I can reject dictatorships because I believe in democracy, but why would an O’ist reject a dictator that was spreading Objectivist ideas and ideals? Say a hypothetical dictator simply changed the law to make 90% of tax collecting illegal and punishable by death? On what basis could Objectivism fight this since tax is theft, and the dictator has just outlawed theft?
Couple of things. First, the Mises quote you replicate from the Salon article does not show “sympathies with fascism.” The word fascism is in there, and he said they saved Europe, but okay, so what does this mean? Why was he saying this? How does this translate into “sympathies,” what does “sympathies” mean? We are not told. The ironically hyper-nationalist Michael Lind just wants us to believe this is unacceptable.
The quote appears in Mises’ book, Liberalism, written in 1927, just after Mussolini took power. It was a commonly argued view that fascism was the wave of the future, and European and American media were singing fascism’s praises. The passage appears in the section entitled “The Argument of Fascism,” in which Mises is explaining the Establishment’s love for this new movement. Mises says, alright, it’s true that fascism saved Europe from a Bolshevik takeover, and for that we can be eternally grateful, but in the very next sentence, he says the salvation it has brought is not the kind that can provide continued success. “To view it as something more would be a fatal error.” Mises was not fooled by fascism, unlike his contemporaries, its evils are not much different from Bolshevism, since they use the same violent methods, Mises explains. In fact, he warned, its foreign policy is based on aggresive force, and is bound to destroy all of Western civilization. (Quite a prescient prediction.) All of this is in the very same chapter. How this constitutes “sympathies” with fascism, is not plainly self-evident. Let us not be in doubt of Salon’s (and the OPs?) exemplary scholarship, maybe this is all just an oversight? (In fact, it was partially this chapter of this book, and his dissection of Nazi Germany Omnipotent Government: Rise of the Total State and Total War that established Mises as one of the leading anti-fascists in academia during the twentieth century.)
Secondly, in the very same book Mises has an entire section (“Democracy” in “The Foundations of Liberal Policy”) devoted to upholding representative democracy on the basis of the argument that the majority is going to get the government they want (through revolution if all else), therefore he supports ballots over bullets. The OP’s stunning theory that Mises sympathizes with dictatorships because he knows no one will support liberalism and therefore opposes democracy is not only not supported, but explicitly defied by the actual book itself. I guess this is an oversight too?
And lastly, the OP asks us, how can we oppose an “Objectivist dictator.” Uhh, well let’s see. On practical grounds we can differentiate between political structures that have institutions and incentive structures that are better or worse at doing the job you want it to do. On moral grounds, if the constitution of a society upholds objective law which prohibits the initiation of force, then it is objectively valid and morally binding on men, all men, in fact, and not just the men of the particular society. However, if the constitution of any society attempts to do more, for example, to prescribe political forms for the society, such as recognizing the office of a dictator as supreme head of state (or such as elected offices), then that constitution is not binding upon men in those aspects. (Incidentally, those are both also practical and moral reasons to oppose representative democracy as well.)