“The world is moving to the right”

The world is moving to the right is the answer Benito Mussolini gives in a 1922 essay about the direction of world politics. More than a forecast, it is a programmatic diagnosis: democracy has exhausted its promise, social unrest has passed its high point, and political life is returning to individual authority and order. The expression appears in Gerarchia, the official fascist journal, where it turns contemporary instability into evidence for an imagined historical reversal.

Publication and Argument

At the beginning of 1922, Benito Mussolini founded Gerarchia, the official fascist journal, and appointed Margherita Sarfatti its editor-in-chief. He opened the journal’s first issue with an essay titled “Which Way is the World Headed?” The essay answers its own question with the expression that gives this entry its subject: the world is moving to the right. Its scale is deliberately broad. Rather than treating Italy’s crisis as an isolated national problem, Mussolini presents it as one instance of a wider change in political direction.

The essay describes people as looking for institutions, ideas, and leaders that can provide dependable points of reference. It acknowledges that left-wing regimes established across Europe between 1848 and 1900 had been built on universal suffrage and social legislation, and says they had given what they could. It then declares the democratic century dead in 1919–1920. In this account, the unrest and democratic hopes of the recent past are not the beginning of a new political order but a spent phase, giving way to a recovery of the right.

A Diagnosis of Democratic Exhaustion

The argument’s movement is from disappointment to restoration. Mussolini presents enthusiasm for social and democratic myths as exhausted and describes a return of political life to the individual. The language makes that change seem both observable and inevitable: a “classic recovery” is already underway. The expression therefore does not merely identify a direction; it casts a contested political shift as a regular process of historical recovery.

That framing is revealing beside the social conditions described elsewhere in the book. In Bologna, labor conflict, pressure on employers, and disputes over access to work and bread had left the city’s middle classes feeling squeezed between opposing forces. In the countryside, leagues organized hiring and working conditions, while breaches of their rules could bring boycotts and fines. The conflict was materially grounded in employment, wages, land, and survival. Mussolini’s essay recasts this unsettled landscape as the end of democratic excess and the restoration of individual life, a general interpretation that subordinates competing social claims to its forecast of a turn to the right.

The Forecast and Fascist Organization

The phrase gains force from the contrast between its language of recovery and the means through which fascist power was being built. In December 1921, Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi’s effort to restrict the squads was met by a directive from Michele Bianchi, secretary-general of the National Fascist Party, declaring party sections and combat squads inseparable. The government’s circulars did not produce effective enforcement. The episode shows that the proclaimed return to order coexisted with an armed party organization operating against the state’s attempts to regulate it.

The expression also sits beside fascism’s efforts to draw mass constituencies into its political project. In spring 1922, Italo Balbo proposed occupying Ferrara to press the government to fund public works for unemployed farm laborers. The mobilization brought about fifty thousand laborers into the city. Their demand for work and bread was presented as a display of the fascists’ capacity to act where the government had failed. This episode complicates any reading of the essay as a simple celebration of a retreat from mass politics: fascism could condemn democratic upheaval while organizing crowds and making their economic needs part of its own public performance.

From Prediction to Political Irony

The phrase’s subsequent context gives its confident forecast an edge of irony. In 1921, fascists entered parliamentary politics through an alliance with liberal and other anti-Bolshevist forces. By November 1922, only fifteen days after the March on Rome, the Chamber of Deputies was crowded with spectators who had come to see the new government; Benito Mussolini entered to applause from deputies other than those of the left. Parliamentary forms remained visible even as political power was being remade through intimidation and force.

The tension persisted. On May 30, 1924, Giacomo Matteotti rose in the Chamber to speak, amid murmurs of hostility. His parliamentary presence made the continuing existence of institutional opposition visible, even as his isolation showed how diminished its practical security had become. Read across these episodes, the expression is less a neutral prediction than a political claim that helps make a particular outcome appear historically settled. Its certainty contrasts with the unresolved struggle beneath it: mass movements continued to press material demands, fascist organizations used coercive power, and parliament remained a stage on which those competing realities could still be seen.