After disposing of Socialism, Fascism opens a breach on the whole
complex of the democratic ideologies, and repudiates them in their
theoretic premises as well as in their practical application or
instrumentation. Fascism denies that numbers, by the mere fact of
being numbers, can direct human society; it denies that these numbers
can govern by means of periodical consultations; it affirms also the
fertilising, beneficient and unassailable inequality of men, who
cannot be levelled through an extrinsic and mechanical process such as
universal suffrage.
Regimes can be called democratic which, from time to time, give the
people the illusion of being sovereign, whereas the real and effective
sovereignty exists in other, and very often secret and irresponsible
forces.
Democracy is a regime without a king, but very often with many kings,
far more exclusive, tyrannical and ruinous than a single king, even if
he be a tyrant. This explains why Fascism which, for contingent
reasons, had assumed a republican tendency before 1922, renounced it
previous to the March on Rome, with the conviction that the political
constitution of a State is not nowadays a supreme question; and that,
if the examples of past and present monarchies and past and present
republics are studied, the result is that neither monarchies nor
republics are to be judged under the assumption of eternity, but that
they merely represent forms in which the extrinsic political evolution
takes shape as well as the history, the tradition and the psychology
of a given country.
Consequently, Fascism glides over the antithesis between monarchy and
republic, on which democraticism wasted time, blaming the former for
all social shortcomings and exalting the latter as a regime of
perfection. We have now seen that there are republics which may be
profoundly absolutist and reactionary, and monarchies which welcome
the most venturesome social and political experiments.