What's wrong with fighting fascism? Ever see a movie in which the sallet helmet wasn't a symbol of evil? Not even Star Wars could resist. FDR also used some pretty strong-arm tactics.

However, if fascism is really evil, then there really is nothing anyone can do about it, unless the Creator of the Universe is such a bumbler that He needed FDR, Churchill, and Stalin (an atheist, of all people) to correct His mistakes.

No, the answer is that fascism is European and that America's Constitution of 1787 achieved everything for which Europe would struggle for the next century and a half.

The French Revolution of 1789 failed when Napoleon Bonaparte returned from his Egyptian-Syrian campaign as a French Caesar in 1799 and then plunged into wars until his defeat and first exile in 1814.

Europe rejoiced with the return of peace and the Ancien Régime. After 23 years of revolution, genocides, and war, "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" were despised. The Allied powers (Russia, Prussia, England, and Austria) assembled under Prince Metternich in the Congress of Vienna, determined that this would never happen again. Within a few years, however, ancient problems returned.

The Ancien Régime was a hierarchical class system based upon inequality. The king, hereditary aristocracy, and high clergy legislated privileges and restrictions for each class according to its function. It was so intrusive that a peasant could not marry without permission of his craft guild or seigniorial lord. Bourgeois businessmen enjoyed greater liberty but chafed under trade restrictions. Aristocrats were prohibited from many occupations even if impoverished. All functions accrued power to the state, viewed as encompassing the good of all, in a predatory contest with other states doing the same thing.

Additionally, the sale of offices and tax-farming invited corruption, since the buyer expected personal profit from dispensing government services.

Napoleon's return of "The 100 Days" in 1815 convinced the Congress that liberals or nationalists, as they became known, remained a threat – so much so that Metternich obstructed assistance to the Greek War of Independence against Ottoman rule. However, working-class revolts in the 1830s and 1848 forced the nobility to ally with bourgeois bankers and businessmen who only proved more efficient exploiters of the workers than aristocrats.

Liberals split into nationalist and socialist camps. Both found inspiration in nostalgic tales of Napoleon, who became the mythical liberator of both classes and nations from monarchs. To an extent, he was.

Napoleon had hit upon a formula of harnessing mass politics for military conquest. He abolished feudal privileges, installed a professional bureaucracy, and imposed his Civic Code equally upon all.

When his conquests stalled at the English Channel, he turned east into Russia and a defeat in 1812. His continental empire suffered more from his own embargo on English trade than Britain's empire overseas. Bankruptcy added to his burdens of war taxes and conscription. His secular liberation antagonized deeply Catholic Spain into unremitting guerrilla war.

Baron von Stein turned Napoleon's formula into a German war of liberation from the French. The Italian Republic, Napoleon's consolidation of feudal states, stood with Napoleon. Under Metternich, however, both returned to Imperial Austrian rule, which regarded their national aspirations as a threat. In Spain, Ferdinand VII restored a regime so reactionary that a French army had to rescue him in 1823.

This, however, was Metternich's system. Austrian Emperor Francis I summed it up: "My people are strange to each other and that is all right[.] ... I send the Hungarians into Italy, the Italians into Hungary. Every people watches its neighbor[.] ... From their antipathy will be born order and from their mutual hatred, general peace" (1).

Socialists posed the greater threat. They elevated Robespierre's idea of virtue and terror into a cult of ideological purity, the possibly 80,000 victims of his Reign of Terror and genocide in the Vendée offered as proof. Gracchus Babeuf had added the idea of abolishing private property and "equality of results," ideas for which he was executed in 1797. Karl Marx consolidated all this into a secular religion after the revolutions of 1848. His "dictator of the proletariat" would be a second Bonaparte.

The nobility leaned on the nationalist cult of tradition and religion. They proposed modernizing the hierarchy of class, pedigree, and money into one of merit rather than destroying it all for a Marxist utopia.

Between 1860 and 1871, the kings of Piedmont and Prussia turned Napoleon's formula into wars of national liberation and united their feudal principalities into the Kingdom of Italy and the German Empire, respectively. Both were constitutional monarchies and adopted a Charter of 1814, which Metternich accepted as a concession to Napoleon's reforms, which he could not reverse. It provided a representative body that ratified budgets and legislation that only the king could propose. Liberals tried to expand its authority while monarchs ignored it. Additionally, Germany crushed the Second Empire of Napoleon III and relieved Europe of another Bonaparte scourge.

WWI destroyed the ancient Hapsburg, Romanov, and Hohenzollern dynasties, while Bolsheviks, now in tenuous possession of Russia, incited global class war and revolution. Civil wars broke out from Spain to Finland and east into Russia. Not even the Middle East was spared. But only in Russia did the "Reds" succeed. Nationalists dominated "White" coalitions while adopting Red methods and branding their corporatist economics as "socialist" for mass appeal. Derived from 1 Corinthians, corporatism recreated the craft guild system on an industrialized, capitalist basis under government planning.

By 1939, most continental regimes were White and authoritarian. Mussolini's National Fascist Party was one of them, the only significant party to use the term at the time. Red propaganda transformed it into a pejorative to smear most of these regimes, at one time or another, effectively transferring the Reds' own subversive stigma in order to acquire allies for the next war.

Mussolini served as prime minister under King Emanuel III, who remained until 1946. Hitler and his aristocrat generals overran the continent and then followed Napoleon's path from the English Channel into Russia and defeat. For Franco's Nationalists, the Spanish Third Republic was another Napoleonic regime with Bolshevik advisers.

On 8 May of 1945, the White Nationalists were done, forever. The USSR was poised for another war.

Almost two hundred years prior, by 1776, the American colonies had already become a nation without feudal classes. After the Seven Years War, 1756-1763, there was no foreign power on the American continent to seriously contend with. Establishing a liberal republic went as stated in the Declaration of Independence and nothing more: "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them[.]"

Antifa is fighting something that never did and never can exist in America, or anywhere else in the Western world, at this point in time. Even worse, they're fighting for identity politics and American elites who are creating a feudal class system of their own.

(1) Frederick Artz, Reaction and Revolution, 1814-1832, Harper and Rowe, New York, 1934, pg. 238.