The first text distinguishes between the concepts of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. Totalitarian mass dictatorships aim for a complete transformation of society and even the human being itself through e.g. social engineering, while authoritarian mass dictatorships focus on maintaining a constructed pre-liberal status quo that is, at its core, a form of “repressive conservatism”. I found the theory that both regimes employ modern technology and policies with different goals especially interesting: a totalitarian system may wish to construct an “alternative modernity” but an authoritarian one attempts to “contain modernity”. The second text demonstrates the power populism holds for totalitarian systems if correctly implemented as a tool, but argues that it can be valuable, if a potential source of instability, for democracy, too. At this point, I am still somewhat trying to bring both texts into context with each other and wonder especially what role populism might play in authoritarian regimes.