Um texto que eu costumo recomendar em discussões sobre o fascismo (e sobretudo sobre a sua base social de apoio) é "Fascism - Left, Right and Center" um capítulo do livro "Political Man", de Seymour Martin Lipset (normalmente dizendo "vão a este link, procurem por
The return of De Gaulle to power in France in 1958 e leiam a partir daí").
Assim, decidi copiar esse capítulo e aproveitei para pôr uma letra maiorzinha (eu ia escrever "isto é provavelmente ilegal, no entanto o ficheiro txt na net com o livro todo já deve ser ilegal de qualquer maneira", mas afinal já está "Out of copyright" - possivelmente só por isso é que está o livro todo online), para ser mais fácil da próxima vez que quiser "linká-lo" (é verdade que podia simplesmente linkar https://ia600503.us.archive.org/25/items/politicalmansoci00inlips/politicalmansoci00inlips.pdf#page=135, mas só percebi que também havia uma versão PDF já ia a meio do post, e de qualquer maneira é um PDF que demora a carregar).
Mas antes, algumas observações.
O autor escreve (em 1960...) que há três tipos de movimentos que por vezes são chamados (nomeadamente pelos seus opositores) de "fascistas":
- Os "de direita" têm uma base social similar aos da direita tradicional - as classes altas, as pessoas mais religiosas, mais idosas, e também mais as mulheres que os homens. Quando dão origem a ditaduras, limitam-se a reprimir a oposição aberta, sem exigirem adesão entusiástica. Exemplos; Dolfuss na Áustria, Franco em Espanha, Horthy na Hungria, Salazar em Portugal, os monárquicos italianos, os gaullistas em França.
- Os "de centro" têm uma base social similar aos do liberalismo tradicional - os pequenos empresários e trabalhadores por conta própria, normalmente anticlericais. O discurso é simultaneamente anti-marxista e anti-establishment. Exemplos - o nacional-socialismo alemão e austríaco, o poujadismo francês, a Falange espanhola, o McCarthyismo nos EUA, o Movimento Social Italiano (já o fascismo italiano original, ele considera-o uma mistura de "centro" e "direita", pelo menos até ao rei ter demitido Mussolini).
- Os "de esquerda" têm, como seria de esperar, uma base social similar à da esquerda tradicional - os assalariados com baixos rendimentos. Normalmente ocorrem em países subdesenvolvidos, com um líder carismático, subido ao poder via golpe militar, que combina políticas sociais a favor dos trabalhadores com nacionalismo e glorificação do exército e um discurso a dizer que as oligarquias e o imperialismo são os responsáveis pelo atraso do país. Exemplos - Perón na Argentina, Vargas no Brasil.
Vejo logo uma dificuldade em adaptar esse esquema ao mundo atual - não estou a ver onde encaixar a Frente Nacional francesa, o Trumpismo nos EUA ou grande parte dos partidos que por essa Europa fora são chamados de extrema-direita; ao que tudo indica, a sua base de apoio já não é tanto a classe média, mas largamente a classe operária (bem, na "2ª volta", Trump teve o apoio do eleitorado tradicional republicano, mas nas primárias era sobretudo na classe operária que tinha o seu apoio), sendo de esperar que muitos dos seus eleitores sejam filhos ou netos de votantes Comunistas ou Democratas (é frequente dizer-se que a maior parte dos eleitores da Frente Nacional vêm do Partido Comunista; mas atendendo a que a FN tem mais votos que o PC desde 1985, os comunistas que passaram para a FN já devem ter morrido muitos). Mas todo o seu estilo e temas fazem lembrar muito mais o chamado "fascismo de centro" do que o "de esquerda" - nos dias de hoje, um exemplo quase perfeito ao milímetro do "fascismo de esquerda" seria a Venezuela de Chavez/Maduro.
Aliás, suspeito que a tal classe média de pequenos empresários e trabalhadores por conta própria já não tem grande relevância política (e, sobretudo, demográfica) no mundo "ocidental" - se os partidos ditos de extrema-direita já não têm a sua base nos merceeiros de esquina e taxistas, creio que o mesmo se passa com os partidos liberais. Posso estar a dizer um enorme disparate, mas quase que apostava que, hoje em dia, a base de apoio dos partidos liberais clássicos (estilo FDP alemão) é sobretudo a classe alta (ou no mínimo média-alta) "progressista nos costumes" (versão moderna do que ainda em 1960 se chamaria "anticlerical"), e que dos liberais-sociais (estilo LibDems britânicos) será uma classe média "progressistas nos costumes" mas composta mais por assalariados bem pagos (quadros técnicos e intermédios, empregados de escritório qualificados, etc.) do que por micro-empresários. Aliás, no caso dos liberais clássicos, nem me admirava que hoje em dia os seus apoiantes e eleitores sejam, mesmo controlando para a religiosidade, mais abastados economicamente que os dos conservadores ou democratas-cristãos.
Diga-se que há um região do onde o tal radicalismo dos pequenos empresários parece estar bem vivo - o mundo muçulmano, onde vários estudos indicam que os pequenos comerciantes e categorias similares são o grupo social que mais apoia os movimentos islamitas, o que até os tornaria bastante parecidos com o fascismo tradicional (e talvez dando razão ao tal conceito de "islamofascismo"?), se não fosse pela parte de os apoiantes dos tal "fascismo de centro" até costumarem ser pouco religiosos - mas talvez seja difícil transpor conceitos desenvolvidos no mundo ocidental para o mundo muçulmano; sobretudo, nos países muçulmanos o islamismo não me parece ter o papel conservador, de pilar do establishment e das elites respeitáveis, que o catolicismo tem (ou pelo menos tinha) nos países católicos. Será o resultado do islamismo não ter uma "Igreja" centralizada e hierarquizada (o que aliás também poderia, aplicado às versões mais radicais do protestantismo, explicar algumas peculiaridades do conservadorismo norte-americano)? Mas o xiismo tem quase uma "Igreja" e mesmo assim Khomeini foi o aliados dos comerciantes do bazar contra o Xá e a sua corte. Ou será o resultado de nos países muçulmanos as elites, ou serem laicas (como nos países "progressistas" estilo Síria), ou serem, pelo menos em termos de política externa, pró-ocidentais (como nos países "conservadores" estilo Arábia Saudita), o que leva, em ambos os casos, a que os pregadores mais extremistas não se sintam muito bem com o status quo?
E, já agora (já que estamos por lá), será que o Egito de Nasser, a Líbia de Kadafy e a Síria ou o Iraque baathistas (quase tudo regimes surgidos ou consolidados depois do artigo ter sido escrito) poderão ser vistos como versões do tal "fascismo de esquerda"? O estilo é praticamente o mesmo - um nacionalismo socializante e militarista, com uma retórica anti-imperialismo e anti-oligarquias (ainda que Jean Touchard, na sua obra "História das Ideais Políticas", refira que "a ideologia nasseriana é muito menos rica em declarações anti-capitalistas que a peronista"); mas pelo que sei, a base de apoio de esses regimes é/era sobretudo na classe média, não entre o operariado (aliás, penso que pouca ou nenhum indústria esses países tinham quando da implantação dos regimes referidos) - talvez o regime de Atassi e Salah Jadid na Síria (1966-1970) tivesse apoio "proletário", mas nem disso estou certo.
Outra coisa - o autor considera que tanto o liberalismo como o fascismo são/foram movimentos da classe média em oposição às grandes organizações; ocorre-me se outro exemplo (embora aí já não a nível dos pequenos empresários e trabalhadores por conta própria, mas sobretudo da classe média assalariada - ou pelo menos dos seus filhos) não seria a esquerda radical dos anos 60/70, e os seus derivados atuais (e aqui reconheço que isto andará perto do Álvaro Cunhal, que falava de "radicalismo pequeno-burguês de fachada socialista", ou mesmo do Lenine em 1920, que dizia que a classe média arruinada era a base do "esquerdismo" e da "posição ultra-revolucionária"). Não que essas correntes defendessem a pequena propriedade e a pequena empresa (pelo contrário, até diria que por norma eram bastante críticos da politica comunista ortodoxa de alianças "anti-monopolistas" com os "pequenos e médios comerciantes/agricultores/industriais"; embora por outro lado, hoje em dia, se calhar é nessa área que há mais entusiasmo por tudo - seja cinema, fanzines ou cervejas - que seja "independente", "artesanal" ou "caseiro"), mas à sua maneira defendiam algo que combinasse o coletivismo económico com a iniciativa e a criatividade dos trabalhadores (acusando tanto o capitalismo ocidental como o comunismo soviético de mecanizar e "alienar" os trabalhadores), estilo alguma versão de propriedade coletiva gerida por assembleias plenárias em que todos participem e deiem ideias - talvez a reação de estudantes universitários que viam que os "empregos para licenciados" cada vez tinham menos autonomia?
A respeito de Lipset ter posto o McCarthysmo na mesma categoria que o nazismo - não sei se não haverá aqui uma componente de bias ou quase de hit job: por volta de 1960, atacar McCarthy e a "nova direita radical" era talvez o desporto favorito dos académicos "liberais" norte-americanos, frequentemente à mistura com acusações que ele e os seus apoiantes nem sequer seriam verdadeiros conservadores, mas, à sua maneira, rebeldes populistas contra o establishment (os mesmo académicos irão se tornar neoconservadores, uns dez anos depois, em reação a outra revolta contra o establishment - a dos seus alunos esquerdistas anti-guerra do Vietname), o que encaixa perfeitamente na análise que lhe é feita no artigo.
Uma nota acerca do voto por sexos, com o autor a dizer que os movimentos de direita têm normalmente mais apoio das mulheres do que dos homens - creio que nos últimos 50 anos isso teve uma quase total reviravolta: nos EUA, se alguma coisa, há uma total inversão, com os Democratas a ganharem esmagadoramente aos Republicanos entre o eleitorado feminino; na Europa (ou pelo menos no Reino Unido) li algures que a direita continua a ter mais votos entre as mulheres, mas que esse efeito desaparecerá quando se controla para a idade (isto, o maior direitismo das mulheres será apenas uma ilusão estatística derivada do eleitorado feminino ter mais pessoas idosas).
Agora uma nota pessoal sobre este artigo - há uns anos, na sequência de uns posts meus sobre o fascismo, o leitor "c." (que penso ser o mesmo que por vezes assina "HO"), depois de criticar bastante algo que eu tinha escrito, escreveu "No entanto, a sua grelha faz algum sentido (embora tema que por mero acaso). Aconselho leitura de Lipset sobre o assunto. Também ele analisou os movimentos radicais nessa perspectiva (de forma mais cuidada, preparada e elaborada). Conclui que algum fascismo é um radicalismo do conservadorismo de direita (por exemplo, salazar em portugal), e o nazismo um radicalismo de centro. Os argumentos de autoridade são abomináveis, mas por favor, pare de fazer estes posts até o ler, sim?" Na verdade, não foi totalmente por acaso - embora eu não tivesse lido o artigo de Lipset na altura, já tinha lido alguma coisa do Jaime Nogueira Pinto e do Nuno Rogeiro (os mais parecido que se encontra em Portugal com intelectuais fascistas?) sobre o artigo. Além disso, talvez possa ter havido outro fator - nos meus tempos de simpatizante do PSR, lí várias coisas de Trotsky e Mandel sobre o fascismo (nomeadamente a sua teoria que o fascismo começa como uma revolta dos pequenos empresários, que depois é cooptada pelo grande capital para atacar a classe operária, que contrasta com a teoria dos comunistas ortodoxos, de que o fascismo será simplesmente a "ditadura aberta da burguesia"); penso que Lipset nunca foi trotskista e que também nunca alinhou totalmente com os neoconservadores, mas ao longo da sua vida andou sempre mais ou menos próximo daqueles que fizeram o caminho trotskismo-schachtmanismo-"liberalism"-neoconservadorismo (como Lipset, muitos eram intelectuais judeus nascidos em Nova Iorque nos anos 20, filhos de emigrantes da Europa de leste), pelo que não me admirava que também tivesse havido alguma influência (sobretudo da parte do fascismo como um movimento dos pequenos empresários).
Bem, após esta introdução, o artigo:
"Fascism" - Left, Right, and Center
- "Fascism" and the Middle Class
- Germany
- Austria
- France
- Italy
- The United States: McCarthyism as Populist Extremism
- Peronism — the "Fascism" of the Lower Class
- The Social Bases of Fascism
CHAPTER V
"Fascism" — Left, Right, and Center
The return of De Gaulle to power in France in 1958 following a military coup d'etat was accompanied by dire predictions of the revival of fascism as a major ideological movement, and raised anew the issue of the character of different kinds of extremist movements. Much of the discussion between Marxist and non-Marxist scholars before 1945 was devoted to an analysis of fascism in power and focused on whether the Nazis or other fascist parties were actually strengthening the economic institutions of capitalism or creating a new post-capitalist social order similar to Soviet bureaucratic totalitarianism.
