Individual rights and legal processes had to be subordinated to the popular will, a will that could only be understood, articulated and executed by a single charismatic national leader, Il Duce, in whom the people could place their trust. It glorified the people not as individuals but as a collective, with the nation serving as the vehicle for their common destiny.
Fascism promised to restore national and ethnic identity and culture even while modernizing the nation to compete in an industrializing world. Above all, fascism represented a rejection of liberalism and the postwar Anglo-American political and economic order that had been imposed on the peoples of the “have-not” nations. Some of the fascist worldview was unique to the Italian experience, but some of it transcended national boundaries. He sought to keep German rearmament under wraps in what he called the “perilous interval” during which the “whole world” was “against us.” Until the economy recovered and German rearmament was further along, he feared that the national socialist revolution could be crushed at any time by the superior power of the democracies. ambassador, gave numerous interviews to prominent American media figures, including William Randolph Hearst, in the hope of making “the personality of Adolf Hitler more accessible to the American people.” He promised to pay Germany’s “private debts” to American bankers and went out of his way to assure the English-speaking world that his national socialist movement would gain power only in a “ purely legal way” in accordance with the “present constitution.” After taking power, he told the press and his own officials to play down the campaigns of antisemitism that began immediately. Impressed by the United States as “a giant state with unimaginable productive capacities” and by Anglo-American domination of the global economy, and well aware of the role it had played in selecting Germany’s past governments, he worked at first to soften Washington’s opposition to his rise. Adolf Hitler, too, proceeded with caution as he ascended to power in the early ’30s.
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