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Carlos de La Torre. 2025. Populism-And-fascism

This document discusses the similarities and differences between populism and fascism, particularly in the context of recent elections of leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. It argues that while both ideologies construct a unified 'people' and embody leadership, fascism is historically confined to a specific period, whereas populism lacks such temporal limitations and often leads to democratic erosion. The document aims to clarify these concepts for a general audience and highlights the ongoing relevance of these debates in contemporary politics.

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100% found this document useful (1 vote)

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Carlos de La Torre. 2025. Populism-And-fascism

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DE LA TORRE

The elections of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, as well

as the strengthening of the radical right globally, brought
back debates about the similarities and differences between
populism and fascism. This Element argues that fascism and
populism are similar insofar as they construct the people as
one, understand leadership as embodiment, and perform The History and Politics
politics of the extraordinary. They are different because there
is a consensus that fascism occurred at a particular historical of Fascism
moment, and what came after was postfascism. There is
not such an agreement to restrict populism to a historical
moment. These isms also differ in the use of violence to deal
with enemies, and in how they construct their legitimacy

Populism and Fascism

Populism and
using elections or abolishing democracy. Whereas fascism
destroys democracy and replaces elections with plebiscitary
acclamation, populists promise to give power back to the

Fascism
people. Yet, when in power, the logic of populism leads to
democratic erosion.

About the Series Series Editors

Cambridge Elements in the History Federico Finchelstein
and Politics of Fascism is a series The New School for
that provides a platform for cutting- Social Research
edge comparative research in the
field of fascism studies. With a broad
theoretical, empirical, geographic,
António Costa Pinto
University of Lisbon Carlos de la Torre
and temporal scope, it will cover
all regions of the world, and most
importantly, search for new and
innovative perspectives.

Cover image: Palazzo della civiltà italiana,

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Elements in the History and Politics of Fascism
edited by
Federico Finchelstein
The New School for Social Research
António Costa Pinto
University of Lisbon

POPULISM AND FASCISM

Carlos de la Torre
University of Florida

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Elements in the History and Politics of Fascism

DOI: 10.1017/9781009528979
First published online: January 2025

Carlos de la Torre
University of Florida
Author for correspondence: Carlos de la Torre, delatorre.carlos@latam.uﬂ.edu

Abstract: The elections of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, as well as

the strengthening of the radical right globally, brought back debates
about the similarities and differences between populism and fascism.
This Element argues that fascism and populism are similar insofar as
they construct the people as one, understand leadership as
embodiment, and perform politics of the extraordinary. They are
different because there is a consensus that fascism occurred at
a particular historical moment, and what came after was postfascism.
There is not such an agreement to restrict populism to a historical
moment. These isms also differ in the use of violence to deal with
enemies, and in how they construct their legitimacy using elections or
abolishing democracy. Whereas fascism destroys democracy and
replaces elections with plebiscitary acclamation, populists promise to
give power back to the people. Yet, when in power, the logic of
populism leads to democratic erosion.

This Element also has a video abstract: www.cambridge.org/delatorre

Keywords: populism, fascism, charismatic leadership, violence, extraordinary
politics

© Carlos de la Torre 2025

ISBNs: 9781009528993 (HB), 9781009528986 (PB), 9781009528979 (OC)
ISSNs: 2977-0416 (online), 2977-0408 (print)

Preface 1

1 Introduction: Fascism or Populism? 2

2 Deﬁning and Explaining Fascism and Populism 11

3 Similarities 24

4 Diﬀerences 35

5 Fascism, Populism, and Democracy 46

6 Conclusions 56

References 60

Preface
The global strengthening of the populist radical right, which some prefer to
categorize as wannabe fascist or postfascist, constitutes perhaps the major
challenge to liberal democracy since its crises in the 1920s and 1930s that led
to the establishment of fascist regimes or to the adoption of some of their
practices and policies across the world. During the interwar period the left
and the right proposed dictatorship as the alternative to the crises of parliamen-
tary democracy. Fascism, as Finchelstein and Pinto have demonstrated, was
a global phenomenon. Its appeal diminished significantly after the Axis Powers
lost the war and the world was exposed to their genocide of populations
racialized as inferior. Yet the specter of fascism never fully disappeared.
Small, marginalized groups proudly labeled themselves fascists. In the last
decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century,
radical right parties, many of them of fascist origins, became normalized and are
attempting to win office or more likely to be part of coalition governments in
Europe. Narendra Modi aims to rebuild a Hindu nation excluding its Muslim
population, and Benjamin Netanyahu is attempting to replace a secular state,
further marginalizing non-Jewish Israeli citizens and the Palestinian population.
In the Americas a new type of right-wing leader like Donald Trump, Jair
Bolsonaro, and Javier Milei has won elections. Once in office they delegitim-
ized democratic institutions and thrived on polarization. Trump and Bolsonaro
disregarded the basic democratic principle that elections are the only legitimate
venue to get to power. When they lost the vote, they cried fraud and their
followers led violent takeovers of Congress.
Are we experiencing the return of fascism? How best to characterize these
leaders, their movements, and their enablers? Is a leader enough for fascism? Or
are a party and movements in the streets needed to properly describe them as
fascist? These are not only academic but also profoundly normative questions.
Are we willing to give up on a democracy that is built on pluralism, that defends
the rights of people to hold different beliefs, and in which dialogue is the tool
used to convince rivals of one’s arguments? Will notions of the heterosexual and
patriarchal family replace the rights of citizens to choose their sexuality, and
women’s reproductive rights? Will nativism and xenophobia trump efforts to
build multiethnic democracies?
To make sense of our turbulent times we need to base our speculations about
the future “on an accurate analysis of the past” (Mosse 1999: 44). This is not the
first comparison of fascism and populism (Berezin 2019; Eatwel 2017;
Finchelstein 2017, 2024; Gentile 2024; Germani 1967, 1978; Hennessy 1976;
Laclau 1977) nor a systematic review of the academic controversies around

each of these concepts (de la Torre 2019; Kallis 2003; Pinto 1995). This
Element provides a synthesis of the debates focusing on the different effects
of fascism and populism on democracy. Their similarities and differences need
to be clearly spelled out to assess the populists’ claim that they improve
democracy by returning power to the people, or the fascists’ notion that
plebiscitary acclamation and unity behind a larger-than-life leader express the
popular will better than liberal representation.
This Element is intended for a general audience, undergraduate students, and
specialists. It uses simple words to discuss theoretical, conceptual, and histor-
ical processes in a rigorous yet accessible way. It follows the steps of Latin
American scholars who have compared these isms since Juan Perón was in
ofﬁce in the 1940s and 1950s. Gino Germani (1967) focused on their distinct
class bases and their emergence under different moments of the modernization
process. Ernesto Laclau (1977) argued that fascism is a populism of the
dominant classes that emerged in a moment of crisis of the left and of the
power bloc. For Federico Finchelstein (2014), populism is fascism adapted to
democratic times when leaders and their movements renounced violently elim-
inating their enemies and accepted elections.
I have been working on populism, democratization, and authoritarianism
since the 1990s. I started to compare populism with fascism when Nadia
Urbinati and Federico Finchelstein invited me to present at the Fascism across
Borders international conference at Columbia University and The New School
for Social Research in 2015. This Element relies on and develops some of my
previous arguments that despite their similarities populism and fascism are
different isms (de la Torre 2022; de la Torre and Srisa-nga 2022). In my research
I used historical-sociological and ethnographic approaches to theorize on the
relationship of populism with democracy and authoritarianism. More recently
I have immersed myself in the historical and theoretical literature on fascism to
contrast it with populism. I have delivered papers on this Element’s project in
invited lectures at the University of Kiel, the University of Guadalajara, the
Catholic University of Peru, and the Federal University of Ceará.

1 Introduction: Fascism or Populism?

The words populism and fascism are not conﬁned to academic circles. These
terms have left the ivory tower, becoming combat words widely used by
politicians, pundits, and citizens to insult rivals or to try to come to terms with
the unexpected political developments of the twenty-ﬁrst century. Contrary to
the predictions of most pundits, Donald Trump won the 2016 election; after he
was defeated by Joe Biden, his followers organized a failed coup d’état. Despite

four indictments, ninety-one felony charges, and convictions in thirty-four

charges, Trump won the 2024 elections. His admirers Jair Bolsonaro and
Javier Milei became the presidents of Brazil and Argentina, the two largest
countries of South America. Bolsonaro followed Trump’s playbook and his
followers tried a failed coup when he lost the election to his archenemy, Lula da
Silva of the leftist Workers Party, in 2022. Yet differently from Trump,
Bolsonaro was prohibited by the superior electoral court from running for office
until 2030. He was also accused of overseeing a broad conspiracy to hold on to
power regardless of the results of the 2022 elections. Gone are the days in
Europe when the traditional right and the center-left formed a cordon sanitaire
to stop extremist radical right-wingers from winning elections or ruling as if
they were normal parties.
How do we make sense of these conundrums? Are we experiencing a renaissance
of fascism and a crisis of democracy like the experiences of the 1920s and 1930s?
Or, alternatively, are these manifestations of populism in its radical right-wing
variants? Does using the term populism absolve radical right parties of fascist
origins like Georgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’ Italia of their past? Can the concept of
populism be restricted to its right- or left-wing variants only? Are we living at the
beginning of the twenty-first century under a new historical constellation that
historian Enzo Traverso (2019) calls postfascism? Or are we seeing the emergence
of what historian Federico Finchelstein (2024: 3) labels wannabe fascists that, at
least for now, are “weaker and more incompetent than classical fascists”? What are
the dangers of labeling leaders and movements that use elections and do not rely on
paramilitary groups as fascists? Is this term further trivialized when used as an
emotional weapon that could get in the way of rational debates?
These normative and theoretical questions are difficult indeed because the
academic community has not agreed on how we define these categories.
Scholars have defined populism and fascism as ideologies, strategies, and styles
to get to power and to govern, and as regimes. For some, fascism is a type of
populism of the ruling classes (Laclau 1977). For others, Nazism and fascism have
a populist phase before they become regimes. Historian Peter Fritzche (2016: 5)
wrote, “the idea of ‘the people’ was both the rhetorical ground on which National
Socialists operated and the horizon for which they reached.” Others see a danger in
the overextension of these concepts. Some propose that scholars stop using fascism
(Allayrdyce 2003); others argue that populism has been robbed “of its specific
historical content . . . At this point the concept of populism loses much, if not all, of
its validity as a transnational analytical category” (Jones 2016: 33).
If scholars cannot agree on what fascism and populism are and if they are even
valuable and useful concepts, how to stop the proliferation of abuses of these
terms by pundits, citizens, and politicians who use them to label whoever they

dislike? Populism is used to categorize politicians and their followers as

irrational, the poorly educated who respond with their guts instead of their brains.
Yet not all consider that this word is a stigma. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La
France Insoumise, for example, uses it as a badge of honor because he says he is
against elites. Differently from leaders in other world regions, right-wing and
other politicians in the United States dispute who is the authentic populist.
Criticizing candidate Donald Trump, President Barack Obama called himself
populist. After winning the 2016 election Steve Bannon, MAGA strategist and
ideologue, asserted, “Trump is the leader of a populist uprising” (de la Torre and
Srisa-nga 2022: 2). Differently from the 1920s and 1930s when elites, social
scientists, artists, and intellectuals proudly collaborated with and belonged to
fascist parties and movements, nowadays very few people use the term as a self-
deﬁnition. It is more often a stigma and a reminder that fascism caused the death
of about 40 million civilians and 20 million soldiers during the Second World
War.1 Does this mean that fascism was just the product of a particular historical
constellation, and if so, was it a unique phenomenon? Or can fascism manifest
itself differently under new historical conjunctures?
This Element analyzes how scholars have used these concepts, their similar-
ities, and their differences, and how they undermined or replaced democracy
with one-person dictatorships conceptualized as lasting over time. But before
proceeding, it is worthwhile describing the socioeconomic and political trans-
formations that led to the emergence and normalization of the radical right in
Europe and the Americas in the twenty-ﬁrst century.

Europe
A good place to start is Cas Mudde’s description of the mainstreaming of the far
right illustrated by the different actions of citizens, the media, and European
institutions when the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) was invited to join coali-
tion governments in 2000 and again eighteen years later.

In 2000, the FPÖ entered a coalition government with the conservative

Austrian People’s Party, which led to massive pushback in Austria and
Europe. Egged on by the Austrian Social Democrats, which had negotiated
in secret with FPÖ too, hundreds of thousands of Austrians took to the streets
to demonstrate against the “fascist” government. The (then) fourteen other
EU member states had tried to prevent the coalition with a strong statement,
saying they would “not promote or accept any bilateral ofﬁcial contacts at
a political level” with a government including the FPÖ. In the end, the EU-14
only boycotted the FPÖ ministers and appointed a committee of three “wise
men,” which recommended that the sanctions should be lifted. Despite

1
https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/05/1091582.

mutterings from some EU member states, and the Austrian Social Democrats,
the sanctions were lifted after less than a year.
When the FPÖ returned to government in 2018, there were much smaller
demonstrations in Austria, and no EU government boycotted FPÖ ministers.
(Mudde 2019: 49)

One might be tempted to conclude that the FPÖ and other radical right parties
have moderated their ideologies and proposals, but, as Mudde shows, that was
not the case. After the Great Recession of 2008, terrorist attacks in Europe, and
the 2017 refugee crisis, the traditional right and some social democrats have
increasingly accepted the radical right discourse on immigration, law and order,
European integration, and corruption. The media has become supportive of
radical right politicians and parties as well, and the social web has allowed for
the proliferation of extreme right-wing subcultures.
The strengthening of the radical right is also a result of how democratization
was designed in the postwar era to constrain popular sovereignty. The goal was
to exorcise the ghosts of fascism and communism, whose roots allegedly laid in
appeals to popular sovereignty and to “the people” by strengthening constitu-
tional courts and safeguarding individual rights. Jan-Werner Müller (2011: 150)
argues that a constrained form of democracy was created in which politics “was
not supposed to be a source of meaning.” László Sólyom, president of the
Hungarian Constitutional Court from 1990 to 1998 and president of Hungary
from 2005 to 2010, explained:

The new constitutional courts were created out of a deep mistrust for the
majoritarian institutions, which had been misused and corrupted in the Fascist
and Communist regimes. In this given historical setting, the constitutional
courts believed they represented the essence of the democratic change and
enjoyed “revolutionary legitimacy.” Little wonder if some constitutional
courts have been inclined to replace the motto “we the people” with “we
the court.” (Furedi 2018: 192)

Appeals to popular sovereignty could not be buried by design in a democracy.

The FPÖ, the French National Front, and other European right-wing parties ﬁrst;
later the movements of the squares of “the indignant” in Spain, Greece, and
elsewhere; and subsequently parties of the left like Syriza, Podemos, and La
France Insoumise challenged the loss of national sovereignty to supranational
organizations, and the surrender of popular sovereignty to elites. Social demo-
crats have accepted neoliberalism with the argument that there are no alternatives,
and as a result politics “has become a mere issue of managing the established
order, a domain reserved for experts, and popular sovereignty has been declared
obsolete” (Mouffe 2018: 17). Neoliberalism and globalization led to the decline
of working-class organizations, as well as of social democrats and other parties of

the left, and to the erosion of class identities. Appeals to the heterogenous people
replaced appeals to class. Yet the vague category of the people was imagined
differently by the left, which constructed it as the plebs – those excluded from
political and economic power by elites – and the right, which used cultural,
religious, and ethnic criteria to imagine the people as an ethnos (Roberts 2023).

The United States

Differently from the recent past when two pragmatic parties sought the support
of swing voters who recognized the legitimacy of their rivals, entered into
agreements with them, and accepted the results of elections to peacefully
transfer power, currently the US is polarized. Whereas the Republican Party
has become a white Christian party in the hands of extreme right activists and
leaders, the Democratic Party is multiracial and more secular. Left-wing, center,
and right-wing politicians and activists coexist inside the Democratic Party tent.
The roots of US polarization were the successful demands of the social move-
ments of the 1960s that democratized American culture and identity. Whereas
the Democratic Party became the umbrella for activists for racial, gender, and
sexual equality, the Republican Party was at the forefront of resistance to the
rights to abortion, same-sex marriage, and racial equality. Political parties
became ideologically polarized around race, religion, geography, cultural
issues, and even “ways of life” (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018: 167). Society thus
split up in cultural wars between secular and liberal understandings of the body,
sexuality, and identity, and religious-traditionalist views of the family and
sexual differences between men and women. Polarization is even manifested
in marriage decisions. In 1960 about 4 percent of Americans said they would be
displeased if their child married someone from the other party; by 2020 that
number grew to about 40 percent.2
As in Europe, neoliberal globalization resulted in the bifurcation of the job
market between a few well-paid jobs and low-paid service jobs that did not offer
opportunities for social mobility. The end of well-paid unionized factory jobs
led to a “sense of economic irrelevance, dislocation and declining material and
occupational security” (Cohen 2019: 9). The logic of producerism was used to
differentiate manly white workers, who provide for their families, live off of the
products of their labor, and pay taxes, from parasites of color, who allegedly do
not work and make a living from government handouts. Whereas the Populist
Party in the late nineteenth century branded ﬁnancial elites as bloodsuckers who
live off of the hard work of manual workers, since the 1960s African Americans,
other people of color, immigrants, intellectuals, and state ofﬁcials who do not

2
www.nytimes.com/2024/01/25/us/politics/biden-trump-presidential-election.html.

make tangible objects became labeled freeloaders who live off of the hard work
and taxes paid by white producers. The extreme right claimed that producers
were also abused by liberal anti-family policies that fomented the perversion of
Christian values by recognizing abortion, same-sex marriage, and LGTBQ
rights. The Tea Party during Obama’s administration and later Donald Trump
used these discursive representations to claim to stand for the interests of white
producers and for defending the family from perverts’ attacks.
After four years in office Trump was able to transform the Republican Party
into his own MAGA party, but, alas, he was unable to destroy democracy. He
profited from deepening the polarization between white and Christian real
Americans of all social classes and educational levels. Trump and his enablers
in the Republican Party, Fox News, and some religious leaders raised the stakes
of elections, pitching them as existential battles where the survival of an ethnic
and religious group was at stake. When Trump and some Republicans refused to
accept that they lost an election and claimed that they would only accept results
that favored them, they put in doubt the fundamental principle of democratic
alternation. After Trump supporters violently took over Congress, and many
Republican legislators continued to be loyal to him, did they abandon democ-
racy? If Trump, his enablers, and followers are fascists, why did they use
elections to get to power in 2024? Is their project to protect the privileges of
white citizens, restricting democracy and transforming it into what O’Donnell
and Schmitter (1986: 13) defined as a limited political democracy,
a “democradura,” or as a soft dictatorship “dictablanda”?

