I don't have time right now to go pull the multiple books on this topic I have sitting on my bookshelf, but the scholarly work has been fairly consistent that there are two main demographic groups easily exploited into authoritarian ideas. First, you've got an entrepreneurial / business owner crowd that are often the backbone of their communities. They are drawn to authoritarianism because they feel like they've worked hard and have earned their place and more or less want to protect it from "those" people, whoever they might be. They are your civics committee members, your civics club members, not necessarily "the elite" but the people with means who want to pull up the ladder and protect their status. The second group is the disenfranchised and undereducated. They see a family they've never had, acceptance, opportunity, and a way to rise above people they feel have wrong them or looked down on them. Over the past few years as I revisited a lot of the scholarly material, what struck me is how easy it is to look around your own community and how these demographics resonate regardless of era and location. For example, I've got a retired banker friend who is very active in the community. She describes herself as a moderate, but when you actually hear her talk, it might as well be out of the Nazi playbook - and she has no ideas she's doing it or how easily she's manipulated by modern political propaganda. And that's the insidious part that Ahrendt talked about - how mundane evil really can be.<p>EDIT: Reading the article now, these archetypes line up perfectly with many other post-war research sources.