Swarthout’s Reviews > From Fascism to Populism in History > Status Update

Populism is not a simple external response to elites and bureaucracies but is rather a criticism of democracy from within.

If more generally, dictatorship was rooted in a trinitarian notion of popular sovereignty, according to which the leader personally embodied the nation and the people—or as the fascists put it, one man, one people, one nation—corporatism provided a theory for regulating conflict in capitalism and under the supreme arbitration of the leader.

Fascists wanted to replace what they saw as mechanistic, repetitive, and involuntary modernity with a “qualified” modernity in which the fascist could tame matter and the economy.