Paxton (Citation2004:217) notes that while “authoritarian regimes often trample on civil liberties and are capable of murderous brutality,” authoritarian leaders “would rather leave the population demobilized and passive.” Fascists, on the other hand, aim to mobilize the passions of fascist followers and excite their revolutionary fervor. This is where the social phenomenon of “populism” comes into play. As Vysotsky (Citation2021) observes, populism pits the passions and grievances of the so-called common “people” against the out-of-touch “elites.” It provides the emotive mobilizing bridge between right-wing conservatism and fascism, broadening the appeal of fascism to create “a mass movement in the service of the fascist agenda” (p. 31; see also Tourish Citation2024).

　　In the United States, populism has its roots among disaffected farmers in the late nineteenth century who were concerned about falling crop prices and rising production costs. Their grievances were most pointedly directed at the excessive transportation costs and interest rates charged by railroad operators and bank lenders, respectively, and they called for greater government regulation of these industries. More broadly, however, particularly under the influence of historian Richard Hofstadter, the legacy of this early agrarian populism has been appropriated by scholars to refer not to a particular set of policies or organized political constituency but to a general political phenomenon that represents the common peoples’ outrage and resentment of self-serving economic, political, and cultural elites who they believe are ignoring, corrupting, and betraying the true ideals of the country (Berlet and Lyons Citation2000; Gilman Citation2018; Mudde and Kaltwasser Citation2017).

　　According to this view, populism has no particular partisan predilection and is more of a zeitgeist than a political ideology that can be attached to the “host ideology” of either the political left or right (Stenner and Haidt Citation2018:179). Nowadays, on the populist right, the elites include the politicians and professional bureaucrats who promote an intrusive “big government” that is trampling on the people’s freedoms, referred to as the “swamp” or “deep state,” along with the so-called mainstream media that propagate “fake news.” Right-wing populists also channel their resentments into a “culture war” against left-wing “woke” identity movements and the encroachment of urban cosmopolitans and secularists on their religious beliefs and way of life. Importantly, the functional equivalence of right-wing populism and fascism lies in the prejudices they share about racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, and other Deng Panyi

　　From:Fascism, American Style: Toward a Sociology of the Fascist Moment, Sociological Focus, Volume 58, 2025 - Issue 2