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 majority support. The base of fascism is the petty bourgeoisie who frustrated by the failing attempts of the proletariat to take power arm and organize to put them down and take power themselves, allied and funded by the big bourgeoisie who they end up doing the bidding of. You don’t need that many armed and organized fascists in the streets for it to work. Liberals at the last minute would much rather cede power to fascists than to the proletariat or communists.
This sounds so simple and it feels like the correct take. But there are also a lot of densely populated left leaning cities. It's hard for me to imagine Portland, for example, ceding ground to a fascist federal government.
One thing I forgot to mention is that the armed bodies of the state will largely cooperate with fascists since they have shared goals of protecting private property and the existing capitalist power structures. So consider things like the Portland cops more or less being in communication with the fascist groups like patriot prayer and allowing them to set up sniper nests on buildings and such which is something that has already happened. The cooperation between the fascist paramilitary types and the cops will only broaden as things get worse and they both work together in terms of fighting proletarian insurrection (like the George Floyd protests ) in the streets. I guess it will come down to who’s able to build power in the streets but the fascists will ultimately have the cops (at probably all levels of gov) on their side and at a certain point cops will not be willing to step down just because a lib mayor tells them to. Communists and anti fascists need to be organizing as many people as possible so that we have the numbers to overcome the combined forces of the state and the fascists (who will also be working to grow their numbers and improve their organization as society breaks down).
Many libs will break fash once they're inconvenienced. I think that's the stage we're in now.
Imagine there's blood in the streets because the fascists are attacking people and leftists and left-aligned people are fighting back. The media is only talking about antifa destroying our homes and restaurants while not mentioning the fascists or even painting them as victims. Would the libs you know support bringing in the national guard to restore the peace? Or support giving police more power to prevent these criminals from making our streets unsafe? The ones I know would support that wholeheartedly.