Nearly 30 years after Il Duce Mussolini, Italy’s dictator from 1922 to 1945, was executed by a partisan firing squad, his ideas were still wreaking havoc across the country; the 1970s were years of clashes between neofascist and communist terrorists that we in Italy called the Anni di Piombo, or years of lead. The neofascists were leading riots in Italy’s south; suspected of bombing banks, trains, and political rallies in the north; and accused of plotting a military coup. The violence killed hundreds of innocent people. I witnessed the destruction every day.

In 1971, when I was a senior in high school, a neofascist leaflet denounced me as a “target to be hit,” listing my phone number and address in Palermo, Sicily (my mom still lives there and answers that number). In October of that year, on a day when I was on duty selling the leftist newspaper Il Manifesto, I watched nervously as a squadraccia, a gang of fascist thugs, paraded across the street from me in full arms, heavy bats in hand, chains wrapped around their chests, black helmets on their heads, brass knuckles shining. Fascist dictators were still running Spain, Greece, and Portugal. The neofascists in Palermo had tried to kill the two young sons of a senator, in revenge against a progressive land reform. Watching the squadraccia I wondered if I too would be wounded, or worse.

This was the menace at the heart of fascism, defined by the display of organized violence and terrorism to win political power, and the ultimate imposition of a totalitarian system hostile to capitalism and individual freedom. By my generation, Mussolini himself had been defeated—though it took the devastation of World War II to dislodge two of Europe’s prominent fascists from power, in Italy and Germany, once they had occupied it. What Italy suffered in the 1970s was a failed effort to reimpose his ideas on the country. Thank God I survived that day in October, but it forced me to rush home and quiz my father about the ideology once again threatening the country. Dad had often reminisced about growing up under Il Duce, calmly noting that “In school they taught us that ‘Il Duce’ will soon trash America and those Negroes.’ And I believed them.” It was a Sicilian barber, just returned to Italy after spending much of his life as a steelworker in Pittsburgh, who changed his mind. “I have seen America, worked in America,” the barber told my father. “America is too strong for us.”

And Italy was ultimately too strong for the fascist resurgence, which ended with the arrests of many of the worst terrorists, but also with job growth, welfare programs, and educational reforms that opened up opportunities for the marginalized of Italian society. All of these policies thinned out the angry masses of discontent, underemployed, and alienated people who had been the best recruits for Mussolini and his successors. Thus in the decades after World War II, Western democracies learned how to prevent fascists from taking power again. The danger I see in Trump is that nobody yet knows how to oppose his particular brand of populism, in America or Europe.