TODAY IN HISTORY: Benito Mussolini, executed on April 28, 1945, showed how democracy can be dismantled from within
There is a familiar frustration among people who like to argue politics by reductio ad absurdum: the moment you invoke Hitler, which can be so very tempting, people claim you lost the debate. The comparison is dismissed as a hysterical and unserious automatic forfeiture of credibility. The polemicist, however, can take comfort in this: Benito Mussolini, executed 81 years ago today, is for many purposes the more apt comparison, and no one seems to mind.
Mussolini did not kill on Hitler’s scale, but he invented the elected autocracy—absorbed by Adolf Hitler, executed with chilling precision by Vladimir Putin, and now tentatively imitated elsewhere. It is a system premised on the idea that electoral victory confers near-total license: rule in the name of “the people,” even to the point of abolishing democracy itself.
It is a system that holds that once a government is elected it can basically do what it wants in the name of “the people.” With the worst criminals — like Mussoilini, Hitler and Putin — that includes eliminating democracy itself. For the people.
Interestingly, Mussolini began as a socialist journalist, a sharp polemicist himself who understood instinctively — exactly like his later imitators — how media could shape political reality. He broke with socialism during World War I, embracing nationalism and the idea that war could forge unity, and then built a movement that fused grievance, identity, and spectacle. In 1919, his Fasci Italiani di Combattimento brought together disaffected veterans, nationalists, and opportunists, bound by anger, energy and an appreciation of violence.
His Blackshirts attacked unions, socialists, and political opponents, creating a climate of fear that suggested a kind of momentum, and even the sense that the future belonged to them. Italian elites, unnerved by the specter of revolution, began to see Mussolini not as a threat but as a solution. To what? Oh, to many of the same things that bedevil democracies today: paralysis, fragmentation, to a state that seemed unable to govern. There is hardly a citizen anywhere who is not susceptible to the sweet elixir of disdain for squabbling politicians. The “parliament” — whose very name comes from talking — talks too much.
Mussolini talked too, and memorably so. “Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hand, and an infinite scorn in our hearts,” is one quote. “We have buried the putrid corpse of liberty,” is another. Il Duce (“the leader”) was not a nice man.
Italy after World War I had more serious problems, to be sure. It was beset by strikes, inflation, and weak coalition governments. Also, as elsewhere, there was a quite reasonable fear of Bolshevism — themselves a bunch of criminals who would use any electoral mandate to not only build a dictatorship but steal from the monied classes. Mussolini offered a sort of crony corporatism. That kind of plan ensured growing support by the elites for Mussolini, who offered order, discipline, and decisiveness. This backfired badly.
The March on Rome in 1922 was a demonstration designed to expose the weakness of the state. Faced with the prospect of confrontation, Victor Emmanuel III chose accommodation, inviting Mussolini to form a government. At that moment, Mussolini’s Fascists were a minority in parliament. His initial government was actually a coalition, including liberals, conservatives, nationalists, and even some Catholics. Crucially, parliament then voted to grant him emergency powers, allowing him to govern by decree for a year. The decision seemed defensible, and the assumption was that Mussolini could be managed.
What followed was a gradual transformation. Institutions were bent, repurposed, weakened, stuffied with toadies and cronies. The press — from whence Mussolini came! — was first attacked as partisan and untrustworthy, then constrained, then absorbed. Elections continued, but without genuine competition. The judiciary was weakened, opposition neutralized, dissent reframed as betrayal. By the mid-1920s, Italy retained the shell of democracy but none of its substance.
This was the innovation: maintaining the appearance of democracy, animated by the assumption that you can fool enough of the people enough of the time.
Hitler was Mussolini’s most successful disciple, studying his methods, borrowing his aesthetics, and radicalizing his model into something far more murderous. But he was not the only one to absorb the lesson. Vladimir Putin also comes very close, having constructed a durable dictatorship through formally democratic means — elections that confer legitimacy without offering real choice, a press environment that marginalizes independent voices while amplifying state narratives, institutions that exist but no longer constrain power in any meaningful sense, and, of course, a shameless and epic kleptocracy.
From there, the pattern becomes familiar, if less complete.
Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has spent years refining an “illiberal democracy” in which media ownership is consolidated among allies, regulatory tools are used to disadvantage critics, courts are reshaped, and electoral systems adjusted to entrench the ruling party — all while maintaining the outward rituals of democratic life. After some 20 cumulative years he was mercifully ousted this month by the skillful campaign of Peter Magyar, who basically reunited the entire country behind him.
Something similar happened in Poland under the Law and Justice Party (PiS). A new more liberal parliament is finding the anti-democrats PiS installed across the system, aided by a PiS president with massive powers to interfere, quite difficult to dislodge.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, particularly after the failed coup in 2016, has purged state institutions, jailed journalists and judges and generals, and centralized authority with constitutional changes, leaving an opposition that exists but operates within a system tilted decisively against it. Erdogan always wins his elections with a small margin — it looks legitimate and keeps hope alive, while citizens have almost no real protection from the government.
In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has pursued a prolonged confrontation with the judiciary while casting the press as a hostile, partisan force, encouraging the growth of parallel media ecosystems that erode trust in independent oversight. His coalition aims to weaken civil service gatekeepers, install cronies in the security services, and appoint the judges; in a twist, they want parliament to be able to overrule judges who happen to forget that they are puppets. A Magyar-like coalition is finally forming against him ahead of elections later this year.
And in the United States, Trump demonstrated how quickly these instincts can be deployed: the systematic delegitimization of the press, pressure on electoral and judicial institutions, weaponization of state institutions, and a refusal to accept the validity of outcomes that do not favor him. The story is well known.
None of these cases reproduces Mussolini’s fascism in its original form, and none maps perfectly onto his mutation of Italy. But the resemblance lies in method: the personalization of power, the steady erosion of institutional constraints, the redefinition of opposition as illegitimate, and the use of democratic mechanisms to weaken democracy itself. Mainly, of course, the disdain of liberal democracy in favor of various versions of majoritarianism.
Mussolini joined Hitler in his freakishly genocidal war on civilization. In retrospect, that was not a great idea.
Mussolini’s final days provide an almost theatrical inversion of his rise.
In April 1945, as the German front in Italy collapsed, he lingered in Milan, still speaking as though he mattered, granting a last interview and entertaining futile negotiations mediated by the Church. When it became clear that there was nothing left to negotiate, he fled north in a convoy of loyalists and retreating German forces, drifting along the edge of the Swiss border without crossing it, clinging to a diminishing circle of followers. At Menaggio, he abandoned his own vehicle and hid among German troops, disguised in a greatcoat and helmet, carrying briefcases he refused to relinquish.
On April 27, partisans stopped the column near Dongo, allowed the Germans to pass, and inspected the Italians. He was recognized despite the disguise, arrested, and, the following day, summarily executed along with members of his entourage (including his mistress Clara Petacci). His body, displayed in Milan, closed the arc of a career built on spectacle with a final, brutal piece of theater.
The temptation is to see that moment as a full stop, a violent but definitive conclusion to a chapter of history. Yet what Mussolini pioneered did not end with him. It adapted, shedding its most overtly brutal features while preserving its core logic, proving that the path from democratic fragility to authoritarian control need not pass through a coup or a revolution. It can proceed, as he demonstrated, through the slow, deliberate transformation of the system from within.
A coda of sorts arrived two days after Mussolini’s execution. With allied armies closing in, led by Americans and the hated Bolsheviks, his disciple Hitler shot himself, in a bunker in Berlin.
