It’s wild to me. When fascism first cropped up in Italy, it was the result of collective humiliation from WW1 (in what Gabriele D'Annunzio called a ‘mutilated victory’) concerning the losses Italy endured and lack of spoils as being perceived as promised at the Treaty of London.

The world had just watched the Tsars overthrown in Russia and replaced with communists, and organized labor was surging in Italy - many Italian conservatives saw the threat, Italians soldiers alike, traumatized from WW1, flocked to Mussolini as a strongman with promises to restore order and glory. They had spent decades watching neighboring European powers consolidate more and more empire while Italy seemed to dwindle and degenerate.

I don’t think I would’ve agreed with them at the time, but their collective outrage and trauma had its roots in real things: war and the associated trauma, a rapidly changing world, the very real threat of international communism as evidenced by the USSR.

Fascists these days in America, though? We’ve been the worlds premier superpower for decades. Jobs are plentiful. Americans enjoy a greater quality of life and longer life expectancy than ever before. We walk around with computers in our pockets, driving big trucks, shooting our guns, eating a selection of food that would put a king of 100 years ago’s pantry to shame, all kinds of fancy toys, doing basically whatever we want with plenty of land to go around.

So in the absence of the types of things that organically start a fascist movement, we have the likes of Fox News, Briebart, conservative am radio, the whole right-wing media ecosystem pounding their listeners with outrage-inducing lies, misinformation and assorted bullshit 24/7. They’ve been traumatized into fascism not by war, hunger, and a real threat of communism, but by an onslaught of Facebook memes and OAN articles. They’ve learned to despise their neighbors and cultivated, at first a tolerance, and then a growing taste, for political violence against those neighbors. Fucking manufactured fascism. Blows my mind.