Going to commit a cardinal sin and repost a bit of analysis I wrote up in the previous thread because it got buried due to the progenitor of the comment chain getting banned (rip bozo)

There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Fascism’s role is and how it relates to the current situation.

Fascism is not an ideology that is independent of or diametrically composed to liberalism; rather it’s a mechanism of capital to be leveraged by the bourgeoisie to supplement their hegemony and serve as a bulwark against leftism. It is not a genuinely popular movement, but masquerades as one. It adopts the trappings of one and often co-opts leftist rhetoric but it is incapable of, materially or ideologically, sustaining any sort of insurrection against the bourgeoisie state because it supports the bourgeoisie state and thus cannot nor does it have any interest in popular uprising.

Fascists can only take power by grafting themselves onto — and not usurping — existing institutions, often with the support of the bourgeoisie if not directly installed by them. We see this example in Hitler’s Germany, who was funded by the billion by industrialists and permitted into government as Chancellor for fear of the KDP, Italy where Mussolini came into power by coalition government and instituted the typical bourgeoisie-friendly economic policies under the auspices of a liberal financial advisor, Japan, Chile and the Chicago boys, etc.

Premature Fascist attempts at violent seizures of power would miserably fail, only for them to get remarkably lenient treatment and be gradually reintroduced to combat leftism. The SDP, that unleashed the Freikorps on the Spartakists, would ban the German Communist Party’s paramilitary wing and very soon after lift Hitler’s ban on public speaking. Liberals will show disgust to Fascism, but always side with them against socialism because their common interest and purpose is the preservation of the propertied classes.

This is also why you see the Proud Boys and other similar groups cooperating with police officers in protests — again, despite the occasional rhetorical effort at portraying themselves as against government overreach — because they’re an auxiliary of the bourgeois state and far from being able to supplant it, cannot exist without it. It is the bourgeois media that platforms it’s adherents, again feigning disgust but we know perfectly well that they’re more than capable of completely blocking out anything they actually don’t want people to hear about like Modi’s prosecution of Muslims and the newest pink wave in South America, and lavish money upon their figureheads.

The reactionaries were called to the capitol and enabled merely to serve their utility for intimidation and the stirring of fervor and passion in the Republican base. These reactionaries acted too prematurely, were promptly disavowed and dispersed without difficulty — and again, as usual, with practically a slap on the wrist because the bourgeois still has use for them.

The issue with the narrative of a credible Fascist coup getting fended off is that it implies that they exist as an independent and opposed force to the American state and liberalism, and they do not. It implies that the American bourgeois republic is something that is a ‘better’ alternative to Fascism, when the reality is that these reactionary nationalists are an vital instrument that helps to guarantee the survival of the capital and the bourgeois republic. If they posed any genuine threat to the current order, if Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi truly believed these people were actually an dangerous threat to their livelihoods and safeties, then there would have been a thorough investigation and purging of all responsible parties and organs. But there wasn’t, because they’re not — they’re useful.

I am not understating the threat of Fascism or white nationalists. They are dangerous and I know this very well — My mother’s birth certificate lists her race as ‘negro’ and I live not very far away from places where black men were lynched and transgender black women were killed last year in response to the George Floyd protests — but they cannot be effectively combated if we cannot recognize their actual nature and how they operate as a component in capital’s myriad methods of hegemony.