Fascism: birth, growth, victory, decay, death

Fascism as Systemic Outcome: An Applied Cliodynamic Analysis

The term “fascism” is often used polemically, as shorthand for repression or violence. Yet if we set aside the rhetoric and instead treat fascism as an institutional form, a different picture emerges.

At its endpoint, a fascist regime is one in which all autonomous structures that could mobilize in opposition to the leadership of the state have been dismantled. Trade unions, media outlets, political parties, voluntary associations: all are homogenized, subordinated, or destroyed. Opponents who resist are violently removed from office or silenced. Civil society ceases to operate as a check. The regime stands as a victorious political–military elite commanding a simplified social field.

Understanding fascism solely as this endpoint, however, obscures the process by which societies arrive there. Fascism is not a sudden eruption of ideology but rather one possible systemic resolution of accumulated blockages within the political economy.

The best analytical framework for grasping this sequence is provided by Mancur Olson’s theory of special interest group sclerosis, Peter Turchin’s cliodynamic accounts of elite overproduction and instability, and Joseph Schumpeter’s insights on creative destruction. Together they show how fascism can emerge as a brutal form of “political–institutional restructuring” when all other mechanisms fail.

1. Institutional sclerosis

Olson argued that as societies mature, entrenched interest groups - whether unions, business lobbies, bureaucratic cliques, or sectors of the state apparatus - accumulate bargaining power. Each group expands and defends its own rents and privileges, blocking reforms that might disadvantage it. Over time, this produces sclerosis: the economy cannot grow, political institutions become rigid and society becomes jammed. Increasingly, the parasitised state bloats, unable to fund itself.

Turchin adds a demographic and elite dimension. As more aspirants compete for limited elite positions, “elite overproduction” heightens competition, polarizes politics, and increases the intensity of factional conflict. Both mechanisms converge: reform stalls, while demands for advancement multiply.

2. Crisis of legitimacy

When sclerosis persists, living standards for the mass of people stagnate or fall. Ordinary citizens lose hope of social mobility. The state, captured by expensive rent-seekers, struggles to finance itself effectively. Public goods deteriorate, and legitimacy drains away. The perception spreads that the normal channels of politics cannot deliver change.

3. Extra-legal contestation

Blocked within institutional frameworks, groups increasingly bypass rules. Strikes, lockouts, militant demonstrations, politicised policing, and paramilitary clashes become normalised. Violence is not yet structural, but it is routinised. The arena of politics moves from parliaments and courts to the streets.

Note that different sections of the elite may back different groups and 'sides': the advent of fascism is always a civil war.

4. Elite convergence on destruction

At some point, fractions of the elite conclude that institutional demolition is the only way forward. They calculate that the destruction of obstructive interests - what they see as “negative institutions” - is a precondition for renewed growth and stability.

They therefore fund or endorse paramilitary movements willing to wield coercion against rivals. It is at this juncture that fascism begins to crystallize: not as an ideological crusade but as a violent simplification of society, clearing away accumulated blockages on the streets.

5. Autonomy of the fascist leadership

If victorious, fascist leadership enjoys a remarkable degree of autonomy. The destruction of free trade unions, independent media, voluntary associations, and opposing political parties leaves bankers, industrialists, and other economic elites with few levers of institutional influence; they are reduced to personal lobbying. 

Scholars of the interwar regimes noted how political–military elites in fascist states exercised radical independence from the remaining fragments of civil society. The fascist state is, in this sense, a spoil of victory for the faction that prevails.

6. Stability without renewal

Where fascist regimes are not ended by military defeat, they may persist for decades. Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal are cases in point. Yet they preside over a simplified and impoverished civic environment.

The brutal truth is that fascism works: its focused violence destroys those rent-seeking structures which caused the crisis, and may well remove the elite overproduction which fuelled it (by mass-killing of opponents, or by forcing them into lower strata of society).

But the original crisis that sponsored their emergence eventually passes: the specific oppositional forces they smashed no longer exist. A new period of growth now occurs, with the broader elite seeking new avenues of economic and cultural advancement. The absence of a plural civil society, once functional in clearing blockages, becomes an obstacle to modernisation and development. In victory, fascism begins its slide into irrelevance.

7. Slow decay and restoration

In such conditions, civil society begins to regrow covertly. Informal associations, cultural networks, and economic institutions accumulate beneath the surface. Over time, as generational turnover occurs and no-longer-needed repression relaxes, these networks quietly reconstitute a plural field. Eventually the authoritarian façade crumbles, often peacefully. In both Spain and Portugal, democratic structures were restored not by sudden insurrection but by the long, covert reassembly of social complexity.

Conclusion

Fascism is not best seen as an aberrant eruption of ideology or pathology - due to crazed ideologues. It is a systemic trajectory in which accumulated special interests and elite competition render normal politics impossible.

The violent destruction of civil society appears as a brutal and political variant of Schumpeterian creative destruction, clearing away obstructive institutions (at the cost of long-term vitality). Once established, fascism decays slowly, because the very simplification that makes it effective in crisis deprives it of the complexity needed for renewal.

This analysis shifts attention from the moral vocabulary of “evil regimes” to the structural dynamics of political economy. Fascism is one possible resolution of sclerosis, not chosen because it is desired in name but because, in moments of crisis, it can seem the only way out.

Its rise and its withering alike can be understood not as mysteries but as the working out of systemic pressures that Olson, Turchin, and Schumpeter each in their own way help us to map.