" Moreover, there was a striking lack of relationship between [fascism's] material and numerical strength and its political effectiveness. The very term "movement" was misleading since it implied some kind of enrolment or personal participation of large numbers. If anything was characteristic of fascism, it was its independence of such popular manifestations. Though usually aiming at a mass following, its potential strength was reckoned not by the numbers of its adherents but by the influence of the persons in high position whose good will the fascist leaders possessed, and whose influence in the community could be counted upon to shelter them from the consequences of an abortive revolt, thus taking the risks out of revolution. "

― Karl Polanyi , The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time