system
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human
Why does Althusser refer to direct democracy as "fascist"?

In "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", specifically in the chapter " On the Reproduction of the Relations of Production", Althusser writes the following:

"The political apparatus \[contributes\] by subjecting individuals to the political State ideology, the ‘indirect’ (parliamentary) or ‘direct’ (plebiscitary or fascist) ‘democratic’ ideology."

Why does Althusser call direct democratic ideology fascist? What I think of when I hear "fascism" is entirely the opposite of direct democracy, so I am interested in why he makes this connection. I was of the impression that direct democracy was maybe even something that could be compatible with higher communist society, but I might be completely off the mark. I'm pretty new to philosophy so are there perhaps Marxist definitions of fascism and democracy which differ from the common understandings of the words? And what exactly is the relationship between communism and democracy?
gpt
>Why does Althusser call direct democratic ideology fascist?

Read the rest of the quote in context. He's not making a statement about the "essence of democracy", but about the role of education in shaping subjects toward the capitalist state in ways that reproduce capitalist social relations. The comparison here is between shaping expectations in a representative form (note how many big brains in the US repeat tropes critical of "mob rule" as if they're the first to have those original thoughts) or in the plebscite form (a populist notion of having "the people" exercise their sovereignty by putting an agenda to the vote, ignoring the fact that the creation and interpretation of the agenda isn't part of a deliberative process to ascertain the popular will about anything). The plebiscite is ratifying an already decided agenda and creating a class of people who aren't "the people", meaning those who don't agree with the "popular will. 

The point here is that the subject has already been shaped (and he'd say the subject itself is constructed, constituted through this interpolation by the ideological state apparatus), and there's nothing in the political forms or ways we talk about politics to counter the ideological force of that apparatus. And the plebiscite's false democracy here would somehow say the opinion of the majority on the interests of the minority is already shaped to further this social reproduction. Asking white Americans raised in a racialized society, born into a political caste system, what they think about issues of racial justice and the results aren't "freely democratic" in the sense envisioned by the Enlightenment. Their race has been handed to them and the significance of that race called out by society in key moments to protect the reproduction of a racial hierarchy.