They are cynical about human rights. They don’t like immigrants or the European Union. They want the state to be strong and “defence”, generally, to mean attack. They are, basically, the racist grandad who is going to spoil your Christmas.

These are the people pollsters have labelled “authoritarian populists” and according to YouGov there’s a lot of them. Forty eight per cent of Brits surveyed exhibit some or all of these traits, according to evidence presented by the YouGov Centre Cambridge last week.

As a framing device for what’s happening – with Trump, Brexit and Le Pen in France – the idea is seductive. When Reagan and Thatcher came to power, “authoritarian populism” was a term academics used to describe their politics. Now it’s a phenomenon, growing rapidly, cutting across old definitions of left and right, goes the argument.

But it’s not so simple and the phenomenon is not new. The term “authoritarian populist” is a construct that, if we are not careful, could blind us to the real roots of centrism’s sudden crisis – and to the answers.

We have been here before. As soon as they understood the personality types dragged towards the political extremes in the late 1920s, social scientists tried to understand the reasons for this new “desire to be dominated”. Erich Fromm, the leftwing psychologist, observed in both the leaders and the led: “The inability to rely on one’s self, to be independent, to put it in other words: to endure freedom.” The power of this intuition can’t be overestimated. Surrounded by explanations that blamed fascism on economic depression, class struggle and the Treaty of Versailles, Fromm located its origins in a fear of freedom.

Trump and Farage are not fascists. Britain, with near full employment, is not Weimar Germany. And according to YouGov, most “authoritarian populists” remain centrist. Only 19% of the UK electorate exhibit hard-right reactionary attitudes, compared with the pro-EU, internationalist, liberal leftists who – on 37% – form the biggest group.

Yet, if you look at the emotions, memes and prejudices driving rightwing populism, many of them do fit with the observations made by studying fascism in the 1930s.

For the big-mouthed racist right, theirs is a rebellion in favour of order. For them, as in the 1930s, all variations – of gender, race or sexuality – have to be interpreted as the strong versus the weak. They love the theatre of the mass rally, where the charismatic leader – the magic helper, as Fromm called him – can browbeat them so hard with illogic, that when “experts” confront them with the facts it does not matter.

But there’s a big difference between today and the 1930s, and it becomes clear when you dig into YouGov’s stats. In Britain, the No 1 predictor of becoming an “authoritarian populist” is your age. Thirty-eight per cent of them are over 60; a further 21% aged between 50 and 60. Low educational achievement is another big predictor, though not as strong.

The rightwing populist masses of the 1930s were mostly drawn from the economically ruined lower middle class. Though there were workers who supported Hitler, the majority opposed him, albeit ineffectively. The clearest divide was class. Today, the clearest divide is by age and education. We have lived through the greatest technological advance in 500 years, and the greatest surge of individual freedom – above all for women. That’s why human rights laws are the ultimate wind-up for this group: they are seen as “rights for other people”, undermining what has survived of the old hierarchies, be it white, male, straight or based on place.

It’s fairly easy to see how you could have stopped Nazism between 1930 and 1933. Drop German war debts; end the policies of austerity that put 25% out of work; and convince big business that it is the right, not the left, that could destroy democracy. And at critical moments, unite the left and centre to face down the populist right in their chosen venue: the streets. The guiding principle is: remove the thing that creates the insecurity.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Ukip supporter: the No 1 predictor of becoming an “authoritarian populist” is your age. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Today, paradoxically, that is a harder task. It would be impossible to reverse out of 30 years of freedom – not least because it is indelibly etched into the lifestyles and psychology of the young. YouGov’s figures show just 25% of the anti-authoritarian, pro-globalist group is over 60; among the under-40s the ultra-right is outnumbered two to one by liberal globalists. This underlines the problem for those on the left who want to find something progressive in the attitudes that blame migrants for low pay and – that charming internet meme beloved in Ukip-land - “Rothschild bankers” for the financial crisis.

Numerous journalists, myself included, have done enough realtime anthropology with the smalltown racist pensioner to understand: it is modernity they dislike, and the freedom that comes with it. And we cannot let it go.

At the centre of the fightback has to be a break with neoliberal economics. Raise wages, end job insecurity, build homes and, before you do any of it, promise all of it loudly. You’d think it would be a no-brainer – until you remember how much energy Labour politicians and commentators poured into opposing such policies over the summer. But there’s more. Fromm explained the failure of the German centre-left to resist Hitler in terms of “a state of inner tiredness and resignation”. They no longer believed in their own leaders, their own ideology: “deep within themselves many had given up any hope in the effectiveness of political action”.

That’s not true today. To observe the school walkouts against Trump, the Hamilton cast’s protest, the stoic resistance of Native Americans against the Dakota pipeline, is to see the opposite of tiredness and resignation. Here too, the most significant mass response to Brexit was that 180,000 people joined the Labour party and 15,000 the Lib Dems.

Only one thing can make this most educated and liberated generation succumb to tiredness and resignation: if the centrist middle classes and the liberal media give up on freedom.