Abstract

After summarizing Roger Griffin’s Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies, I describe the academic subfield of Comparative Fascist Studies. I argue that CFS could be strengthened by integrating it with cognitive science, evolutionary psychol­ogy, and religious studies. That biocultural integration would make it more effective as both a scholarly endeavour and an antifascist vaccine for democratic societies. I explain the role of traditional mass media and digital social media in the rise of dominance-style leadership and radical-right populism, construct a neurosociological revision of the CFS concept of fascism as a “political religion,” and characterize ultranationalism as a set of maladaptive supernormal stimuli. These revisions of CFS aim at providing a cross-disciplinary frame­work able to explain the spread of alt-right conspiracy theories online and offline.