Things not to conflate:
Election results and "support" Majoritarianism and "The People" Dissidents v. general popular indifference to policy matters Nazism as a movement and Nazism once in state power
Also, xenophobia does indeed seem to be a relatively universal human attribute, what needs to be "taught" is the target--just who, if anyone, is the "Other?" Xenophobia (the fear of or distaste for things that are unfamiliar or different) can be a short-lived reaction if there is an absence of demonization and scapegoating, and the presence of public symbolic leadership to expand the circle of "Us" to include "Them."
The idea that that elite propaganda was needed to promote antisemitism in interwar Germany is laughable. And the link with populist economic conspiracism is also clear. See: Postone, Moishe. (1980). “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to ´Holocaust.´” new german critique, no. 19, Winter, pp. 97–115. It discusses the false dichotomy between "parasitic financial capitalism" and "productive industrial capitalism" which many Germans turned into scapegoating of the Jews.
Roger Eatwell and Roger Griffin both write about how for many years in academia fascism as a mass movement often was not taught in favor of an overly-simplistic elite-imposed model. This model is clearly represented in the article on Facing History and Ourselves. The people who run Facing History, incidently, use the most reliable and persusive scholarship on the topics it covers, holding frequent high-level seminars with academics to critique their analysis. There is a new set of theories about fascism, other than just Fritzsche:
Griffin, Roger. (1991). The Nature of Fascism. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Eatwell, Roger, and Noël O’Sullivan (Eds.). (1989). The Nature of the Right: American and European Politics and Political Thought Since 1789. Boston: Twayne Publishers.
Griffin, Roger, ed. (1998). International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus. London, Arnold.
The new basic thesis is that fascism is a form of "palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism."
Here is a thumbmail summary, along with Matthew Lyons article "What is Fascism" at:
http://www.publiceye.org/eyes/whatfasc.html
Fascism is a distinctive revolutionary form of right–wing populism, and both share a tendency to scapegoat demonized enemies, often in the form of complex conspiracist theories....
Right–wing populism can act as both a pre-cursor and a building block of fascism, with anti–elitist conspiracism and ethnocentric scapegoating as shared elements. The dynamic of right–wing populism interacting with and facilitating fascism in interwar Germany was chronicled by Peter Fritzsche in Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany. Fritzsche showed that distressed middle–class populists in Weimar launched bitter attacks against both the government and big business. This populist surge was later exploited by the Nazis which parasitized the forms and themes of the populists and moved their constituencies far to the right through ideological appeals involving demagoguery, scapegoating, and conspiracism.
“The Nazis expressed the populist yearnings of middle–class constituents and at the same time advocated a strong and resolutely anti–Marxist mobilization. . .. Against “unnaturally” divisive parties and querulous organized interest groups, National Socialists cast themselves as repre-sentatives of the commonweal, of an allegedly betrayed and neglected German public. . .. [b]reaking social barriers of status and caste, and celebrating at least rhetorically the populist ideal of the peo-ple’s community. . .”
This populist rhetoric of the Nazis, focused the pre–existing “resentments of ordinary mid-dle–class Germans against the bourgeois ‘estab-lishment’ and against economic and political privilege, and by promising the resolution of these resentments in a forward–looking, techno-logically capable volkisch ‘utopia,’" according to Fritzsche.
As Umberto Eco explains, however, the populist rhetoric of fascism is selective and illusive:
“individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citi-zens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is a theatrical fiction. . .. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People. . .. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell. . .Fascism.”
Fritzsche observed that “German fascism would have been inconceivable without the pro-found transformation” of mainstream electoral politics in the 1920’s “which saw the dissolution of traditional party allegiances.” He also argued that the Nazis, while an electorally–focused movement, had more in common rhetorically and stylistically with middle class reform movements than backwards looking reactionary movements. So the Nazis as a movement appeared to provide for radical social change while actually moving its constituency to the right.
Conservative analyst Kevin Phillips compared the populist resurgence in the 1990s to pre-vious examples in the 1890s and 1930’s and found many of the same elements:
“Economic anguish and populist resentment; mild–to–serious class rhetoric aimed at the rich and fashionable; exalta-tion of the ordinary American against abusive, affluent and educated elites; contempt for Washington; rising ethnic, racial and religious animosities; fear of immigrants and foreigners, and a desire to turn away from internationalism and concentrate on rebuilding America and American lives.”
Phillips wrote of the connection between populism and fascism in the context of weak centrist parties: “The sad truth is that frustration politics has built to a possibly scary level precisely because of the unnerving weakness of the major parties and their prevailing philosophies.” Phillips cited both Republicans and Democrats for “jointly reenacting some of the ineptness and miscalculation of Germany’s Weimar Republic” After decrying liberal elitism and arrogance, Phillips condemned Republican politicians who have “periodically unleashed the anti–black and anti–Israel messages they now complain about in more blunt politicians as 'bigotry.' Conservatives and nationalists in Germany in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s behaved somewhat
similarly.”
According to Phillips,” If Patrick Buchanan is to be put in a 1930–something context, so should the second–rate conservatives and liberals responsible for the economic and social failures from which he and other outsiders have drawn so many angry votes.”
Fascism can also be a reaction of a minority population. According to Richard K. Fenn:
"Fascist tendencies are most likely to flourish wherever vestiges of a traditional community, bound together by ties of race and kinship, persist in a society largely dominated by large–scale organizations, by an industrial class system, and by a complex division of labor. Under these conditions the traditional community itself becomes threatened; its members all the more readily dread and demonize the larger society." --Fenn, The End of Time, p. 224.
The success of fascist movements in attracting members from reformist populist constituencies is due to many complex overlapping factors, but key factors are certainly the depth of the economic and social crisis and transformation of the culture, and the degree of anger and frustration of those who see their demands not being met.
Desperate people turn to desperate solutions.
-Chip Berlet