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The ideology of liberalism and that of the far-right movement in the West are often contrasted within mainstream social sciences as well as by the actors, organizations, and movements associated with each political faction. However, many critical scholars have noted that the ideology and practice of liberal governance (e.g. idealism, free markets, private property rights, rule of law, limited government, self-determination) have always involved authoritarian and exclusionary ideas and policies associated with far-right governance (Landa 2009; Losurdo 2011; Tosaka 2024).

Furthermore, certain far-right political leaders (e.g. Augusto Pinochet, Jörg Haider) have sought to incorporate policies of neoliberal economic governance with their broader authoritarian or ‘post-fascist’ socio-political project, which (like interwar fascism) ‘reverses the Enlightenment tendency to assimilate citizenship to the human condition’ (Tamás 2000, 48).

Much like liberalism, it is difficult to reduce fascism to a simplistic or singular ahistorical definition. While a denial of universal humanism has always been at the heart of the fascist project, much like liberalism, fascism and fascist ideology can take various forms. Nicos Poulantzas (2008, 265) notes:

As Togliatti correctly reported at the time, there is nothing more false than to consider fascist ideology a unified and univocal ‘system’: ‘Fascist ideology contains a series of heterogeneous elements […] Beware the tendency to consider fascist ideology as something solidly constituted, finished, homogeneous […]’.

In fact, the role of fascist ideology among the masses nowhere involves the slightest repetition of an identical discourse, a vehicle for the techniques of propaganda in the face of atomized and undifferentiated masses […] Quite to the contrary, this role is such that these ideologies and that discourse present themselves in a considerably differentiated way such that they are incarnated in diverse fascist politico-ideological apparatuses according to the different classes, class fractions and social categories to which they are addressed, which permitted them precisely to exploit the material conditions of existence of those classes and fractions.

Fascist ideological discourse is, in fact, considerably different depending on whether it is addressed to the working class and is incarnated in the apparatuses especially intended for it (fascist unions), to the popular classes of the countryside or to the petty bourgeoisie (fascist party).

[…]

In addition to the direct repressive actions undertaken by the squadristi against local socialist governments, the first years of fascism (1920–1925) exhibited troubling communions, as fascism had to compromise with existing (liberal) powers to consolidate itself.

Indeed, fascism was able to divide liberals by appealing to the fear of the bourgeois class against the threat of ‘the extremes’ (Breschi 2012, 415–6): the clericals, but most importantly the socialists. This explains the moral support of many prominent Italian liberal intellectuals to fascism (Giovanni Gentile, Luigi Einaudi, and even Benedetto Croce before Giacomo Matteotti’s murder).

Opposed to the parliamentary subterfuges of Giovanni Giolitti, they wished to establish a ‘strong state’ purportedly more faithful to the ‘spirit of the Risorgimento’ (Breschi 2012, 419–21). Furthermore, a ‘liberal-fascist’ current was also expressed in the journals La Nueva Politica Liberale (which brought together disciples of Gentile) and Critica Fascista, exhibiting strong anti-individualist, anti-naturalist and anti-democratic sentiments (Bianchi 2024).

While fascism is usually acknowledged as antithetical to liberalism, the Italian experience showed that this relationship was far more complex, and that the liberal attempts at domesticating fascism were conducted in defense of capitalists and rentiers, and at the expense of pluralism and democracy. Rather than domesticating it, this liberal acquiescence facilitated and institutionalized the fascist project.

[…]

To counter the ‘revolt of the masses’ entailed by proletarianization, Wilhelm Röpke (1960) promoted the ‘revolt of the elites’, those that he called ‘the aristocrats of public spirit’. Beyond a profound classism and élitism, Röpke’s thought exhibited a pronounced racist streak, coming to the rescue of the white ‘democracy’ of the Apartheid South African régime in 1964, as it was increasingly under attack. Indeed, this archconservative’s ‘elitist, anti-democratic distaste for “mass society” led him to praise Apartheid South Africa and to justify the marginalization of its black demos’ (Becher et al. 2021, 71).

Yet, Röpke was not the only early neoliberal thinker to display such blatant racism. A sympathy and even appreciation of fascism formed a minor but significant strand of early neoliberal thought, with commonalities in their approach to democracy, race and patriarchy which founders of the Mont Pelerin Society were anxious to obscure after World War II (Maher 2023, 394–7).

Thus, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises offered unqualified support for the fascist use of violence in opposition to communism in Liberalismus (1927), and French philosopher and convenor of the Lippmann Colloquium Louis Rougier argued for the repression of democratic rule in his main prewar writing Les Mystiques économiques (1938).

These two ferociously anti-socialist thinkers nevertheless recognized by 1938 that the fascist régimes in Germany and Italy posed a threat to the liberal order. This contrasted with their French counterpart Bertrand de Jouvenel, who remained a strong supporter of fascism and viewed the working classes as unfit for participation in democratic governance, reinforcing the need for authoritarian leadership (Maher 2023, 398–9).

Anti-collectivism and anti-socialism formed the crux of early neoliberal thinking, but so did racial differentialism, with a racialized understanding of the underpinnings of the market economy visible in the works of Mises, Röpke and Rougier.

Finally, a return to traditional gender rôles was another key tenet of early neoliberalism common to fascist ideology, with [neo]patriarchy envisioned as a necessary feature for the reproduction of capitalism. As Maher reminds us (2023, 403–4), Mises’ biological conception of gender ‘led him to the conclusion that women by their very nature were incapable of being full participants in the market society’ and Röpke identified the ‘disintegration of the family’ as one of the main consequences of processes of proletarianization.

Dismayed by declining birth rates, Rougier and Jouvenel deemed defending the [neo]patriarchal order a civilizational struggle. This is consistent with the fundamental insight of the social reproduction literature, which highlights how the restructuring of women’s labour (inside and outside of the household) is central to reproducing workers and society under authoritarian neoliberalism (Biscahie and Evrenosoglu 2025).

(Emphasis added.)

Other ways wherein liberals enabled fascism include repeatedly praising fascism in the press, training dozens of Fascist cadets, electing politicians sympathetic to Fascism, repeatedly overlooking or trivializing Fascist oppression, chanting “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!” alongside Fascists in German government chambers, suppressing militant antifascists regularly, signing a naval pact with Fascists, extending credit to Fascists, signing a military alliance with Fascists, partitioning Czechoslovakia for the Fascists, tolerating businesses that marketed products (including oil and nickel) to Fascists, becoming economically critical to the Axis war machine, providing bank accounts for Fascists, bailing out Axis businessmen, holding more Axis prisoners of war than Jewish refugees, collaborating with self-identified fascists, directly incorporating former Axis intelligence into the state, starting Operation Paperclip and keeping the employés, starting Operation Bloodstone, appointing former Axis leaders to high ranks within the NATO, accepting surviving Axis collaborators as party members, endorsing an underground network of neofascists, allowing monuments to Axis collaborators, martyrizing Axis collaborators, and contributing to neofascism in Ukraine.

Since the Fascists, unlike the people’s republics, did not even attempt to reduce the fundamentals of capitalist society — capital, the law of value, and generalized commodity production — liberals willingly enabling Fascism was historically inevitable.