How Does Liberalism Justify Fascism?

Most liberals ridicule a quote from some left-wing forces, which states that true socialism has not yet been realized anywhere in the world. But these liberals probably haven’t correctly read the views of some prominent liberal thinkers, who, incidentally, also believe that liberalism has not yet been realized.

This is not a personal interpretation; one only needs to turn to von Mises, one of the loyalists of classical liberalism, who considered liberalism a political program that was never fully implemented anywhere or at any time.

In a book titled ‘Liberalism,’ he says that to know what liberalism is, one should not turn to history, because liberalism has never succeeded in implementing its program as intended anywhere.

Ludwig von Mises was one of the most prominent economists of the ‘Austrian School,’ whose ideas, along with figures like Hayek, became one of the most important theoretical sources in liberal philosophy and economics, and a significant part of economic policies and decisions are still founded on their theories.

In his book ‘Liberalism,’ he writes that liberalism is neither a religion, nor a worldview, nor a special interest party. Liberalism is entirely something else. It is an ideology; it is a theory about the relations among social affairs and simultaneously the application of this theory to human behavior in social affairs.

His view of liberalism as the sole path to human happiness has precisely the aspects that, ironically, are criticized by liberals regarding socialist ideas. Von Mises says in this book that the existence of poverty and misery in the world is not an argument against liberalism. Liberalism, in fact, wants to eliminate this poverty and misery and believes that the tools it proposes are the only useful tools for achieving this goal. Anyone who thinks they know a better way, or even just another way, to achieve this goal must prove it.