Absent a brief interlude during the First Spanish Republic, Spain was a monarchy until the 1930s. Even in the wake of King Alfonso XIII's deposition, the country enjoyed a large body of royalist supporters (the Spanish Carlists) who advocated a return to the Bourbon Dynasty.

Opposite the Carlists, Spain enjoyed a large and flourishing anarchist movement along with a nascent but growing communist movement. These two groups were in an on-again-off-again relationship, relative to the politics of the period and who was currently in charge of the national government.

A third branch of political activists, composed primarily of the military and religious orders (which was substantial in the early 20th century), was neither wedded to a return of the monarchy nor in favor of the nationalization/communalization of the large Spanish agricultural estates. They were Nationalists - one might even go so far as to call them National Socialists - who advocated for formal military domination of the economic order of the state.

The military order granted some degree of social mobility that did not exist under the Bourbon Dynasty, as the Franco Dictatorship was largely a product of overseas colonial expeditions full of junior officers who had returned to the peninsula. However, they were not in any way aligned with the civilian proletariat, instead demanding service within the military/bureaucracy as a gateway to the labor aristocracy / petite bourgeoisie subclass that comprised the modern liberal establishment.

The rigid hierarchy with ranked social mobility was the middle ground between Dynastic Rule and Proletariat Dictatorship. It released the pressures built up within the proletariat class by presenting an outlet in the form of re-occupation of colonial territory. However, it only permitted a fraction of the overall population - particularly the young, male population most prone to restive revolutionary tendency - to participate and only within the strict confines of the military bureaucracy.