Why did fascists hate democracy?

Answer 1

Maybe i don't know what I'm talking about but isn't fascism socialism? I know the Nazi party stands for national socialist party.

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Fascism is not socialism; nor is Nazism. There's a lot to explain here, so let's see if I can do it succinctly.

1. Fascism was originally an Italian thing; Nazism (which was German) was somewhat similar in appearance but is actually quite different when you get into the details. Despite this, it's common for Nazism and Fascism to be lumped together and used interchangeably.

2. Nazism is indeed short for "National Socialism". However, it's sort of a misnomer. The Nazi Party's original name was the "German Workers Party", and it was a far-right, racist political group that hated how World War I ended. Hitler took over and was able to better organize and lead it. In the early 1920's, they changed the name of the party to the "National Socialist German Workers Party", basically to make their party sound cooler and make it more popular. They actually strongly opposed Socialism, and when they came to power, the first thing they did was arrest the Socialists.

3. During their rise to power, Hitler and his cronies did say things that seemed like they were Socialists. However, they were mostly doing this as a ploy to gain power, which they would later ignore once in control. Additionally, they tended to couch their "socialism" in racial terms- they were concerned with elevating the "German race" above all other races, not with tradional socialist "class struggle".

3. Fascism was led by Benito Mussolini, who was originally a leading Italian Socialist. He supported Italy joining World War I, which the other Socialists did not. He broke with the party and came up with Fascism, which was a hyper-nationalist, militarist, authoritarian party.

Nazism and Fascism differed on two key things in particular:

1. Nazism focused primarily on racism- that German people were good, and Jews, Slavs (Russians, Polish, Serbs, etc) and Africans were bad. Fascism wasn't concerned with racism- at least not at first. When Italy started losing in World War II, Germany basically forced them to become racist too.

2. Fascist economics involved "corporatism"- basically merging big businesses with the government agencies, and letting these new big agencies run the economy. Nazism wasn't particularly concerned with economics, and mostly left big business and capitalists to do whatever they wanted.

Now that that's out of the way, back to the original question.

Fascists (including, for this purpose, similar forces like the Nazis) distrusted democracy because they felt that a strong central government was necessary to enforce unity and prevent cultural and ethnic differences from causing dissension. They wanted their country to rally around the strong central leader, and not fall to internal divisions.

As for Socialism, Fascists (as above, including others) disapproved of it for similar reasons to why distrusted democracy. They felt that national unity was most important, and socialism, with its emphasis on class struggle, was not compatible.