Benito Mussolini

Fascism's first political instrument was not an argument but a beating. From 1919 the squadristi — demobilized soldiers, students, farm overseers, thugs — travelled by truck into towns held by socialist councils and peasant leagues, burned the labor halls and cooperative offices, and forced castor oil down the throats of local organizers in front of their neighbors. The humiliation was the point, and it was designed to be watched. Mussolini did not invent political violence, but he was the first man in modern Europe to understand it as theater with a national audience, and to keep the trucks moving fast enough that the state never quite decided to stop them.

The March on Rome in October 1922 was the same instinct at the scale of a country. Militarily it was close to a bluff: tens of thousands of poorly armed Blackshirts converging on the capital in the rain, which the army garrison could have dispersed had the King signed the order for martial law. Mussolini himself waited in Milan, near the Swiss border, ready to run. Victor Emmanuel III blinked, and Mussolini arrived in Rome by overnight train — in a sleeping car, in a black shirt and spats — to be handed the premiership. He then spent twenty years insisting he had marched at the head of his legions. He had correctly read that the establishment wanted a reason not to fight, and he supplied one by simply standing there.

Once in power the body itself became the regime's message. He was photographed bare-chested threshing wheat in the harvest fields, fencing, riding, running with troops, swimming at Riccione, flying his own aircraft, standing on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia with his jaw thrust forward and his fists on his hips. Journalists were forbidden to mention his birthdays or his stomach ulcer; the Duce was to have no age and no illness. This was not vanity in the ordinary sense. It was a governing theory — that authority is something you perform physically, in public, until the country believes it — and it worked on Italy for two decades and on a good many foreign observers besides.

Mussolini was a formidably quick reasoner in the narrow, tactical way that auxiliary Ti allows: he could take any position and construct a case for it on the spot, and he could take the opposite position a year later and construct that case with equal force. He was a working journalist for most of his adult life, and he never lost the polemicist's habit of treating ideas as ammunition. In 1914 he was the revolutionary socialist who denounced the war as a capitalist crime; within months he had founded Il Popolo d'Italia and was denouncing the anti-interventionists as cowards. The logic in each case was clean. The premises had simply been swapped out.

The same faculty served him inside the machine of power, and there it was lethal. After Matteotti's murder in June 1924 — the deputy was abducted in Rome by Fascist thugs and his body found in a shallow grave two months later — the regime nearly fell. Mussolini disappeared from public view; the opposition walked out of parliament in protest and thereby walked out of the only arena where they could still have hurt him. On 3 January 1925 he came to the Chamber and, instead of denying responsibility, assumed it: he declared that if Fascism had been a criminal association, he was the chief of that association, and dared anyone present to act. It was a piece of nerve rather than a piece of doctrine, and it converted the scandal that should have ended him into the founding act of the dictatorship. Within a year the opposition parties were dissolved, the press licensed, and the secret police established.

What this thinking never did was build. Corporatism — the elaborate architecture of syndicates and corporations that was supposed to abolish class conflict and replace parliament — read impressively in pamphlets circulated abroad, and delivered almost nothing in Italy but jobs for loyalists. Mussolini could design a system on paper in an afternoon and lose interest in it by the following week, because the reasoning had always been in service of the immediate need: an explanation for what he wanted to do next.

He was, by the testimony of people who loathed him, an extraordinary judge of a crowd. He learned to pause on the balcony until the noise below crested and broke; to ask the square a question and let it roar the answer back; to drop his voice so that a hundred thousand people strained forward to hear. He wrote his own speeches, edited the newspapers' coverage of them, and gave detailed instructions to editors about what the Italian public was to be permitted to feel that week. The diaries and letters collected by Christopher Duggan show ordinary Italians writing to him as though to a confessor — which is a measure of how precisely calibrated the performance was.

It was an instrument of manipulation, not of sympathy, and the distinction shows most sharply in 1938, when he introduced racial laws that expelled Jewish Italians from schools, universities, the civil service, and the professions — many of them Fascists of long standing, some of them the movement's own founders. He had spent years mocking German race theory as nonsense. He adopted it when the alliance made it useful, and he read the Italian public accurately enough to know that the laws would be met not with revolt but with a broad, shame-faced acquiescence. Being able to feel what a nation will tolerate is not the same as caring what happens to the people inside it.

The tertiary position also explains the brittleness underneath. Applause was not merely useful to him; he needed it, and he governed increasingly by what would land well rather than by what could be sustained. Ethiopia in 1935 was invaded partly because a colonial triumph would play magnificently at home, and it did — the popular ecstasy of May 1936, when he announced the return of the empire from the balcony, was the high point of his life. It was also the moment that isolated Italy from Britain and France and drove him into Hitler's arms, at a cost of a quarter of a million Ethiopian lives and mustard gas sprayed from the air onto people with rifles.

Inferior Ni in an ESTP tends to appear as a grandiose vision borrowed rather than developed — held with total conviction, tested against nothing. Mussolini's was the New Roman Empire: mare nostrum, eight million bayonets, a nation of warriors remade in the image of Augustus. He gutted the center of Rome to drive an avenue between the Colosseum and his own balcony, stamped fasces on every public building, and told the Italians that they were being forged into a hard, martial people. He appears to have believed it. Nothing in his method could have told him otherwise, because he never built the institutions whose reports would have contradicted him.

The reckoning came in the war. Italy entered in June 1940 explicitly because France was already collapsing and Mussolini wanted, in his own phrase, a few thousand dead to sit at the peace table — a decision taken on the immediate read of a situation that turned out to be the beginning rather than the end. The army he sent to fight had no modern tanks worth the name, no heavy bombers, ammunition stocks measured in weeks, and divisions reorganized on paper so that the count would look larger. The invasion of Greece in October 1940, launched partly out of pique at not being consulted about German moves in Romania, was thrown back by a smaller army and had to be rescued by the Wehrmacht. North Africa went the same way. From 1941 Italy was effectively a German dependency, and Mussolini a junior partner who had lost the power to improvise.

In July 1943, after the Allies landed in Sicily, his own Fascist Grand Council voted him out and the King had him arrested and driven away in an ambulance. He offered no resistance whatever. German commandos lifted him from a mountain hotel in the Gran Sasso two months later and installed him as the head of the Salò Republic in the north — a puppet regime that executed the Grand Council members it could catch, including his own son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano, and assisted in deporting Italian Jews to Auschwitz. The vision had by then curdled into a grievance play acted out on a stage held up by someone else's army.

Why ESTP Over ESTJ

The ESTP reading also accounts for the career's shape in a way no judging type can. A systematizer does not go from revolutionary socialist to nationalist interventionist to Fascist founder in six years; a man who lives in the present, reads the room, and takes whatever ground is available does exactly that. Mussolini's gift was tactical and physical and almost entirely short-range — the coup timed to the hour of the King's nerve, the speech pitched to the mood of the square, the aggression aimed where resistance was weakest. Set against a war of production and attrition, it was worth nothing at all.