For the last few years, as leftists and liberals have been locked in endless disagreement over what constitutes fascism — and whether it describes Trump or his MAGA movement — reactionaries have made their own contribution to the “fascism debate.”

Their definition goes something like this:

Matthew Loop @matthewloop

Benito Mussolini was quoted as saying, “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Yesterday's Twitter files confirmed what many of us have known about this country for a long time. We must turn the tables.

4:53 PM ∙ Dec 3, 2022

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All of that is wrong. For starters, the Mussolini quote is almost definitely fake. Its internet origins are obscure, but it seems to have started circulating in anti-Bush circles in the 2000s — by liberals like Molly Ivins and Thom Hartmann, as well as a smattering of works by anti–Iraq War libertarians and 9/11 truthers.

When writers mentioned any source at all, they tended to claim it had come from Mussolini’s entry in Giovanni Gentile’s 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana. But neither that quote nor anything like it appears in there; neither does it show up in Jane Soames’ authorized translation of the same, which she billed as “the only statement by Mussolini of the philosophic basis of Fascism.” It is possible he said or wrote it somewhere else. But it is unlikely. And even if he did, he would not have meant what 21st-century Americans think he meant, for reasons I’ll get to in a second.

Two decades later, the ill-conceived idea that fascism is “the merger of state and corporate power” has now switched polarities and become attractive to the right. This is in part because American corporations have increasingly followed their customer bases’ rejection of GOP-style racism and anti-LGBT bigotries, and thus gravitated more (though by no means entirely) to the institutional Democratic Party. In this sense, it’s of a piece with the Republican Party’s cosplaying anti-capitalism — adding fake anti-fascism to their opposition to “woke capitalism” or whatever they’re trying to call it, as Jamelle Bouie wrote about this week.

It is also a convenient way to throw out an I’m rubber your glue argument: The left says we’re fascists, but see? They’re the real Mussolinis.

This preschool-worthy argument has been championed most fervently, of course, by the libertarian-leaning fascist apologist Glenn Greenwald. He claimed “merger of state and corporate power” is the “classic definition of fascism” last year on Fox News, and has been on a tear lately — tweeting out that definition no fewer than twelve times in the last two months.

As the tweet above attests, Glenn, and those attracted to his brand of contrarianism, have stepped this up lately in defense of the mega-billionaire Elon Musk, as he tries to turn Twitter — central node of the digital public square that it is — into a fully privatized reactionary plaything, robed in the faux-revolutionary garb of alleged struggle against what they dub Big Government (meaning the Democratic Party) and Big Tech (meaning everyone in Silicon Valley who is not currently friends with or named Elon Musk). It is especially popular this week in the wake of the so-called “Twitter Files,” the hyped-up release of a few internal emails that Musk and his new publicists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss insist show some kind of nefarious collusion between the platform’s previous owners and the U.S. government (yet in fact show nothing of the kind).

But as I signaled above, not only is this definition of fascism based on an almost definitely fake quote, both the fake quote and the bad definition are based on a basic misunderstanding of a single, crucial word. When Mussolini and the Italian Fascists talked about “corporatism” or a “corporate state,” they were not talking about anything like Twitter Inc. — or any kind of private businesses at all.

While they look similar, the word Mussolini and his acolytes often used, corporazione, does not mean corporation in the sense Americans typically understand the word today: a large, for-profit business. A better translation — the one used by most English-language scholars of Fascist Italy — is “guild.” Here’s James Q. Whitman:

The term “corporatism” is by no means easy to define. As a general matter, one can say that corporatism is the body of political theory that seeks to establish a modern guild order: an order, that is, somehow founded neither on state power nor on individual liberty, but on the autonomy of guild-like intermediary bodies, such as unions and professional associations.

In effect, “corporatism” was the idea of organizing society into sectors, categorized by industry or mode of economic production, such as agriculture, maritime shipping, or building construction. As the translation of “guild” suggests, this is rooted in the feudal systems of pre-Enlightenment Europe. Because each of these sectors included both bosses and workers, and because those involved had little choice about which guild they were part of (try as he might, a brick mason couldn’t join the fishermen’s guild), it was looked at in 19th- and early-20th-century Europe as an alternative to both free-market liberalism and Marxist class struggle. A form of it, known as “associationism,” was practiced in the United States during the wartime economy of 1917-18.

That’s what made it so appealing to Mussolini. As he (actually) wrote in “The Doctrine of Fascism”:

No individuals or groups (political parties, cultural associations, economic unions, social classes) outside the State. Fascism is therefore opposed to Socialism to which unity within the State (which amalgamated classes into a single economic and ethical reality) is unknown, and which sees in history nothing but the class struggle. Fascism is likewise opposed to trade unionism as a class weapon. But when brought within the orbit of the State, Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State.

This appealed to some Italians because it called for the destruction of troublesome labor unions while paying lip service to the “real needs” of workers to have some sort of say over their working conditions. It appealed to Mussolini because it fit his vision of “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato” — everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State. He became so enamored with the idea of incorporating (see that word?) these guilds into the state that in 1939 the Grand Council of Fascism dissolved the lower house of the Italian parliament and replaced it with Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni: the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations; or, better said, of Unities and Guilds. Instead of dividing up the peninsula into geographic districts, the Fascists divided the lower house of parliament into different industries, whose members would be appointed by the dictatorship. (The chamber ultimately had no real power.)

It should be noted, again, that none of this is necessary for a government to be considered fascist. Mussolini’s government only somewhat and belatedly implemented any kind of corporatism. The Nazis, for their part, abandoned even rhetorical pretenses to corporatism a decade before Hitler came to power. As führer, he oversaw a privatized market economy that, as the historian Richard Overy has written, “kept the substance of German capitalism intact, but at the cost of entrepreneurial independence and unavoidable complicity in the racial and imperialist strategies of the regime’s leaders.”

So if Mussolini ever said anything like the quote at the top of this piece — and again, I really doubt he ever did — it would have been as some sort of disingenuous self-justification: a way of saying, Fascism isn’t so scary! It’s just a riff on the old guild system. Aprons for everyone. That is because, far from being a “classic definition,” the historic concept of “corporatism” — while associated with fascism — does not necessarily require fascism to exist, or even imply it is in the offing.

And again, and I can’t stress this enough, none of this has anything to do with private businesses of any kind. It has nothing to do with limited liability corporations lobbying, or joining forces with, or even outright bribing government officials. It is not about the FBI warning a social media company about plans to distribute hacked material. And it has absolutely nothing to do with a presidential campaign (or the Trump White House for that matter) asking moderators to, say, take down pictures of a candidate’s son’s penis.

Honestly, you have to be so historically illiterate to even think that’s what “corporatism” meant in historical context — much less declare over and over again for months that a word you have failed to understand is the literal definition of fascism — that anyone who has gone around saying it should be too embarrassed to speak in public about the topic ever again.

Anyway. This has gone on for a bit. So tomorrow — or more likely Friday — I will bring this to its rollicking conclusion. I will explain how, while “corporatism” is a non-starter in modern discussions of fascism, private business interests do indeed have a history of collusion with fascist regimes. And how, if there is anyone today who combines a 1930s-type interest in guild-style corporatism with far-right reactionary politics, it is a Fordist billionaire named Elon Reeve Musk.