Populist Hierarchy

Fascism combines a rhetorical populism, the authentic people against corrupt elites, with a rigid hierarchical vision of the organic community. The "people" who are celebrated are not the universal citizenry but an ethnically, racially, or culturally defined subset.

Paxton emphasizes that fascism weaponizes democratic language (the will of the people, popular sovereignty) against democratic institutions. The contradiction is central: the leader embodies the people's will but is accountable to no democratic mechanism.

Social media platforms are structurally hospitable to anti-elite populism. The architectural equality of social media, any account can go viral, encodes a populist promise that is simultaneously democratic and demagogic. Political scientists Mudde and Kaltwasser (2017) note that social media has dramatically reduced the organizational and financial barriers to populist movements, enabling rapid mobilization outside institutional political structures.

The distinction between the authentic people and the corrupt elite is encoded in digital community formation: in-group and out-group dynamics are amplified by platform algorithms that recommend content aligning with existing beliefs. Tufekci (2017) documents how networked social movements can achieve massive scale of mobilization while remaining structurally shallow, susceptible to elite capture and authoritarian redirection because they lack the organizational infrastructure that historically forced democratic accountability.