Nothing new about this.
Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chavez, Ortega, Pol Pot...different ideologies, different concentrations of virulence, but the same basic trend.
"We need a strong, powerful leader who will kick ass and take names and make the world safe for 'nice people' like us. Then it will be just like it was in the good ole days."
And there is always a substrate of troglodytes who will fall for it, as well as 'intellects vast, cruel and unsympathetic' ready to seduce them.
No one would have believed, in the early years of the 21st century, that our world was being watched by intelligences greater than our own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns, they observed and studied, the way a man with a microscope might scrutinize the creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency, men went to and fro about the globe, confident of our empire over this world. Yet, ..., intellects vast and cruel and unsympathetic regarded our planet with envious eyes...and slowly, and surely, drew their plans against us.
No, I don't believe there is a sinister conspiracy of evil men that is organized against us, I think it is an emergent process, a natural evolution that generates these movements, and that they prosper, live, and sometimes die by a mechanism similar to natural selection. It is a consequence of, or perhaps a reaction to, structures that arise in complex systems. But that is of little comfort to those of us who live in these times.