Latin America

The radical right arrived in Latin America, probably to stay. Bolsonaro won the
Brazilian elections against the leftist Workers Party in 2018. José Antonio Kats
formed the Republican Party as an alternative to the traditional right that had
accepted the welfare state and promoted same-sex marriage and was defeated in
a runoff election by leftist Gabriel Boric in 2021 in Chile. Libertarian and anti-
gender-ideology candidate Javier Milei won the 2023 elections in Argentina.
This is not the first antiestablishment right-wing populist wave in Latin
America. Neoliberal populists emerged in the 1990s against traditional parties,
promising the reduction of the state, self-regulation of the economy, globaliza-
tion, and law and order.
Alberto Fujimori arose in a context of hyperinflation, when two guerrilla
groups were on the verge of taking over the Peruvian state. He ruled for ten
years, curbed hyperinflation, delivered “order and security” by defeating the
guerrillas and arresting the leader of the Shining Path, and, with the excuse of

ending terrorism, abused human rights, especially of peasant and Indigenous

people. In 1992 he achieved a self-coup, closed Congress, and enacted a new
constitution (McClintok 2013).
Álvaro Uribe was president of Colombia between 2002 and 2010. He
emerged in a context of a deep security crises (Bejarano 2013: 328). His law-
and-order approach reduced crime rates and brought security at the cost of
human rights abuses and the concentration of power in his hands.
Nayib Bukele promised law and order to control the power of gangs that had
become a parallel state in some communities in El Salvador (Wolf 2021: 67). His
administration incarcerated without a proper trial and abused the human rights of
about 71,000 people in a population of 6.5 million. As the homicide and crime
rates diminished, Bukele’s popularity increased. After reforming the constitution,
which forbade reelection, he won an overwhelming majority of votes in 2024.
The novelty of radical right politicians such as Bolsonaro, Milei, and Kats is
that in addition to favoring neoliberalism and law and order, they emerged as
a backlash to women’s rights, LGTBQ+ rights, and the empowerment of non-
whites. Their pro-family and morality proposals resonated with a conservative
Christian base made up of evangelicals, Pentecostals, and right-wing Catholics.
Sectors of the middle class felt threatened by the empowerment and social
mobility of nonwhites in Brazil (Porto 2023). Kats, following Trump, vowed to
construct walls on the borders with Peru and Bolivia (Rovira Kaltwasser 2019:
49). He also promised to militarize territories where the Indigenous Mapuche
people were resisting timber exploitation, labeling Indigenous activists terrorists
(53). Milei is a libertarian who promised to shrink the state so as to let the market
regulate itself. He opposed LQTBQ+, women, and Indigenous rights.
Even though Bolsonaro failed as a president, mainly due to his denial of
Covid, which resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths, and he is currently
banned from running for ofﬁce, the movement that supported him remains
strong. The number of Brazilians who consider themselves on the right jumped
from 20 percent in 2020 to 40 percent in 2021 (Avritzer and Renno 2023: 256).
Bolsonarism is made up of groups

that mobilize mainly on social networks around certain key ideas including
the perception of a common enemy (the left, in general, and the Partido dos
Trabalhadores [Workers’ Party – PT], in particular), moral conservatism
(defense of the traditional family, patriarchy, and a Christian nation), eco-
nomic liberalism (neoliberalism, the theology of prosperity, the inviolability
of private property, and entrepreneurship), patriotism (Brazil above every-
thing), and public safety (as in the saying that the only good criminal is a dead
criminal). (Bernardino Costa 2023: 99)

Democratic institutions, a strong civil society, and the private media con-
strained Bolsonaro. His administration disrupted environmental, human rights,
educational, and health state policies established by center and left parties in the
previous decades. His rhetoric against Indigenous people, environmentalists,
feminists, anti-racist activists, and LGTBQ+ groups resulted in the assassin-
ation of Indigenous activists, the further destruction of the Amazon rainforest,
increasing violent attacks on transgender citizens, and aggressive and vulgar
attacks on feminists and anti-racist activists. But democracy and even some
policies challenged by Bolsonaro like class and racial quotas for higher educa-
tion survived. Bolsonarism as a movement was not defeated, and new leaders
could probably emerge.

Conclusion and Questions to Be Addressed in Future Sections

I use the term radical right to characterize movements, parties, and govern-
ments in Europe and the Americas. This term has been employed descriptively,
and in the following sections the definitions of fascism, right-wing populism,
postfascism, and wannabe fascists will be analyzed in detail. The debates on
how to characterize these families of right-wing politics are important for
several reasons.
First, because whereas historical fascism got rid of democracy, replacing it
with rituals of plebiscitary acclamation, populist legitimacy lies in wining free
and open elections. Thus, populists limited but did not abolish rights of free
information and organization.
Second, whereas it is relatively easy to point to the actions and the date when
democracy was abolished by fascists in Italy, Spain, or Germany, it is very
difficult to recognize the slow processes of democratic erosion under populism.
When in office populists concentrate power in the hands of the president,
reducing the clout of legislatures, and the judicial system is put in the hands
of loyal followers who use it to punish critics with the appearance of following
legality. The private media is censored and intimidated, but not abolished.
Parallel organizations are created in civil society to diminish the power of
independent social movements and nongovernmental organizations.
Third, there is a scholars’ agreement that classical fascism was the result of
a coalescence of historical forces such as the banalization of death after the First
World War, the fear of the diffusion of Bolshevism, the crises of democracy, the
appeal of dictatorship for the right and the left, and the Great Depression.
Whatever came after is called postfacism (Griffin 2020; Traverso 2019).
Populism is not confined to a historical period and has emerged in societies
with different levels of democratization and modernization, as well as in the

Global South and Global North. Differently from fascism, populism can be
from the right when the people are built as an ethnos, or from the left when they
are constructed as the plebs. Finally, the terms populism and fascism simultan-
eously illuminate and obscure. Populism, for instance, could be used to absolve
right-wing parties from their fascist past, or to blame their authoritarianism on
their nativism (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017: 83). If elections are used to
legitimately get to power, populists belong to the democratic and not the fascist
camp. But how to interpret the actions of self-described democrats who do not
accept losing elections because they think of themselves as the only legitimate
candidate of the true people? Are they fascist when they organize rebellions,
plot military coups, or delegitimize elections? Can fascism be reduced to the
actions of leaders, or do they need fascist parties, paramilitary organizations,
and a mass movement in the streets as well? Are Trump and Bolsonaro wannabe
fascists who were not able to get rid of democracy because of their lack of will
and strategy, or due to the resistance of institutions, state officials, social
movements, and the media?
This Element selectively uses some of the enormous historical and social
scientific literature on fascism and populism to compare their similarities and
especially to point out their differences. The sections distinguish the dynamics of
these isms, differentiating when they were movements challenging the power of
elites, when they got to office, and the institutional and structural conditions that
allowed them to establish new regimes. It looks at the historicity of fascism and
populism and their interactions with their allies, enablers, and enemies. It focuses
on cases that the literature does not doubt to name fascist or populists even though
some scholars challenge the inclusion of Nazism as fascism, and others question
the validity of putting leaders with radically different economic policies such as
Perón, Chávez, Trump, or Bolsonaro in the same analytical basket.
Section 2 focuses on the epistemological and conceptual strategies of differ-
ent attempts to define fascism and populism. The selection of theoretical and
conceptual approaches is not exhaustive and reviews cumulative, minimum,
and complex definitions. It advocates for the latter because it takes ideologies,
organizations, performances, and styles of communication into account.
Complex definitions allow focusing on gradations to differentiate light from
full-blown cases. For instance, different from politicians who might occasion-
ally use populist tropes, styles of communication, and performances, others
perform populism most of the time. Complex definitions also allow us to
explore when fascism became populism and where it is mutating back to
fascism or postfascism in the twenty-first century.
Section 3 shows the similarities of fascism and populism when contrasted
with liberal-democratic logic and its key ideas and practices. It explores their

construction of the category of the people, their notion of leadership, and their
performance of politics of the extraordinary in mass events, meetings, and
demonstrations.
Section 4 argues that despite the similarities discussed previously, popu-
lism and fascism are distinct because of how they use and perform violence,
their legitimation strategies, and their historicity. Whereas populism has
occurred at different historical times and in distinct geographical regions,
under diverse moments of modernization and democratization, fascism was
the product of a particular historical constellation, and whatever came after
that was postfascism. Yet when right-wing populists like Trump and
Bolsonaro do not accept elections and instigate followers to use physical
violence, what are they?
Fascist and populist relations to democracy are explored in Section 5. After
fascists were invited to govern by traditional elites, they outmaneuvered other
conservative forces. They got rid of democracy yet preserved elites’ economic
power and status. Populists, despite their claims to be democratic innovators who
promise to give power back to the people, brought democratic decay, and in some
historical and institutional circumstances forged populist hybrid regimes that
either democratized or moved to became full dictatorships. Section 5 focuses
on the interactions between political actors under different institutional, historical,
and structural constellations. It shows the possible outcomes of these confronta-
tions and argues that, nowadays and for the time being, wannabe fascists or right-
wing radical populists have not been able to destroy democracy and replace it
with dictatorship. Rather, while in ofﬁce, they further delegitimize institutions
and procedures. Fascists replace democracy with one-person dictatorships that
allegedly express the popular will better than elections. They imagine fascist
dictatorships as long-lasting. As long as populists use elections as the legitimate
tool to get to ofﬁce, they remain in the democratic camp. Yet they contribute to
further move democracies in crises to the grayer area between autocracy and
democracy. Whereas some democratize, others move to full dictatorship.

2 Deﬁning and Explaining Fascism and Populism

This section analyzes the different epistemological and conceptual strategies
used to deﬁne these isms. It starts with Gino Germani’s pioneering differenti-
ation of fascism and national populism in terms of their class base and emer-
gence at distinct periods of modernization. Then it explores arguments to get rid
of these ambiguous concepts in the social sciences, or to preserve them just as
insults. Subsequently it focuses on minimum and concise deﬁnitions that could
be used to compare cases in different historical times and geographical spaces.

Minimum deﬁnitions have been criticized because they are reductionist. As an

alternative, scholars have created complex definitions to make sense of grad-
ations and to preserve the thickness of social reality. The challenge is to produce
complex concepts that could be useful for comparative research, avoiding such
a long list of traits that confines the category to fit just one or two cases.

Modernization, Mass Society, and Social Class

Italian-Argentinean sociologist Gino Germani was the ﬁrst scholar who sys-
tematically compared fascism and national populism. In the introduction to his
volume Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National Populism he explains the
personal reasons that motivated his lifetime scholarly endeavor.

I was a child when fascism reached power in Italy, and still a teenager when it
established a totalitarian state. In my early youth I experienced the total
ideological climate involving the everyday life of the common citizen, and
more strongly so, the younger generation. Later in Argentina, where I went as
a political refugee, I met another variety of authoritarianism. Both Italian
fascism and Argentinean Peronism came to power as an outcome of the crises
of liberal-democratic regimes hitherto considered fairly well established.
(Germani 1978: vii)

Germani was arrested by Mussolini’s police when he was a young antifascist

activist, and as an adult he temporarily lost his job as a college professor under
Peronism. It is worth remembering that General Juan Perón started his political
life in 1943 as a member of a pro-Axis military junta. Among other positions he
served as the secretary of labor, and in this role he jailed or co-opted labor
leaders while promoting collective bargaining agreements, increasing wages,
delivering paid vacations to workers, and raising their social status. Perón was
arrested by his fellow junta members in October 1945 because of his prolabor
policies but was rescued a few days later by labor demonstrations that
demanded his liberation. He abandoned fascism after his release, won the free
and open elections of 1946, and served two terms until he was deposed by
a military coup in 1954. Despise dropping fascism and wining free elections, he
continued to be labeled a dictator by many foreign commentators, perhaps
because he closed newspapers and repressed the opposition.
Differently from his contemporaries who considered Perón a fascist,
Germani used the dominant sociological paradigms of his time – modernization
and mass society theory – to explore the similarities and differences between
fascism and national populism. His model of change is based on the notion of
social integration. He explained,

[A] society is integrated if there exists sufﬁcient correspondence between

three levels: the normative level (the institutionalized and legitimate norms,
values, statuses, and roles regulating social actions); the psychosocial level
(the internalization of the norms, values, etc., in terms of motivations, atti-
tudes, aspirations, and character structure); and the environmental level (the
whole external context within which social actions take place). When such
correspondence exists, individual behavior will be precisely that predicted by
the normative structure. It will be institutionalized and legitimated behavior.
(Germani 1967: 193)

Abrupt social change such as rapid urbanization, industrialization, or disloca-

tion due to disaster or war produces breakdown or disintegration that could lead
to anomie, meaning that actors do not have a normative structure to make sense
of the new social conditions and then to act rationally. During crises of norma-
tive integration and anomie actors follow their emotions, acting irrationally, and
could be mobilized. Germani distinguishes primary mobilization that occurred
in the transition from a traditional to a modern society and when actors were
excluded from the political community, from secondary mobilization in par-
tially modernized and democratized societies. Whereas Italian fascism was
a process of secondary mobilization caused by the upheavals of the First
World War and the Russian Revolution, Peronism was a primary mobilization
of actors previously left out of the political system. The class base of these
movements was different as well. The social base of Perón’s national populism
was recent internal migrants from the countryside to the cities not previously
socialized into working-class cultures. Because they were in a state of anomie,
they responded to the emotional appeals of Perón and his wife, Eva, obtaining
material as well as symbolic rewards. The downwardly mobile middle class was
the social base of Italian fascism that only got ersatz satisfaction in the forms of
imperialism and racism.
Germani considers national populism as a sui generis type of authoritarian-
ism, similar yet fundamentally different from fascism because of the social
conditions under which national populism and fascism emerged and their class
bases. He links national populism to the transition to modernity and to the
incorporation of previously excluded masses. Yet populist movements, parties,
leaders, and governments have emerged under different social conditions and in
nations with dissimilar levels of modernization and democratization. His dis-
tinction between these isms could be maintained only if populism is linked
exclusively, as Germani did, to the transition to modernity and the term fascism
is used to describe leaders, parties, and movements in partially modernized and
democratized societies. This model could perhaps explain the differences
between what Latin Americanist scholars call classical populism of leaders

such as Perón, and the radical populist right. Thus Donald Trump or Jair
Bolsonaro could be characterized as fascist instead of right-wing populist. But
what to do with self-described leftists such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela or
Rafael Correa in Ecuador, whose policies were nationalist, statist, redistribu-
tive, and anti-imperialist? These politicians were certainly authoritarian in how
they constructed and dealt with enemies, but they were poles apart from fascism
unless this term is used as synonymous with any type of autocratic government.
A second empirical problem is that social class alone does not explain the
appeal of these isms. The new working class in a state of anomie that Germani put
at the center of his interpretation, as well as the older working class that was
socialized by anarchists, communists, and socialists supported Perón because
they had obtained material and symbolic rewards when he was the secretary of
labor. Mussolini and other fascists were backed not only by the middle class. They
“drew support from all classes” (Mann 2004: 20). Ian Kershaw (2015: 231)
agrees when he writes fascism cannot be defined “as simply a middle-class
movement, or, indeed, in unequivocal class terms at all.” Class is important to
explain these isms, if instead of trying to attach a movement to a particular class,
we focus on historical processes of class formation. Whereas in advanced capit-
alist nations class was a major cleavage and source of political and social identity,
in most nations of the Global South social heterogeneity and class fragmentation
were articulated in cleavages around the populist notion of the people against the
elites instead of class. With the changes in the social structure of the Global North
that reduced class salience and identities, the populist opposition to the elites is
becoming a new cleavage that perhaps is replacing class (Roberts 2023).
Like other structuralist class theories, Germani ignores populists’ or fascists’
own beliefs. Even though there was an attempt to include emotions and reasons,
the first were reduced to irrational responses of masses in a state of anomie.
Scores of social historians and sociologists have shown that organization and
political opportunity explain protest better than anomie and breakdown.
Fascism and populism should be banned from academia but perhaps retained
as insults. Because fascism has been used to characterize such a dissimilar range
of movements, parties, and leaders in several world regions and historical times,
critics, with good reason, have argued that it has suffered from semantic
inflation. Some scholars have proposed to get rid of this concept. Historian
Stuart Wolf in 1968 wrote, “Perhaps the word fascism should be banned, at least
temporarily from our political vocabulary” (Griffin 2020: 39). Historian Gilbert
Allardyce (2003: 51) emphatically noted, “There is no such thing as fascism.
There are only men and movements that we call by that name.” He concluded,
“Full of emotion and empty of real meaning, the word fascism is one of the most
abused and abusive in our political vocabulary” (54).

Similarly, scholars of populism periodically propose to ban this term because

it is used indiscriminately to refer to right and leftist politicians who pursued
neoliberal or statist policies. Political theorist Benjamín Arditti (2024), well
known for his analysis of populism and democracy, proposes to move our
conversation from the question “What is populism?” to “Is there such a thing
as populism?” He offers three responses that he calls provocations. The first is to
get rid of populism as a category of the social sciences because populism does
not exist. He writes, “Populism as we know has passed its sell-by date and can
be dropped, just as we have stopped asking whether monarchs have a divine
right to rule.” If the academic community insists on continuing to use populism,
they should keep it as an insult or restrict the term to analyzing a particular
historical moment. His second provocation to reduce populism to an insult will
not allow researchers to explain the ambiguities of populist challenges to real,
existing democracies. Populists point to problems that other politicians tried to
ignore, yet their solutions undermine democratic conviviality and pluralism. It
is important to differentiate between types of populism. Some are exclusionary
of the other built with religious, ethnic, and racial criteria while other populists
seek to include the politically, culturally, and socioeconomically marginalized
sectors of society. Arditti’s third solution is perhaps the most problematic
because if scholars of populism agree on something, it is to not restrict populism
to one moment in history.
Despite the attempt to ban these categories from academia, these concepts
will probably stay with us for good. Hence following the spirit of their aboli-
tionist critics, we should not use these categories for empirical research without
first reflecting on their epistemological and theoretical assumptions. In what
follows the epistemological and conceptual strategies of scholars who advocate
for minimum definitions are contrasted with complex constructs that aim to be
open to ambiguities and gradations.

