Fascism / interwar third position
Peak influence 1922–1945
Disputed placement
The Economic placement near zero is the contested one. Fascist regimes used corporatist boards, autarky and directed production, which reads as interventionist; Italy also conducted large-scale privatisation in the 1920s, and Nazi Germany transferred state enterprises to private owners while destroying independent unions. Neither the collectivist nor the market reading survives the record, and scholars disagree about whether the economics was doctrine or improvisation. It sits a shade to the market side of zero rather than on it, matching Mussolini's own placement here: ownership stayed private, and it was direction rather than expropriation that made the economy the regime's. The Religion score is likewise a compromise between the Lateran Treaty and Nazi neo-paganism.
Core claim
The nation is a living organism whose decadence can be reversed by a unifying leader, and liberal proceduralism and class politics are the diseases that produced the decadence.
What it wants the state to do
Wants everything: a single party fused with the state, dissolved independent unions and parties, censored press, a militarised mass movement, and an economy left in private hands but directed to national and military ends.
Historical success case
There is no case here that its critics and its historians agree on. The regimes' own claims to have ended unemployment rest on rearmament, conscription, the forced removal of women and Jews from the labour market, and figures the regimes themselves produced.
Historical failure mode
Total defeat and industrialised mass murder within twenty-three years, from a system whose founding premise — the leader's intuition over deliberation — removed every mechanism that could correct a catastrophic decision.
Nearby traditions
Francoism and clerical authoritarianism, which share the repression and lack the revolutionary and expansionist content; right-populism, which shares grievances and operates inside electoral rules that fascism explicitly repudiated.
Common mix-up
It is not simply the right-hand end of the economic line, and it is not socialism. It is placed high on Authority and Nation and near zero on Economic precisely because a single left–right line cannot hold it — which is the reason this whole tool exists.
Coordinates
| Axis | Value | Reads as |
|---|---|---|
| Identity | +0.80 | 0.80 toward Traditional |
| Pace | +0.80 | 0.80 toward Radical |
| Economic | +0.10 | 0.10 toward Individual / market |
| Authority | +0.95 | 0.95 toward State power |
| Nation | +0.98 | 0.98 toward Nationalist |
| Democracy | +0.95 | 0.95 toward Autocratic |
| Religion | +0.20 | 0.20 toward Theocratic |
| Technology | +0.45 | 0.45 toward Transhumanist |
| Ecology | -0.50 | 0.50 toward Growth |
| Military | +0.90 | 0.90 toward Interventionist |
| Class | -0.90 | 0.90 toward Harmony |
| Rationalism | +0.00 | balanced |