You’re right, and I’m not saying that I disagree with his entire methodology, but that I would have preferred another approach that looks at nativism, authoritarianism and populism as components you can build a party from, and it’s more interesting to look at the components, than at the particular combination many parties use them in at this particular moment in time.

Populism, from my point of view, is just an approach outsider parties take when they want to attack the establishment: They try to gather as many opposition views as possible, to storm the castle. Any neglected outsider view can take this approach, it has very little to do with the authoritarian nativists as such.

Authoritarianism, of course, shows up all over the political spectrum, especially at the extremes.

Nativism is the one component that is most essentially rightist, but mostly because of how it is defined, as something to do with ethnicity. Do you know Orwell’s definition of nationalism? He took something that is usually associated with ethnicity, and applied it to the Catholic Church, the Communist Party, etc. That’s interesting. I don’t think there’s much essentially different between ethnic chauvinism and working class chauvinism, just as there’s not much essentially different between prejudices about foreigners, and prejudices about people who believe in other religions, or believe in different ideologies.

If you take a step back like that, it makes more sense to me to analyze these parties in terms of how they’ve assembled components that all parties make use of in some form. There is a difference between social democrats and authoritarian nativists. But I think you need to focus on the underlying components to understand that difference.