> it's on the cusp of a full scale fascist take over
Not really.
Or, rather, that claim is being used as justification for overreach and power grabs from the same authoritarians who claim to be against fascism.
Not really.
Or, rather, that claim is being used as justification for overreach and power grabs from the same authoritarians who claim to be against fascism.
In principal, no, non-fascist authoritarianisms can exist. In modern practice, they are comparatively rare. Leninism in the narrow sense was internationalist rather than nationalist, but most of its later derivatives (starting, in the USSR with “socialism in one country”) have shaded progressively more toward nationalism. Superficially “left” authoritarianisms (again, largely, Leninism and its derivatives) may have a rhetorical bent toward egalitarianism that contrasts with fascisms elitist/heirarchicalism, but even in old-school Leninism its distinction from Marxism is its adoption of vanguardism which naturally tends toward hierarchy, and that’s even more intense in its subsequent derivatives, both institutionalized with state power and, in many case, in revolutionary movements; the necessity of armed power to maintain authoritarian systems makes institutionalized authoritarianism naturally tend toward militarism even when as movements they might present as anti-militaristic. All of the modern authoritarian movements are corporatist, whether by bringing “outside” groups formally into regime decision-making, or abolishing them and replacing them with formal state institutions, or by assuring that “outside” interests are run by people connected to the regime and informally coordinating power, even if there aren’t part of formal decisionmaking.
For Nazis the oligarchy gets its power from bigger businesses (and still, the army and police, like all authoritarians). This is a very managerial system that promotes internal competition (Chapoutot wrote a book extremely interesting about it, especially when you lived through poorly implemented agile/scrum). It's basically the cousin of Fascim, one of their parents being Bonapartism.
I suppose communism/socialism/stalinism (depending on your definition) the oligarchy gets its power from the bureaucracy once they capture it from the proletariat. Again, a cousin of the two previous system, with the same parent (according to Trotsky, Kronstad's butcher)
For platformism (the most authoritative version of anarchism), it never got to the point of having that much authority, but it could have gone towards Bonapartism too. With a much weaker power base consisting of only the army and basic nationalism, so if you don't have Napoleon or Nestor Makhno, it probably won't work (and Makhno was too anti-nationalist to build his power on that, so I guess it wouldn't work).
'Oligarchic' and 'monarchic' aren't political ideologies btw. They're political systems.
In Leninism and derived systems, there is no need for the oligarchy to seize anything from the proletariat, the distinction between then and their notional parent in Marxism is vanguardism, which already incorporates an elite which becomes the oligarchy when seizing power “in the name of” the proletariat.
The last Republican president Trump, did so many things that invoked echos of the last major wave of fascism (Hitler and Mussolini) that one of the foremost experts on Nazism (Christopher Browning [1]) wrote a piece in the media directly making the comparison - not something experts on that period generally do lightly. [2]
That was in 2018, and it was followed by two more years of authoritarian power grabs culminating in an attempted coup.
Since then, Trump has continued to largely drive the policy and political approach of the Republican party. And other leading Republicans, like Desantis, have followed his lead. Those attacks have extended to the media (there's currently advancing in Florida that would require bloggers to register with the state if they cover the state) and there were calls to "eradicate trans people" at CPAC to resounding cheers (which is literally how the holocaust started [3])
So while I am not a fan of the Democratic party (there isn't a party in American politics that represents my political views), there is only one party that is clearly a neo-fascist party. And that party is far too close to regaining power for comfort.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Browning [2] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/suffocation-of-d... [3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-his...
You know what a moral panic is, right? "Trump is Literally Hitler!!!!" is another moral panic. No, I don't expect anyone caught in the grips of one to believe they are caught in the grips of one, especially when prominent journalists, celebrities and pundits are also caught in it, so I won't try to convince you. iykyk.
Personally, I think a President lying to get his country into two (2) ruinous wars simultaneously, and the resultant, decades-long occupations is far more destructive than anything Trump could manage.
Overseeing FISA courts, mass surveillance, assassination lists did far more destruction to democracy than Trump even tried to do, but we're not ready for that conversation.
So, no, Trump is not heralding a wave of neo-fascism. Maybe if folks who believe so could put down the torches and pitchforks long enough to actually listen to the people who voted for him, we all could work together to vote in a principled President at least once in my lifetime. No, repeating to each other that Trump's voters were all hick white supremacist neo-fascists is not actually listening. Empathetic listening is listening. But, again, I don't expect to convince anyone of that here and now.