The political concepts of left and right originate in the seating plan at the National Assembly of the French Revolution, but the rise of international socialist and communist movements at the end of the 19th century made it possible to identify groups in different countries that were like one another in some abstract way – the British left, the Russian left and so on. Yet the term was more often used to describe a position within a workers’ organisation than in relation to society as a whole – as in Lenin’s diatribe against ‘left-wing communism’. A coherent global left appeared only with the arrival of the fascist threat. It did not take long, as Fronczak emphasises, for fascism to provide a way for right-wing elements to identify themselves and their goals. In addition to German, Italian, Romanian, Spanish and Japanese far-right groups, there were blackshirts in Buenos Aires and Detroit, blueshirts in Paris and Peking, greyshirts in Beirut and Johannesburg, greenshirts in São Paulo and Cairo, silvershirts in Minneapolis, goldshirts in Mexico, as well as Falangist formations in South and Central America: comrades of Franco’s clerical-military fascism, but with an extra emphasis on the racial unity of white Hispanic-Americans, or la raza, a group they thought had conceded far too much ground to Indigenous peoples and to democracy.
What we would now call the right-wing politics of the 19th and early 20th centuries had been pulled in different directions: back to feudal and religious authority, forward into industrialisation and liberalism. Between the two was the ever present discourse of racial hierarchy. Fascism, which proposed to pursue traditional right-wing goals – racial-national aggrandisement, commercial and territorial expansion – by revolutionary means, promised to modernise reactionary politics for the 20th century, and to resolve its incoherent counter-tendencies through the purification of popular violence.
As the sociologist Dylan Riley says, fascism was in this sense a form of democratic authoritarianism, suitable for a new political age. It appeared first in Italy, hazily before the country entered the First World War and then taking coherent form in the chaotic aftermath of the armistice, as Italy was gripped by strikes and recriminations. The fascists gloried in ‘beatings in the street, brawls in the square, buildings burned in daylight, public humiliations and beards ripped out, victims dragged by rope, bullwhippings, purgations and public executions, some of them mock and some actual’. Fronczak emphasises that the violence seemed to feed a ‘spiritual need’, marking an ‘expedition into the interior of one’s self’.