to economic and integration issues caused by reunification that still persist to this day.
They’ve been incredibly loud with their views being anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, and Eurosceptic positions. The AfD has developed a strong focus on German nationalism since their founding in 2013–with positions on reclaiming Germany’s sovereignty and national pride. They are particularly annoyed with Germany’s culture of shame surrounding its nazi past with the far-right faction’s leader within the party, Der Flügel, stating at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin that “Germans are the only people in the world who plant a monument of shame in the heart of the capital” stating that Germans needed to make a 180 degree turn and reclaim their national pride. They aim to rewrite the past and make a new one for Germany based on many of the same principles of the past.
How could a neonazi fascist party become the second largest party in a country that was once ruled by the most infamous nazi regime of all time? Well, as previously stated, the AfD does the best in the states of former East Germany where reunification and economic issues still have not been solved. The German economy as a whole has been weak with limited growth due to their neoliberal economics which aren’t doing the working class any favors.
The 2015 migration influx of 1.1 million asylum seekers was initially supported by the majority of Germans, but the right-leaning media would cover any incident involving migrants with a very biased attitude. This caused Germans to start distrusting and become unsupportive of migration which has only grown since 2015. The AfD does incredibly well with young Germans and their message of reclaiming the national identity and spirit is a cause that that age group (18-29) can seemingly get behind. All of these factors, combined with immense support from Elon Musk through social media, are what led to the AfD, a far-right extremist, neonazi political party, becoming the second largest political party in Germany–the most powerful country in the EU.
Italy
Italy, like Germany, also has a history of fascism going back to Mussolini during WWII. This new rise in fascism hasn’t been covered very much at all, but it should be. The Lega Party, whose official name is Lega per Salvini Premier (League for Salvini as Premier), is a far-right populist party founded in 2017. The LSP is a confederation of regional parties which make up the whole of the national party. The party receives the majority of its support in northern Italy, especially in Veneto and Lombardy.
The LSP has its origins in and is the successor of the LN, Lega Nord, which was established in 1989. They have a history of advocating for Padania, the north of Italy, to secede from Italy and become its own autonomous region while in recent years advocating for Padanian nationalism. The Party has always opposed illegal immigration and held Eurosceptic stances. In 2013, Matteo Salvini, a member of the European Parliament, became the federal secretary of the LN. Salvini took the party to the European nationalist right and helped to form the Identity and Democracy Party, a right-wing, nationalist, Eurosceptic European political party. They held a brief cooperation with CasaPound, a far-right fascist organization in Italy.
In the 2022 Italian general election, the right coalition of which LSP is apart of won 237 out of 400 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, of which LSP won the second most seats at 66, and 115 out of the 200 Senate of the Republic seats, of which the LSP won the third most at 30.
Obviously this isn’t a dramatic rise in fascism like the other two but Italy, as a whole, is an incredibly right-leaning country as you can tell by the election results. Populism is incredibly popular and does very well in elections. This is not a good sign when the left-leaning parties are getting blown out as they did in 2022.
I chose to write about Italy and Lega because of Matteo Salvini. He’s a lifetime politician in his 50s that has created a cult of personality around him and has brought renewed success to the Lega Party. He’ll likely be around for a while as their leader and we may even see him as the head of the government one day. Salvini is a neo-nationalist and a strongman like leader. He opposes same-sex marriage, civil unions and adoption as well as anti-discrimination laws, yet he is still quite the popular figure in Italian politics.
As for right now, his party is the second most powerful in Italy and the rest of the story remains to be seen. As to how this happened, we take a look at Italy’s history of government corruption. Before the Second Republic (1994-Present), leftist politics were quite popular in Italy. They had a separate Communist and Socialist party and did quite well during the mid 70s & 80s. During the late 80s, however, corruption began to be exposed as it was rampant in Italian politics.
During the early 90s, the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Party disbanded while the Communist Party rebranded as the Democratic Party of the Left as it became the main social democratic party in Italy. This led to the Second Republic in which two longtime leaders of the left and right coalitions traded positions as Prime Minister every few years. Eventually a shift occurred as Euroscepticism rose and the right-wing parties of Italy became more and more popular while the left-wing parties became more and more obscure. An unprecedented shift to the right that has no telling what’s in store for the future.
What Can We Do?
Our focus, for the time-being, must be on our current government which is seizing more power by the day. If the Democratic opposition is not going to fight for us then we must fight for ourselves. This means organizing, joining groups, starting book-clubs, doing community outreach, starting school clubs, getting the leftist message out there.
We must show the people that we are with them–that we are them. As bad as fascism is, it holds no candle to the strength the people hold when they come together in unity and demand change. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao all say that violent revolution is inevitable. Perhaps that will be sooner than we think.
While Trump is destroying the government in order to rebuild it in his image, we must consolidate power. We must lurk in the darkness. We must build comrades, form coalitions with other leftist groups, do weapons and medicine training, volunteer, strike, agitate the proletariat.
Everyone has a part to play, but the very first part for everyone is realizing that they are a part of our movement. This means we must bring every wrongdoing by the government under a magnifying glass for all to see clearly and plainly. We must write books and get them out there, write articles that spread the message, create posters and propaganda and place them around towns and cities. My final point is this: fascism is a tough ideology to break once it’s taken full control, we must not let it take full control–the time is not now, the time is not tomorrow, the time to start was yesterday, but start today before it’s too late.
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