While I think this is a good level headed take, you’re seriously underestimating how comfortable with fascism the average american voter truly is. If they readily accept “immigrants and queers did it” as an answer to their admittedly worsening living standards, when corporations are no longer even hiding their plunder, they were looking for a reason to turn on them anyway.

This is by design, and the democrats are just as much at fault. The US flag has been synonymous with torture, genocide, death squads, weaponized rape whether a Democrat or a Republican is at the helm, and it’s only been the so-called hard leftist minority struggling for change within the US. As long as they reaped a tiny sliver of benefit from global imperialism, they were happy to shut up and tug for a bigger slice of the pie.

Now that they hardly even get the crumbs, parts of the electorate want to continue as usual, another part wants to get the whole world again so the crumbs alone can fill them up. But the US, from the ground up, has been designed so that you can only get a progressive in power by accident. If a fascist can get elected and immediately start wielding near-absolute power, you were always a corporatocracy with a fascist contingency plan.