While an analysis of the actual behavior of parties in oflBce is crucial to an understanding of their functional significance, the social base and ideology of any movement must also be analyzed if it is to be truly imderstood. A study of the social bases of different modem mass movements suggests that each major social stratum has both democratic and extremist poHtical ex- pressions. The extremist movements of the left, right, and center (Communism and Peronism, traditional authoritarianism, and fascism) are based primarily on the working, upper, and middle classes, respectively. The term "fascism" has been applieed at one time or another to aU of these varieties of extremism, but an analytical examination of the social base and ideology of each reveals their different characters.
The political and sociological analysis o£ modem society in terms of left, center, and right goes back to the days of the first French Republic when the delegates were seated, according to their political coloration, in a continuous semicircle from the most radical and egalitarian on the left to the most moderate and aristocratic on the right. The identification of the left with advocacy of social reform and egalitarianism; the right, with aristocracy and conservatism, deepened as politics became defined as the clash between classes. Nineteenth-century conservatives and Marxists alike joined in the assumption that the socioeconomic cleavage is the most basic in modern society. Since democracy has become institutionalized and the conservatives' fears that universal suffrage would mean the end of private property have declined, many people have begun to argue that the analysis of politics in terms of left and right and class conflict oversimplifies and distorts reality. However, the tradition of political discourse, as well as political reality, has forced most scholars to retain these basic concepts, although other dimensions, like religious differences or regional conflicts, account for political behavior which does not follow class lines.[1]
Before 1917 extremist political movements were usually thought of as a rightist phenomenon. Those who would eliminate democracy generally sought to restore monarchy or the rule of the aristocrats. After 1917 politicians and scholars alike began to refer to both left and right extremism, i.e.. Communism and fascism. In this view, extremists at either end of the political continuum develop into advocates of dictatorship, while the moderates of the center remain the defenders of democracy. This chapter will attempt to show that this is an error— that extremist ideologies and groups can be classified and analyzed in the same terms as democratic groups, i.e., right, left, and center. The three positions resemble their democratic parallels in both the compositions of their social bases and the contents of their appeals. While comparisons of all three positions on the democratic and extremist continuum are of intrinsic interest, this chapter concentrates on the politics of the center, the most neglected type of political extremism, and that form of "left" extremism sometimes called "fascism"— Peronism— as manifested in Argentina and Brazil.
The center position among the democratic tendencies is usually called liberalism. In Europe where it is represented by various parties like the French Radicals, the Dutch and Belgian Liberals, and others, the liberal position means: in economics— a commitment to laissez-faire ideology, a belief in the vitality of small business, and opposition to strong trade-unions; in politics— a demand for minimal government intervention and regulation; in social ideology— support of equal opportunity for achievement, opposition to aristocracy, and opposition to enforced equality of income; in culture— anticlericalism and antitraditionalism.
If we look at the supporters of the three major positions in most democratic countries, we find a fairly logical relationship between ideology and social base. The Socialist left derives its strength from manual workers and the poorer rural strata; the conservative right is backed by the rather well-to-do elements — owners of large industry and farms, the managerial and free professional strata — and those segments of the less privileged groups who have remained involved in traditionalist institutions, particularly the Church. The democratic center is backed by the middle classes, especially small businessmen, white-collar workers, and the anti-clerical sections of the professional classes.
The different extremist groups have ideologies which correspond to those of their democratic counterparts. The classic fascist movements have represented the extremism of the center. Fascist ideology, though antiliberal in its glorification of the state, has been similar to liberalism in its opposition to big business, trade-unions, and the socialist state. It has also resembled liberalism in its distaste for religion and other forms of traditionalism. And, as we shall see later, the social characteristics of Nazi voters in pre-Hitler Germany and Austria resembled those of the liberals much more than they did those of the conservatives.
The largest group of left extremists are the Communists, whose appeal has already been discussed in some detail and who will not concern us much in this chapter. The Communists are clearly revolutionary, opposed to the dominant strata, and based on the lower classes. There is, however, another form of left extremism which, like right extremism, is often classified under the heading of fascism. This form, Peronism, largely found in poorer underdeveloped countries, appeals to the lower strata against the middle and upper classes. It differs from Communism in being nationalistic, and has usually been the creation of nationalist army officers seeking to create a more vital society by destroying the corrupt privileged strata which they believe have kept the masses in poverty, the economy underdeveloped, and the army demoralized and underpaid.
Conservative or rightist extremist movements have arisen at different periods in modem history, ranging from the Horthyites in Hungary, the Christian Social party of DoUfuss in Austria, the Stahlhelm and other nationalists in pre-Hitler Germany, and Salazar in Portugal, to the pre-1958 Gaullist movements and the monarchists in contemporary France and Italy. The right extremists are conservative, not revolutionary. They seek to change political institutions in order to preserve or restore cultural and economic ones, while extremists of the center and left seek to use political means for cultural and social revolution. The ideal of the right extremist is not a totalitarian ruler, but a monarch, or a traditionalist who acts like one. Many such movements— in Spain, Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Italy— have been explicitly monarchist, and De Gaulle returned monarchical rights and privileges to the French presidency. Not surprisingly, the supporters of these movements differ from those of the centrists; they tend to be wealthier, and — more important in terms of mass support — more religious.
"Fascism" and the Middle Class
The thesis that fascism is basically a middle-class movement representing a protest against both capitalism and socialism, big business and big unions, is far from original. Many analysts have suggested it ever since fascism and Nazism first appeared on the scene. Nearly twenty-five years ago, the economist David Saposs stated it well:
Fascism . . . [is] the extreme expression of middle-classism or populism. . . . The basic ideology of the middle class is populism. . . . Their ideal was an independent small property-owning class consisting of merchants, mechanics, and farmers.
This element . . . now designated as middle class, sponsored a system of private property, profit, and competition on an entirely different basis from that conceived by capitalism. . . .
From its very inception it opposed "big business" or what has now become known as capitalism.
Since the war the death knell of liberalism and individualism has been vociferously, albeit justly sounded. But since liberalism and individualism are of middle-class origin, it has been taken for granted that this class has also been eliminated as an effective social force. As a matter of fact, populism is now as formidable a force as it has ever been. And the middle class is more vigorously assertive than ever. . . ?[2]
And although some have attributed the lower middle-class support for Nazism to the specific economic dificculties of the 1930s, the political scientist, Harold Lasswell, writing in the depths of the Depression, suggested that middle-class extremism flowed from trends inherent in capitalist industrial society which would continue to affect the middle class even if its economic position improved.
Insofar as Hitlerism is a desperation reaction of the lower middle classes, it continues a movement which began during the closing years of the nineteenth century. Materially speaking, it is, not necessary to assume that the small shopkeepers, teachers, preachers, lawyers, doctors, farmers and craftsmen were worse off at the end than they had been in the middle of the century. Psychologically speaking, however, the lower middle class was increasingly overshadowed by the workers and the upper bourgeoisie, whose unions, cartels and parties took the center of the stage. The psychological impoverishment of the lower middle class precipitated emotional insecurities within the personalities of its members, thus fertilizing the ground for the various movements of mass protest through which the middle classes might revenge themselves.[3]
As the relative position of the middle class declined and its resentments against on-going social and economic trends continued, its "liberal" ideology — the support of individual rights against large-scale power — changed from that of a revolutionary class to that of a reactionary class. Once liberal doctrines had supported the bourgeoisie in their fight against the remnants of the feudal and monarchical order, and against the limitations demanded by mercantilist rulers and the Church. A liberal ideology opposed to Throne and Altar and favoring a limited state emerged.
This ideology was not only revolutionary in political terms; it fulfilled some of the functional requirements for efficient industrialization. As Max Weber pointed out, the development of the capitalist system ( which in his analysis coincides with industrialization ) necessitated the abolition of artificial internal boundaries, the creation of an open international market, the establishment of law and order, and relative international peace.[4]
But the aspirations and ideology which underlay eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberalism and populism have a different meaning and serve a different function in the advanced industrial societies of the twentieth century. Resisting large-scale organizations and the growth of state authority challenges some of the fundamental characteristics of our present society, since large industry and a strong and legitimate labor movement are necessary for a stable, modernized social structure, and government regulation and heavy taxes seem an inevitable concomitant. To be against business bureaucracies, trade-unions, and state regulation is both unrealistic and to some degree irrational. As Talcott Parsons has put it, the "new negative orientation to certain primary aspects of the maturing modern social order has above all centered in the symbol of capitalism'. . . . The reaction against the 'ideology' of the rationalization of society is the principal aspect at least of the ideology of fascism."[5]
While continuing conflict between management and labor is an integral part of large-scale industrialism, the small businessman's desire to retain an important place for himself and his social values is "reactionary"— not in the Marxist sense of slowing down the wheels of revolution, but from the perspective of the inherent trends of a modern industrial society. Sometimes the efforts of the small business stratum to resist or reverse the process take the form of democratic liberal movements, like the British Liberal party, the French Radicals, or the American Taft Republicans.
Such movements have failed to stop the trends which their adherents oppose, and as another sociologist, Martin Trow, recently noted: "The tendencies which small businessmen fear — of concentration and centralization — proceed without interruption in depression, war and prosperity, and irrespective of what party is in power; thus they are always disaffected. . . "[6] It is not surprising, therefore, that under certain conditions small businessmen turn to extremist political movements, either fascism or antiparliamentary populism, which in one way or another express contempt for parliamentary democracy. These movements answer some of the same needs as the more conventional liberal parties; they are an outlet for the stratification strains of the middle class in a mature industrial order. But while liberalism attempts to cope with the problems by legitimate social changes and "reforms" ("reforms" which would, to be sure, reverse the modernization process ) , fascism and populism propose to solve the problems by taking over the state and running it in a way which will restore the old middle classes' economic security and high standing in society, and at the same time reduce the power and status of big capital and big labor.
The appeal of extremist movements may also be a response by different strata of the population to the social effects of industriali-zation at different stages of its development. These variations are set in sharp relief by a comparison of the organized threats to the democratic process in societies at various stages of industrialization. As I have already shown, working-class extremism, whether Communist, anarchist, revolutionary socialist, or Peronist, is most commonly found in societies undergoing rapid industrialization, or in those where the process of industrialization did not result in a predominantly industrial society, like the Latin countries of southern Europe. Middle-class extremism occurs in countries characterized by both large-scale capitalism and a powerful labor movement. Right-wing extremism is most common in less developed economies, in which the traditional conservative forces linked to Throne and Altar remain strong. Since some countries, like France, Italy, or Weimar Germany, have possessed strata in all three sets of circumstances, all three types of extremist pohtics sometimes exist in the same country. Only the well-to-do, highly industrialized and urbanized nations seem immune to the virus, but even in the United States and Canada there is evidence that the self-employed are somewhat disaffected.
The different political reactions of similar strata at different points in the industrialization process are clearly delineated by a comparison of the politics of certain Latin-American countries with those of Western Europe. The more well-to-do Latin-American countries today resemble Europe in the nineteenth century; they are experiencing industrial growth while their working classes are still relatively unorganized into trade-unions and political parties, and reservoirs of traditional conservatism still exist in their rural populations. The growing middle class in these countries, like its nineteenth-century European counterpart, supports a democratic society by attempting to reduce the influence of the anti-capitalist traditionalists and the arbitrary power of the military.'[7]
To the extent that there is a social base at this stage of economic development for extremist politics, it lies not in the middle classes but in the growing, still unorganized working classes who are suffering from the tensions inherent in rapid industrialization. These workers have provided the primary base of support fof the only large-scale "fascist" movements in Latin America— those of Peron in the Argentine and Vargas in Brazil. These movements, like the Communist ones with which they have sometimes been allied, appeal to the "displaced masses" of newly industrializing countries.
The real question to answer is: which strata are most "displaced" in each country? In some, it is the new working class, or the working class which was never integrated in the total society, economically or politically; in others, it is the small businessmen and other relatively independent entrepreneurs (small farm owners, provincial lawyers ) who feel oppressed by the growing power and status of unionized workers and by large-scale corporative and governmental bureaucracies. In still others, it is the conservative and traditionalist elements who seek to preserve the old society from the values of socialism and liberalism. Fascist ideology in Italy, for example, arose out of an opportunistic movement which sought at various times to appeal to all three groups, and remained suficientily amorphous to permit appeals to widely different strata, depending on national variations as to who were most "displaced."[8] Since fascist politicians have been extremely opportunistic in their efforts to secure support, such movements have often encompassed groups with conflicting interests and values, even when they primarily expressed the needs of one stratum. Hitler, a centrist extremist, won backing from conservatives who hoped to use the Nazis against the Marxist left. And conservative extremists like Franco have often been able to retain centrists among their followers without giving them control of the movement.
In the previous chapter on working-class authoritarianism I tried to specify some of the other conditions which dispose different groups and individuals to accept more readily an extremist and demonological view of the world.[9] The thesis presented there suggested that a low level of sophistication and a high degree of insecurity predispose an individual toward an extremist view of politics. Lack of sophistication is largely a product of little education and isolation from varied experiences. On these grounds, the most authoritarian segments of the middle strata should be found among the small entrepreneurs who live in small communities or on farms. These people receive relatively little formal education as compared with those in other middle-class positions; and living in rural areas or small towns usually means isolation from heterogeneous values and groups. By the same token, one would expect more middle-class extremism among the self-employed, whether rural or urban, than among white-collar workers, executives, and professionals.
