Don't wanna write a wall of text, but historically fascist movements have come to power under the banner of a charismatic leader with majority support from the population. As fascistic as America is today, I'm not sure there is enough support to sustain a serious fascist movement. Nearly every major city is at least a 50/50 split among liberal democrats and republicans. Many of those republicans are politically uneducated and don't have a real desire for authoritarian dictate. The Republican candidate has won the popular vote in the presidential election once in the last 30 years and the only places where fascists outnumber every day liberals is in rural America.
So can fascism exist without popular majority support in dense urban areas? What does the fall of capitalism look like with no strong left or right movement? Am I naïve and should we expect reactionary attitudes to grow in response to a collapsing economy? My materialist brain is usually pretty good at seeing the direction we're headed but I'm not sure on this one.
I suppose the doomer take is that we haven't actually collapsed yet, and when the jenga tower really starts to fall, libs will be forced to choose between going right and going left. At that point if we don't have a popular workers movement with enough power, actual fascism will become a threat.
It doesn’t need a majority, just a well organized political movement to seize power. Then all they need is the cops and military to go along with it, which they will.
They could have done it on Jan 6th if they were better organized.
But they were organized by the FBI. The fash already won, the country with the concentration camps and legal slavery still has popular support, it doesn't make sense that they would coup themselves to establish the same thing.
The hooting car dealership owners demand a more cruel Fascism.
Sadly I think that raises the most interesting question of the 2020's. Can capitalism's death drive manifest itself or will the weight of everything collapsing prevent it from effectively coalescing and we'll just get total economic breakdown
Fascism is trying it's best overseas, can't say Modi isn't putting in the work. But even Viktor Orban had to suck up to China. There hasn't really been a blood and soil leader/movement that's been able to break free from the dominance of the current capitalist order, and in fact has had to be totally propped up by capital to not devolve into warring groups of separate 8chan cores mailing each other anthrax like in burgerland (it also doesn't help that we're the 4th reich as is)
Even hitler didn’t break free of it. (Not that it would have been good, but he was defeated by capitalism (yes yes and the USSR i know).
I don't know how I feel on that subject either way. I agree with what you're saying, but there was a lot of support from capital even from the US (see: IBM) and I would argue that the US wouldn't have entered the war without the demand from the working class that was given power during the labor surge of that era
but also there is the argument that yeah, they still privatized everything, the caloric intake of germans actually went down during hitler's reign, and that it was still reliant on capital to the extent that it cost them the war. I genuinely don't know either way. I would err on the side of "the working class will win the 2020's" but that's pretty pollyana