Minimum Definitions
Some scholars consider that fascism and populism are phenomena and realities
of the social world. To understand and explain observable facts, they have
developed minimal definitions that clearly differentiate their object of study
from other phenomena. Their goal is to avoid fuzziness, developing elegant and
parsimonious short definitions that can travel across time and space. First, they
must identify the domain of reality where their object of study can be clearly
located, such as ideology, the economy, politics, etcetera. Influenced by Michael
Frieden’s concept of ideology, they have distinguished its core from adjacent or
peripheral components.

Roger Grifﬁn built on fascist self-interpretations to construct a minimum

ideological definition of generic fascism in order to differentiate it from other
forms of authoritarianism. He defined fascism as “a genus of political ideology
whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist
ultranationalism” (Griffin 2008: 88–89). The ultranation is an imagined com-
munity that “like a living organism, can decline and ‘die,’ or regenerate itself
and return to enough strength culturally and politically to realize renewed
greatness inspired by past glories” (Griffin 2020: 83). Palingenesis is the
myth of rebirth from decadence “to be realized by removing obstacles to or
‘enemies’ of the nation’s renewal” (83). Fascism at its core is a hybrid of these
two “mythic elements: the myth of rebirth or palingenesis, and the myth of the
organic nation or race, the ‘ultranation’” (90). Even though Griffin wrote that
populism should be clearly distinguished from fascism, his definition of fascism
casts it as “populist ultranationalism.” The adjacent element of fascism is the
creation of a pervasive populist movement “to mobilize and unleash the dor-
mant power of ‘the people’ to cleanse itself from the forces of decadence and
regenerate itself in a new era of greatness” (92).
Cas Mudde also used Michael Freeden to define populism as a thin ideology
linked to thick ideologies such as conservatism or socialism. He defines popu-
lism as “an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two
homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt
elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté
générale (general will) of the people” (Mudde 2004: 543). With his coauthor
Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, in a later publication he wrote, “Populism is in
essence a form of moral politics, as the distinction between ‘the elite’ and ‘the
people’ is first and foremost moral (i.e. pure vs. corrupt), not situational (e.g.
position of power), socio-cultural (e.g. ethnicity, religion), or socioeconomic
(e.g. class)” (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2012: 8–9). Accordingly, populists
construct politics as a Manichaean struggle between the forces of good and evil.
Federico Finchelstein (2017: 54) argues that the search for a minimum
definition resembles looking for the fascist or populist “Holy Grail.” While
elegant and parsimonious, minimum ideological definitions reduce the com-
plexity of these isms to one of their fundamental components. These ideological
definitions are silent on party organizations, communication styles, or charis-
matic leadership, for example. Minimalist definitions put aside traits or compo-
nents labeled as peripheral or adjacent and not core to their theorization. For
instance, the ideational definition of populism considers leadership as not
central, thus imposing as universal a trait that works well for European radical
right parties but does not explain these phenomena in the Global South, where
populisms are leader centric. A fundamental problem of ideological definitions

is that they do not explain who the carrier of the ideology is. It could be the
population at large, a leader, a movement, or a political party. They assume that
those who belonged to fascist or populist movements were just fascist or
populist all the time. They do not differentiate between different levels of
commitment, nor people’s life histories and how they negotiated their different
identities (Passamore 2014: 18).
Ideological minimum definitions sanitize these isms. Griffin cleans fascism
of its violence, while other scholars (Finchelstein 2017; Kershaw 2015; Mann
2004; Traverso 2019) put violence as one of its definitional features. Similarly,
Mudde and Rovira Kaltwatzer (2017: 83) absolve populism of authoritarianism
when they argue that nativism and not populism is at the root of populism’s
exclusionary ideas assuming clear-cut separations between populist and nation-
alist appeals. Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (99) also normalized authoritarian
populism when they wrote that “there is a dormant Hugo Chávez or Sarah Palin
inside all of us.” Finally, in their zeal to give the impression that there is
a consensus around their classifications, some promoters of minimal definitions
include authors who understand ideology differently. Griffin argues that Roger
Eatwell (2017) shares his minimal definition when the latter includes violence
and politics as well. Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser (2017) include scholars
who use discourse analysis inspired by Ernesto Laclau as sharing in their
discursive ideational definition.

From a Minimal Sartorian Deﬁnition to a Fuzzy Concept

Kurt Weyland (2001) in a very influential article redefined populism as
a political strategy to get to power and to govern. His minimal definition
locates populism in the political domain and considers that leaders appeal
directly to their constituencies, bypassing traditional mediating institutions
like parties and unions. The opposite of populism, he argued, is Weberian
formal organizations and political parties. Because their main goal is to get to
power and to stay, populists are opportunistic and pragmatic. Differently from
zealous fascists, populists lack ideological commitments (Weyland 2019: 50).
In a later publication, Weyland acknowledged that Sartorian definitional
minimalism is not effective in differentiating populism from surrounding
concepts. He reconceptualized populism as a fuzzy concept, meaning that it
is not always easy to clearly differentiate populism from alternatives.
Differently from the Sartorian goal to clearly distinguish a cat from a dog,
populism might be a cat-dog because “in their quest for power leaders flexibly
adjust to contextual opportunities and constrains and change color with the
circumstances” (Weyland 2017a: 65).

Some leaders the literature does not label populist, at times and under certain
circumstances, might use populist tropes. Under conditions of what Bernard
Manin (1997) called audience democracies, when the personal qualities of the
leader are more important than clear ideologies and politicians try to communi-
cate directly with the electorate, we could expect that politicians might occa-
sionally use populist rhetoric. Differently from leaders who occasionally use or
perform populism, full-blown populists consistently perform populist styles,
use a rhetoric of the antagonistic confrontation of the people against elites, and
seek to communicate directly with electors using the media and mass meetings.
Donald Trump, Hugo Chávez, and Juan Perón are good examples of full-blown
populists, whereas light populists occasionally and selectively borrow from the
populist discursive and performative playbooks.
Kevin Passmore (2014: 14) writes that a major problem with some theories
of fascism and, I will add, of populism “is that they presume an undifferenti-
ated and ultimately passive mass, integrated into fascism by ritual repetition of
ideas and/or by technologies of rule.” Some scholars of fascism do not pay
attention to the different levels of involvement with and commitment of
common people or followers to fascism. Whereas some, especially those
who actively participated in paramilitary groups and organizations that
required a high level of involvement, perhaps were true believers and acted
as convinced fascists, others paid lip service to fascist ideologies or changed
their loyalty over time (52, 65).
It is worth remembering that because fascists came to power after periods of
brutal violence in Italy, or that in Germany the Nazis became ferociously
repressive in ofﬁce, people often “bow their heads in mock mental obeisance
but refuse to internalize the system” (Baehr 2008: 49). Similarly, whereas poor
people who often interact with party brokers accept the self-interpretations of
populist politicians as protectors of the poor, those who sporadically interact
with party brokers are not committed to the populist worldview nor to their
party identities (Auyero 2001).
If common people varied in their allegiance to, commitment to, and belief
in fascism, some leaders strategically shifted in and out of fascism, or
adapted and drew inspirations from selective institutions. Antonio
Salazar’s “New State,” the longest-lasting dictatorship in modern Europe,
remained in power for thirty-six years, avoiding the “most aggressive and
radical aspects of fascism, while integrating and deriving inspiration from
some of the institutions derived from it” (Pinto 1995: v). Salazar did not
create “a strong single party that held the monopoly on ideology, propaganda
and the organization of the masses, the Portuguese New State did not codify
the ‘cult of the leader’” (Pinto 2007: 75). Yet a personality cult was created,

and Salazar was built by state propaganda into a charismatic leader of

similar stature as his neighbor Francisco Franco. In his earlier years Franco
was para-fascist, anticommunist, and pro-Axis. In 1937 he merged the
fascist Falange party with the Carlist monarchists, “altering its name to the
most complex and absurd of all the fascist-type movements – Falange
Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista
(FET-JONS)” (Payne 2007: 58). Later Spain mutated to “an inward looking,
highly reactionary and illiberal Catholic state led by a personal dictator”
(Griffin 2020: 132).
To make sense of the complexity of these isms and their transformations over
time, more comprehensive definitions that look at their ideologies, organiza-
tions, and communication styles are needed. Complex definitions pay attention
to gradations and to the fuzziness of these isms.

Complex Definitions
If one-sentence definitions are reductionist as they trim down complexity by
focusing on just one aspect of the phenomena, the challenge is to avoid listing
such large numbers of components that definitions become useful for a single
historical experience only. This section draws on scholars who have developed
complex definitions that consider ideologies, organizations, performances, and
communication styles (Diehl 2024).

Ideologies
Differently from other ideologies such as liberalism or communism, fascism
and populism have no sacred texts. Yet fascism and populism were major
ideological innovations for their “capacity to fuse ideas and sentiments to create
new public justiﬁcations for the exercise of power” (Müller 2011: 92). Whereas
the Nazis were ideological fanatics, other fascists and populists were more
pragmatic. Fascists were “ultranationalist, antiliberal, and anti-Marxist”
(Finchelstein 2017: 15). They believed in an “organic” or “integral” nation,
and this involved an unusually strong sense of the nation’s “enemies,” both
abroad and (especially) at home (Mann 2004: 13). Because opponents were
seen as enemies, they were to be removed and the nation cleansed of them (16).
The enemy was constructed as “an existential threat to the nation and to its
people that had to be ﬁrst persecuted and then deported or eliminated”
(Finchelstein 2017: 15).
Differently from conservatives who considered that the existing social order
is essentially harmonious, fascists proposed to create a new order using the
power of the state. They aimed to forge

a totalitarian state in which plurality and civil society would be silenced, and
there would increasingly be no distinctions between the public and the
private, and between the state and its citizens . . . [They] defended a divine,
messianic, and charismatic form of leadership that conceived of the leader as
organically linked to the people and the nation. It considered popular sover-
eignty to be fully delegated to the dictator, who acted in the name of the
community of the people and knew better than they what they truly wanted.
Fascists replaced history and empirically based notions of truth with political
myth. (Finchelstein 2017: 15)

Populist ideology shared the fascist distinction between friend and enemy
but without advocating for their physical elimination, and “a charismatic
understanding of the leader as an embodiment of the voice and desires of
the people and the nation as a whole” (Finchelstein 2017: 20). It invoked the
people “in a two-fold opposition, at once vertical and horizontal, against
‘those on top’ (and sometimes also ‘those on the bottom’) on the one hand,
and against an alien or threatening ‘outside’ on the other, generally in such
a way that economic, political and cultural elites are represented as being
‘outside’ – or at least different or ‘other’ – as well as ‘on top” (Brubaker 2020:
60). Populist ideologies did not advocate for dictatorship; on the contrary, the
only way for them to get legitimately to power is to win clean and competitive
elections.

Organizations

When fascism emerged in Italy and Germany, most political parties were made up
of notables who reached out to the public only during election times. Another
characteristic was that they were class parties. Fascists innovated by appealing to
all social classes and were successful in their recruitment efforts. Fascists engaged
“committed militants rather than careerist politicians” (Paxton 2005: 58). They
mobilized “the masses, giving them the illusion of being actors, not simple
spectators of politics” (Traverso 2019: 105).
Michael Mann (2004: 16) writes that paramilitarism was both a key value
and a quintessential organizational form of fascism, and that violence
explains its radicalism. Fascists created a new type of party, the fascist militia
party, which “operated in political struggles with warlike methods and
considered political adversaries as ‘internal enemies’ that must be defeated
and destroyed” (Gentile 2008: 292). Fascists had an all-encompassing con-
ception of politics that subordinated “privacy-based values (religion, culture,
morality, love etc.) to the preeminent political power” (297). Paramilitary
violence was used to repress and terrorize enemies of the left, perverts, or
racialized minorities; to show the weakness of the state and its inability to

maintain order; and to display the total commitment of the fascist militant.
Paramilitarism socialized militants into a brotherhood, a comradeship of
a “segregated, hardened elite, beyond conventional standards of behavior”
(Mann 2004: 29).
Fascist organizations provided a sense of mission and identity. Brazilian
Integralism, the largest fascist party in Latin America in the 1930s, “imposed
a way of living, behaving, speaking, keeping silent, walking, getting married,
dying, and presenting oneself” (Pereira Gonçalves and Caldeira Neto 2022:
29). Members of Brazilian Integralism wore green shirts and greeted each
other with the word Anauê, meaning “you are my relative.” Upon joining they
were baptized and swore “unrelenting obedience to the leader . . . as well as
their commitment to the norms and doctrine of integralism” (20).
Populist organizations allow for the reinforcement of identities of us versus
them, communities of the righteous, worldviews, and, in some cases, even
a mission to followers tasked with returning power to the people. Yet para-
militarism and physical violence are not organizational features of populism.
Populists have created different types of parties that are often personalist, such
as informally organized clientelist parties, mass-based parties, television
parties, and digital parties. In the Global South populists have organized
followers using networks that exchange votes for services. Mass parties
have a “mass base which contributes to the functioning of the party both
ﬁnancially and with its political militancy; a large and permanent bureau-
cracy; a highly hierarchical and centralized organizational structure;
a capillary territorial presence . . . and an explicit and persistent ideological
orientation” (Gerbaudo 2019: 31).
Neoliberal television parties resemble a media or marketing company.
Experts in media marketing and communication who appeal to voters as
depoliticized consumers replace the full-time bureaucrats of mass-based par-
ties, and the telegenic qualities of a leader take priority over platforms or
ideologies. In reaction to these transformations that turned citizens into con-
sumers of television, many demanded increasing direct participation in deci-
sions. Despite using web platforms to increase participation, these parties
resorted to plebiscitary democracy so that members could ratify decisions the
leadership had already made (Gerbaudo 2019).
The fascist state created a series of institutions and a community of “discip-
lined, hardened ﬁghters” (Paxton 2005: 143). Populist organizations have been
formed from the bottom up, like the Tea Party, or from the top down, as was
done by Chávez’s government. Regardless of their origins, these organizations
promote polarization and politicize social interactions as the confrontation
between antagonistic camps.

Performances and Communication Styles

Fascist and populist leaders were media innovators who used radio, cinema,
television, and the social web to communicate directly with citizens. As will be
explained in detail later, they performed, imagined, and lived politics as
extraordinary moments, different from bureaucratized and banal ordinary
politics. All spheres of social and personal life could become politicized as
arenas for the struggle between two antagonistic camps: the old, dying regime
and the new polity, society, and humanity in the making. Extraordinary politics
were performed in ceremonies and rituals that celebrated the extraordinariness
of the leader, his or her embodiment of the people, while simultaneously
creating horizontal bonds of solidarity and identity among the participants.
These ceremonies constructed a people against a series of internal and external
enemies.

Movements in Power and Regimes

Complex definitions analytically aim to distinguish when these isms’ followers
are trying to get to power, their actions when they get to office, and whether they
can overhaul institutions to create regimes (Arato and Cohen 2022; de la Torre
2019; Paxton 1998). Political institutions often keep fascist and populists at the
margins of the political system. Crises of political representation, economic
upheavals, or catastrophic events often become opportunities to get to office.
Whereas political elites invited Mussolini and Hitler to form coalition govern-
ments, thinking that they could control and manage their radicalism, populists
got to power by winning elections. Section 5 will elaborate on the different
actions that took place under dissimilar institutional contexts that led to the
violent and sudden death of democracy under fascist dictatorships, or to the
slow undermining of democracy under populism.

Conclusions
Surveying different definitions illustrates the limitations of distinct conceptual
strategies. The advantage of minimum definitions is their elegance, and the cost
is that complexity is reduced to just one component of these phenomena:
ideology, politics, or morality. Complex definitions aim to integrate different
aspects that minimum definitions have elaborated, yet the challenge is to
produce definitions that are multifaceted and simultaneously useful for com-
parative analysis. Whereas for some scholars, the goal is to differentiate a cat
from a dog in order to increase the clarity that is needed to advance and
accumulate knowledge, others argue that theory co-constitutes social reality.

They propose to deal with fuzziness by accepting gradations and to live with
definitions that do not necessarily solve for good all ambiguities.
Despite criticisms, these categories will stay in academics, politics, and daily
life. Populism connotes a particular political logic of antagonism that trans-
forms rivals into enemies and a leader into the symbol of an array of promises
and demands for transformation. Populist legitimacy comes from winning
elections, and even though they restrict the rights of their enemies, populists
do not physically eliminate them. Fascism replaces democracy with plebiscitary
rituals of acclamation and gets rid of fundamental freedoms and rights to
privacy, communication, and association.
Perhaps history could provide some answers to gradations and permutations.
Finchelstein (2017) has argued that after its military defeat at the end of the war,
fascism had run its course and Juan Perón, Getulio Vargas, Jean-Marie, and Marine
Le Pen, among others, adapted it to democratic times. Populism became a new type
of postwar authoritarianism that accepted elections. Yet, as critics have shown, not
all experiences labeled populism have fascist origins. Right and left populism share
a political logic based on the existential confrontation between friend and enemy
(Laclau 2005). They are in the democratic camp as long as they accept electoral
outcomes. When radical right populists do not accept losing elections and organize
insurrections and court the support of paramilitary groups, are we experiencing the
mutation of right-wing populism into wannabe fascists? Finchelstein (2024) argues
that we are living in a new historical time in which leaders like Trump or Bolsonaro
do not recognize the legitimacy of elections when they lose, share with fascists
appeals to violence and militarization, use lies and conspiracy theories, draw on
racism and xenophobia, and attack democracy. Yet because they emerged in a new
historical constellation that values democracy, they faced the resistance of organ-
izations of civil society, part of the media, common citizens, political parties that
value democracy, and state functionaries, and so have not been allowed to impose
fascism.
In the twenty-first century postfascists use but do not depend on paramilitary
violence. They have accepted elections, particularly if they win, yet they have not
agreed to recognize the legitimacy of political rivals. They use religious and
cultural tropes to build enemies of the purity of the people. Differently from
political enemies who could be defeated and contained, ethnic-religious enemies
might need to be segregated, marginalized, expelled, or even murdered.
The following sections explore the similarities and differences between these
isms, and contrast how they eroded or abolished democracy. They distinguish
when fascists and populists challenge power, get to office, and can bring regime
change. The text uses complex definitions to focus on fascists’ and populists’
ideologies, organizations, styles of communication, and performances.

