Fascist followers do not truly believe but perform their own enthusiasm.

Evidence

Just as little as people believe in the depth of their hearts that the Jews are the devil, do they completely believe in their leader. They do not really identify themselves with him but act this identification, perform their own enthusiasm, and thus participate in their leader’s performance. It is through this performance that they strike a balance between their continuously mobilized instinctual urges and the historical stage of enlightenment they have reached, and which cannot be revoked arbitrarily. It is probably the suspicion of this fictitiousness of their own ‘group psychology’ which makes fascist crowds so merciless and unapproachable. If they would stop to reason for a second, the whole performance would go to pieces, and they would be left to panic. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 220

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that crowds act rather than feel their identification — and that their mercilessness stems from the suspicion of this fictitiousness — is a deep, unsettling paradox.
• XREF: connects to: Fascist leaders are focal points of citizens’ reactions, not supermen — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 225

Related

• Fascist leaders are focal points of citizens’ reactions, not supermen (similarity 0.85)
• Personalized leader propaganda substitutes psychological imagery for objective discussion (similarity 0.82)
• The fascist leader performs the forbidden impulses his followers suppress (similarity 0.81)
• Fascist followers’ masochism is fused with sadistic impulses (similarity 0.81)
• Fascist leaders subjectively drive the catastrophe they always expected (similarity 0.79)
• Fascist agitators overemphasize organization to compensate for the crowd’s loose structure (similarity 0.79)
• Outsider groups serve as involuntary conduits for fascism’s own taboo impulses (similarity 0.79)
• Indifference to victimization, not overt bigotry, enables fascism. (similarity 0.78)