The following sections bring together available data for different countries which indicate the sharp difference between the social roots of classic fascism and populism and those of right-wing movements.
Germany
The classic example of a revolutionary fascist party is, of course, the National Socialist Workers' party led by Adolf Hitler. For Marxian analysts, this party represented the last stage of capitalism, winning power in brder to maintain capitalism's tottering institutions. Since the Nazis came to power before the days of public opinion polls, we have to rely on records of the total votes to locate their social base. If classic fascism appeals largely to the same elements as those which back liberalism, then the previous supporters of liberalism should have provided the backing for the Nazis. A look at the gross election statistics for the German Reich between 1928 and 1933 would seem to verify this ( Table I ) .
Although a table like this conceals changes by individuals which go against the general statistical trend, some reasonable inferences may be made. As the Nazis grew, the liberal bourgeois center parties, based on the less traditionalist elements of German society — primarily small business and white-collar workers — completely collapsed. Between 1928 and 1932 these parties lost almost 80 per cent of their vote, and their proportion of the total vote dropped from a quarter to less than 3 per cent. The only center party which maintained its proportionate support was the Catholic Center party whose support was reinforced by religious allegiance.
The Marxist parties, the socialists and the Communists, lost about a tenth of their percentage support, although their total vote dropped only slightly. The proportionate support of the conservatives dropped about 40 per cent, much less than that of the more liberal middle-class parties.
TABLE I
Percentages of Total Vote Received by Various German Parties, 1928-1933, and the Percentage of the 1928 Vote Retained in the Last Free Election 1932.*
Election Expressed as Percentage of Total Vote
| 1928 | 1930 | 1932 | 1932 | 1933 | Ratio of 1928 to Second 1932 | |
| Party | Percentag | |||||
| Conservative Party | ||||||
| DNVP | 14.2 | 7 | 5.9 | 8.5 | 8 | 60 |
| Middle-class Parties | ||||||
| DVP (right liberals) | 8.7 | 4.85 | 1.2 | 1.8 | 21 | |
| DDP (left liberals) | 4.8 | 3.45 | 1 | 0.95 | 0.8 | 20 |
| Wirtschaftspartei (small business ) | 4.5 | 3.9 | 0.4 | 0.3 | f | 7 |
| Others | 9.5 | 10.1 | 2.6 | 2.8 | 0.6 | 29 |
| Total proportion of middle-class vote maintained: | 21 | |||||
| Center (Catholic) | 15.4 | 17.6 | 16.7 | 16.2 | 15 | 105 |
| Workers' Parties | ||||||
| SPD (Socialist) | 29.8 | 24.5 | 21.6 | 20.4 | 18.6 | 69 |
| KPD (Communist) | 10.6 | 13.1 | 14.3 | 16.85 | 12.3 | 159 |
| Total proportion of working-class vote maintained: | 92 | |||||
| Fascist Party | ||||||
| NSDAP | 2.6 | 18.3 | 37.3 | 33.1 | 43.9 | 1277 |
| Total proportion of increase in Fascist party vote: | 1277 |
* The basic data are presented in Samuel Pratt, The Social Basis of Nazism and Communism in Urban Germany (M.A. thesis, Dept. of Sociology, Michigan State University, 1948), pp. 29, 30. The same data are presented and analyzed in Karl D. Bracher, Die Aufiosung der Weimarer Republik (Stutt- gart und Diisseldorf: Ring Verlag, 1954), pp. 86—106. The 1933 election was held after Hitler had been chancellor for more than a month.
f - The Wirtschaftspartei did not nm any candidates in the 1933 elections.
An inspection of the shifts among the non-Marxist and non-Catholic parties suggests that the Nazis gained most heavily among the liberal middle-class parties, the former bulwarks of the Weimar Repubhc. Among these parties, the one which lost most heavily was the Wirtschaftspartei, which represented primarily small businessmen and artisans. [10] The right-wing nationahst opponent of Weimar, the German National People's party (DNVP), was the only one of the non-Marxist and non-Catholic parties to retain over half of its 1928 proportion of the total vote.
The largest drop-off in the conservative vote lay mainly in the election districts on the eastern border of Germany. The proportion of the vote obtained by the German National People's party declined by 50 per cent or more between 1928 and 1932 in ten of the thirty-five election districts in Germany. Seven of these ten were border areas, including every region which fronted on the Polish corridor, and Schleswig-Holstein, fronting on the northern border. Since the party was both the most conservative and the most nationalist pre-Nazi opponent of the Versailles Treaty, these data suggest that the Nazis most severely weakened the conservatives in those areas where nationalism was their greatest source of strength, while the conservatives retained most of their voters in regions which had not suffered as directly from the annexations imposed by Versailles and in which, it may be argued, the party's basic appeal was more conservative than nationalist. The German-American sociologist Rudolf Heberle has demonstrated in a detailed study of voting patterns in Schleswig-Holstein that the conservatives lost the backing of the small property owners, both urban and nural, whose counterparts in nonborder areas were most commonly liberals, while they retained the backing of the upper-strata conservatives.[11]
Some further indirect evidence that the Nazis did not appeal to the same sources as the traditional German right may be found in the data on the voting of men and women. In the 1920s and 1930s the more conservative or religious a party, the higher, in general, its feminine support. The German National People's party had more female backing than any party except the Catholic Center party. The Nazis, together with the more liberal middle-class parties and Marxist parties, received disproportionate support from men.[12]
More direct evidence for the thesis is given in Heberle's study of Schleswig-Holstein, the state in which the Nazis were strongest. In 1932 "the Conservatives were weakest where the Nazis were strongest and the Nazis were relatively weak where the Conservatives were strong. The correlation in 18 predominantly rural election districts between percentages of votes obtained by the NSDAP [Nazis] and by the DNVP [Conservatives] is negative (minus .89). ... It appears that the Nazis had in 1932 really succeeded the former liberal parties, like the Landespartei and Democratic party, as the preferred party among the small farmers .. . while the landlords and big farmers were more reluctant to cast their vote for Hitler."[13]
A more recent analysis by a German pohtical scientist, Giinther Franz, identifying voting trends in another state in which the Nazis were very strong— Lower Saxony— reported similar patterns.
Franz concluded:
The majority of the National Socialist voters came from the bourgeois center parties. The DNVP [conservatives] had also lost votes, but in 1932, they held the votes which they received in 1930, and increased their total vote in the next two elections. They were (except for the Catholic Center) the only bourgeois party, which had not simply collapsed before the NSDAP. . . .[14]
This situation in Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony also existed in Germany as a whole. Among the thirty-five electoral districts, the rank-order correlation of the proportionate Nazi gain with the liberal parties' loss was greater (.48) than with the conservatives' loss (.25).[15]
Besides the liberal parties, there was one other group of German parties, based on the Mittelstand, whose supporters seem to have gone over almost en masse to the Nazis— the so-called "federalist" or regional autonomy parties. [16] These parties objected either to the unification of Germany or to the specific annexation of various provinces like Hesse, Lower Saxony, and Schleswig-Holstein to Prussia. In large measure they gave voice to the objections felt by the rural and urban middle classes of provincial areas to the increasing bureaucratization of modem industrial society and sought to turn the clock back by decentralizing government authority. At first glance, the decentralist aspirations of the regional autonomy parties and the glorification of the State inherent in fascism or Nazism seem to reflect totally dissimi- lar needs and sentiments. But in fact both the "state's rights" ideology of the regionalists and the Nazis' ideological antagonism to the "big" forces of industrial society appealed to those who felt uprooted or challenged. In their economic ideology, the regional parties expressed sentiments similar to those voiced by the Nazis before the latter were strong. Thus the Schleswig-Holsteinische Landespartei, which demanded "regional and cultural autonomy for Schleswig-Holstein within Germany," wrote in an early program:
The craftsman [artisan] has to be protected on the one hand against capitalism, which crushes him by means of its factories, and on the other hand against socialism, which aims at making him a proletarian wage-laborer. At the same time the merchant has to be protected against capitalism in the form of the great department stores, and the whole retail trade against the danger of socialism.[17]
The link between regionalism as an ideology protesting bigness and centraHzation, and the direct expression of the economic self- interest of the small businessmen may be seen in the joining of the two largest of the regional parties, the Lower Saxon Deutsch-Hanoverischen Partei and the Bavarian Bauern und Mittelstandshund, into one parliamentary faction with the Wirtschaftspartei, the party which exphcitly defined itself as representing the small entrepreneurs. In the 1924 elections the Bavarian regionalists and the small businessmen's party actually presented a joint electoral ticket.[18] As Heberle points out about these parties: "The criticism of Prussian policy . . . the demand for native civil servants, the refusal to accept Berlin as the general center of culture, were all outlets for a disposition which had been formed a long time before the war. ... At bottom the criticism against Prussia was merely an expression of a general antipathy against the social system of industrial capitalism. . . ."[19]
The appeal of the Nazis to those elements in German society which resented the power and culture of the large cities is also reflected in the Nazis' success in small communities. A detailed ecological analysis of voting in German cities with 25,000 or more population, in 1932, indicates that the larger the city, the smaller the Nazi vote. The Nazis secured less of their total vote in cities over 25,000 in size than did any of the other five major parties, including the Catholic Center and the conservative DNVP.[20] And Berlin, the great metropolis, was the only predominantly Protestant election district in which the Nazis received under 25 per cent of the vote in July 1932.[21] These facts sharply challenge the various interpretations of Nazism as the product of the growth of anomie and the general rootlessness of modem urban industrial society.
Examination of the shifts in patterns of German voting between 1928 and 1932 among the non-Marxist and non-Catholic parties indicates, as we have seen, that the Nazis gained disproportionately from the ranks of the center and liberal parties rather than from the conservatives, thus validating one aspect of the thesis that classic fascism appeals to the same strata as liberalism. The second part of the argument, that fascism appeals predominantly to the self-employed among the middle strata, has been supported by three separate ecological studies of German voting between 1928 and 1932. Two American sociologists, Charles Loomis and J. Allen Beegle, correlated the percentage of the Nazi vote in 1932 in communities under 10,000 in population in three states with the percentage of the labor force in specific socioeconomic classes and found that "areas in which the middle classes prevailed [as indicated by the proportion of proprietors in the population and the ratio of proprietors to laborers and salaried employees] gave increasingly larger votes to the Nazis as the economic and social crises settled on Germany."
This high correlation between Nazi vote and proprietorship holds for farm owners as well as owners of small business and industry in Schleswig-Holstein and Hanover, but not in Bavaria, a strongly Catholic area where the Nazis were relatively weak.[22]
Heberle's study of Schleswig-Holstein, which analyzed all of the elections under Weimar, concluded that "the classes particularly susceptible to Nazism were neither the rural nobility and the big farmers nor the rural proletariat, but rather the small farm proprietors, very much the rural equivalent of the lower middle class or petty bourgeoisie (Kleinbtiergertum ) which formed the backbone of the NSDAP in the cities."[23]
The sociologist Samuel Pratt's excellent study of urban voting prior to the Nazi victory related the Nazi vote in July 1932 to the proportion of the population in the "upper middle class," defined as "proprietors of small and large establishments and executives," and to the proportion in the "lower middle class," composed of "civil servants and white-collar employees." The Nazi vote correlated highly with the proportion in both middle-class groups in different-sized cities and in different areas of the country, but the correlations with the "lower middle class" were not as consistently high and positive as those with the "upper middle." As Pratt put it: "Of the two elements of the middle class, the upper seemed to be the more thoroughly pro-Nazi."[24] The so-called upper class, however, was predominantly composed of small businessmen, so that the correlation reported is largely that of self-employed economic status with Nazi voting.[25] This interpretation is enhanced by Pratt's finding that the Nazi vote also correlated (+.6) with the proportion of business establishments with only one employee — in other words, self-employment. "This would be expected, for plants of one employee are another measure of the proprietorship class which was used in measuring the upper middle class."[26]
The occupational distribution of the membership of the Nazi party in 1933 indicates that it was largely drawn from the various urban middle-class strata, with the self-employed again being the most overrepresented (Table II). The second most overrepresented category — domestic servants and nonagricultural family helper s— also bears witness to the party's appeal to small business, since this category is primarily composed of helpers in family-owned small businesses.
The relation of German big business to the Nazis has been a matter of considerable controversy, particularly since various Marxists have attempted to demonstrate that the movement was from the outset "fostered, nourished, maintained and subsidized by the big bourgeoisie, by the big landlords, financiers, and industrialists."[27] The most recent studies suggest that the opposite is true. With the exception of a few isolated individuals, German big business gave Nazism little financial support or other encouragement until it had risen to the status of a major party. The Nazis did begin to pick up financial backing in 1932, but in large part this backing was a result of many businesses' policy of giving money to all major parties except the Communists in order to be in their good graces. Some German industrialists probably hoped to tame the Nazis by giving them funds. On the whole, however, this group remained loyal to the conservative parties, and many gave no money to the Nazis until after the party won power.[28]
TABLE II
The Ratio of the Percentage of Men in the Nazi Party to the Percentage in the General Population from Various Occupations, 1933*
Occupational Category 1Q33
Manual Workers 68%
White-collar Workers 169
Independents[f] 187
Officials ( civil servants ) 146
Peasants 60
Domestic servants, and nonagricultural family helpers 178
* Computed from a table in Hans Gerth, "The Nazi Party: Its Leadership and Composition," in Robert K. Merton, et al., eds., Reader in Bureaucracy
(Glencoe: The Free Press, 1952), p. 106.