3 Similarities
Sections 3 and 4 focus on the similarities and differences between fascism and
populism. This contrasts the political logic that constructs democratic subjects
accepting pluralism and the confrontation between political rivals whose
demands could be solved within existing institutions, with the populist and
fascist logic that builds popular subjects. Under the latter a plurality of demands
merges, and the social is divided into a confrontation between two antagonistic
camps (Laclau 2005). To solve these demands, a rupture of the institutional
system might be needed. When contrasted with the political logic of liberal
democracy – its legitimation, beliefs, strategies, and practices – fascism and
populism give the impression that they are quite similar in how they construct
the people as a unitary actor, their notion of leadership as embodiment, and their
understanding of politics as extraordinary moments of change, renewal, and
liberation. Section 4 will show that, despite these similarities, they are funda-
mentally different because of their use of violence, legitimation strategies, and
historicity.

The People
Fascism and populism are not external viruses that attack democracy from afar;
they are part of modernity and the democratization process, and reactions to
what are perceived as failures. Fascism and populism offer alternatives to liberal
notions of representation. Fascists believe that “genuine democracy was based
on identity between the governors and the governed – a principle from which it
followed that the popular will could be concentrated in one individual, making
a dictatorship such as Mussolini’s a much more credible expression of democ-
racy than liberal parliamentarism” (Müller 2011: 116). The Nazis gave facism
a racial, more exclusionary, and radical interpretation. “The leader had
a mystical connection to his people, but ultimately, he did so because they
were of the same ‘racial stock’ united against an enemy race and its universalist
ethical beliefs, which could only weaken the Volks’ authentic will” (123).
Populists combine the idea that the leader embodies the people and their will
with the notion of the centrality of elections as the only legitimate route to get to
power. Their reasoning is that because the leader is like the people but inher-
ently superior, the people will only vote for their truthful embodiment, and if
electoral results do not conﬁrm their beliefs, it is because elections were rigged.
The concept of the people is ambiguous and yet central to democracy,
nationalism, fascism, and populism. “The people” is not an empirical reality
located out there waiting to be discovered and analyzed. As Laclau (2005)
wrote, “the people” is a social construct that could be imagined differently. This

highly emotional term has been used to refer to all the population of a nation or
a wannabe nation imagined as a political community in opposition to other
nations. Sometimes the nation is attached to the soil, to immemorial times with
ancient roots in language, culture, religion, race, or ethnicity that differentiate
the truthful members of a national community from “the other” who does not
really belong to the homeland. Often the other is imagined as a threat to the
rightful members of the people because they could contaminate or soil the purity
of their culture, religion, or ethnic and racial makeup. When religion, race, and
culture are used to demarcate the in-group from the out-group, there is always
the possibility of violence. The politicization of the fear of pollution often leads
to the dehumanization of the other or, worse, to genocide. The most extreme
examples of the consequences of these constructs were the Nazis’ genocide of
Jews, gypsies, and other groups racialized as inferior, and Mussolini’s brutal
colonial wars. Similarly to fascism, but without its genocidal violence, the
radical populist right uses religion and culture to construct the other as
a polluting threat. In India, Europe, Israel, and the US the Muslim is imagined
as the other; in Turkey and Israel the enemies are secular elites; for Trump it is
illegal aliens mostly coming from Latin America, and so on.
An alternative construct of “the people” differentiates the rightful citizens
who work and produce from parasitical others who appropriate the fruits of the
citizens’ labor. The opposition then becomes against the few who have monop-
olized and used economic resources, politics, and culture to marginalize,
exploit, or take advantage of the many. Emotions of envy and resentment are
used by leftist populists all over the world to depict enemies as oligarchical
parasites or as the caste that has appropriated all resources.
Elites loathe and fear the people when imagined as the poor, those at the
bottom of society, because the concept of the people evokes strong pictures of
the irrational crowd and of the dangerous masses. The notion of the poor
denotes a position of “inferiority and subordination, an ascription of lowliness
that relegates the poor to a lesser part of society, at the bottom of social life”
(Kalyvas 2019: 542). They are constructed as the plebeian, the low, the inferior,
the outcast, those lacking education, manners, worth, and merit.
In Argentina in the 1940s, recent immigrants from the interior of the country
were despised by upper- and middle-class folks as “greasers” and “little dark
heads” (cabecitas negras), meaning the “low,” nonwhite, and uneducated
sectors of the population. The plebeians are those whose voices do not count,
who are misplaced and unseen. In “Ten Thesis on Politics” Rancière (2010: 38)
wrote, “If there is someone that you do not wish to recognize as a political being,
you begin by not seeing him as the bearer of signs of politicity, by not
understanding what he says, by not hearing what issues from his mouth as

discourse.” He had previously argued, “The patricians do not see what is

coming from the mouths of the plebeians are articulated words speaking of
common things, and not growls of hunger and furor” (Rancière 2000: 12).
Alternatively, the poor and the plebeian could be portrayed as the mythical
bearers of virtue. José Álvarez Junco (1987: 251–253) quoted historian of the
French Revolution Jules Michelet’s exaltation of the people as the “embodiment
of two treasures: first is the virtue of sacrifice, and second are instinctual ways of
life that are more precious than the sophisticated knowledge of the so-called
cultured men.” He also reminds us that Mikhail Bakunin wrote, “The people is
the only source of moral truth . . . and I have in mind the scoundrel, the dregs,
uncontaminated by bourgeois civilization.”
The notion of the people oscillates between passivity and activity, the female
and the male. The people could be portrayed as the submissive object of abuse
and women-like because of their passivity. Or the people could be constructed
as the virile embodiment of national-popular values and the opposite to effem-
inate elites. As political theorist Paula Diehl (2023) argues, populism and, I will
add, fascism, share in the democratic imagination, offering to transform the
passive people into the active bearers of collective national virtues.
Populism and fascism offer a voice to those whose ability to speak does not
count, those whose voices appear to the ears of elites as mere noise. Both are
transgressive of the proper way of doing politics, and of whom has the educa-
tion, manners, and speech capacities to participate in the public sphere. Roger
Eatwell (2007: 8) writes, “Hitler used a form of low rather than high language,
the discourse of ordinary people rather than the grandiloquence of the political
Establishment.” Borrowing from Pierre Ostiguy (2017: 76), populists and
fascists perform “the celebratory desecration of the ‘high.’ They ‘flaunt the
low’ to show the illegitimacy of the domination of elites, and the artificiality of
their symbols of distinction in their ‘manners, demeanors, way of speaking and
dressing, vocabulary, and tastes displayed in public’” (78).
Fascists and populists conceive the people hierarchically as made up of
leaders and followers. “The people” has one voice and will that ultimately is
that of the leader. Under fascism and populism, a leader claims to be the
embodiment of the popular, the plebeian, and national values. Fascist and
populist leaders offer their protection and to be the voice of the marginalized,
the oppressed, and the uncounted in exchange for their loyalty and devotion.
Differently from populism or fascism, democratic plebeian politics and cultures
of resistance are bottom up, leaderless, and based on the disunity of the voices of
the many (Breaugh 2019; Kalyvas 2019). Drawing on Rancière, Benjamín
Arditi (2015: 102–104) suggests analyzing the people as an event, an unex-
pected eruption of collective action by means of which those who are not seen

and do not have a recognized and legitimate voice demand to be heard as equals
in the public sphere. The people as an event refers to those occasional moments
when those at the bottom and whose voices do not count say they have had
enough and refuse to accept their place “when that place wrongs their equality”
(106). Such an event differs from populist and fascist politics because it is
plural, leaderless, and bottom up.
Democrats, fascists, and populists construct differently the notion of the
people’s will. Political theorist Paulina Ochoa (2015: 74–75) writes that demo-
crats use notions of self-limitation and in the name of the people place limits on
their claims to be their spokespersons. They conceive of the people as indeter-
minate, accept “that the people can (and probably will) change,” that their
“appeal to the people’s will is fallible, temporary, and incomplete.”
Democrats acknowledge that their “claims may be wrong and accept political
defeats.” On the contrary, the fascist leader is the bearer of the infallible truth.
Fascists abolish elections, replacing them with plebiscitary ceremonies of
acclamation. Populists do not abolish democracy because their legitimacy lies
in winning elections. Yet they contend that because they are the only truthful
voice of the people, they do not need to limit their claims. They “assume that the
will of the mythical ‘people’ is transparent, ﬁxed in time, and available for
a leader to incarnate its will” (de la Torre 2015: 20).
Fascists and populists (right and left) build the people-as-one as “an absolute
collective individual with a single will, transparent to itself” (Kalyvas 2019:
547). The assertion that populism constructs the people-as-one is contested by
scholars who differentiate right and left populism in terms of whether they
construct a unitary or plural people. Paola Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia (2021:
35) differentiate right-wing populism, which they call postfascism because they
imagine the people as one, from populism in the singular, which is left-wing
populism because the people “is not a unit understood as a self-enclosed identity
that expels differences.” These scholars conveniently forget that, under leftist
populism, at times of confrontation the leader appropriates the claim to be the
only voice of the people. After winning a referendum against drastic cuts in
social services and government expending, Alexis Tsipras, the leader of Syriza,
capitulated to the demands of the Troika and imposed severe budget cuts in
2015. Under Evo Morales, the constitution was changed to recognize Bolivia as
a pluri-national state composed of different Indigenous original peoples, as well
as whites, Afro-descendants, and mixed-blood citizens. When Indigenous
people challenged Morales’s policies of natural resource extraction, they were
labeled as not truly Indigenous and manipulated by foreign NGOs (Postero
2015). In sum, fascist and populist leaders and their coterie name who belongs
to the nation and the people, and spell out the traits of the popular.

Notions of peoplehood inform nation-building projects and policies. The

allure of fascism is its “message of national renewal, powerfully linking fear
and hope” (Kershaw 2015: 230). The unity, even the identity, of the nation is
gained “from the ‘cleansing’ of all those deemed not to belong” (229). Fascists
use militarism and terror to get rid of internal enemies who corrupt the nation
such as communists, Jews, and other undesirables, and war to conquer living
space, as did the Aryan Germans so they could colonize Eastern Europe and as
did the Italians so they could take Libya and Ethiopia.
Latin American populists in the 1940s and 1950s imagined the nation as
mestizo, meaning cultural and racial hybrids of white, Indigenous, and black.
They saw that their role was to slowly assimilate Indigenous people, Afro-
descendants, and mixed-race poor people to a nation that over time would become
increasingly culturally and racially white. The notion of mestizaje was thus an
exclusionary project of inclusion as nonwhite cultures needed to be abandoned to
become a member of the mestizo nation. Mestizaje, particularly in Brazil, led to
the myth that Latin American nations were democracies free of racism.
Women’s role under fascism and populism was to reproduce and morally
educate healthy members of the nation. Their policies supported maternity and
child beneﬁts for large families. Fascists and populists created organizations to
teach women their responsibilities in reproduction, education, and consumption.
They opened job opportunities in female service and teaching professions, while
creating party branches for women. The Nazis’ women’s section had more than
2 million members in 1938 (Passmore 2014: 128). The women’s section of the
Peronist party boasted 500,000 members, and women massively voted for Perón
and his ticket in 1951 after Perón gave them the right to vote (Plotkin 2003: 179).

Leadership
The question of leadership has been at the center of fascist and populist
scholarship. Whereas some scholars have focused on the social conditions
that produce charisma (Germani 1978; Parsons 1942), others have focused on
the charismatic bond (de la Torre 2022; Eatwell 2007; Pappas 2021; Pinto and
Larsen 2007; Zuquete 2007, 2008). Parsons (1942: 138) wrote that rapid social
change led to “widespread psychological insecurity and anxiety. Charismatic
movements of various sorts seem to function in the situation as mechanisms of
reintegration which give large number of common people imbued with a high
emotional, indeed often fanatical zeal for a cause.” Parsons and Germani
differentiated rational action from anomic and irrational action provoked by
rapid social change or catastrophes that broke down social integration. Hence
organization and rational action are the opposites of disorganization under

which charismatic leaders appeal to and mobilize disorganized and irrational

masses in a state of anomie. Approaches that reduce emotions to irrational
responses were criticized by scholars who focus on organizations and political
opportunities.
When studying charisma, the challenge is not to reduce followers to irrational
masses or charisma to the attribute of an individual. In what follows, I rely on
reconceptualization of the charismatic bond (Eatwell 2007; Pinto and Larsen
2007; Zuquete 2007, 2008) and on my reconstruction of Weber’s notion of
charisma as a social relationship (de la Torre 2023). Eatwell distinguishes
contagion charisma based on an intensively emotional bond with a leader,
from coterie charisma, “the attraction to a hard core of supporters, both in
their inner courts and more locally, who have held that the leader was driven
by a special mission and/or that the leader was invested with unique powers”
(Eatwell 2007: 15). I focus on the redemptive mission of the leader and on the
body of the leader in order to study charisma as a social relation. Differently
from Parsons and Germani, these approaches do not counterpose charisma to
organization. On the contrary, they argue that to be successful, charismatic
appeals need to coincide with organizations.

The Redemptive Mission of the Leader

Differently from rational bureaucratic leaders whose legitimacy lies in their
ofﬁce, “the bearer of charisma enjoys loyalty and authority by virtue of
a mission believed to be embodied in him” (Weber 1978: 1117). Followers
project onto leaders their own beliefs, wishes, and desires. Pinto and Larsen
(2007: 133), in their conclusion to their book on fascism and charisma, wrote:

[E]very fascist dictator had to possess some individual abilities that made
them “extraordinary.” He needed followers to “understand” or “appreciate”
and connect these qualities. Finally, there must be a situation or an event that
which required these unusual abilities, or which could “call” for the recon-
struction of the regime in such a way as to allow the application of new
solutions to problems.

The missions of leaders are “often linked to a foundation myth, in which

leaders like Mussolini portray themselves as the creators of radical new move-
ments” (Eatwell 2007: 6). Similarly, Perón claimed to have developed justicia-
lismo and Chávez’s socialism of the twenty-ﬁrst century as alternatives to
communism and liberal capitalism. The leader must prove charismatic “in the
eyes of their adherents” (Weber 1978: 1112). Hitler led Germany “from the
depths of a depression to full employment” (Mosse 1999: 38). Mussolini and
Hitler reached the peak of their popularity in 1935–6 when Italy conquered

Abyssinia and in 1939–41 when Germany occupied most of Europe (Eatwell

2007: 10). When Hugo Chávez in a televised broadcast accepted his responsi-
bility for leading an unsuccessful coup attempt in 1992 against President Carlos
Andrés Pérez, he became the symbol of the struggle against the corrupt neo-
liberal political establishment. Venezuelans subsequently voted massively for
Chávez in December 1998.
Charismatic leaders invoke and are linked to myths. Some myths are reli-
giously inspired; others are more secular. Hitler used Christian symbols such as
“the resurrection of the German Reich,” the “blood of martyrs,” and constant
appeals to Providence (Mosse 1999: 74). His mission was to restore Germany’s
greatness. He manufactured an aura of divine infallibility. Hitler, for example
claimed, “I hereby set forth for myself and my successors in the leadership of the
Party the claim of political infallibility. I hope the world will grow as accustomed
to that claim as it has to the claim of the Holy Father” (Finchelstein 2024: 76).
Donald Trump triumphed in two mythical and almost religious arenas of
American capitalism: the business world and mass entertainment. His name
was a brand for casinos, steaks, hotels, and other commodities. He was a media
celebrity hosting the TV series The Apprentice for fourteen seasons, and before
winning the presidency he was a regular host on Fox & Friends.

The Body of the Leader

Weber (1978: 1112) wrote that charismatic leaders are “bearers of speciﬁc gifts
of the body and mind that were considered ‘supernatural’ (in the sense that not
everybody could have access to them).” Contemporaries referred to “the pier-
cing power of Mussolini’s eyes” and were “mesmerized by Hitler’s power of
oratory” (Eatwell 2007: 9).
After reaching power the body of the fascist or populist leader becomes
omnipresent. More than a thousand ﬁlms and newsreels were made that feature
the Führer (Eatwell 2007: 13). Similarly, in Argentina, Juan and Eva Perón were
constantly in the newsreels, their images were on billboards and posters, and their
voices were on the radio. Chávez had a weekly six-hour TVand radio program in
which he sang, cracked jokes, attacked internal and external enemies, and
informed citizens about crucial policies. Donald Trump’s image was everywhere
as well. He dominated the news cycle and was constantly on social media.
Some leaders bragged about the hypermasculinities manifested in their
success in sports, in the business world, in the military, or as “conquerors” of
women. Some were portrayed as fathers of their nations. Getulio Vargas
claimed to be “the father of the poor,” while Lázaro Cárdenas was “tata
Lázaro.” The father metaphor “turns citizens into permanent children. It turns

a politician into someone who understands the interests of citizens – even when
they do not – and who may punish wayward children who fail to recognize their
wisdom” (Kampwirth 2010: 12).

