Fascism has traditionally been supported by the middle classes, socialism by the working classes.
Perhaps the most obvious example:
An opportunist to his bones, Mussolini early mastered the direction of the winds and learned quickly to turn full sail into them.
From Socialist to Fascist
This much-envied talent led Mussolini to desert the Socialist party in 1914 and to cross over to the enemy camp, the Italian bourgeoisie. He rightly understood that World War I would bury the old Europe. Upheaval would follow its wake. He determined to prepare for “the unknown.” In late 1914 he founded an independent newspaper, Popolo d’Italia, and backed it up with his own independent movement (Autonomous Fascists). He drew close to the new forces in Italian politics, the radicalized middle-class youth, and made himself their national spokesman.
Mussolini developed a new program, substituting nationalism for internationalism, militarism for antimilitarism, and the aggressive restoration of the bourgeois state instead of its revolutionary destruction. He had thus completely reversed himself. The Italian working classes called him “Judas” and “traitor.” Drafted into the trenches in 1915, Mussolini was wounded during training exercises in 1917, but he managed to return to active politics that same year. His newspaper, which he now reinforced with a second political movement (Revolutionary Fascists), was his main card; his talents and his reputation guaranteed him a hand in the game.
Besides totalitarianism, a key distinguishing feature of fascism is that it uses a rightist mass movement to attack the organizations of the working class: parties of the left and trade unions. This strategy is variously called Corporatism, Corporativism, or the Corporative State [2], all terms that refer to state action to partner with key business leaders, often in ways chosen to minimize the power of labor unions. Mussolini, for example, capitalized on fear of an imminent Socialist revolution [3], finding ways to unite Labor and Capital, to Labor’s ultimate detriment. In 1926 he created the National Council of Corporations, divided into guilds of employers and employees, tasked with managing 22 sectors of the economy. The guilds subsumed both labor unions and management, but were heavily weighted in favor of the corporations and their owners. The moneyed classes in return helped him change the country’s laws to raise his stature from a coalition leader to a supreme commander. The movement was supported by small capitalists, low-level bureaucrats, and the middle classes, who had all felt threatened by the rise in power of the Socialists.