In the days when antifascist meant what it actually means and hadn’t been turned into a scare word by the fascists whom antifascists exist to oppose, there was Benedetto Croce. Croce the philosopher considered himself an idealist. His passion was for the human imagination. But as fascism under Mussolini aimed to stifle imagination in the 1920s and 1930s, Croce began making a vigorous, even relentless, case for its opposite—liberal democracy, which he considered the best guarantor of free minds.