The Texas Walkout and Anti-Fascist History. Remembering the Aventine Secession
Some essays take a long time to come together, and so it was with this essay. Lucid is not about breaking news, but rather big-picture analysis. Sometimes it takes a few days of reflection to give you meaningful commentary. This one came out longer than usual so I put in subheadings – if you are familiar with the Texas situation you can skip to the Italian one.
In response to your messages to me, I am also trying to end each essay with takeaways, lessons, or action items so that we can use difficult moments from other times or places to help us in our fight for freedom today.
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As readers of Lucid know, I follow events in the United States with an eye to their resonance with the past and present of global authoritarianism. So it has been with the temporary out-of-state relocation by Texas Democrats to stall the passage of a Texas GOP redistricting plan.
Texas is a testing ground for an authoritarian future in which being part of the political opposition becomes a criminal act. But it is also a laboratory for resistance, as the actions of Texas Democrats show.
It that brings to mind an episode of unprecedented collective action to rid Italy of tyrant Benito Mussolini as he accelerated his lawless actions.
This was the Aventine Secession (named after an ancient Roman revolt). In the summer of 1924, over 120 opposition politicians abandoned Parliament to protest Fascist election rigging and Prime Minister Mussolini’s coverup of his role in the murder of Socialist party leader and member of parliament Giacomo Matteotti. They met instead on the Aventine Hill in Rome.
There are major differences between 1924 Italy and 2025 America. One is the role of physical violence, which was key to how the Fascists came to power in the first place and remained integral to their practice of politics. Italy also had a broad spectrum of political parties, and the largest political left in Western Europe. And it had King Victor Emanuel III, Commander in Chief of the Italian Armed Forces, who had appointed Mussolini as Prime Minister in 1922 and had the authority to dismiss him at any time.
Read this essay less as a comparison than as a reflection on the meeting of resistance and Fascist tactics at a dire moment in Italian history.
Texas: Criminalizing the Opposition
Along with the counter-redistricting plan of California Governor Gavin Newsom, the two-week absence from the Texas legislature by Democratic lawmakers marks a shift to a more assertive and creative Democratic strategy in the face of Republican aggression at the federal, state, and municipal levels. Democrats are engaging in collective action across state borders and seizing the upper hand in terms of narrative and public sympathies.
This has been met with outrage by the Texas GOP, which long ago became a rogue entity with respect to democracy. Texas Republicans did not just parrot Donald Trump’s propaganda about Joe Biden “stealing” the 2020 election. They actually passed a resolution in June 2022 that rejected the “certified results” of that election and the authority and legitimacy of a sitting U.S. president. This aligned the Texas GOP with insurgents, separatists, and coup instigators who work to undermine national governments.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott and his party continue to try and delegitimize democratic authority, depicting Texas Democrats as criminals. Thus the public notice that lawmakers who fled the state should be “rounded up” by the FBI and, once back in Texas, require police escorts and permission slips to leave Abbott’s statehouse fiefdom (and must be confined there if they refuse these controls). Cue also Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s request that they be removed from office or arrested.
The election trickery, propaganda, and criminalization of the opposition are familiar to those who study early Fascism. Less known is the resistance these Fascist tactics inspired in legislators.
The Aventine Secession
Two events prepared the high-stakes decision of opposition lawmakers to leave Parliament: The Fascist institutionalization of election fraud, and the murder of their colleague Matteotti. As Prime Minister, Mussolini had led Fascist attacks on the free press, the judiciary, and opposition politicians. He also took steps to constrain the power of Parliament and, in the spring of 1924, sought to pass an electoral “reform” that would rig the system in the Fascists’ favor.
This was the Acerbo Law, which replaced proportional representation and gave any party receiving over 25% of the vote two-thirds of seats. Fascist militia members were on hand in Parliament to threaten opposition politicians during the discussion of the law, and voter intimidation helped the Fascists obtain 64.9% of the vote, which gave them a clear majority (Viktor Orbán, head of state of Hungary, now has a similar law).
The second factor was the disappearance of Matteotti, who was not just the head of an anti-Fascist party, but an anti-corruption crusader who had discovered that Mussolini and the Fascists were taking bribes from the American oil company Sinclair.