[f] Includes self-employed businessmen, artisans, and free professionals.
The ideal-typical Nazi voter in 1932 was a middle-class self-employed Protestant who lived either on a farm or in a small community, and who had previously voted for a centrist or regionalist political party strongly opposed to the power and influence of big business and big labor. This does not mean that most Nazi voters did not have other characteristics. Like all parties looking for an electoral majority, the Nazis tried to appeal to some degree to every large group of voters.[29] They clearly had a great deal of success with other middle-class groups, particularly the unemployed.[30] And at the low point of the Great Depression, which affected Germany more than any other industrial nation, discontent with the "system" was widespread throughout the society. However, as a movement, Nazism was most attractive to those with the characteristics summarized above.
A NOTE ON THE GERMAN NONVOTER
Perhaps the most important argument against the thesis that Nazism developed pre-eminently as a movement of the liberal petty bourgeoisie has been the suggestion that the major source of the first great gain in Nazi strength (between 1928 when they secured 2.6 per cent of the vote and 1930 when they captured 18.3 per cent of the electorate) was previous nonvoters. Between these two elections, nonvoting dropped sharply from 24.4 per cent to 18 per cent of the ehgible electorate— a fact which has led to the conclusion that the Nazis' great gain came from the traditionally apathetic and from young first voters.[31] The most comprehensive critique of the class analysis has been that of the American sociologist Reinhard Bendix, who suggested a process of growth in which the middle class followed the new voters into support of Nazism:
The importance of the newly eligible voters and of the politically apathetic casts doubt on the conception of fascism as a middle-class movement. This is not to deny that the economic insecurity of middle-class groups was important for the conquest of power as a secondary response. It is to assert rather that the radicalization of the electorate originated among the previous nonparticipants in party politics, who probably came from various social groups, and that the significant support of the totalitarian movement by members of the middle class and of other social groups occurred subsequently in the hope of relief from economic distress and in the desire to gain from backing the victorious movement.[32]
This thesis challenges the class analysis of Nazism and contradicts the generalizations about the growth of new social movements which were presented in the discussion of working-class authoritarianism in the previous chapter. This analysis suggested that the most outcast and apathetic sections of the population can be won to political action by extremist and authoritarian parties only after such parties have become major movements, not while they are in their period of early rise. To support a new and small movement requires a relatively complex, long-term view of the political process, which insecure, ignorant, and apathetic persons cannot sustain. This logic should apply to the Nazis as well, and a statistical analysis of the relationship between the decline in nonvoting and the growth of Nazism indicates that in fact it does.
Geiger, Bendix, and others who concluded that the Nazis derived their early backing from traditional nonvoters based this opinion on the overall election figures which showed an enormous increase of Nazi votes simultaneous with the sudden participation of over four million previous nonvoters. But when the changes in the rates of nonvoting and of the Nazi vote are broken down by districts, we actually find a small negative rank order correlation of -.2 between the per cent increase in the Nazi vote and the increase in the proportion of the eligible electorate voting.
More vividly stated, in only five of the electoral districts where the Nazi gain between 1928 and 1930 exceeded their average gain for all of Germany was the increase in the size of the electorate also disproportionately high. In twenty-two of the thirty-five national districts, there is a negative relationship; either the voting gain is low and the Nazi gain is high, or vice versa. The evidence on the decline in nonvoting between 1928 and 1930 thus does not challenge the class analysis of Nazism.[33]
It is true that there are reasons other than a simple inspection of changes in votes which suggest that the Nazis recruited heavily from the apathetic sector of the population. As I pointed out in the preceding chapter, those sections of the population that are normally apathetic tend to have authoritarian attitudes and values.[34] The political interests of the apathetic, however, can be awakened only by a mass movement which presents a simple extremist view of politics. The Nazis did not fit this category from 1928 to 1930; they did, however, after 1930. Those analysts who concentrated on the Nazis' presumed 1930 gain among the apathetic ignored a growth which, in fact, happened later. The largest single drop in nonvoting in Germany actually occurred in the last election of March 1933, which was held after Hitler took office as head of a coalition government. Nonvoting dropped from 19 per cent in 1932 to 11 per cent in 1933, a drop of 8 percentage points, while the Nazi vote increased from 33 per cent to 43 per cent. And if we again correlate the growth in the Nazi vote with the increase in the electorate, we find, precisely as the hypothesis demands, that the two trends show a high positive relationship (.6).
To present the result by district, in twenty-eight out of the thirty-five districts the Nazi vote gain was higher or lower than the national average gain when the increase in the voting electorate was congruently higher or lower than the national average.
As a mass authoritarian party whose leader was already chancellor, the Nazi party received additional support (bringing it for the first time above the 40 per cent mark) from the ranks of the antipolitical apathetics, thus paralleling the pattern of growth of leftist extremists who also recruit from the most outcast strata as they reach the status of a contender for power.
Austria
Voting patterns in Austria during the first Republic are similar to Germany's, although the sharply different political scene prevents precise comparisons. The Austrian electorate was divided into three main groups before 1930: the Socialist party, securing about 40 per cent of the vote; the conservative clerical Christian Social party, supported by about 45 per cent of the electorate; and the much smaller liberal pan-German parties (largely the grossdeutsche Volkspartei), with between 10 and 15 per cent of the vote. The Volkspartei is the one which chiefly interests us here since it represented the liberal anticlerical polocies also pursued by the German liberal center parties. To these it added a strong pro-German orientation, which was linked after 1918 to the liberal traditions in Germany. Its support up to and including 1930 came largely from a sizable anticlerical segment of the urban middle classes, plus the Protestant and Jewish minorities. Throughout the 1920s, the Volkspartei was included in an anti-Marxist government coaHtion with the Christian Social party. It broke with that party in 1930 largely because of its opposition to the seemingly antiparliamentary measures pursued by the Christian Social leaders and the Heimwehr, their private army. In order to preserve democratic procedures against attack from clerical authoritarians Dr. Schober, the leader of the Volkspartei, formed a coahtion with another pan-German anticlerical rural group, the Landhund which "stood for . . . law and order, and for . . . parliamentary govemment."[35] The new coalition polled 12 per cent of the vote nationally. In the 1930 elections this pan-German alliance was probably the closest to the expression of a democratic anticlerical liberal ideology. But within two years most of those who had supported it backed the Nazi party. The American sociologist Walter Simon, who analyzed the electoral data of that era in detail, re- ports the events of these two years succinctly and vividly:
It is highly significant that in November 1930 Dr. Schober's fusion ticket of "liberal" Germanism, the ''Nationaler Wirtschaftsblock und Landhund, Fiihrung Dr. Schober," received its votes from an electorate that consisted largely of voters who were to go over to the Hitler movement within less than a year and a half as well as of voters who belonged to the Jewish middle-class. With this Dr. Schober had succeeded to rally for the last time in one camp the Jewish Liberal and anti-Marxist middle class and the German-oriented anti-clerical middle class. Both groups still continued to cherish the traditions of the 1848 revolution in which their great-grandfathers had fought side by side against the forces of autocratic government and for constitutional government. . . . Nearly all of the non-Jewish voters of the party had gone over to vote for the Nazis by 1932. Dr. Schober himself died in the summer of 1932, and the urban wing of his ticket, constituted as "gross-deutsche Volkspartei" affiliated with the Nazis in May 15th, 1933 under the terms of the so-called "Kampfhiindnis" or fighting alliance.[36]
The shift to the Nazis by the supporters of the grossdeutsche Volkspartei cannot be explained as the pro-German Austrians' accommodation to the governing tendency in Germany. The Nazis captured the support of the non-Jewish sector of the anticlerical Austrian middle class over a year before they took power in Germany and replaced the Volkspartei as the major third party in various provincial elections held throughout Austria in 1931 and 1932.[37]
The Austrian political scene also illustrates the distinctive character of conservative or right-wing "fascism." The Christian Social party never accepted the legitimacy of democratic institutions in the first Austrian Republic; many of its leaders and followers could not conceive of allowing the Marxist atheists of the Social Democratic party a place in the government, and in 1934 Austrian clerical conservatism imposed a dictatorship. It was a conservative dictatorship; no group was punitively injured unless it remained an organized opposition to the regime. The socialists and the trade-unions were suppressed, but were able to maintain a powerful underground. In 1938, when the Nazis took over Austria, the difference between the two dictatorships became obvious: the totalitarian Nazis actively sought to control the entire society, quickly destroyed the socialist and trade-union underground, and began active persecution of Jews and all opponents of Nazi ideas, regardless of whether or not they were politically active.[38]
France
Before the Algerian revolt of May 1958, postwar France had witnessed the growth of two relatively large movements, each of which has been labeled fascist by its opponents — the Gaullist Rassamblement du Peuple Française (RPF) and the L'Union de Defense des Commergants et Artisans (UDCA), most generally known as the Poujadist movement. When the Poujadists secured a large vote (around 10 per cent) in the 1956 elections and temporarily replaced the Gaullists as the principal "rightist" foes of the Repubhc, this suggested to some analysts that Poujade had inherited the support which De GauUe had given up when he dissolved the RPF and retired to Colombey-les-deux figlises to await his recall by the French people.
The ideologies of the two leaders and their movements are sharply divergent, however. De Gaulle is a classic conservative, a man who believes in the traditional verities of the French right. He has sought in various ways to give France a stable conservative regime with a strong president. In advocating a strong executive he follows in a tradition which in France has been largely identified with monarchism and the Church. In his appeal to rebuild France, De GauUe never set the interests of one class against another; neither he nor his movement ever sought to win the backing of the middle classes by suggesting that their interests were threatened by big business and the banks or by the trade-unions. Rather, De GauUe identified himself with all that advanced France as a nation: the growth of efficient large industry, the nationalizations which had occurred under his regime before 1946, and the strengthening of state power. He also ostentatiously maintained his identification with the Catholic Church. De Gaulle falls directly in the tradition of strong men of the conservative right. He has sought to change political institutions in order to conserve traditionahst values.
The materials available on Gaullist support bear out the contention that the RPF recruited its strength from the classic sources of conservatism. Survey data indicate that the RPF won more votes at its height before 1948 from those who previously had voted for the PRL — the party of liberty, or the "moderes," the French conservatives — than from backers of any other party. In 1947, 70 per cent of those who said they had previously been for the PRL said they intended to vote Gaullist. The other large source of GauUist converts was the Cathohc MRP which, though leftist on a number of economic issues, had secured the votes of many traditional conservatives for some time after the war because of its explicit Cathohcism. Fifty-four per cent of the former MRP supporters were Gaullists in 1947. This support from the parties linked to Catholicism and conservatism compares with 26 per cent Gaullist support among those who had previously backed the Radical party, the traditional liberal and middle-class anticlerical party of France.[39]
Even more direct evidence of the basically conservative character of GauUist support is the survey results from the period following De Gaulle's temporary retirement from politics and the dissolution of the RPF. In 1955 about half (52 per cent) of those who reported having voted Gaullist in 1951 said they would vote for the dissident Gaullist party (URAS), but four out of five who had changed to another party intended to vote for the conservative moderates.[40]
A variety of survey data compiled by Sondages, the French Gallup Poll, shows that the RPF secured its heaviest support from those who normally back the more conservative parties in European countries: the more well to do, the more religious, the older, and the women. RPF voters were better educated than the backers of any other French party (38 per cent of them had more than a higher elementary education); more of their supporters were over 65; they were stronger than any other party among industrial executives, engineers, and businessmen; and, as with other Cathohc parties, the majority of their voters were women. Only 12 per cent of the RPF supporters reported no religious observance, as contrasted with 40 per cent of the Radicals.[41] Sondages reported in 1952 that "the RPF is the most feminine of all the parties. . . . The [occupational] categories which are predominant and are represented more than their proportion in the population are the white-collar workers, the businessmen, industrial managers and engineers."
