Mussolini
Article
Mussolini is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between February 20, 2021 and August 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “FDR was part of the same phenomenon as Mussolini”; “The second contains Lenin, Mussolini, the Equal Rights Amendment”; “He went on a fact-finding trip to fascist Italy, met Mussolini”. It most often appears alongside Congress, FDR, Gabriel Over The White House.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: February 20, 2021
- Last seen: August 25, 2025
Appears In
- Movie Review: Gabriel Over The White House
- The Consequences Of Radical Reform
- Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography
- Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
- Open Thread 396
Related Pages
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- Congress (2 shared issues)
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- FDR (2 shared issues)
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- Gabriel Over The White House (2 shared issues)
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- Gandhi (2 shared issues)
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- Germany (2 shared issues)
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- Hitler (2 shared issues)
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- Italy (2 shared issues)
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- Scott (2 shared issues)
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- United States (2 shared issues)
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- US (2 shared issues)
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- 9-11 (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
When reading Hoover's biography, I was struck by his theory that FDR was part of the same phenomenon as Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin - the US version of a worldwide longing for a fascist strongman who could come in and solve everything. Watching Gabriel Over The White House moved that from conjecture to drop-dead obvious fact.
Inline links: Hoover's biography
These threads don't cleanly map to the modern left-right political spectrum. The first contains Jane Jacobs and anti-colonialists coexisting uneasily alongside religious fundamentalism and wisdom-of-repugnance-style arguments against homosexuality. The second contains Lenin, Mussolini, the Equal Rights Amendment, and neoliberal reformers. They don't even map cleanly to libertarianism vs. authoritarianism; the first has a libertarian streak, but could presumably justify various monarchies and theocracies; the second has clear authoritarian elements, but would also include extreme libertarians who want to abolish the state and run everything on market principles.
This is a strong claim, but Balakrishna Moonje helped found the precursor to Modi’s party. He went on a fact-finding trip to fascist Italy, met Mussolini, decided he had the right idea, and told the Indian papers that he wanted to:
Inline links: he wanted to
So let's at least say this isn't the least fascist-inspired group around. It’s not that there aren’t extenuating circumstances. Indian independence movements of the time were fighting Britain, which made the fascist powers natural allies. And in 1934 when Moonje met Mussolini nobody had seen just how badly fascism could go. Still, not the sort of pedigree you want for your country's ruling party.
Only four years ago, the local Italian-American community successfully resisted efforts to rename Balbo Drive, a street in a prominent location named after a prominent literal Fascist (an early leader of the party who built Mussolini’s air force and ran large parts of North Africa before being shot down, poetically, by Italian air defenses).
4: New subscriber-only post I forgot to mention last week: Dictator Book Club: Mussolini On Fascism:
Inline links: Dictator Book Club: Mussolini On Fascism
Like most Americans, I only know four things about Mussolini:
He had absolutely amazing taste in architecture. Of these, it was #1 that caught my interest. Fascism is in the news a lot these days. Liberals suggest the Trump administration is fascist; conservatives retort that this perspective owes its prominence to a sophomoric version of historiography where “fascism is when you do things liberals don’t like; the less liberals like it, the fascismer it is” […] Maybe (I figured) it was time to learn more than four things about Mussolini. So here’s a fifth: he wrote a short essay, The Doctrine Of Fascism to explain the true nature of fascism once and for all to curious future readers. Subscribers can read it here. 5: Thanks to everyone who offered to be an evaluator for ACX Grants. We still have a few gaps in our team and are looking for volunteers with the following expertise: A volunteer to do a small amount of consulting work on ~5 environment/geoengineering/climate tech grants.