On June 10, just before he was about to reveal this in Parliament, Matteotti was attacked and dragged into a black car. His body was found three months later. His murder plunged Il Duce into a crisis that threatened to end his career. The opposition press accused him of complicity in the crime, and the judiciary opened an investigation.
It was in this emergency situation that the Aventine Secession took shape. Over 120 members of parliament, representing centrist, liberal, left, and progressive Christian parties, decided to protest the election rigging and the coverup of Matteotti’s murder by boycotting Parliament and meeting on the Aventine.
The aim was to change public opinion on fascism and pressure the ever-cowardly King to dismiss Mussolini and return Italy to rule of law governance. The declarations of the politicians engaged in the walkout seem eerily contemporary. "When a Parliament has surrounded itself with militias and illegality, it is just a joke," wrote Giovanni Amendola of the Democratic Liberal Party, justifying their action.
The walkout persisted throughout 1924, as the investigation into Mussolini and his Fascist killers proceeded. By the end of the year, the moral and political capital of the Aventine Secession had increased, and rumors of Il Duce’s forced resignation were prompting public celebrations. The King still refused to act.
Mussolini saw an opening and applied the strongman’s golden rule: do whatever is necessary to stay in power. On January 3, 1925, a day after Amendola told the London Times that Mussolini “was finished,” the Italian leader announced the first Fascist dictatorship, delivering a chilling message to those still present in Parliament:
I, and I alone, assume political, moral, and historical responsibility for all that has happened…If Fascism has been a criminal association, I am the head of that criminal association…Gentlemen, Italy wants peace, quiet, work, and calm…We will give it by love, if possible, or by force, if necessary.
This was the beginning of the end of the Aventine Secession. The King refused to save the country by having Mussolini arrested on Jan. 3, 1925 –he would wait to do that until 1943, when the country was on its way to defeat in war.
By the end of 1925, the Italian police state was taking shape: the constitution had been suspended, civil liberties nullified, and all political parties other than the Fascist party suppressed –which made the parliamentary status of those brave opposition politicians a moot point.
In November 1926, the Fascist parliament declared that the Aventine secessionists had forfeited their seats in the Chamber. By then, many of them had gone into exile. Those who stayed in Italy were imprisoned for years or beaten and their houses ransacked. Amendola was attacked by Fascists in July and died of his injuries in exile in France.
Lessons for Us Today
While this may seem a depressing outcome, and historians remain divided about the wisdom of the secession, there is new interest in this anti-Fascist episode and it offers important lessons and warnings that can be of use to us as we fight for our freedoms.
Don’t Wait for Conservative Elites to Save You from Fascists.
The anti-Fascist opposition waited for the King to intervene, and then decided to disrupt the parliamentary institution to get his attention and prompt him to do what his position gave him the power to do: dismiss Mussolini and use the armed forces to disband the small Fascist militia.
Unity and Solidarity Among Factions is Key
Even in the midst of a very challenging and dangerous environment, multiple parties that had been fractured and often oppositional came together in alliances that were new and generative. These alliances would be the basis for joint anti-Fascist work from exile and during the wartime resistance to Fascism years later.
Use the Spaces and Tools You Have Today, and Show Your Support
The panic at his probable prosecution sent Mussolini on a totalitarian path, and no resistance movement could have withstood the “strongman surprise” he delivered on Jan. 3, 1925.
Yet, even after the declaration of dictatorship, the secessionists embodied a timeless resistance principle: use the tools and spaces you have available to you in that moment. Sometimes this means making a moral and political statement by leaving spaces that have become compromised. This lets you regroup and try something different.
Although they operate in a very different context, this is what the Texas Democrats are doing now. We can contact them and give them our support and let them know we believe they are on the right path. It will mean more than we can imagine.
Keep the Memory of Resistance Alive
The new anti-Fascist Constitution of Italy of 1948 included an act of restorative justice for those secessionists whose seats were declared forfeited. They were deemed “Senators by right.” Some had passed away, but others had returned to Italy from exile to steer the path back to democracy.
Tyranny is never defeated in a simple and linear fashion, and each resistance action deserves to be known and honored, regardless of its immediate result and effectiveness. Those who act in difficult times inspire others and deserve to be remembered. This essay is written in that spirit.
Since those in power refuse to oust Trump, those of us who are mere citizens will have to find a way.
Let us hear more about "new and generative alliances". Accomplishing this seems paramount.