Extraordinary Politics, Mass Meetings, and the Charisma of Rhetoric

Fascists and populists offer redemption from the routines of day-to-day admin-
istrative politics that lay in the hands of bureaucrats and experts. Under fascism
and populism politics is performed, imagined, and lived as extraordinary
moments of redemption against bureaucratized and banalized ordinary politics.
Mass meetings are the arenas in which the leader is recognized and acclaimed
by followers. These are the sites for “the recognition on the part of those subject
to authority which is decisive for the validity of charisma” (Weber 1978: 242).
With the repetition of songs, slogans, and banners, mass meetings aim to create
political identities or to at least differentiate the in-group from the out-group. In
these meetings the people validate the authority of the leader and create
horizontal links of belonging to a camp against a series of enemies.
Mass meetings were a key fascist innovation that inﬂuenced Latin American
populists. When Juan Perón, José María Velasco Ibarra, and Jorge Eliécer
Gaitán lived in or visited Italy and Germany, they attended, were inspired by,
and emulated Mussolini’s and Hitler’s mass meetings. Populist leaders under-
stood politics as the people’s participation in mass meetings, their occupation of
public spaces, and demonstrations on behalf of a leader. Mass gatherings
became crucial mechanisms to create horizontal links. The French National
Front and later the Rassemblement National, for example, organized rituals to
build a community of militant believers. These included a yearly tribute to Joan
of Arc, the celebration of the colors of France, summer schools, mass rallies,
and feasts. These rituals reinforce feelings of belonging. For its activists the
Front is a community of patriots under siege by the enemies of the fatherland.
They play key roles in mobilizing the vote and spreading the party’s ideology.
Their duty is not only to convince but to convert. Jean-Marie Le Pen asserted
that the militant “has to recruit others who in turn recruit others in order to make
a snowball that will end up being the majority” (Zúquete 2007: 104).
Contrary to predictions that mass meetings will disappear with television and
social media, Donald Trump’s 2016, 2020, and 2024 campaigns made ample
use of mass rallies. He claimed to be “the only man without a guitar that can ﬁll
a stadium” (Wolff 2021: 201). His rallies resembled sport events where people
had fun at tailgate parties. Trump danced, cracked jokes, insulted rivals, and
used violent words and incitation to attack opponents.

Weber (1978: 1130) wrote that stump speeches prioritize rhetoric over
content and are “purely emotional.” Rhetoric “has the same meaning as the
street parades and festivals: to imbue the masses with the notion of the party’s
power and confidence in victory and, above all, to convince them of the leader’s
charismatic qualifications.” Weber also differentiated between scientific and
political speeches. “The enterprise of the prophet is closer to that of the popular
leader (demagogos) or the political publicist than that of the teacher” (445).
Building on Weber, José Álvarez Junco (1987: 220) wrote political discourse
“does not inform or explain, but persuades and shapes attitudes . . . It responds
to areas of disquiet and problems, it offers reassurance.” Since the goal is to
motivate people to act, “well-reasoned arguments are less useful than emotional
appeals” (Álvarez Junco 1990: 234).
To be successful in performing politics as extraordinary moments of change
and renewal, charisma needs to go together with organizations. Mussolini and
Hitler came to power with the support of an extensive network of uncivil society
made of war veteran organizations, extreme nationalists, and other undemo-
cratic groups (Eatwell 2007). When leaders do not form organizations, their
movements vanish after their death. José María Velasco Ibarra was president of
Ecuador five times, dominating politics from the 1930s to the early 1970s. He
finished only one term in office because he was overthrown by military coups,
yet he returned four times to office as the “Great Absentee.” Instead of creating
a political party, he gathered the support of politicians and their clientelist
networks and did not create organizations seeking the endorsement of existing
associations of civil society. Hence, after he died, Velasquismo evaporated (de
la Torre 2010). Differently, Perón co-opted or repressed labor leaders to create
his own coterie. He organized a political party and put together a women’s
branch. His movement did not die with him, and when allowed by the military
left, right-wing Peronists have dominated Argentinean politics.
Nationalism, fascism, and populism advocated for a “democracy of the
masses in which the people would in theory directly govern themselves”
(Mosse 1999: 2). Fascism inaugurated “a new a new kind of politics designed
to mobilize the masses and to integrate them into a political system – through
rites and ceremonies in which they could participate, and through an aesthetic of
politics which appealed to the longing for community and comradeship in an
industrial age” (92). Populists combined a rhetoric that portrayed the people as
antagonist to elites or the oligarchy with collective action to intimidate oppon-
ents and to show the power of the people. Populist followers occupied public
spaces from which they were often marginalized; they did not consider that
political rivals have the right to express themselves, and they silenced such
rivals. The legacy of the populist incorporation of those previously excluded as

the people, while empowering the many, went against the rights of expression
not only of the few, but of any critic of the leader who could be transformed into
an enemy. As in fascism their participation in mass meetings gave them the
sense of their transformation from spectators into protagonists of their own
history. Yet, similarly to fascism the script was written by the leader and at most
by some of his close collaborators.
Fascism and some populisms create political religions understood as offering
redemption through politics. They offer “a comprehensive set of meanings, but
also spectacles and rituals, which competed with those of the Catholic Church in
particular” (Müller 2011: 113). As Arato (2015) wrote, the power left vacant by
theological or religious categories like God or Christ is replaced by human
agents such as class in Marxism, and the people and the leader in fascism and
populism. These human agents are not only endowed with the category of
sacredness but are credited with supernatural traits. “Hitler frequently talked
about himself as an instrument of ‘Providence,’ and some of his orations about
‘faith in my Volk’ actually concluded with the word ‘Amen’” (Müller 2011:
113). Hitler was a leader for life. He was “the leader of the party, the army, and
the people. In his person the power of the state, the people, and the movement
were unified” (Neumann 1944: 84). Joseph Goebbels said that Hitler is “the
naturally creative instrument of divine destiny” (Finchelstein 2024: 58). One of
the thousands of letters sent to Mussolini every day portrayed him as godlike.
“For us Italians you are our God on earth, and we turn to you faithful and certain
of being heard” (Kershaw 2015: 281).
Juan and Eva Perón were similarly transformed into religious figures. Evita
asserted that “Perón is a God,” while Peronists professed that “God is Peronist”
(Finchelstein 2014: 80). Hugo Chávez became the synthesis of Jesus and Simón
Bolívar, the liberator of Latin America. González Trejo (2018: 139–141) writes
that after his death, Chávez was buried in a newly built secular sanctuary that
“symbolizes the renaissance of the homeland and the immeasurable life of the
Eternal Commandant.” Chávez’s coffin has the inscription “Supreme Commander
of the Bolivarian Revolution.” Above his sarcophagus in the center is a portrait of
Bolívar the Father with one of Chávez his Son on its right and left sides.
When Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed during the presidential campaign in 2018,
his Pentecostal, Christian, and Catholic followers prayed for his prompt recov-
ery, and “religious leaders said that God had protected Brazil’s savior” (de la
Torre and Srisa-nga 2022: 32). Christian fundamentalist followers constructed
Trump as God’s emissary, a quasi-providential conductor destined to save
America. His White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said, “I think God
calls all of us to fill different roles at different times, and I think he wanted
Donald Trump to be president” (Finchelstein 2020: 92). One of Trump’s

Christian supporters maintained, “Millions of Americans believe the election of

President Donald Trump represented God giving us another chance – perhaps
our last chance to truly make America great again” (94). Trump argued in 2016
that because his leadership comes from the divine, this is “a struggle for the
survival of our nation, believe me. And this will be our last chance to save it.”
His election, he said, represented “our Independence Day” (97). His 2024
campaign released a video entitled God Made Trump.

God had to have someone willing to go into the den of vipers. Call out the
fake news for their tongues as sharp as a serpent’s. The poison of vipers is on
their lips. So God made Trump. God said, “I will need someone who will be
strong and courageous. Who will not be afraid or terriﬁed of wolves when
they attack. A man who cares for the ﬂock. A shepherd to mankind who won’t
ever leave or forsake them. I need the most diligent worker to follow the path
and remain strong in faith. And know the belief in God and country.3

If leaders are portrayed as godlike, enemies become dehumanized and the

embodiment of pollution, of all that is wrong, even evil. The Nazis made their
fantasies about their enemies come true.

If anti-Semitic lies stated that Jews were inherently dirty and contagious and
therefore ought to be killed, the Nazis created conditions in the ghettos and
concentration camps where dirtiness and widespread disease became reality.
Starved, tortured, and radically dehumanized, Jewish inmates became what
the Nazis had planned for them to become and were, accordingly, killed.
(Finchelstein 2024: 59)

Conclusions
This section focused on some of the parallels between these isms. Other
similarities could be added and explained such as their claim to offer a third
way of development that overcame the failures of both communism
and capitalist-liberal democracy, or their assertions to be beyond right–left
binaries. As in the 1920s and 1930s when conservative elites normalized and
sanitized fascists, inviting them to form coalition governments under the false
assumption that they would tame their radicalism, conservative elites are
forming coalitions with the extreme right in the twenty-ﬁrst century. In the
1920s and 1930s Italian and German elites invited fascists to the executive
ofﬁce. Republican elites allowed Trump to become a candidate and refused to
get rid of him even after his supporters used violence to storm Congress. The
Argentinean right-wing party Together for Change joined Milei in the runoff

3
www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/opinion/trump-god-evangelicals-anointed.html.

election against the Peronist ticket, and its former presidential candidate Patricia
Bullrich and other ﬁgures of the “respectable right” are in key ministries.
Historian Robert Paxton (1998: 10) writes that comparison “works better
when we try to account for differences than when we try to amass vague
resemblances.” The similarities between fascism and populism analyzed in
this section make sense when contrasted with how liberal democrats understand
key categories of political life like the people, leadership, or their notion of the
political. Democrats understand politics as based on pluralism and the nonan-
tagonistic confrontation between political rivals who ought to be convinced by
the logic of the best argument. Differently, fascists and populists face and/or
built existential enemies. The notion of the enemy that ought to be contained
leads to a political logic that gives priority to confrontation and polarization and
that aims to get rid of the other. The next two sections will show that despite
sharing a non-pluralistic view of politics, performances of politics as extraor-
dinary moments of renewal, views of the people as one, and leadership as the
charismatic mission to bring redemption, these isms are profoundly different.

4 Differences
Despite the aforementioned resemblances, fascism and populism are distinct
political phenomena. The rise of Juan Perón in Argentina helps illuminate their
differences. As mentioned in the introduction, when Perón first got to power in
1943 he was a member of a pro-Axis junta that wanted to Christianize the
country, making Catholic education mandatory, repressing the left, and banning
political parties. The junta was supported by a web of Argentinean clerical-
fascist and nationalist groups. As the secretary of labor, he used repression and
co-optation to replace independent labor leaders with a cadre of sympathetic
bosses, sponsored unionization, and met some union demands. Perón ditched
fascism when he realized that after the defeat of the Axis, elections were the
only mechanism to legitimately get to power. Even though he admired
Mussolini, he said fascism was “an unrepeatable phenomenon, a classic style
to define a precise and determined epoch” (Finchelstein 2017: 12). In 1946
Perón won the presidency in an open and clean election. Differently from
fascists, Perón kept violence for the most part at the rhetorical level. I write
for the most part because his supporters tried to burn newspaper buildings and
churches and beat up rivals in the streets, and his regime incarcerated oppon-
ents. Yet compared to fascism, state violence was lighter. When Perón was
overthrown by the military, these juntas were much more repressive than his
administration. Differently from fascists, populist did not use generalized
violence to eliminate enemies and relied on elections as the only legitimate

tool to get to ofﬁce, meaning that rights to information and association were
constrained but not abolished.
This section focuses on their different uses of violence and their strategies of
legitimation, and argues that whereas fascism emerged in a particular historical
constellation and that what came after was postfascism, populism cannot be
conﬁned to a particular historical moment.

Violence and the Construction of Friend and Enemy

Even tough populists and fascists imagined the people as one, and right-wing
populists like fascists used ethnic-cultural and religious constructs; these move-
ments differed in their use of violence to deal with external and internal
enemies. Fascists “idealized war as the laboratory of a form of civilization
organized by the total state and embodied in the new humanity that emerged
from the trenches” (Traverso 2016: 99). Their objective was to rebuild the
nation by violently getting rid of enemies, and by taking revenge against
those responsible for the humiliation of the motherland. The carriers of the
cleansing of enemies and the regeneration of nation were the new fascist men.
They ought to be “energetic, courageous, and spartan . . . the very opposite of
muddleheaded, talkative, intellectualizing liberals and socialists – the
exhausted, tired old men of the old order” (Mosse 1999: 31). Fascist virility
was opposed to “all symptoms of decadence: weakness, cowardice, immorality,
ugliness, monstrosity” that characterized the Jewish and homosexual outsiders
(Traverso 2016: 210).
Fascists’ supporters and leaders were young. Many were former frontline
soldiers who had become “immune to the horrors of war” (Mosse 1999: 15) and
wanted to use warlike methods against internal enemies “that must be defeated and
destroyed” (Gentile 2008: 292). When violence was successful in silencing and
terrorizing enemies and was unpunished, it “had both cathartic and a liberating
effect on the perpetrator . . . reinforcing their collective sense of being a segregated,
hardened elite, beyond conventional standards of behavior” (Mann 2004: 29).
Fascist violence had its origin in the biologically racist dehumanization of the
nonwhite native as an inherently inferior and primitive other during colonialism
and imperialism (Traverso 2003). European intellectuals provided rationaliza-
tions for colonial and racist projects, and for the genocide of nonwhite popula-
tions. Historian Enzo Traverso reports that during the second half of the
nineteenth century approximately 50–60 million died as victims of imperialist
and colonialist violence and genocide. For example, the population of the
Belgian Congo was cut by half from 20 million to 10 million between 1880
and 1920 (65).

Michael Mann (2004: 16) distinguishes political cleansing whose violence

ends when the enemies surrender from ethnic cleansing that leads to the
genocide of ethnically defined enemies constructed as agents of pollution and
hence as inassimilable. If the people understood as an ethnos is to rule itself,
then what to do with those casted as essentially different and even as polluting
because of their ethnicity, religion, and culture? The search for “ethnic unity
might outweigh the kind of citizen diversity that is central to democracy” (3).
Franz Nuemann (1944: 103) writes that long before Hitler, a “biological race
theory replaced the political theory of nationality.” Racism and anti-Semitism
substituted for class struggle. “By heaping all hatred, all resentment, all misery
upon an enemy who can easily be exterminated and who cannot resist, Aryan
society can be integrated as a whole” (125). Nazism was a unique and more brutal
form of fascism because of its extreme biologization of anti-Semitism and its
insistance on the need to eliminate the Jew to regenerate the nation (Traverso
2003). For the Nazis, the image of the Jew incorporated constructs of a racially
distinct other and a carrier of the disease of “Communist subversion.” Hitler
referred to the “Jewish bacillus” as a hotbed of revolutionary infection, arguing
that repression alone was inadequate unless it also included a racial purge
(Traverso 2003: 120). Anti-Semitism became a violent crusade to eliminate the
Jew to purify the nation and to free it from Communism. Nazism, as Traverso
(150) writes, was a synthesis of science, irrational myth, and various forms of
violence. The Jewish genocide was “conceived and realized as part of a total war,
a war of conquest that was both ‘racial’ and colonial, and extremely radical” (75).
Fascist violence emerged in a political and cultural milieu in which both left
and right praised revolutionary physical force to get rid of parliamentarism in
order to create a better society. It also took place at political conjunctures when the
state could not or was unwilling to impose its monopoly over the use of violence.
Fascist paramilitary groups were tolerated by the state and used by elites to
confront and defeat the threat of Bolshevism. Praise for violence was also
expressed in political theory. Carl Schmitt’s notion of the political did not identify
violence with a pre-political state of nature but transformed it into the very core of
the political that was defined as the existential conflict between friend and enemy,
always implying the possibility of death. “The essential task of politics for
Schmitt is not to hide but to develop conflict” (Traverso 2016: 199). As Franz
Neumann (1944: 45) wrote, “This is a doctrine of brute force in its most striking
form, one that sets itself against every aspect and act of liberal democracy and
against our whole traditional conception of the governance of law.”
Populist violence was different. Perón described himself as a “herbivorous
lion,” meaning that his violent tropes against enemies remained, for the most
part, at the rhetorical level (Finchelstein 2020: 100). Yet symbolic and verbal

violence was used to ridicule, marginalize, and force critics into silence or exile.
Populists also used physical violence beating up opponents, and even tried to
destroy the symbols that marked their exclusion from the public sphere that
were in the hands of elites like universities and newspaper buildings in Perón’s
Argentina. From Perón to Chávez, Latin American populists could beat up,
incarcerate, or exile enemies, but they did not rely on violence to clean their
nations of enemies.
American populists like George Wallace and Donald Trump performed mass
meetings in which violence could be a possible outcome. In Wallace’s unsuc-
cessful bids for the presidency in 1964, 1968, and 1972, “violent antagonism
played a particular strong role . . . the threat, and anticipation, and performance
of which was central to his image and success” (Lowndes 2005: 148). In a 2016
campaign rally, pointing to a critic, Trump said, “There is a remnant left over
there. Maybe get the remnant out. Get the remnant out. The crowd, taking its
cue, then tried to root out other people who might be dissenters, all the while
crying ‘USA’” (Snyder 2017: 45). In another he said, “‘I’d like to punch him in
the face.’ ‘Knock the crap out of him, would you? I promise you I will pay the
legal fees’” (Hochschild 2016: 224).
Differently from the populist performance of the possibility of violence used
to create feelings of comradeship among supporters under the tutelage of
a leader, Trump and Bolsonaro took violence to a new level when they refused
to accept that they lost elections and their followers took over the symbols of
state power. Did these actions show that the boundaries between fascism – or, if
you prefer, postfascism – and right-wing populism are becoming murkier and
there is a sort of a return to fascists’ use of violence? After all, Trump and
Bolsonaro, like interwar fascists, were supported by armed militias, but unlike
them, have not created militia parties.
Focusing on how enemies are constructed allows us to explore continuities
between fascist and populist violence. Finchelstein (2014: 41) shows how the
fascist-clerical notion of the total enemy “that must be expelled from the political
realm” was reworked by three authoritarian governments in Argentina: the
Uriburu dictatorship (1930–2), Peronism (1946–55), and the military dictatorship
(1976–83). The military junta built on the notion of the subversive as a total
enemy to systematically kidnap, torture, and kill about thirty thousand
Argentineans. Subversives were “seen as a virus that needed to be eliminated”
(Finchelstein 2014: 126). Thus they were put in concentration camps and tor-
tured, and their offspring taken away and given for adoption by military families.
The construct of “gender ideology” fabricated and popularized by the
Catholic Church, similarly to the notion of the subversive, allows for the
creation of an identiﬁable and perverse total enemy that is attempting to

destroy the nuclear, heterosexual, and patriarchal family conceived as the

basic and most fundamental unit of society. Pope Francis in 2014 talked
about the crisis of the family that, according to him, is “an anthropological
fact, and consequently a social, cultural fact . . . Family is family” (Butler
2024: 76). Gender ideology puts in the same basket different demands for
rights such as abortion, access to reproductive technology, sex education,
same-sex marriage, gender-conforming surgery, trans rights, etcetera. It
provokes the fear that “normal people” understood as gender conforming
and hetero will be stripped away from their status as “mother, father, man, or
woman, that such words will no longer be speakable,” or will be used “for
nefarious purposes” (255). When struggles against rights are framed with
words such as gender ideology, passions are intensified, “stoking fear and
redirecting it as hatred, moralizing sadism, and figuring their . . . destruction
as promise of redemption” (132). To protect the family, those who are
advocating for its destruction should be identified, stripped of rights, and
even expelled as carriers of a virus. Similarly, the image of the Muslim
immigrant in Europe and the illegal alien in the US evokes feelings of
invasion, contamination of culture, and pollution of mores. The other con-
structed as the carrier of strange cultures and religious beliefs, or as perverts
that aim to debauch the family become targets of repulsion, fear, and hatred
that ought to be chastened and even sacrificed to rebuild the nation.