Survey findings not only demonstrate the conservative character of De Gaulle's supporters but also indicate that they were more likely to distrust parliamentary institutions and favor strongman government than the electorate of any other major party except the Communists. The Gaullists were second only to Communists in the proportion of their members who beheved that their party should, in some circumstances, take power by force, and who favored progress by means of revolution. A larger proportion of Gaullist voters than that of any other party including the Communists believed that "some party or parties should be banned," that only a minority of "cabinet ministers are honest men," that the "leadership" of a political party is more important than doctrine or program, and had "full confidence" in their party leader.[42]
In the election of 1956, much to the surprise of many political observers, the Poujadist movement rose to important proportions. Some saw Poujadism as the latest response of the more authoritarian antirepublican elements on the French right to an opportunity to vote against democracy and the Republic.[43]
In fact, Poujadism, like Nazism in Austria and Germany, was essentially an extremist movement appealing to and based on the same social strata as the movements which support the "liberal center." While it is impossible to know whether in power it would have resembled Nazism, its ideology was like that of the Nazis and other middle-class extremist populist movements. Poujadism appealed to the petty bourgeoisie, the artisans, merchants, and peasants, inveighing against the dire effects of a modem industrial society on them. It opposed big business, the trusts, the Marxist parties, the trade-unions, department stores and banks, and such state control over business as social security and other welfare state measures which raised the taxes of the little man. But while Poujadism explicitly attacked both the left and right, it strongly linked itself with the revolutionary republican tradition. Appealing to populist sentiments — the idea that the people rather than parties should control the government — Poujade praised the French revolutionaries who did not "hesitate to guillotine a king," and demanded the revival of various revolutionary institutions like the Estates-General, to which would be presented lists of grievances submitted by local bodies of citizens in the fashion of 1789.[44] Combined with its attacks on big business, left parties, and unions, were attacks on the Jews and a nationalist defense of colonialism.[45]
The relationship of Poujadist ideology to the anticlerical liberal rather than the right tradition in France has been well summed up by the British writer Peter Campbell:
In its various forms the traditional anti-democratic Right has held that the Republic has betrayed France: according to Poujadism it is the politicians and the administrators who have betrayed the Republic and the honest folk it ought to protect. The task of the Poujadists is to reconquer the Republic in the spirit of the Revolution of 1789-1793. The Poujadists demand a new States-General with new cahiers of the people's grievances and instructions. . . . The Poujadists have preferred the motto of the Republic to the various trinities of the extreme Right (such as Marshal Petain's "Work, Family, and Fatherland") but they have stressed their own special interpretations of "liberty, equahty, and fraternity."
Its attachment to the Republic and to the principles and symbols of the Revolution place Poujadism in the democratic tradition. . . . Nevertheless, its psychology is very near to that of Fascism, or rather, that of the rank and file's fascism in contrast to that of the social elite's fascism. In Poujadism there is the same fear of being merged into the proletariat (a fear associated with hostility to both the organized workers below and the social ranks above the threatened lower-middle class), desire for scapegoats (domestic and foreign), and hostility towards cultmre, intellectuals, and non-conformists.[46]
The ideological diferences between Gaullism and Poujadism do not necessarily demonstrate that these two movements represented different strata of the population. Many have argued that "the essential core of Poujadism was its 'opposition to the [democratic] regime,' so that it could absorb the Gaulliism of 1951."[47] But a look at a map of France upon which is superimposed the Gaullist vote of 1951 and the Poujadist vote of 1956 quickly challenges this theory. Poujadist strength lay largely in areas of France, principally the south, where the GauUists had been weak, while the Gaullists were strong in areas which resisted Poujadist inroads. Although Poujade received fewer votes in the country as a whole than De Gaulle — 2,500,000 as against 3,400,000 — the 1956 Poujadist ticket was far stronger than the 1951 Gaullist one in many southern districts.[48] Gaullist strength centered in the more well-to-do, industrialized, and economically expanding regions of France, while the geographical core of Poujadism was in the poorer, relatively underdeveloped, and economically stagnant departments.
In addition to the ecological evidence, a considerable amount of more direct survey or voting data demonstrates that Poujadism drew its backing from the traditional social base of liberalism — the anticlerical middle classes — and that it was a revolutionary movement, not a conservative one. A survey of a national sample of the electorate conducted by the French National Institute for Population Study in 1956 found that about half of the Poujadist voters were self-employed.[49] These national findings were reiterated in a survey conducted by the French Institute of Public Opinion Research in the first sector of Paris, which found that 67 per cent of the Poujadist vote in this district came from small businessmen or artisans.[50] While sample surveys of the Gaullist electorate had shown them to be the best educated of any party's supporters, the Parisian Poujadists had less education than the supporters of any other party with the exception of the Communists. Their economic status, judged by the ranking given respondents by interviewers, was also considerably less than that of the Gaullists.[51]
These data are consistent with the interpretation suggested by ecological analysis— that Poujadism was largely a movement of the self-employed lower middle class and the petty bourgeoisie in declining provincial areas, and thus differed greatly from Gaullism, backed in 1951 by that section of the middle class which was either well to do or lived in the more economically developed regions of France.[52]
These data, however, still do not demonstrate that Poujadism's basic appeal was to traditional "liberals."[53] For such evidence, we must turn to two sources — the religious beliefs and behavior of the movement's supporters and their opinions on questions which are linked to acceptance or rejection of traditional French family values. As the data reported in Table VII in Chapter VII indicate, the parties which draw their support disproportionately from practicing Catholics have been the Catholic MRP, the conservative Independents, and the Gaullists, while the Communists, Socialists, Radicals, and Poujadists are overrepresented among the nonpracticing Catholics, and among those with no religion.[54] The conservative Independents and the GauUists drew about two thirds of their vote in 1956 (according to the survey already cited) from practicing Catholics, while only 35 per cent of the Poujadists and 29 per cent of the Radicals were regular churchgoers.
Previously published data from this same survey dealing with attitudes toward family size and birth control, matters which in France are closely linked to religion and politics, also confirm the thesis that Poujadists are more likely to resemble anticlerical leftists in their opinions than right-wing conservatives. (See Table III.) Thus when the respondents were divided according to party affiliation, the sentiments among the Poujadist voters were similar to those among the left parties, while voters who backed the Social Repubhcans (the Gaullist rump group led by Jacques Soustelle, which remained loyal to De Gaulle after he withdrew from politics) had social attitudes close to those of the MRP and the Independents.
TABLE III
Relationship Between Party Vote and Attitudes Toward Birth Control in France*
| Attitudes | Party Affiliation | ||||||
| Independent | MRP | Soc. Rep. (Soustelle) | UDCA (Poujade) | Radical | Soc. | Com | |
| The number of births in France is: | |||||||
| Too great | 27% | 21% | 26% | 48% | 42% | 43% | 42% |
| As it should be | 56 | 59 | 48 | 39 | 43 | 43 | 39 |
| Not enough | 10 | 14 | 19 | 11 | 8 | 6 | 8 |
| Approve birth-control information | 29 | 24 | 29 | 42 | 51 | 60 | 68 |
| Disapprove giving birth-control information | 59 | 65 | 64 | 46 | 37 | 30 | 19 |
* Alain Girard and Raul Samuel, "Une enquete sur I'opinion publique k regard de la limitation des naissances," Population, 11 (1956), p. 500. The total sample was 2,432.
In 1958 following the military coup d'etat which returned De Gaulle to the presidency of France yet another large political party which denigrated the traditions of parliamentary democracy, the Union for a New Republic (UNR), was formed. The UNR contested the first elections of the Fifth RepubHc, claiming with some justice to be the Gaullist party par excellence, since it was led by many men who had taken part in previous Gaullist movements, such as Jacques Soustelle and Michel Debre. The party secured about 20 per cent of the vote, less than the support which had rallied around the RPF in 1947-51, but much more than Soustelle had secured in 1956 for the pro-De Gaulle URAS. Although there have been no pubHshed studies of the 1958 elections, polling results made available by the French Institute of Public Opinion Research from a survey conducted in February 1959 indicate that the Gaullism of 1958 was based on the same relatively well-to-do and conservative strata as that of the earlier RPF and URAS, and bears little similarity to the support of the populist extremist, Poujade. As the data contained in Table IV indicate, less than one quarter of the self-employed businessmen backed the UNR, considerably less than the proportion which had voted for Poujade two and a half years earlier. Conversely, the UNR drew considerable backing from those in "upper-class" occupations and from the white-collar workers. And as in the case of the earlier Gaullist groups, the majority of the voters for the new party were women, and 54 per cent had more than a primary-school education. In fact, the UNR's voters were much better educated on the average than the supporters of any other major party, as contrasted with the Poujadists of 1956, who had less schooling than the backers of any other non-Communist party. Unfortunately, there are as yet no rehable data concerning the way in which those who backed Poujade in 1956 voted in 1958. A panel survey by Georges Dupeux of the University of Bordeaux which sought to answer this question during the election campaign itself was unable to obtain replies from over half of those interviewed, but of the few who admitted having been Poujade sup- porters, only two out of eleven voted for the UNR.
The ideological characters of Gaullism and Poujadism and the social attributes of their supporters indicate that the distinction between conservative (right) authoritarianism and liberal (centrist) authoritarianism which helps to account for the social roots of Nazism is also useful in interpreting postwar French pohtics. Both the conservative and the liberal strata gave birth to large social movements which were critical of the parliamentary regime of the Fourth Republic, and which were anti-Marxist and extremely nationalistic. But one has been basically conservative, the other revolutionary in the populist sense.
TABLE IV
The Party Choices of Voters in Different Occupational Categories in the First Elections of the Fifth French Republic*
| Party | Industrialists, Executives, Professionals | Self-Employed | White-collar | Workers | Peasants | Retired and Rentiers |
| Communist | 0 | 0.02 | 0.1 | 0.26 | 0.06 | 0.06 |
| Socialist | 5 | 13 | 16 | 25 | 12 | 22 |
| UFD (Mendes) | 7 | 5 | 9 | 6 | 6 | 4 |
| Radical | 2 | 12 | 6 | 5 | 9 | 9 |
| RFD (left Gaullist) | 3 | 4 | 1 | ** | 2 | ** |
| MRP (liberal Catholic) | 5 | 9 | 9 | 10 | 14 | 13 |
| UNR | 40 | 23 | 30 | 17 | 13 | 21 |
| Christian Democrat (Bedault Gaullist) | 8 | 8 | 6 | 3 | 3 | 9 |
| Independent and Peasant (conservative) | 28 | 18 | 11 | 7 | 35 | 15 |
| Poujadist | 2 | 5 | 1 | ** | 1 | ** |
| Nacionalist (fascist) | 0 | 2 | ** | ** | ** | 0 |
| (N) | (60) | (129) | (282) | (416) | (317) | (217) |
* This table and other references in the text to the 1958 elections are from data kindly supplied by Professor Jean Stoetzel and Louis Angelby of the French Institute of Public Opinion Research from a national survey of the French electorate made from February 17 to February 26, 1959. An earlier survey by the Institute which provides much data about the attitudes of the French population during the birth of the Fifth Republic is reported in Sondages, 20 (1958, n. 4), pp. 3-62.
**Less than 1 per cent.
Italy
It is difficult to analyze Italian political history in terms of the three types of antidemocratic politics, because of the special manner in which Italian Fascism originally came to power. As a movement, it began as a neo-socialist party, more perhaps in the later Peronist tradition than the others, but, led by a thorough opportunist, it took every chance offered it to win support from diverse strata. Its ideology for a long time seemed directed mainly at the anticlerical middle classes, but after 1929 it came to terms with the Vatican and signed the first concordat in the history of unified Italy. For much of its period in power, Italian Fascism represented a coalition between antidemocratic traditionalism and middle-class populist authoritarianism directed against the leftist revolutionary sectors of the urban and rural populations.
Many analysts of Italian Fascism have seen its origins in middle-class areas and ideological appeal. According to the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, the valley of the Po, inhabited chiefly by "small property owners and tenant farmers essentially middle-class in their material interests as well as in their intellectual and moral outlook" was even "commemorated by Mussolini himself as the cradle of the Fascist movement." Much Fascist legislation was "designed to increase the number of small landholders," and Mussolini's initial syndicalist program, appealing to very heterogeneous groups, was dropped when he "carried his agitation successfully to the urban and rural middle classes, who gradually attached themselves to the original inner nucleus of shock troops."[55]
The two partners in the Fascist coalition split during the war when the more conservative segment made peace with the Western powers and the more genuinely fascist part led by Mussolini set up the Itahan Social Republic to fight on as an ally of the Nazis. Since the end of the war, two basically antidemocratic non-Marxist movements have continued in Italian politics. The Monarchists represent the traditionalist elements who seek to defend Throne and Altar, while the neo-Fascists, the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), attempt to continue the revolutionary fascist tradition. Though many of the social conditions, ideologies, and programs are different, in the Monarchists and MSI we find again versions of right-wing and centrist extremism. The images which both present to the Italian pubic are clearly colored by the Mussolini experience, and the voters are probably reacting to that even more than to the programs of the moment. This fact makes it difficult to expect any close analogy between these groups and those we have discussed in other countries. The limited survey data available do suggest, however, that in some ways these parties differ from each other in ways comparable to the differences between the GauUists and the Poujadists, or the German right and the Nazis. The monarchists are more well to do, older, religious, and predominantly female. The MSI supporters come from the less well to do and are comparatively young, predominantly mas- culine, and irrehgious or anticlerical.
