“I start with the individual and strike at the state. … Down with the state in all its forms and incarnations: the state of yesterday, of today, and of tomorrow; the bourgeois state and the socialist state.”
— Benito Mussolini, 1920“Our formula is this: Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, no one against the state.”
— Benito Mussolini, 1925
Quotations to keep in mind when alt-right types claim to be libertarians ….
[Sources: First quotation, James H. Meisel, “A Premature Fascist? – Sorel and Mussolini,” p. 16; Western Political Quarterly 3.1 (March 1950), pp. 14-27; second quotation, David D. Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 272.]
Ralph Raico’s book “Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School” documented how Mussolini for a time advocated manchester liberalism to “cleanse the Augean stables of the Italian rent-seeking state.” I suppose today one might say “drain the swamp.” You could still see the remnants of that thinking in the 1921 Program of the Fascist National Party” which began with this line RE: the state:
The state must be reduced to its essential functions of political and juridical order.
Of course, the same bullet points from that document ended with this:
The National Fascist Party subordinates its attitude, in the face of the forms of individual political institutions, to the moral and material interests of the Nation understood in its reality and in its historical development.
With fascism, I don’t know if you actually have to wait for the passage of time for one idea to manifestly subsume or conflict with the other.