Populist and Fascist Legitimacy

Fascist believed that “elections distorted true representation” (Finchelstein 2020:
82) because electoral representation could not express popular sovereignty. In his
critique of parliamentarism, Schmitt argued that “parliamentary discussion is
today nothing more than a device for registering decisions previously reached
on the outside” (Neumann 1944: 43), and proposed to replace it with decisionism,
“the demand for action instead of deliberation, for decision instead of evaluation”
(45). Differently from the plural citizens of a parliamentary democracy, who
“voted to choose a fellow citizen to serve as their representatives, fascists
expressed their citizenship directly by participating in ceremonies of mass assent”
(Paxton 2005: 78–79). “The general will of the people, if not mediated through
representative government, needed coherence, and political as well as personal
conformity were essential to the existence of such direct democracy” (Mosse
1999: 79). As will be described in the next section, after conservative elites
invited Mussolini and Hitler to be part of coalition governments, they outman-
euvered mainstream conservatives, got rid of elections, abolished civil liberties
and the free media, and used the state to try to swallow civil society.

For populists, the only legitimate source of power comes from clean elec-
tions, and even though they make it difﬁcult for rivals to win, they respect
outcomes. Populism incorporates the democratic principle that the only form of
legitimacy lies in the vote, with the view of democracy as participation in
ceremonies, demonstrations, and other mass rituals that create community,
belonging, and identity. These two understandings of democracy are in tension.
Whereas for free elections, civil liberties, pluralism, a free press, and rights of
association are a necessary precondition, populist mass meetings and cere-
monies create a sense of community and even identity among populists by
targeting enemies. Populists often do not respect the right of the other to have
different opinions and used physical violence to silence them. Yet, differently
from fascism, which physically eliminated enemies, populists keep their strug-
gles for the most part at the level of symbolic and discursive violence.
Populists reduce democratic accountability to the notion of clean elections.
After winning elections populist leaders feel free to do as they please. In the 1940s
Perón said, “We have given the people the opportunity to choose, in the cleanest
election in the history of Argentina, between us and our opponents. The people
have elected us, so the problem is resolved. What we want is now done in the
Republic of Argentina” (Peruzzotti 2013: 75). Populists conceive of state institu-
tions of horizontal accountability such as the comptroller, prosecutors, or anti-
corruption agencies as mechanisms of elite control that attempt to dilute the will
of the people (Peruzzotti 2023). They argue that in the name of controlling the
executive, elites undermine projects of democratization that infringe on the
privileges of the few. Populists have replaced mechanisms of horizontal account-
ability with other branches of government with “variants of ‘vertical accountabil-
ity’ involving frequent elections, referenda, and plebiscites” (de la Torre and
Arnson 2013: 10).
Democrats, fascists, and populists have different understandings of legitim-
ate power. In what follows I quote our most recent elaboration on their distinct
notions of legitimacy borrowing on and developing Claude Lefort’s theory.

In monarchies the king, like God, had two bodies and the two were insepar-
able. The king’s body was mortal, as well as immortal and eternal. Once the
body of the king and the body of the politic were decapitated during the
democratic revolutions of the 18th century, the space occupied by the reli-
gious political body of the king was opened. “Power appears as an empty
place and those who exercise it as merely mortals who occupy it only
temporarily or who could install themselves in it only by force or cunning.”
(Lefort 1986: 303)
The uncertainty of democracy, where power belongs to the people in the
abstract but not to a concrete individual who at most could occupy it only

temporarily, could lead to its destruction. The revolutions of the eighteenth

century, according to Lefort, also generated “from the outset the principle that
would threaten the emptiness of that space: popular sovereignty in the sense
of a subject incarnated in a group, however extensive, a stratum however
poor, and an institution or a person, however popular.” (Arato 2012: 23)

Totalitarianism, thus, “is an attempt to reincarnate society in the ﬁgure of

a leader or a party which would annul the social division and would realize the
fantasy of people-as-one, in which there is no legitimate opposition, where all
factual opposition is conceived of as coming from the outside, the enemy”
(Flynn 2013: 31). Symbolically, this is done by abandoning the democratic
imagination of the people as “heterogeneous, multiple, and in conﬂict” and by
living in a society where power does not belong to any individual (Lefort 1986:
297). Under totalitarianism, there are no internal divisions within the people.
The divide is between the people – imagined as having one identity and one
will – and its external enemies, which need to be eliminated to maintain the
healthy body of the people.

Populism aims to get rid of the uncertainties of democratic politics by naming

a leader as the embodiment of the people and nation. Yet this attempt is
different from fascism which abolished democracy altogether. The vote for
populists is the only tool to legitimately get to power, therefore democratic
uncertainty is not fully abolished. The populist imaginary thus lies between
democracy and fascist and Communist totalitarianism. The political theorist
Isidoro Cheresky (2015) argued that power in populism is semi-embodied
because populists claim legitimacy through winning elections that they could
conceivably lose and thus are bound to electoral results. (de la Torre and
Srisa-nga 2022: 107–108)

Because populists imagined the people as having one uniﬁed voice and will,
it is “morally impossible” that they could vote for those constructed as the
enemies of the people (Ochoa 2015: 83). When populists lose, or even if they
imagine that they won’t win elections, they cry electoral fraud or claim elections
were rigged. José María Velasco Ibarra, after losing an election in 1940,
organized a failed military insurrection that ended with his exile from
Ecuador; yet, after four years, an insurrection of the left and the right against
the liberal party brought him back to power as the “Great Absentee” (de la Torre
2010). Manuel López Obrador cried fraud the two times he lost elections
because, he argued, how could the people vote for another candidate? His
followers in protest took over the main streets of Mexico City for weeks
(Ochoa 2015). The question is, then, why do some populists abide by the
rules of the democratic game knowing that they can lose or win elections,
accept defeat, and transfer power peacefully, while others only accept elections

if they win? Perhaps, like other politicians they abide by the democratic rules of
the game when the stakes of elections are not high. But populists paint elections
as crucial moments when the destiny of the nation is at stake, and the choice is
between the rebirth of the people and the motherland or its downfall and
disintegration.

The Historicity of Fascism and Populism

Sociologist Mabel Berezin (2019: 356) wrote that these isms differ in that
“fascism is best conceived as a historical event, whereas populism is an analyt-
ical category.” Despite profound disagreements, scholars of fascism agree that it
was a particular moment in history – the interwar period of the twentieth
century – and that whatever came later was postfascism. Fascism was the
product of a unique conjuncture. First, fascism emerged after the horrors of the
First World War banalized death. Fascists exalted war as “the supreme moment
of life, exalting battle as a kind of fulﬁllment for man and for the triumph of
strength, speed, and courage” (Traverso 2003: 94). Second, as argued earlier in
this Element, the origins of fascist violence lay in the colonial and imperialist
invention of races to dehumanize, exploit, and even kill the nonwhite other.
Third, the Bolshevik Revolution was for many a major threat to the social order,
and fascists presented themselves as the only force capable of stopping com-
munism. Fourth, fascism emerged during a crisis of political representation and
popular consent of constitutional democracy. Right-wing and left-wing intellec-
tuals, activists, and citizens alike praised violence and dictatorship. Corporatism
was developed as an alternative form of representation to individualistic liberal-
ism, and as a “forced integration of organized interest, mainly independent
unions” (Pinto 2020: 7). The Catholic Church and its intellectuals and organiza-
tion diffused corporatism as a Christian answer to correct the excesses of liberal
capitalism, and as an alternative to atheistic communism. Fascist notions of
personalization of leadership, a single party, and organic-statist legislatures
were selectively adapted and adopted globally. Salazar in Portugal and Getulio
Vargas in Brazil used fascist parties to consolidate their power, to later repress
them, and to selectively adopt parts of the fascist playbook like corporatism
(Pinto 2020). Fascists got to power in states with weakened old regimes and
“half institutionalized democratic parliaments” (Mann 2004: 365). Facism
“emerged as a new and audacious synthesis, one that combined radical authori-
tarianism, militarized activism, and the drive for a coercive state, professing
a radical nationalist, imperialist, and racial creed, shaped by violent antipathy
against liberals, democrats and socialists” (Elley 2013: 208).

Differently from earlier historicist theories of populism that argued that popu-
lism took place during the transition to modernity or in the phase of import
substitution industrialization in Latin America, nowadays most scholars do not
restrict populism to a historical period. Populist movements and parties have
emerged in different socioeconomic, geographical, historical, and institutional
settings when citizens have felt that elites have appropriated popular sovereignty.
Populists have been elected to govern under different institutional conditions, and
in regimes with different levels of legitimacy. As will be explained in Section 5,
only when all institutions such as political parties, the courts of justice, parliament,
the media, etcetera, lost legitimacy and credibility were populists able to bring
regime change. Populists changed constitutions, took over courts, reduced the
power of parliaments, concentrated power in the executive, limited the rights to
expression and association, and used laws instrumentally to systematically punish
critics. Under these conditions they transformed democracies undergoing crises
into populist hybrid regimes. They were democratic insofar that they based their
legitimacy in the vote and maintained limited civil and political rights. They were
simultaneously authoritarian insofar as elections took place under skewed playing
ﬁelds, rights to expression and association were curtailed, and laws were used
against critics.

Postfascism?
After Trump’s and Bolsonaro’s elections, the term fascism returned to civic and
academic debates. This is not the ﬁrst time that the appropriateness of this
concept to characterize nondemocratic regimes has been debated. Latin
American Marxists argued that the military dictatorships of the 1960s and
1970s were fascist because they were anticommunist and had a middle-class
social base, and the monopoly faction of the bourgeoisie was dominant. Some
argued that the charismatic leader was replaced by a technocratic civilian-
military elite. Sociologist Theotonio Dos Santos (1977: 190) concluded his
article by assuring readers, “The threat of fascism is the fundamental political
problem in Latin America.” In the same issue of Revista Mexicana de
Sociología, Agustín Cueva (1977) noticed that fascism could assume different
forms and that the nations of the Southern Cone – Brazil, Argentina, and Chile –
experienced a different type of fascism. Like under classical fascism, monopoly
capital was dominant; it was terrorist and anti-working class, and emerged when
capitalism was in crisis. Yet this fascism was not the same. It was not nationalist
because of Latin America’s dependency, and differently from classical fascists,
Augusto Pinochet and other military leaders mobilized their middle-class sup-
porters in the streets at the moment of the coup, only to later deactivate them.

The Marxist structuralist theory of fascism that focused on the acute eco-
nomic crisis of capitalism, on the dominance of monopoly capital, and on the
argument that its social base was made up of the petty bourgeoisie has several
problems. These interpretations can become ahistorical when all repressive and
authoritarian governments are labeled as fascist. Structuralist approaches do not
take fascist beliefs into account. Facism’s social base cannot be reduced to the
middle class because it appeals to all classes. Some also neglected fascist
leadership, and as George Mosse (1999: 37) wrote, “discussing the movements
without the leaders is rather like describing the body without the soul.”
Historians, as argued earlier in this Element, situate fascism in a particular
historically bounded constellation of events. Important changes illustrate that
what came after fascism is different. First, when former fascists accepted that
elections ought to be used to get to power, facism became a different ism that can be
described as radical right populism or as postfascism. Second, biological racism
was replaced with cultural forms of racism. Culture is understood with essentialist
criteria as rooted in the territory, language, and religion of an ethnic group. Each
ethnicity, it is argued, has cultural rights, and to try to assimilate people of different
cultures is an attack on human diversity. Scholars of the Nouvelle Droite hence
propose to stop immigration of ethnic groups who have their own religion, culture,
mores, or ways of being. They argue that in the name of multiculturalism global
elites seek cheap labor. Therefore, at least theoretically, they do not advocate for the
extermination of the essentially culturally different other who ought to stay in the
soils where it belongs. Yet what to do with the descendants of immigrants? Are
they unassimilable because culture, like biology, is an essence? Third, they do not
support similar policies or share similar notions about gender and sexuality. Some,
especially in the Americas but also Vox in Spain and Giorgia Meloni in Italy,
consider that gender ideology, abortion, same-sex marriage, and LGTBQ+ rights
are causing moral decay, lowering white birth rates, replacing natives with non-
white immigrants, and destroying the heterosexual nuclear family. Others, like
Marine Le Pen, embrace LGTBQ+ and gender rights, arguing that immigrants
from Muslim nations aim to impose their traditional morality in states built on
notions of laïcité. Fourth, differently from the fascist era when the interventionist
and strong state was put at the center of economic policies, nowadays the radical
populist right-winger or postfascist proposes different roles for the state in the
economy. Some European leaders and parties propose to strengthen the welfare
state for natives only. Jair Bolsonaro promoted neoliberalism, while Javier Milei
was a libertarian. Donald Trump at the same time endorsed neoliberalism at home
and restricted free trade and globalization.
Roger Grifﬁn (2020: 205–209) distinguishes three postfascist families: Nazi
hot spots, fascist terrorists, and identitarians. The latter emerged in France in

2012 and have sprung up all over Europe and the United States. José Pedro
Zúquete (2018: 38, 42) in The Identitarians writes that for them “everything is
political”; their militancy is a way of life with “the goal of retaking territory and
reconquering minds and souls.” They argue that the “new class war of the
twenty ﬁrst century, is, and will be, between the people (still territorialized,
still attached to traditions) and the globalist (and therefore rootless) elites, as
a cosmopolitan hyperclass at the center of a cosmocracy” (Zúquete 2018: 126).
In the US, their most common name is the alternative right or simply alt-right.
They became well known during Trump’s ﬁrst presidential campaign when
Steve Bannon became the executive chairman of the Breitbart News
Organization, claiming that it would be “the platform for the alt-right” (Wolff
2018: 138). Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton forcibly denounced Bannon,
Breitbart, and the alt-right in these terms:

This is not conservatism as we have known it. This is not Republicanism as

we have known it. These are race-baiting ideas, anti-Muslim and anti-
immigrant ideas, anti-woman – all key tenets making up an emerging racist
ideology known as the “alt-right” . . . The de facto merger between Breitbart
and the Trump campaign represents a landmark achievement for the alt-right.
A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party. (Green
2017: 213)

Her words were prophetic as an array of alt-right militants, right-wing

militias, and believers of conspiracy theories such as QAnon stormed the
Capitol Building in an attempt to cleanse it of corrupt, pedophile, and evil
politicians and to reinstate their hero, Trump, to ofﬁce because, they argued, the
election was stolen.

Conclusion: Populists, Wannabe Fascists or Postfascists?

Andrea Mammone (2015) wrote that the word populist normalizes and sanitizes
extremist antidemocratic actors. New terms are perhaps needed to understand
the permutations of the radical right when its members stopped accepting
electoral results they dislike and promoted violence against enemies con-
structed as the total other because of their race, ethnicity, religion, or culture.
Federico Finchelstein argues that nowadays radical right populists are abandon-
ing populism and becoming wannabe fascists. Like their predecessors, wannabe
fascists glorify violence, use racism and xenophobia to construct enemies,
replace historical truths with lies, and have switched “from generic rhetoric
about the enemy (the elites, traitors, deep state, outsiders, etc.) to the speciﬁc
naming of racial, political, and/or sexual, and/or religious foes who are then met
with political violence” (Finchelstein 2024: 85). However, these leaders are not

fascist because they have not descended to terror to get rid of their enemies or to
dictatorship – at least not yet. Filchelstein’s provocative argument focuses more
on the actions and ideologies of leaders, stressing their lack of an uncomprom-
ising fascist will that explains why they have remained in the limbo between
authoritarian populism and fascism. He also considers historical, structural, and
institutional factors that have constrained wannabe fascists from fully following
the path of their predecessors.
Enzo Traverso (2019) developed a complementary structuralist interpretation.
He argues that to have fascism, a leader is not enough because a mass movement
is also required. He proposes that the twenty-ﬁrst century is a new historical and
unstable constellation different from the one that allowed fascists to get to power
in the 1920s and 1930s. The character of racism changed from biology to culture,
anti-Semitism did not disappear but muted into Islamophobia, and the extreme
right accepted features of democracy like elections. Perhaps under this new
constellation fascism will remain aspirational. If this is the case, their effects on
democracies will be different from classical fascism that ended up replacing it
with dictatorship. Wannabe fascists or postfascists, like populists, will probably
undermine democracy from within. Geoff Eley (2023: 56) argues that even
though classical fascism was a unique historical event, the authoritarian projects
of the radical right are similar because, like fascist projects, they aim “to silence
and even murder . . . opponents rather than arguing with them; prefer an authori-
tarian state over democracy; [and] pit an aggressively exclusionary idea of the
nation against a pluralism that values and prioritizes difference.”
The next section focuses on the conditions that allow semi-democratic forces
to replace democracy with dictatorship, and the different outcomes of the
conﬂicts between two antagonistic camps under various institutional and struc-
tural conditions that could but do not necessarily lead to the slow death of
democracy.