Poll data locate the greatest concentration of neo-Fascist voters in small communities.[56] And ecological studies show that the MSI, like Poujadism in France, has been strongest in the less developed and less urbanized regions of the country.[57] Mavio Rossi, an American student of Italian politics, has reported that "the neo-Fascist movement is spreading most rapidly in the backward southern provinces, . . . that most of the neo-Fascists [attending party meetings] are teen-age students or young men in their thirties, . . . [and that] the older neo-Fascists are for the most part veterans of the last war."[58] The evidence bearing on the class composition of the neo-Fascist supporters is, however, not consistent with the overall hypothesis that neo-Fascism as a centrist movement should be pre-eminently a movement of the self-employed. The data from the 1953 International Public Opinion Research survey reported in Table II in Chapter VII indicate that small farm owners and artisans are the only occupational categories to give the party disproportionate support ( 15 per cent) as compared with its vote in the total sample ( 12 per cent ) . Other more recent surveys conducted in 1956 and 1958 by DOXA, an Italian survey organization, found, in 1956, little difference in the amount of support given to the MSI by the self-employed (8 per cent) as compared with manual workers (9 per cent) , and in 1958 that the neo-Fascists received about the same percentage (6 per cent) among self-employed artisans as they did among manual workers.[59]
It should be noted, however, that most sample surveys of the Italian electorate indicate that the Monarchists are much more well to do than are the neo-Fascist supporters. Thus a 1957 survey conducted by International Research Associates found that 12 per cent of the well to do are Monarchist voters, as contrasted with only 2 per cent for the Fascists. The main Fascist strength reported in this and most other studies is in the middle strata, as does that of the Christian Democrats and the right-wing socialists and the Republicans, while the Nenni left-wing socialists and the Communists have the bulk of their strength among the poorer classes.[60]
The disparity between Italian neo-Fascism and the other movements may reflect its character as a Fascist movement after Fascism has already been in power. The electorate may be reacting more to their memory of Mussolini in office than to the current program of the party. The relative weakness of the party among the self-employed may be a product of the fact that the Fascist regime did not help the self-employed strata, but came to terms with big business, large landlords, and the Church. Also, in its last year, 1944-45, as the Italian Social Republic, it tried to win the support of the working class of northern Italy by nationalization of industry, workers' councils, and a general radical socialist appeal.
The United States: McCarthyism as Populist Extremism
The tradition of a strong liberal movement designed to protect the social and economic position of the small independent farmer or urban merchant, historically a part of the democratic left, has also existed in the United States. As many historians have pointed out, the Populist and Progressive movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took this classic form. In this period of rising industrial capitalism and the growth of trusts, large sections of the farm and urban petty bourgeoisie responded to an appeal to control big business, the trusts, the railroads, and the banks. These movements contained a strong element of anti-
Semitism and generahzed xenophobia directed against any emerging power and influence of immigrants.[61] On the political level they showed a strong distrust of parliamentary or constitutional democracy and were particularly antagonistic to the concept of party. They preferred to break down the sources of partisan strength and create as much direct democracy as possible through the introduction of initiative and referendum, and through easy recall elections. Parties, politicians, big business, bankers, and foreigners were bad; only the people acting for themselves were good.
The Populist movement lost much of its direct pohtical influence with the rapid growth of large industries and large cities.
To some extent the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was a latter-day expression of provincial Populism appealing to farmers and the small businessmen in towns and villages against the domination by metropolitan centers. In the 1930s outright fascist movements sought to win strength by appealing directly to the economic interests of farmers and small merchants, attacking democratic institutions, and placing the blame for social and economic difficulties on international financiers and Jews.[62]
There is no accurate measure of the actual strength of the various American extremist populist movements in the 1930s. Some place their support in the many millions. Whatever their strength, they were unable to convert it into partisan victories or become a major third party. Perhaps the most successful neo-populist extremist of the thirties, Huey Long, Governor and Senator from Louisiana, is a clear example of populist continuity. In the South and for a short time on the national scene, he attacked "the Bourbons and absentee corporation interests," promised to destroy large fortunes through heavy taxation and to sustain the middle class and redistribute the wealth to the poor. How successful Long would have been on the national scene we shall never know, since an assassin's bullet removed him in 1935. But that he represented a strong link with the populism of the nineties is clear not only from an examination of his ideology but also from the fact that there is a high correlation between the vote he obtained in elections in Louisiana in the 1920s and 1930s and that secured by the Populists in 1896.[63] Whether Longism on the national scene would have meant dictatorship is unknown, but Longism in power in Louisiana meant a severe attack on the freedom of opposition and a free press, and contempt for juridical and constitutional processes.
One recent expression of populist extremism in America was McCarthyism. McCarthy had no party, not even an organization, but for a few years he ranged the American political scene denouncing the forces of the left — the New Deal Democrats — as traitors or the accomplices of traitors, and at the same time insisted that the bulk of the traitors were nurtured by the traditional enemy of popuHsm, the Eastern upper class.[64]
That McCarthy appealed to the same social groups as did "left- wing" populism can be verified by data from opinion surveys. A study by the sociologist Martin Trow attempted to locate McCarthy's social support by dividing respondents from a small New England city into four political categories: (1) labor-liberals — those who were favorable to trade-unions and hostile to large corporations; (2) nineteenth-century liberals — those who were opposed to trade-unions and to large corporations; (3) moderate conservatives — those who supported trade-unions and were also favorable to large business; and (4) right-wing conservatives— those who were hostile to unions and favorable to big business. In terms of this typology, those in category 2, the "nineteenth-century liberals," correspond to the liberals of Europe, and, as Trow shows, their ideology is preponderantly that of the small businessman.[65]
And when we examine the way in which the supporters of each of these four political positions reacted to McCarthy, we find that it was the nineteenth-century liberals— not the moderate or ex- treme conservatives— who were most likely to support him (Table V).
TABLE V
McCarthy's Support by Political Orientation*
Per cent favor his methods
Labor Liberals 37 (191)
Nineteenth-century Liberals 60 (142)
Moderate Conservatives 35 (190)
Right-wing Conservatives 38 (140)
• Computed from Martin A. Trow, op. cit., p. 276.
The support for McCarthy among the nineteenth-century liberals was almost twice as great as among those holding other political positions. As Trow points out, this is the one political tradition in America which currently has "no institutionalized place on the political scene, little representation or leadership in the major parties, [and] which sought that voice and place through McCarthy. And he expressed for them their fear and mistrust of bigness, and the slick and subversive ideas that come out of the cities and the big institutions to erode old ways and faiths."[66] Like Poujadism, McCarthyism and nineteenth-century liberalism are primarily the reactions of the small businessmen. Though small businessmen comprised only one fifth of the men in Trow's sample, "they contributed a third of the nineteenth-century liberals."
And the small businessmen among the nineteenth-century liberals were even more likely to be McCarthyites than those in other occupations. As in the case of Poujadism, the highest proportion of McCarthy supporters was "found among the poorly educated small businessmen holding these nineteenth-century liberal attitudes: almost three out of four of these men were McCarthy supporters." But while McCarthy was drawing the traditional supporters of American populism behind him, the chief defenders of the established order ultimately joined together to defeat him. As I have tried to show elsewhere, American conservatism and big business resisted McCarthy.[67]
In discussing McCarthyism and Poujadism in the same section as Italian Fascism and German and Austrian Nazism, I do not intend to suggest that these movements would have resulted in dictatorships if their leaders had attained power. What I do suggest is that they, like other movements appealing to the self-employed urban and rural middle classes, were in large part products of the insoluble frustrations of those who feel cut off from the main trends of modern society. Not only were these five national movements disproportionately backed by the small independents, but in each country they secured much more support from those living on farms or in provincial small towns and cities. Here are the declining "liberal" classes living in declining areas. The petty bourgeoisie of these sections not only suffer deprivation because of the relative decline of their class, they are also citizens of communities whose status and influence within the larger society is rapidly declining. From time to time, depending on various specific historical factors, their discontent leads them to accept diverse irrational protest ideologies — regionalism, racism, supernationalism, anticosmopolitanism, McCarthyism, fascism.
Peronism — the "Fascism" of the Lower Class
The third type of social movement which has often been described as fascist is Peronism, the movement and ideology which formed around Juan Peron, President of the Argentine from 1946 to 1955. Unlike right-wing antidemocratic tendencies based on the more well-to-do and traditionalist strata and those tendencies I prefer to call "true" fascism — centrist authoritarianism, based on the liberal middle classes, primarily the self-employed — Peronism, much like Marxist parties, has been oriented toward the poorer classes, primarily urban workers but also the more impoverished rural population. Peronism has a strong-state ideology quite similar to that advocated by Mussolini.[68] It also has a strong antiparliamentary populist content, stressing that the power of the party and the leader is derived directly from the people, and that parliamentarianism results in government by incompetent and corrupt politicians. It shares with right-wing and centrist authoritarianism a strong nationalist bent, blaming many of the difficulties faced by the country on outsiders — international financiers and so forth. And like the other two forms of extremism, it glorifies the position of the armed forces.
Peronism differs from the other movements, however, in its positive orientation toward the workers, the trade-unions, and the class struggle. Peron came to power in 1946 in a revolutionary coup backed by the army and the working class which followed the overthrow of a Conservative party regime. But Peron and his party remained in power in reasonably honest elections, winning overwhelming majorities. In the 1946 elections, the working-class-based Socialists failed to elect even one member of the Chamber of Deputies for the first time in forty years. According to the expert on Latin America, Robert Alexander, "Even in the city of Buenos Aires, which had been overwhelmingly Radical and Socialist, the Peronistas came in first with about a quarter of a million votes, the [middle-class] Radicals were second with 150,000, and the Socialists polled third with little over a hundred thousand."[69]
In these elections class lines were drawn more sharply than in any previous election. Peron was supported by the lower strata and opposed by the middle and upper classes.[70] The Argentine sociologist Gino Germani has explained the receptivity of the Argentine working class to Peron's revolutionary appeal as a typical phenomenon of a period of rapid industrialization and urbanization much like the pattern in Europe discussed in Chapter 11."[71]
In power Peron enacted a great deal of legislation which increased the standard of living, pay, rewards, leisure, and social security of the workers. He also passed laws known as the Statute of the Peon to benefit farm laborers and tenants against the landlords. These laws dealt with days off, housing, minimum pay, medical aid, and unwarranted discharges. His administration organized a plan to give land to farm laborers. Perhaps the principal institutional base of Peronist power was the trade-unions, which were completely dominated by his followers, grew to great size, and functioned as real agencies of collective bargaining backed by the state.
All of these measures, which sound like the program of a fairly radical labor party, were combined with extreme nationalism, strong emphasis on the dominant role of the "leader," corporatist ideology, populist demagogy, and lack of respect for constitutionalism and tradition. Not surprisingly, Peron won the enthusiastic support of the lower strata, both rural and urban, and the strong opposition of the middle classes, big business, and the landlords. For much of his rule he was backed by the armed forces from whose officer corps he had come."[72] In some measure his regime was a coalition between the nationalist officers of an underdeveloped country and its lower classes oriented against foreign imperialists and local bourgeois "renegades." Ultimately the regime was brought down by the officers and the church who were alienated by Peron's extremism, lack of responsibiHty, and continued antagonism to strata with which they were aligned. Even in exile, exposed as a corrupt politician and as a man who used his position for immoral purposes, Peron has remained the leader of the Argentine workers, and Peronist leaders have remained powerful in the trade-unions.
The phenomenon known as Peronism — anticapitalist populist nationalism which appeals to the lower strata in alignment with the army — is, of course, not unique to the Argentine. In Brazil, Getulio Vargas successfully developed the same theme a decade earlier, was also identified with fascism, and continued to retain the support of the workers after he left power.[73] "Getulisme," like Peronism, was characterized by a practical program of social reforms designed to benefit the urban industrial workers. The main opposition came from "the landed aristocracy, the old families, who were attached to the old social structure of Brazil."[74] Vargas' Labor party is a major force in Brazilian politics, sometimes allied with the Communists who, as has been noted, also supported Peron during much of his administration.[75] If Peronism is considered a variant of fascism, then it is a fascism of the left because it is based on the social strata who would otherwise turn to socialism or Communism as an outlet for their frustrations.
The Social Bases of Fascism
The analysis of modern totalitarian movements has reflected the old concepts of left, right, and center. Politicians and scholars alike have seen these movements as representing the extremes of the political spectrum, hence they speak of Communism as the extreme left and Fascism as the extreme right. But antidemocratic ideologies as well as antidemocratic groups can be more fruitfully classified and analyzed if it is recognized that "left," "right," and "center" refer to ideologies, each of which has a moderate and an extremist version, the one parliamentary and the other extra-parliamentary in its orientation. It is also necessary to recognize that a left extremist movement that is working-class based and oriented also may be militaristic, nationalistic, and anti-Marxist.[76]
While all the varieties of antidemocratic mass movements are of equal interest, I have tried here to establish the usefulness of the tripartite distinction by examining the social bases of different political movements. Data from a number of countries demonstrate that classic fascism is a movement of the propertied middle classes, who for the most part normally support liberalism, and that it is opposed by the conservative strata, who have, however, at different times backed conservative antiparliamentary regimes.
The conservative regimes are, in contrast to centrist ones, non-revolutionary and nontotalitarian. In a conservative dictatorship, one is not expected to give total loyalty to the regime, to join a party or other institutions, but simply to keep out of politics.
