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.
I can’t offer readings because this is what I’ve gathered from long discussions with theory heads and I’m a dumb dumb, but here’s the gist.
Capitalism needs to expand continuously and we are seeing that imperialism will even force it to slowly erode conditions within the imperial core. The expansions happen both outward and inward. Once the rot reaches the bourgeoisie, eventually a large enough segment of them become downwardly mobile that they will collectively gather to redistribute the wealth of the increasingly small faction of upwardly mobile bourgeoisie amongst themselves.
The reason fascism is so nebulous is because A) we keep trying to read fascist theory and make it make sense and B) we keep looking at superstructure when we ought to be looking at the base.
Fascism hijacks disruptions in the superstructure and weaponizes it to jumble power relationships between factions of the ruling class, ideally in their favor. Because every culture and society has a different superstructure, fascism will always adapt to look different. But the material base remains the same.
You can gather a bit of this from Mussolini’s writing, but really fascist theory is much more affective than rigorous. It masks itself in pseudointellectual tone, but a coherent canon or even a synthesized canon is hard to come across. In the same way that leftists say “Read Settlers!” or “Google Murray Bookchin”, fascists say, “Read Siege!”, referring to Siege by James Mason. And it’s really just not a good book. Incoherent, even contradictory sometimes, and I learned almost nothing about modern fascism from it