5 Fascism, Populism, and Democracy

It was previously noted that fascism and populism are not external viruses that
invade and attack democracy from outside, and that they are rather possible
outcomes of processes of democratization. Yet their effects are different. There
is a consensus that shows how fascists in power abolished civil liberties and
pluralism, attempted to control organizations of civil society, and got rid of the
open public sphere. There is no such census on populism and democratization.
Whereas, for some, populism in power slowly undermines democracy by
concentrating power in the presidency and restricting rights of information
and association (Weyland 2019), for others, it is the road to democratize

political systems that are ruled by technocratic elites on the back of people’s
sovereignty (de Benoist 2018; Mouffe 2018). Yet defenders of populism differ
in the type of populism they advocate. For the left, the people of populism ought
to be conceived as the plebs who are exploited and/or marginalized by elites
(Mouffe 2018). Right-wing scholars claim that populists are defending the
people understood as rooted in territories, immemorial histories, languages,
and religions from global elites. They argue that multiculturalism and immigra-
tion are destroying the people and the nation (de Benoist 2018: 357). Yet
differently from the left that proposes to use the state to reduce inequalities,
the right is divided between market-oriented proposals and welfare chauvinists
who aim to use the welfare state for nationals only.
I focus on the effects of fascism and populism on democracy, looking at the
interactions between two camps in moments when the political is understood as
the struggle between friend and enemy. Fascists and populists thrive on polar-
ization and antagonistic confrontation between two camps. Whereas fascists
aim to eliminate the other camp using warlike methods, populists do not go as
far and try to contain and marginalize but not to kill enemies.

The Fascist End of Democracy

Hitler and Mussolini did not get to power with coups or by winning elections.
They were invited by conservative elites to form coalition governments in
nations in which the state was weak, unwilling or unable to maintain order
due to strong polarization in the streets and political deadlock. Between 1919
and 1922 there were six changes of government in Italy, and in 1919–20, during
the biennio rosso, the country experienced takeover of private property, includ-
ing the occupation of factories in Turin in 1920 (Kershaw 2015: 135). The
specter of Bolshevism was becoming a real possibility, and fascists were
perceived as the only organized group that could use violence and terror to
reestablish law and order. The fear of communism also inﬂuenced the Catholic
Church. Pope Pius XI was convinced that communism was worse than fascism,
and he was indifferent to political liberties (Paxton 2005: 108). German soldiers
and workers established councils in major cities, and the right responded
violently with a coup attempt in 1919 and Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch in
Bavaria in 1923 (Bermeo 2003: 36). Violence that was “endemic in taverns and
gathering spaces of all sorts eventually became the regime’s undoing” (36). Six
national ballots were held in Germany between May 1928 and November 1932
(38). Italy and Germany experienced the deadlock of constitutional govern-
ments “(produced in part by the polarization that the fascists abetted); conser-
vative leaders who felt threatened by the loss of their capacity to keep the

population under control at a moment of massive popular mobilization; an

advancing Left; and conservative leaders who refused to work with that Left
and who felt unable to continue to govern against the Left without further
reinforcement” (Paxton 1998: 17).
Having been invited to form coalition governments by King Victor Emmanuel
and by Paul von Hindemburg, Mussolini and Hitler outmaneuvered their allies
and turned democratic regimes in crisis into dictatorships. Whereas it took three
years for Mussolini to control the Italian state and, afterward, to deal with the
power of the king, Hitler established his total domination of Germany within six
months. After the fire at the Reichstag, Hitler used laws that empowered him to
govern by decree for four years. When the laws expired in 1937 Hitler extended
them for another five years. Franz Neumann (1944: 52) argues that “the Enabling
Act represented the most radical departure from the principles of liberal constitu-
tionalism.” All legal protection of speech, assembly, property, and personal
liberty were suspended, “permitting authorities to arrest suspected ‘terrorists’
(i.e. communists) at will, and gave the federal government authority over the state
government’s police power” (Paxton 2005: 107). Open terror against opponents
was the main method of taking control, alongside heavy pressure to comply with
the new regime (Kershaw 2015: 214).
In Italy the struggle between Mussolini, his party militants, and the conserva-
tive establishment was more gradual. The kidnapping and assassination of social-
ist leader Giacomo Metteotti by squadrists finally led Mussolini to mobilize the
fascist militia so as to abolish parties, civil liberties, and the free press. By early
1927 Italy had become a one-party dictatorship (Paxton 2005: 109–110).
After concentrating power fascists got immersed in a four-way struggle for
dominance among “the leader, his party (whose militants clamor for jobs,
perquisites, expansionist adventures, and the fulfillment of elements of the
early radical program), the regular state functionaries such as police command-
ers and magistrates, and the traditional elites – churches, the army, the profes-
sions, and business leaders” (Paxton, 1998: 18). Despite its constant flux,
fascism “left the distribution of property and the economic and social hierarchy
largely intact” (Paxton 2005: 141).
Duplication of lines of authority explains the chaotic and shapeless lines of
authority in fascism, which was nonetheless concentrated in the leader as the
center that mediated or provoked conflicts and divisions to reign supreme. In
Italy, for example, “the local party chief flanked the appointed mayor, the
regional party secretary flanked the prefect, the Fascist militia flanked the
army and so on . . . After the Nazi Party attained power, the parallel organiza-
tions threatened to usurp the functions of the army, the Foreign office and other
agencies” (Paxton 2005: 124–125). The Nazi state fragmented into a normal

state that upheld traditional positive legality – meaning citizens could get
married or be convicted of murder according to normal law – and
a prerogative state that enacted arbitrary rules such as who was a member of
the nation-state and who had rights (Müller 2011: 119).
Federico Finchelstein studied the texts of fascist theorists and the declar-
ations of leaders and activists to argue that the fascist dictatorship was not
conceived as a temporary event. Rather it was imagined as permanent and
personalized in an almost divine leader. Their justiﬁcation was “that if the
leader truly and permanently embodied the people and the nation, there was
no need to put the one-man leadership into question” (Finchelstein 2024: 160).

Populisms and the Possible Slow Death of Democracy

Differently from fascists, who were ideologically committed against parliamen-
tary democracy, populists pledged to fight to improve it. However, despite their
claims to be real democrats, populists in office, regardless of their ideological
self-identification, eroded democracies worldwide in the twenty-first century.
Several chapters in the Routledge Handbook of Global Populism illustrate
patterns of democratic backlash in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas
(Filc 2019; Levistsky and Loxton 2019; Lowndes 2019; Mietzner 2019;
Resnick 2019; Rivero 2019). When religious-ethnic constructs are used to
define the people, the result is that nonbelievers or members of other religions
are excluded or targeted as polluting the purity of the people and the national
community, as illustrated in Narendra Modi’s India, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s
Turkey, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, or Donald Trump’s United States. Other
populists like Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, Michael Sata in Zambia, or
Hugo Chávez in Venezuela included the politically, economically, and cultur-
ally excluded with the condition of their loyalty and transformed political rivals
into enemies of the leader and the people.
The question, then, is: Under what conditions are populists able to replace
democracy with autocracy? Do populisms lead not only to democratic decline
but also to regime change? What are the institutional, economic, and supra-
national factors that explain democracy’s survival or its death?
Political scientist Kurt Weyland (2019) provides the first answer by differen-
tiating two routes by which populists have historically eroded democracy. The
first is that, when they closed institutional channels to the opposition, its most
reactionary sectors plotted military coups. The history of Latin America from
the 1930s to the 1970s oscillated between populists in power and military coups.
After the third wave of democratization shaped the international community to
accept elections as the only tool to name and remove presidents, coups became

more costly (Bermeo 2016). The successful military interventions in Thailand

against Thaksin in 2006 and Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014 are the exception and
not the rule to displace populists from office. Nowadays, as Weyland and others
argue, populism often leads to slow democratic erosion. Whereas it is relatively
easy to point to the events, the dates, and the actions that led to the death of
democracy with a fascist coup in Italy after the assassination of Giacomo
Matteotti or the Nazis’ abolition of democracy with the Enabling Act of 1933,
it is more complicated to point out the thresholds when a liberal democracy in
crisis becomes a populist hybrid regime (democratic-authoritarian), and when it
becomes competitive authoritarian (Peruzzotti 2022).
When populists get to power, they enter confrontations with non-populist parties
and associations of civil society, as well as with national and supranational institu-
tions. If populists prevail in these conflicts, they transform democracies in crises
into populist hybrid regimes, meaning that populist regimes have democratic and
authoritarian characteristics. They are in the democratic camp because elections are
used as the only legitimate mechanism to get to office. For free elections to take
place, the rule of law protects fundamental rights to information and association or
at least ensures that these rights are not severely curtailed. Hybrid regimes simul-
taneously belong to the authoritarian camp because political rivals are considered
existential enemies. Populists claim to represent and to even embody a section of
the population while excluding other sectors using ethnic criteria or their position in
the social structure, and because a leader is built into the sole authentic and
authorized voice of the people. The coexistence of formal democratic rules and
autocratic methods “creates[s] an inherent source of instability” (Arato and Cohen
2022: 148). Hybrid regimes either democratize or become fully authoritarian. In
what follows, the different aftermaths of the possible confrontations between
a populist in office and the non-populist camp are outlined. This differentiation
does not imply a teleological argument that populism will inevitably end up in an
electoral autocracy; it rather aims to illustrate the indeterminacy of political
confrontations between two camps that see each other as enemies.
Political scientist Julio Carrión (2022) uses the term Hobbesian moment to
analyze the struggles between populists in office versus the non-populist camp
in these decisive and uncertain critical junctures. Their confrontations could
lead to four different outcomes: (1) successful or failed coup attempts; (2)
supranational institutions that tame populists; (3) successful resistance of the
non-populist camp (parties, social movements, state bureaucrats who have
loyalty to their position and not to a politician) that allows for the survival of
a delegitimized democracy; (4) regime change and transformation of the con-
stitution and electoral rules by the winning populist camp.

(1) Persistence of the Military Coup Temptation

Polarization could induce radicalized sectors of the opposition to try a military
coup in order to stop the populists – a risky action indeed in a new international
constellation that does not favor military takeovers. When coups failed as in
Venezuela (2002) or Turkey (2016), the outcomes led to the further radicaliza-
tion of populist leaders and their projects. After the miscarried coup attempt,
Hugo Chávez adopted socialism of the twenty-first century as a new model of
direct democracy and of state-led development. The opposition tried a general
strike to oust Chávez. Later it used elections to unsuccessfully attempt to
replace him. Following Chávez’s death, his handpicked successor, Nicolás
Maduro, was elected president in 2013 but lost congressional elections to the
opposition in 2015. Maduro subsequently ruled by decree, called for a new
constitutional assembly to take power away from the opposition-controlled
legislature, and used brutal repression. Venezuela is no longer a democracy
(López Maya 2018).
As in Venezuela, a coup was used in Turkey to try to get rid of a polarizing
president, and its aftermath led to further democratic erosion. This was the first
coup attempt that was stopped by citizen’s mobilization. Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan, the leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), won the
parliamentary elections of 2002, and since then, AKP has always won at the
polls. Erdoğan entered conflicts with two players of the establishment with veto
power who wanted to preserve the legacies of the Kemalist secular state: the
military and the judiciary. The aftermath of the failed coup of 2016 led to 40,000
arrests and the suspension of “approximately 125,000 military officers, civil
servants, judges, prosecutors, police officers, teachers, and academics”
(Altinordu 2019: 33). Erdoğan used the state of emergency to rule by decree
and to call for a constitutional referendum in 2017 that transformed Turkey’s
parliamentarism into a presidential system and “to the de facto and de jure rise
of a competitive authoritarian regime” (Baykan 2018: 253).

(2) Supranational Institutions

The second possible outcome is that supranational institutions restrain popu-
lists. Whereas supranational organizations were not able to control Hugo
Chávez, Alexis Tsipras and his party, the Coalition of the Radical Left
(Syriza), surrendered to the demands of the International Monetary Fund, the
European Central Bank, and the Council of Europe. Tsipras’s campaign pledged
to resist austerity policies and the demands of foreign creditors. Once in ofﬁce
after winning a referendum, he capitulated to the demands of the Troika in

July 2015. Syriza became a party of the establishment as its radical populist
promises evaporated.

(3) Temporary Defeat of the Populist Camp

A third outcome occurs when non-populist parties, social movements and other
organizations of civil society, and state officials who see themselves as servants
of the the state and not of a politician resist and ultimately overshadow populist
proposals of regime change. Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro faced the
resistance of the judiciary, the legislative, state officials, political parties in the
opposition, and mobilized citizens. Trump was constrained by a system of
checks and balances and stronger institutions. Polarization “of the two-party
system limit[ed] Trump’s popular support and guarantee[d] intense opposition”
(Weyland 2020: 399). His policies, style, and rhetoric energized the Democratic
Party and brought a coalition of all those who were fed up with him. After losing
the 2020 election, he was unable to get institutional support for his claims that
the election was rigged. He asked his supporters to stop the steal and save
democracy on January 6, 2021. America’s democracy survived, but polarization
has deepened and his loyal followers have lost trust in elections and the
institutions that guarantee their fairness. Trump won the 2024 election, promi-
sing to strengthen the executive branch and to overhaul federal bureaucracies to
get rid of the “deep state.”4
Similarly, Jair Bolsonaro, who called himself the Trump of the Tropics,
“tested the fabric of Brazilian democracy” (Hunter and Power 2023: 137), but
in the end democracy prevailed and the military did not give a coup. Bolsonaro
was barred from running for office for eight years by Brazil’s highest electoral
court, yet his movement remains strong.

(4) Populist Hybrid Regimes

A fourth outcome was the establishment of populist hybrid regimes in
Venezuela under Chávez, Orbán’s Hungary, Erdoğan’s Turkey, and Ecuador
under Correa. These leaders defeated the opposition that became demoralized
and were able to bring piecemeal regime change that resulted in an inﬂated
presidency. Following Nancy Bermeo’s (2016: 10) analysis, executive aggrand-
izement “occurs when elected executives weaken checks on executive power
one by one, undertaking a series of institutional changes that hamper the power
of opposition forces to challenge executive preferences.” According to Kurt
Weyland, two sets of institutional and external opportunities need to coincide:

4
www.donaldjtrump.com.

(1) institutional weakness provides “an opening for the populist suffocation of
democracy”; (2) external stimuli such as an acute yet resolvable crisis or “a
country blessed by huge hydrocarbon windfalls” (Weyland 2020: 390). By
institutional weakness Weyland means frameworks that facilitate these trans-
formations, altering electoral rules or constitutions that could be modified
easily. Electoral rules that allowed disproportionate majorities to a winner
gave Viktor Orbán an opening in Hungary in 2010. A year later his followers
approved a new constitution that increased prime ministerial powers and weak-
ened liberal safeguards. Another manifestation of institutional weakness is
when violations of institutional rules are common and do not bring sanctions.
Chávez and Correa disregarded existing legislation on how to modify the
constitutions of their nations. After constituent assemblies drafted new consti-
tutions that were approved in referenda, transitory councils dominated by the
populist coalition were formed and tasked to replace electoral authorities,
judges, and officials in charge of the institutions of horizontal accountability.
They followed their task and replaced independent officers with regime cronies
(de la Torre and Ortiz 2016; Hawkins 2016).
External opportunities such as a grave but manageable crisis or mineral
commodities windfall permitted these leaders to further increase the power of
the executive. Orbán successfully dealt with a deep economic crisis (Weyland
2020: 397). Venezuela and Ecuador were rich in hydrocarbons and reaped huge
benefits from the commodity boom of the 2000s that catapulted oil and natural
gas prices to record levels.
One can recognize a populist hybrid regime when (1) elections are not free
and fully competitive, (2) when freedom of expression and association are
systematically curtailed, and (3) when laws are used instrumentally to serve
the interests of the incumbent (Arato and Cohen 2022: 136). Democracies
polarized by populists could not last for long periods of time because of their
view of the political as an existential struggle between two camps where
citizens, organizations of civil society, and even bureaucrats have to pick
sides. In addition, populist sources of legitimacy are paradoxical: free elections
together with views of the people as one and a leader as a savior. At the same
time that populists use elections to get to power legitimately, they consider that
they and only they should win them since they are the only real representatives
of the authentic people. Because the mission of the leader is the people’s
liberation from oppressive elites, they do not feel constrained by institutions
and norms, as these are considered tools of the elites to control the people.

(5) Competitive Authoritarianism

Hybrid regimes could become competitive authoritarian when incumbents
control the institutions of horizontal and vertical accountability. Elections
under competitive authoritarianism cease to be mechanisms of accountability
but become “instead a mechanism of regime reproduction. They serve to
legitimize the extraordinary aggrandizement of executive power” (Carrión
2022: 180). Competitive authoritarian regimes do not meet minimal democratic
credentials and are forms of electoral autocracy in which “the formal demo-
cratic institutions exist and are meaningful, but in which incumbents abuse and
skew the playing field to such an extent that the opposition’s ability to compete
is seriously compromised” (Levitsky and Loxton 2019: 336). Despite the
difficulties to defeat incumbents, the opposition tries hard even though it
often fails, as in Hungary (2022) or Turkey (2023) (Esen and Gumuscu 2023;
Scheppele 2022). But when an incumbent such as Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela
tilts the playing field so heavily that he can no longer lose elections, that regime
“has become effectively a single party state” despite appeals to popular sover-
eignty (Arato and Cohen 2022: 151).
Political scientists use the concept of competitive authoritarian regimes to
describe Erdoğan’s regime after the coup (Baykan 2018), and right- and left-
wing populist administrations such as those of Alberto Fujimori, Rafael Correa,
Hugo Chávez, and Evo Morales in Latin America (Levitsky and Loxton 2019).
This category focuses on the strategies of populists in power and the resulting
institutional design. Researchers could use this category to study how populist
polarization and the transformation of rivals into enemies could lead to the slow
death of democracy. However, competitive authoritarian regimes are not homo-
geneous (Cameron 2018). Whereas Alberto Fujimori did not mobilize sup-
porters, Hugo Chávez created participatory forms of democracy at the local
level and mobilized followers. To correct overgeneralizations of the use of the
term, scholars could develop subtypes that differentiate processes of participa-
tion, inclusion, and innovation.