Though the dictatorship of the Austrian clerical conservatives has been described as fascist, the differences between it and its Nazi successor are abundantly clear. Similarly, although Franco is backed by the Spanish fascists — the Falange — his regime has been dominated by conservative authoritarians. The party has never been allowed to dominate the society; most institutions remain independent of the state and the party, and the opposition is not asked to conform or join, only to abstain from organized opposition.
Although a distinction may be made among these movements analytically, in any given country there is considerable overlap, as in the case of the Spanish Nationalists. Basically revolutionary movements like Nazism did secure some support from conservatives who agreed with its nationalistic and anti-Marxist aspects. Italian Fascism represented a coalition of both centrist and conservative extremism led by a pure opportunist. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude from the absence of movements which are purely one or the other variety that the analytic distinction is of merely speculative interest. Recent political movements — Poujadism, McCarthyism, Gaullism — all exhibit particular characteristics associated with the nature of their social base. If we want to preserve and extend parliamentary democracy, we must understand the source of threats to it, and threats from conservatives are as different from those originating in the middle-class center as these are from Communism.
Extremist movements have much in common. They appeal to the disgruntled and the psychologically homeless, to the personal failures, the socially isolated, the economically insecure, the uneducated, unsophisticated, and authoritarian persons at every level of the society. As Heberle puts it, such movements are supported by "those who for some reason or other had failed to make a success in their business or occupation, and those who had lost their social status or were in danger of losing it. . . . The masses of the organized [Nazi] party members consisted therefore before 1933 largely of people who were outsiders in their own class, black sheep in their family, thwarted in their ambitions. . . .""[77] As far back as the 1890s, Engels described those who "throng to the working-class parties in all countries" as "those who have nothing to look forward to from the offocial world or have come to the end of their tether with it — opponents of inoculation, supporters of abstemiousness, vegetarians, antivivisectionists, nature-healers, free-community preachers whose communities have fallen to pieces, authors of new theories on the origin of the universe, unsuccessful or unfortunate inventors, victims of real or imaginary injustice . . . honest fools and dishonest swindlers.""[78] It is often men from precisely such origins who give the fanatical and extremist character to these movements and form the core of believers.[79] But the various extremist movements, like their democratic alternatives, wax or wane depending on whether they can win and retain the support of the strata whom they are trying to represent and lead. It is impossible to understand the role and varying success of extremist movements unless we distinguish them and identify their distinctive social bases and ideologies much as we do democratic parties and movements.[80]
In the next section we turn from the social characteristics of the supporters of antidemocratic tendencies back to the conditions of effective democracy in action. Part II seeks to locate the peristent patterns associated with varying rates and types of participation in the electoral struggle in various democratic countries.
[1] In spite of the complexities of French politics, the foremost students of elections in that country find that they must classify parties and alternatives along the left-right dimension. See F. Goguel, Geographie des elections françaises de 1870 d 1951, Cahiers de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, No. 27 (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1951).
[2] David J. Saposs, "The Role of the Middle Class in Social Development: Fascism, Populism, Communism, Socialism," in Economic Essays in Honor of Wesley Clair Mitchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), pp. 395> 397. 400 - An even earlier analysis by Andre Siegfried, based on a detailed ecological study of voting patterns in part of France from 1871 to 1912, suggested that the petty bourgeoisie who had been considered the classic source of French democratic ideology were becoming the principal recruiting grounds for extremist movements. Siegfried pointed out that though they are "by nature egalitarian, democratic, and envious . . . they are fearful above all of new economic conditions which threatened to eliminate them, crushed between the aggressive capitalism of the great companies and the increasing rise of the working people. They place great hopes in the Republic, and they do not cease being republican or egalitarian. But they are in that state of discontent, from which the Boulangisms marshal their forces, in which reactionary demagogues see the best grovmd in which to agitate, and in which is born passionate resistance to certain democratic reforms." Andre Siegfried, Tableau politique de la France de Vouest sous la troisieme republique (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1913), p. 413.
[3] Harold Lasswell, "The Psychology of Hitlerism," The Political Quarterly, 4 (1933), P- 374-
[4] See also Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944).
[5] Talcott Parsons, "Some Sociological Aspects of the Fascist Movement," in his Essays in Sociological Theory (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1954), pp. 133-34- Marx himself pointed out that "the small manufacturer, the small merchant, the artisan, the peasant, all fight against the [big] bourgeois, in order to protect their position as a middle class from being destroyed. They are, however, not revolutionary, but conservative. Even more, they are reactionary, they look for a way to reverse the path of history," quoted in S. S. Nilson, "Wahlsoziologische Probleme des Nationalsozialismus," Zeitschrift fiir die Gesamte Staatswissenschaft, 110 (1954), p. 295.
[6] Martin A. Trow, "Small Businessmen, Political Tolerance, and Support for McCarthy," American Journal of Sociology, 64 (1958), pp. 279-80.
[7] For an analysis of the political role of the rapidly growing Latin-American middle classes see John J. Johnson, Political Change in Latin America — the Emergence of the Middle Sectors (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958). The different political propensities of a social group at successive stages of industrialization are indicated by James Bryce's comment in 1912 that "the absence of that class of small landowners which is the soundest and most stable element in the United States and in Switzerland and is equally stable, if less politically trained, in France and parts of Germany, is a grave misfortime for South and Central America." This may have been true in an early period, before the impact of large-scale organization of the farms meant economic competition for small farmers and added them to the rank of the potential supporters of fascism, as the data on Germany and other countries discussed here show. See James Bryce, South America: Ob-servations and Impressions (New York: Macmillan, 1912), p. 533.
[8] A comparison of the European middle class and the Argentine working class, which argues that each is most "displaced" in its respective environ- ment, is contained in Gino Germani, Integracion politica de las masas y la totalitarismo (Buenos Aires: Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores, 1956). See also his Estructura social de la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Raigal, 1955).
[9] See pp. 115-20 of Chap. IV.
[10] Karl D. Bracher, Die Aufldsiing der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart and Diisseldorf: Ring Verlag, 1954), p. 94. The parliamentary delegation of this party was almost exclusively composed of businessmen who were active in the interest group associations of small business. See Sigmund Neumann, "Germany: Changing Patterns and Lasting Problems" in S. Neumann, ed., Modern Political Parties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 364.
[11] Rudolf Heberle, From Democracy to Nazism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1945).
[12] The most comprehensive set of German election data presenting party vote in different elections by sex may be found in Maurice Duverger, La Participation des femmes a la vie politique (Paris: UNESCO, 1955), pp. 56—63; and Gabriele Bremme, Die politische Rolle der Frau in Deutschland (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1956), pp. 74-77, m, 243-52; see also Heinrich Striefler, Deutsche Wahlen in Bildern und Zahlen ( Diissel- dorf: Wilhelm Hagemann, 1946), pp. 20-22; Giinther Franz, Die politischen Wahlen in Niedersachsen 1867 bis 1949 (Bremen-Horn: Walter Dom Verlag, 1957)) PP- 28-32; Karl D. Bracher, op. cit., p. 476; Herbert Tingsten, Po- litical Behavior: Studies in Election Statistics (London: P. S. King & Son, 1937), PP- 37-65-
[13] Rudolf Heberle, op. cit., pp. 113, 114, 119 (emphasis supplied).
[14] Giinther Franz, op. cit., p. 62,
[15] The six eastern border districts in which Nazi gain and conservative loss were both high account for the small positive correlation between the two. Without these six districts, the correlation is actually negative.
[16] In Schleswig-Holstein, the regionalist Landespartei was strong in 1919 and 1921 in the same districts in which the liberal Democratic party secured its greatest vote. These were the same areas which went most heavily Nazi in the 1930s. See R. Heberle, op. cit., pp. 98-100; in Lower Saxony, an examination of the vote suggests that the supporters of the Welfen, the Hanoverian regionalists, who were a major party in the state until 1932, went over to the Nazis. Those "middle-class and rural voting districts . . . in which the Welfen secured their largest vote, became the earliest and strongest centers of Nazism." See G. Franz, op. cit., pp. 53-54, also p. 62. In Bavaria, a somewhat comparable party, ihe Bayerischer Bauem una Mittelstandsbund, dropped from 11.1 per cent in 1928 to 3.3 per cent in 1932. And a study of Bavarian voting patterns suggests that it, like the other regionalist parties, lost its voters predominantly to the Nazis. See Meiiu-ad Hagman, Der Weg ins Verhdngnis, Reichstagswahlergebnisse 1919 bis 1933 besonders aus Bayern (Miinchen; Michael Beckstein Verlag, 1946), pp. 27-28. A sympathetic analysis of the way in which an agrarian regionalist move- ment paved the way for Nazi electoral victory in Hesse is Eugen Schmahl, Entivicklung der volkischen Bewegung (Giessen: Emil Roth Verlag, 1933). This book contains an appendix which analyzes electoral shifts from 1930 to 1932 by a Nazi, Wilhelm Seipel, "Entwicklung der nationalsozialistischen Bauern-bewegung in Hessen," pp. 135-67. In the elections for the provincial assembly in 1931, the Hessen Landbund's representation dropped from 14 per cent to 3 per cent, and the organization shortly thereafter withdrew as a political party, and made an agreement with the Nazis. Ibid., pp. 163-65.
[17] Cited in R. Heberle, op. cit., p. 47. The Hessische Volksbund expressed similar sentiments in Hesse. Ibid., p. 52.
[18] F. A. Hermens, Demokratie und Wahlrecht (Paderbom: Verlag Ferdi- nand Schoningh, 1933), pp. 125-26; and Giinther Franz, op. cit., p. 53.
[19] R. Heberle, op. cit., p. 49.
[20] Samuel A. Pratt, op. cit., pp. 63, 261-66; Heberle also reports that within Schleswig-Holstein, "An analysis of election returns by communities showed a rather strong inverse correlation between the size of the community and the percentage of votes obtained by the NSDAP." R. Heberle, op. cit., p. 89; Bracher, differentiating the 35 large election districts into those which were high or low in voting Nazis, found that the high Nazi districts were more rural than the low ones. This parallels Pratt's findings. See Karl A. Bracher, op. cit., pp. 647-48.
[21] All the studies agree that religion affected support of the Nazis more than any other factor. The Nazis were weak in Catholic regions and cities, and secured majorities in many Protestant small commiznities.
[22] Charles P. Loomis and J. Allen Beegle, "The Spread of German Nazism in Rural Areas," American Sociological Review, ii (1946), pp. 730, 729. Catholic affiliation constantly overrides class or other allegiances as a major determinant of party support in practically all election data for Germany, in both the Weimar and Bonn republics. The Nazis' largest support in Bavaria and other Catholic areas came from Protestant enclaves, a fact which makes ecological analysis that does not hold religious affiliation constant relatively useless in such regions.
[23] R. Heberle, op. cit., p. 112; Franz also reports that in Lower Saxony, "It was the bourgeois middle-class in the cities, and the farm-owners on the land who supported the NSDAP." Giinther Franz, op. cit., p. 62.
[24] See Samuel A. Pratt, op. cit., p. 148.
[25] Examination of the German census for 1933 reveals that over 90 per cent of the "upper middle-class" category used by Pratt is filled by "proprietors," with only a small proportion coming from employed groups.
[26] Samuel A. Pratt, op. cit., p. 171.
[27] R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1934), p. 80.
[28] See F. Thyssen, I Paid Hitler (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1941), p. 102; Walter Gorlitz and Herbert Quint, Hitler. Eine Biographic (Stuttgart: Steingrubben Verlag, 1952), pp. 284, 286; Edward Norman Peterson, Hjalmar Schacht for and against Hitler (Boston: The Christopher Publishing House, 1954), pp. 112-17; for general discussion and documentation see also August Heinrichsbauer, Schwerindustrie und Politik (Essen: Verlag Gliickauf, 1948); Arild Halland, Nazismen i Tyskland (Bergen: John Griegs Forlag, 1955); and Louis P. Lochner, Tycoons and Tyrants, German Industry from Hitler to Adenauer (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1954).
[29] An analysis of the sources of the vote for the Social Democratic party in 1930 estimated that 40 per cent of the SPD voters were not manual workers, that the party was backed in that year by 25 per cent of the white-collar workers, 33 per cent of the lower civil servants, and 25 per cent of the self-employed in artisan shops and retail business. But the core of the SPD support was employed, skilled manual workers, while the core of the Nazi strength was small owners, both urban and rural. See Hans Neisser, "Sozialstatistischen Analyse des Wahlergebnisses," Die Arbeit, 10 (1930), pp. 657-58.
[30] Pratt reports a high positive correlation between white-collar unemployment and the Nazi vote in the cities. See S. Pratt, op. cit.. Chap. 8.
[31] See an early statement of this view in Theodore Geiger, Die Soziale Schichtung des Deutschen Volkes (Stuttgart: Enke Verlag, 1932), p. 112; Heinrich Striefler, op. cit., pp. 23-28; Reinhard Bendix, "Social Stratification and Political Power," in R. Bendix and S. M. Lipset, eds.. Class, Status and Power (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1956), p. 605; Giinther Franz, op. cit., pp. 61-62.
