The thing that is surprisingly hard to keep in mind is that the US is a culturally fascist country. It has been for a very long time. It’s what a fascist democracy looks like.

It is a country with long standing and broadly shared and accepted foundational mythology. It glorifies the military, and the “All American” young adult. There’s a strong cult of tradition, a deep distrust of learning and knowledge, and firm belief in the United States as a country and people of “action”. Despite their own claims to the contrary, they believe that disagreement with the US is betrayal, particularly on the part of people who arr not white and born of white US citizens. They always have an external enemy (and often an internal one, too) to judtify any action. They have contempt for countries and peoples they see as weak, and a huge hard-on for machismo.

American exceptionalism, which is taught to every school child in the country, is a fascist doctrine.

You can go down the list of fascist qualities outlined in Ur-Fascism and see that the US has always ticked off a large majority of them. The only thing that’s different today is that Americans are confronting someone trying to turn it into a disctatorship.

It’s not the fascism that bothers people about the current shift, but the governing structure the current fascist-in-chief is trying to impose.