Conclusions
Nancy Bermeo (2003: 221) concludes her classic volume Ordinary People in
Extraordinary Times by demonstrating that political elites were responsible for
democracy’s demise. In Italy and Germany elites invited fascists to the execu-
tive under conditions of polarization in the streets, constitutional deadlock, fear
of an imminent communist revolution, their unwillingness to rule in coalition
with the moderate left, and their arrogant assumption that they could control
fascist leaders. They were outpowered by fascists, yet traditional elites

preserved their economic power and social position. History could have had
different outcomes if elites did not try to use fascist movements and their leaders
to get rid of the left. Political and some economic elites continue to normalize
and sanitize radical right populists or wannabe fascists when they invite them to
be part of coalition governments, or when they allow them to take over a major
conservative party such as the Republican Party in the United States. If elites
were the culprits who caused the end of democracy during the interwar period,
currently they are allowing reactionary leaders and their movements to erode
democracy, or collaborating with them. It is an open question if the military and
other elites will follow political, economic, and media elites to allow them to
successfully bring about the demise of democracy.
When fascists or populists get to ofﬁce in polities with constitutional dead-
locks, civil confrontations that the state cannot or is unwilling to control, and
crises of democratic legitimacy there is the possibility of democratic backslid-
ing, even that the democratic government could eventually be replaced with
a dictatorship. But possibility is not the same as inevitability. There is no
teleology that leads populism in power inevitably to killing democracy. Most
often various governments that are more or less democratic and authoritarian
have emerged. The gray area between democracy and autocracy is unstable and
governments democratize or become dictatorships. Weyland (2020) correctly
focuses on institutional arrangements and external stimuli such as a resolvable
crisis or oil and mineral windfalls to explain the few cases when populists were
able to bring regime change. Yet even when democracy has survived, populists
in ofﬁce have contributed to further delegitimize its institutions and norms –
particularly when they cry fraud if they lose an election, transform rivals into
enemies, and raise the stakes of elections as all-or-nothing confrontations.
Fascism is different from populism because it got rid of elections, used
widespread internal and external violence, and employed ceremonies of mass
assent as instruments of legitimation. For the time being, regardless of whether
we call them right-wing populist extremists, wannabe fascists, or postfascists,
these leaders, their movements, and their parties will continue to operate in the
democratic game while undermining the democratic legitimacy of procedures
and institutions. Whether the radical right will be willing and able to get rid of
democracy is unknown. Perhaps more democracies will move to the gray area
between authoritarianism and full democracies, or perhaps they will incremen-
tally move closer to the autocratic end, becoming “democraduras” (limited
political democracies) or “dictablandas” (soft dictatorships) (O’Donnell and
Schmitter 1986: 13). It is tempting to share Weyland’s optimistic conclusion
that only when populists govern under facilitating institutional conditions and
externalities do they bring about regime change, and that hence democracy will

not collapse in most nations of the world. But the elites’ normalization of the
radical right (often of fascist origins), the global diffusion of right-wing extrem-
ist populism, and the realization that, even when leaders like Trump or
Bolsonaro failed as presidents, they continue to have mass bases of supporters
who idolize them as redeemers could lead us to more pessimistic conclusions.

6 Conclusions
This Element started with a quote by George Mosse about the need for an accurate
analysis of the past in order to speculate about the future. Analytical categories,
concepts, definitions, and theories are hence crucial, and that is why this Element
discussed epistemological and analytical strategies. At present, and despite the
abundance of case studies and theoretical elaborations, there is no consensus on
what fascism or populism are or how best to define them. Perhaps we will never
reach a definitional consensus because these terms are not just analytical categor-
ies that are used by scholars in the ivory tower of academia, but words used in
political conflicts. Most pundits use populism to evoke images of irrationality and
danger to democracy. Fascism recalls a violent past that led to the genocide of
populations racialized as threats to the purity of the people. The use and abuse of
these emotionally charged words explain why there are periodic calls to ban them
from academic vocabulary, or to keep them as insults against whoever we dislike.
Abolitionism, however, does not solve the problem because, despite their ambi-
guities and semantic inflation, these categories are indispensable to try to make
sense of the past and to differentiate it from the present.
To create consensus, minimum definitions that could travel in time and space
were proposed. The first step was to locate them in a domain of social reality.
Next, to avoid fuzziness, they were contrasted with their opposites. Despite
their elegance and parsimoniousness, one-sentence definitions were declared
reductionist, considering key elements of fascism or populism as of secondary
importance. Griffin did not place violence as definitional of fascism, while
Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser imposed Eurocentric notions that a leader is
not central to the definition of populism. In sum they reduced these phenomena
to one of their key components. Complex definitions rely on the different
aspects of these isms such as ideology, communication style, and organizations
highlighted by minimum definitions. Scholars who use complex definitions are
not terrorized by fuzziness or gradations and accept the possibility that popu-
lism could turn into fascism or vice versa. Yet to be useful for comparative
analysis, they need to reduce the number of definitional components; otherwise
their definition might apply only to one or two cases. Federico Finchelstein, for

example, reduced the long list of traits of fascism listed in his book From
Fascism to Populism to just four in his volume The Wannabe Fascists.
If scholars can’t have the same opinion about definitions, perhaps they could
agree on what they do and on their practices to differentiate these isms and find
similarities. When compared to the logic of liberal democracy that produces
what Laclau (2005) names democratic subjects who accept compromise and
pluralism and operate within the bounds of existing institutions, populism and
fascism are similar because they share a political logic that produces popular
subjects whose demands cannot be fulfilled without the rupture of the existing
institutional system. Fascism and populism share similar constructions of the
people, leadership, and performance of politics as extraordinary moments of
change and renewal. The difference between liberal democrats and fascists and
populists, then, lies in different understandings of the political as based on
compromise, dialogue, pluralism, and incremental change, or as the struggle
between friend and enemy and the need to rupture exclusionary institutional
arrangements. Populism is a hybrid that shares with democracy the importance
of the vote, and with fascism constructs of the political as the antagonistic
confrontation between friend and enemy. Populists could be label as light
Schmidtian because they do not aim to physically eliminate the internal or
external enemy, and instead marginalize it and keep it alive to continue to argue
that they are struggling against oligarchical elites who refuse to allow change.
Nor are all populists the same because the left constructs the people as the
plebs, and the right uses cultural, racial-ethnic, and religious criteria to build it
as an ethnos. Similarly, not all fascists are the same. The extreme biologization
of race to construct the people and its enemies was unique to Nazism. Right-
wing dictators borrowed fascist policies like corporatism, using violence to deal
with enemies, and ideological glorifications of the nation, among others.
Focusing on practices and actions allows us to differentiate when fascists and
populists challenge the power of traditional elites, get to office, and try to change
the institutional and normative framework of democracy. When out of power they
promise real democracy to replace the failures of parliamentarism to represent the
people’s will and interests. Yet they use different strategies. Whereas fascists use
paramilitarism to fight against the left, racial minorities, and “perverts,” populist
violence is for the most part confined to words and symbolic action. Populists
thrive on polarization and often use violence to attack political enemies in public
spaces, the symbols of the power of elites like buildings where the media
operates, but without fascist paramilitary organizations and tactics.
Their different uses of violence are contextual and organizational. Classical
fascists formed paramilitary parties and emerged in contexts where violence
was used by the right and the left and the state had lost the capacity or

willingness to impose law and order. If the state has a monopoly on violence,
extremist groups could be contained. Yet as in the 1920s and 1930s, the radical
right is promoting paramilitary violence to stop the left in Brazil and the US.
Mussolini and Hitler were invited to the executive by political elites who
thought that they could domesticate their radicalism. Other elites joined in out
of fear of communism, but fascists outmaneuvered them while respecting their
property and status. Getulio Vargas and António de Oliveira Salazar used fascist
movements and parties to consolidate their grip on power, later repressing and
expelling them from office while adopting corporatism. Francisco Franco won
a civil war, killed and brutally repressed enemies, merged the Fascist Party with
other conservative groups, supported without committing to the Axis Powers in
the war, and during the Cold War joined the anticommunist camp. To get to
office, populists used open elections and some even struggled against electoral
fraud. Marginal elites allied with populists against well-established or trad-
itional elites. Nowadays, like in the interwar period, traditional political elites
have enabled right-wing radical populists, normalizing them by inviting them to
be part of coalition governments or, in the US, by allowing right-wing extrem-
ists to take over a major traditional party.
Whereas fascists undermined and eventually got rid of democracy, not all
populists want or are allowed to transform democracies in crisis into populist
hybrid regimes or, worse, competitive authoritarian regimes. Only under excep-
tional institutional settings and externalities were Chávez, Correa, Orbán, and
Erdoğan able to bring regime change. Transnational institutions or the resist-
ance of civil society, non-populist parties, and state officials outflanked popu-
lists in Greece, Brazil, and the US. Therefore, there is no teleology that leads
from populism to the death of democracy. Most often populists displace dem-
ocracies in crisis that already are in the gray area between democracy and
dictatorship, bringing them closer to the nondemocratic pole.
Classical fascism emerged in a particular historical milieu produced by the
First World War and the Russian Revolution, which resulted in crises of the state
and democracy. Fascism had leaders, paramilitary cadres, political parties,
organizations, publications, and the support of liberal professionals, intellec-
tuals, students, and mobilized followers in the streets. When fascists accepted
elections, renounced paramilitarism, and modified biological differences into
cultural racism, a new historical constellation was put in place. For the time
being actors, even those Finchelstein names wannabe fascists, claim to be
struggling for democracy even though their actions and words are plainly
authoritarian. Intellectual defenses of Schmidtian visions of the political such
as Chantal Mouffe’s (2018) propose to keep the struggle between friend and
enemy as an agonistic conflict that does not aim to physically eliminate the

other. It is an open question if the confrontation between friend and enemy could
be kept within limits, or whether agonistic politics that accept the right of the
enemy to exist will mute the antagonistic conflicts that could be resolved only
with the elimination of the enemy.
We are experiencing a global reemergence of the radical right with fascist
members who are learning from each other, sharing publications, and meeting
regularly both formally and informally. An advantage of using the term wan-
nabe fascists is to not allow for the normalization of antidemocratic extremists,
and to remind citizens that new and different forms of fascism could arise. It is
worth remembering that even though the Latin American military dictatorships
of the 1970s were not classical fascism, they inherited and built on fascist
notions of the total enemy. The military junta in Argentina put subversives in
concentration camps, tortured them, and gave their offspring for adoption to
military families. Similarly, narratives and images of the ethnic other as an agent
of pollution could lead to expelling the other from the nation and, in extreme
situations, to genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Flavio Gentile (2022: 14) writes that as long as the radical populist right
renounces violence and uses elections to try to legitimately get to office, they are
populists who are getting closer to fascism. They remain in the democratic camp
also because power is not permanently embodied in a leader, and populists do not
abolish democratic uncertainty as they must win elections that in theory could be
lost. The contested term populism is useful because it refers to a particular political
logic that manufactures enemies, uses reason and passions, and aims to bring back
the redemptive promises of democracy. Populisms vary according to how they
imagine the people, and its effects on democracy are not the same when challen-
ging the power of elites in office or bringing regime change.
Trump, Bolsonaro, and others might be wannabe fascists who are unwilling to
take their ideas to its final consequences or, more likely, they are operating under
a new international and intellectual milieu that does not accept dictatorship – at
least not yet. Our responsibility as citizens is to not enable politicians who
promise to restore the greatness of an imaginary nation clean of “perverts,”
political, and ethnic enemies. We ought to defend and demand the expansion of
rights, pluralism, and an open and democratic public sphere. If in the past political
elites caused the demise of democracy (Bermeo 2003: 221), citizens cannot allow
politicians of traditional right-wing parties to play with fire again, enabling and
normalizing radical right populists assuming that they could tame extreme
anti-democrats.

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Zúquete, J. P. (2007). Missionary Politics in Contemporary Europe. Syracuse,
NY: Syracuse University Press.
(2008). “The Missionary Politics of Hugo Chavez.” Latin American Politics
and Society 50 (1): 91–122.
(2018). The Identitarians: The Movement against Globalism and Islam in
Europe. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Florida, on 29 Jan 2025 at 13:27:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,
available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009528979
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to António Pinto and Federico Finchelstein for their invitation to
write in their series Elements in the History and Politics of Fascism, and to
colleagues and students for their comments. I also want to thank Oscar
Mazzoleni and the two anonymous reviewers for their observations on a ﬁrst
draft.

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available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009528979
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available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009528979
The History and Politics of Fascism

Series Editors
Federico Finchelstein
The New School for Social Research
Federico Finchelstein is Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and
Eugene Lang College in New York City. He is an expert on fascism, populism, and dicta-
torship. His previous books include From Fascism to Populism in History and A Brief History
of Fascist Lies.

António Costa Pinto

University of Lisbon
António Costa Pinto is a Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of
Lisbon. He is a specialist in fascism, authoritarian politics, and political elites. He is the
author and editor of multiple books on fascism, including (with Federico Finchelstein)
Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Europe and Latin America.

Advisory Board
Giulia Albanese, University of Padova
Mabel Berezin, Cornell University
Maggie Clinton, Middlebury College
Sandra McGee Deutsch, University of Texas, El Paso
Aristotle Kallis, Keele University
Sven Reichardt, University of Konstanz
Angelo Ventrone, University of Macerata

About the Series

Cambridge Elements in the History and Politics of Fascism is a series that provides
a platform for cutting-edge comparative research in the ﬁeld of fascism studies. With
a broad theoretical, empirical, geographic, and temporal scope, it will cover all regions
of the world, and most importantly, search for new and innovative perspectives.

Elements in the Series

Populism and Fascism
Carlos de la Torre

A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/CEHF

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Carlos de La Torre. 2025. Populism-And-fascism

Uploaded by

Carlos de La Torre. 2025. Populism-And-fascism

Uploaded by

DE LA TORRE

The elections of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, as well

Populism and Fascism

About the Series Series Editors

Cover image: Palazzo della civiltà italiana,

POPULISM AND FASCISM

Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment,

Elements in the History and Politics of Fascism

Abstract: The elections of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, as well as

This Element also has a video abstract: www.cambridge.org/delatorre

© Carlos de la Torre 2025

1 Introduction: Fascism or Populism? 2

2 Deﬁning and Explaining Fascism and Populism 11

5 Fascism, Populism, and Democracy 46

1 Introduction: Fascism or Populism?

four indictments, ninety-one felony charges, and convictions in thirty-four

dislike? Populism is used to categorize politicians and their followers as

In 2000, the FPÖ entered a coalition government with the conservative

Appeals to popular sovereignty could not be buried by design in a democracy.

The United States

ending terrorism, abused human rights, especially of peasant and Indigenous

Conclusion and Questions to Be Addressed in Future Sections

2 Deﬁning and Explaining Fascism and Populism

Minimum deﬁnitions have been criticized because they are reductionist. As an

Modernization, Mass Society, and Social Class

Germani was arrested by Mussolini’s police when he was a young antifascist

[A] society is integrated if there exists sufﬁcient correspondence between

Abrupt social change such as rapid urbanization, industrialization, or disloca-

Similarly, scholars of populism periodically propose to ban this term because

Roger Grifﬁn built on fascist self-interpretations to construct a minimum

From a Minimal Sartorian Deﬁnition to a Fuzzy Concept

and Salazar was built by state propaganda into a charismatic leader of

Performances and Communication Styles

Movements in Power and Regimes

discourse.” He had previously argued, “The patricians do not see what is

Notions of peoplehood inform nation-building projects and policies. The

which charismatic leaders appeal to and mobilize disorganized and irrational

The Redemptive Mission of the Leader

The missions of leaders are “often linked to a foundation myth, in which

Abyssinia and in 1939–41 when Germany occupied most of Europe (Eatwell

The Body of the Leader

Extraordinary Politics, Mass Meetings, and the Charisma of Rhetoric

Christian supporters maintained, “Millions of Americans believe the election of

If leaders are portrayed as godlike, enemies become dehumanized and the

Violence and the Construction of Friend and Enemy

Michael Mann (2004: 16) distinguishes political cleansing whose violence

destroy the nuclear, heterosexual, and patriarchal family conceived as the

Populist and Fascist Legitimacy

temporarily, could lead to its destruction. The revolutions of the eighteenth

Totalitarianism, thus, “is an attempt to reincarnate society in the ﬁgure of

Populism aims to get rid of the uncertainties of democratic politics by naming

The Historicity of Fascism and Populism

This is not conservatism as we have known it. This is not Republicanism as

Her words were prophetic as an array of alt-right militants, right-wing

Conclusion: Populists, Wannabe Fascists or Postfascists?

5 Fascism, Populism, and Democracy

The Fascist End of Democracy

population under control at a moment of massive popular mobilization; an

Populisms and the Possible Slow Death of Democracy

more costly (Bermeo 2016). The successful military interventions in Thailand

(1) Persistence of the Military Coup Temptation

(2) Supranational Institutions

(3) Temporary Defeat of the Populist Camp

(4) Populist Hybrid Regimes

(5) Competitive Authoritarianism

de la Torre, C. and C. Arnson. (2013). “Introduction: The Evolution of Latin

(2024). The Wannabe Fascists: A Guide to Understanding the Greatest

Hochschild, A. R. (2016). Strangers in Their Own Land: A Journey to the Heart

McClintock, C. (2013). “Populism in Peru: From APRA to Ollanta Humala,” in

Paxton, R. (1998). “The Five Stages of Fascism.” Journal of Modern History

(2010). Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Continuum.

Wolf, S. (2021). “A Populist President Tests El Salvador Democracy.” Current

António Costa Pinto

About the Series

Elements in the Series

A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/CEHF

Cover image: Palazzo della civiltà italiana,