[32] Reinhard Bendix, op. cit., p. 605. Bendix has since modified his posi- tion. See R. Bendix and S. M. Lipset, "On the Social Structure of Western Societies: Some Reflections on Comparative Analysis," Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 5 (1959), pp. 1-15
[33] These findings are sustained by the analysis of Loomis and Beegle. They report that in 1932, in the 59 election districts in rural Hanover, the correlation between the proportion of nonvoters and the Nazi percentage of the vote was .43. This correlation also challenges the thesis that the Nazis appealed primarily to the nonvoter. See Charles P. Loomis and J. Allen Beegle, op. cit., p. 733. Both this study and an earlier one by James K. Pollock have been ignored by most of the literature in the field. Pollock pointed out that "In studying another aspect of German electoral behavior, we find little relationship between the size of the vote cast in these elections [1930-33] and the nature of the political result. ... In these critical years in Germany, many of the urban industrial areas showed a greater electoral interest than did the agricultural areas. At the same time, this increased popular vote in the large cities as a rule was cast against Hitler, while the agricultural areas regularly showed a strong interest in him." James K. Pollock, "An Areal Study of the German Electorate, 1930-1933," American Political Science Review, 38 (1944), pp. 93-94.
[34] See pp. 110-11.
[35] Walter B. Simon, The Political Parties of Austria (Ph.D. thesis. Department of Sociology, Columbia University, 1957, Microfilm 57-2894 University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan), pp. 28, 71.
[36] Ibid., pp. 322-23. The statements concerning the sources of the vote and the shifts to the Nazis are documented by Simon in a careful and elaborate examination of electoral statistics.
[37] Although anti-Semitism had characterized part of the pan-German movement before 1918, the grossdeutsche Volkspartei, whose supporters went Nazi in 1931-32, and which united with the Austrian Nazis in 1933, had been liberal on the religious question. During the twenties the party was charged with "being overly sympathetic towards the Jews," and its electoral ticket was strongly supported in 1930 by the Neue Freie Presse, "the organ of the liberal Jewish middle and upper class." Walter Simon, op. cit., p. 328.
[38] For an excellent description of the political events which led to the destruction of the Austrian Republic, see Charles A. Gulick, Austria from Hapsburg to Hitler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948).
[39] Sondages, February 16, 1948, p. 47.
[40] Jean Stoetzel, "Voting Behavior in France," British Journal of Sociology, 6 (1955),P- 105.
[41] These data are reported in Enghsh in J. Stoetzel, op. cit., pp. 116-19 and in Philip Williams, Politics in Fost-War France (London: Longmans,Green & Co., 1954), p. 446.
[42] Sondages, 14 (1952, No. 3), presents a detailed report on the social characteristics and opinions of the supporters of the various major parties, from which the data in the above two paragraphs are taken. For a later report of the same survey, see Philip WiUiams, Politics in Post-War France (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1958, 2d ed. ), pp. 452-54.
[43] See Georges Lavau, "Les Classes moyennes et la politique," in Maurice Duverger, ed.. Partis politiques et classes sociales en France (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1955), pp. 60, 76.
[44] See Jean Meynaud, "Un essai d'interpretation du mouvement Poujade," Revue de Vinstitute de sociologie ( 1956, No. 1), p. 27, for discussion of republican populist symbols in Poujadism; for further docvunentation on Poujadist ideology see other sections of this article, pp. 5—38; S. Hofifman, Le mouvement Poujade (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1956); M. Duverger, et at., eds., Les Elections du 2 Janvier 1956 (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1957), esp. pp. 61-64.
[45] Poujade publicly even gave money to support a major strike at Saint-Nazaire. See J. Meynaud, op. cit., p. 26.
[46] Peter Campbell, "Le Mouvement Poujade," Parliamentary Affairs, 10 (1957), pp. 363-65.
[47] See S. Hoffman, op. cit., pp. 190 ff., for a discussion of the various hypotheses which have been advanced to account for the growth of the Poujadists.
[48] Ibid., p. 193; for a detailed analysis of the ecological sources of the Poujadist vote, see Frangois Goguel, "Geographie des elections du 2 Janvier," in M. Duverger, et ah, eds., op. cit., esp. pp. 477—82.
[49] This is the same survey which is reported in Table I in Chap. VII. These data were computed from the IBM cards of the study which were kindly supplied by Alain Girard of the Institute.
[50] Jean Stoetzel and Pierre Hassner point out that the Poujadist success meant the "entry into the National Assembly of a large group of representatives of professions up to now poorly represented: the list of Poujade elected deputies published in Le Monde gives 26 out of the 52 Poujadists as in commercial occupations (10 food sellers, 10 diverse tradesmen, and 6 wholesale merchants); the other 26 are either artisans, or owners of rather small or medium sized enterprises, plus a school director and two 'students.' " Thus, the official representatives of Poujadism, as well as its social base, were lower middle class. See Stoetzel and Hassner, "Resultats d'un sondage dans le premier secteiu de la Seine," in M. Duverger, et al., eds., op. cit., p. 190.
[51] These data are derived from tables reported in Jean Stoetzel and Pierre Hassner, op. cit., esp. pp. 236-42. This article reflects the vote in Paris, with its diversified occupational structure, and its large middle class, both independent and salaried. Other articles in this volume analyze election results in other departments, and indicate that Poujade was supported by tradesmen, artisans, and in some districts peasants. See pp. 316, 322-52, 369-95, in particular.
[52] Gaullism, of course, also drew heavily from strata to whom Poujade had limited access, particularly the bureaucracy of large industry, managers, engineers, and white-collar workers. "In the few economically progressive departments in which Poujadism gained some success (e.g., Isere), careful study has revealed that this success came principally in the backward cantons wthin the department." Maurice Duverger, The French Political System (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 97.
[53] Maurice Duverger points out that the traditional supporters of the Radicals were "almost the same social groups which today support Poujade, that is, small shopkeepers and artisans." Ibid., p. 98.
[54] Various data indicate that the Poujadists are disproportionately male as compared with the Independents, MRP, and Gaullists. For data from actual voting returns see Claude Lelau, "La geographic des partis dans risere," in M. Duverger, et ah, eds., op. cit., p. 394; see also Jean Stoetzel and Pierre Hassner, op. cit., p. 236; see Bondages, December 1, 1948, p. 223, January 16, 1949, pp. 16-18 and August 1949, p. 126, and 1952, n. 3, p. 24, for data on the sex composition of the Gaullist backers.
[55] See Erwin von Beckerath, "Fascism," Encyclopedia of the Social Sci- ences, Vol. VI (New York: Macmillan, 1937), p. 135.
[56] See data in the files of the World Poll. See also P. L. Fegiz, II Volto Sconosciuto dell'Italia (Milano: Dott. A. GiufFr^, 1956), pp. 501-26.
[57] Francesco Compagna and Vittorio de Caprariis, Geograpa delV elezioni italiane dal 1946 al 1953 (Bologna: II Mulino, no date), pp. 25, 34.
[58] Mavio Rossi, "Neo-Fascism in Italy," Virginia Quarterly Review, 29 (1953). PP- 506—7. A detailed ecological study of Italian elections from 1946 on by the French sociologist Mattei Dogan unfortunately treats Monarchists and neo-Fascists as one group. He reports they are strongest in southern Italy, but also that their strength increases with the size of community, being particularly high in southern cities such as Naples and Bari, but also in Rome and Trieste. He accounts for "right-wing" strength in Rome by the presence of civil servants and retired civil servants "who remember the Fascist regime nostalgically," and in Trieste by the fact that there "nationalism has been exacerbated by the conflict with Yugoslavia." "Le Comportement politique des Italiens," Revue frangaise de science politique, 9 ( 1959), pp. 398—402.
[59] These statistics are based on a secondary analysis of the data of these studies made from IBM cards kindly supphed by Dr. P. Luzzatto Fegiz, director of DOXA.
[60] The statistics are from a 1957 survey, the results of which have not been published. In all, six different Italian surveys conducted by three different research organizations have been inspected, or reanalyzed. Given the fact that we are concerned with the support of a party that has less than 5 per cent of the electorate behind it, it is only natural that there should be considerable variation in results from one sample survey to another. The conclusions cited above represent the best estimate that can be made of the sources of neo-Fascist and Monarchist support from all the surveys.
[61] See Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), for a detailed exposition of this thesis.
[62] See Victor C. Ferkiss, "Populist Influence in American Fascism," Western Political Quarterly, 10 (1957), pp. 350—73.
[63] Perry H. Howard, Political Tendencies in Louisiana, 1812-1952 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), p. 128.
[64] For an analysis of the twin components of McCarthyite ideology, see the essays in Daniel Bell, ed., The New American Right (New York: Criterion Books, 1956).
[65] See Martin A. Trow, op. cit., pp. 277-78.
[66] Ibid., p. 276. A less comprehensive study based, however, on a national sample also reported that small businessmen were more likely to be McCarthy supporters than any other occupational stratum. See Immanuel Wallerstein, McCarthyism and the Conservative (M.A. thesis, Department of Sociology, Columbia University, 1954).
[67] S. M. Lipset, "The Sources of the Radical Right," in Daniel Bell, ed., op. cit., pp. 216-17, 232-33.
[68] It should be noted that Peron sometimes accepted the linkage with fascism and praised Hitler and Mussolini.
[69] Robert J. Alexander, The Peron Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), P- 51-
[70] The continued working-class appeal of Peronism has been shown by the fact that in the elections of 1957, about one quarter of all voters cast a blank so-called "white" ballot indicating their support for the Peronista party, which was not allowed on the ballot. A survey conducted by Gino Germani indicates that most of the "white" voters were workers. For a detailed analysis of the vote in various elections which correlates the support of different parties with occupational categories, see G. Germani, Estructura social de la Argentina, op. cit.. Chap. XVI.
[71] See pp. 68-71.
[72] But even witliin the armed services it has been suggested that Peron's power rested more with the enlisted men than the officer corps. "There is also a division between officers and enlisted men; this was widened under Peron, who was more successful to Peronizing the latter than the former, as evidenced by the abortive revolt of 1951, which was largely the work of some of the officer group and was defeated partly by the loyalty of the enlisted men to Peron." Arthur P. Whitaker, Argentine Upheaval (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1956), p. 67.
[73] "Of all the decisions made by Vargas, probably none had greater political implications than his determination to bring the working groups into the political arena. ... By 1938 ... as a consequence of labor's support when he was consolidating his dictatorship under the neo-Fascist Estado Novo (New State), Vargas came to appreciate the political potential of the workers. He retained their approval through elaborate welfare programs and by imposing restrictions and obligations on business management." John J. Johnson, op. cit., pp. 167-68.
[74] Jacques Lambert, Le Brisil: Structure sociale et institutions politiques (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1953), pp. 146—47.
[75] Leslie Lipson describes the Brazilian Labor party, Getulio Vargas' postwar creation, as "nationalistic, friendly to industrialism, and sympathetic to urban labor." See his article "Government in Contemporary Brazil," Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 22 (1956), pp. 192-93, and also Theodore Wyckoff, "Brazilian Political Parties," South Atlantic Quarterly, 56 (1957), pp. 281-98, for a discussion of the principal Brazilian parties and their social base. A recent ecological study which analyzes the working-class support of the Brazilian Labor party and the Communists is A. Simao, "O voto operario en Sao Paulo," Revista brasilieras estudos politicos, 1 (1956), pp. 130-41.
[76] Some have found it difficult to accept the fact that a leader and movement whose ideology, symbolism, and methods resembled Fascism and Nazism could in fact not be rightist. Thus a book written before Peron consolidated his power suggested that he represented the interests of the estancieros, the large landlords who had controlled the Conservative party and ruled the Argentine for much of its history. See Felix J. Weil, Argentine Riddle (New York: John Day, 1944). Even Time magazine wrote in 1951 "as though it were not news to anybody, that 'Peron operates a state essentially modeled on the classic Nazi-Fascist pattern.' " Time, May 21, 1951, p. 43, cited in George I. Blankstein, Peron s Argentina (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 277.
[77] R. Heberle, op. cit., p. 10.
[78] Friedrich Engels, "On the History of Early Christianity," in K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957), P- 319
[79] See G. Almond, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), Chaps. 9 and 10, esp. pp. 258-61.
[80] In emphasizing the consistencies in the type of extremist politics associated with various social groupings, I do not mean to assert that such findings permit a high order of political prediction. As Reinhard Bendix has pointed out: "The point is not that certain types of farmers in relatively industrialized countries are potential fascists or communists, but that they have a certain propensity to radicalization under conditions of acute distress. When such radicalization will eventuate and which way it will turn, the analyst of social stratification is not in a position to predict. His knowledge does enable him to estimate the relative chances for such a development, but only in the sense that certain types of farmers are more likely to be affected than others. Obviously, local conditions, historical antecedents, the acuteness of the crisis, and the intensity of the organizational drive on the part of a totalitarian movement will play a role and can be judged only in specific cases." R. Bendix, op. cit., p. 602.
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